Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

By Geraldine Brooks

Book Overview

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - Pulitzer Prize winning author presents the stories of a wide range of Muslim women in the Middle East. As an Australian American and an experienced foreign correspondent, Brooks' thoughtful analysis attempts to understand the precarious status of women in the wake of Islamic fundamentalism.

"Frank, enraging, and captivating." - The New York Times

Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks' intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks' acute analysis of the world's fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam's holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

As a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385475772
• ISBN13: 9780385475778
• Release Date: December 1995
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

fascinating, helpful reading

For those of us who have a newly kindled (or revived) interest in the lives of Islamic women in the Middle East, this book is a welcome read. I found it as easy to devour as a novel, but full of glimpses into the lives of real women the author has encountered during travels and journalistic expeditions in the Middle East. From relationships between women in multi-wife and/or multi-generational households, to attitudes on women in education, business and sports, this book gives you a little of everything. While I still find myself confused about some of the terminology and apparel, this book made me feel like I had some grasp of the issues facing women in Islamic countries. I was particularly interested in the accounts of the author's experiences with the family of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and in the descriptions of the teachings of Mohammad as she sees them played out in the lives of Islamic women. I felt she did a pretty good job of remaining non-judgemental, especially being Jewish herself. I didn't think she was critical of Islam, as much as the way certain cultures have interpreted or distorted Koranic (?) teachings.

More balanced than most

Books on Islam generate a lot of controversy these days, especially after 9/11. Having read several I found this one fairly balanced. Brooks is a reporter by trade, which at times leads to a bit of superficiality in the treatment of complex topics but on the whole makes this a relatively dispassionate treatment of women and Islam. Of course Brooks brings a Western point of view to her subject, and is intensely critical of a system where women are subject to male family members with few personal rights. She is careful to point out that Islamic law does provide for inheritance by women and allows a type of pre-marriage contract that can protect them from the husband's polygamy, give them the right of divorce, establish that their education will be allowed to continue, etc. But one suspects that these privileges are available only to the wealthy as a practical matter. Brooks is careful to distinguish various Muslim societies from one another, just as one sees huge differences among Christian countries. She along with most authors I've read has little good to say about Saudi Arabia. But interestingly, she identifies Iran as a more progressive society in which women are permitted to work and participate in politics. And Egypt is described as having a lively, sensual culture that she believes will never be snuffed out by fundamentalists.One of the more disturbing chapters of the book deals with education. The number of women in school is unacceptably low,education often ceases as women are wed at a very early age, and much schooling is focused on the study of Islam. Even more disturbing is the increasing control fundamentalists exert over educational institutions, which results in a student body much more conservative than the faculty who were educated in more open-minded times. And academic freedom has no place here. Brooks tries to identify areas of repression that she sees as cultural rather than religious. At the same time, she says that Muslims cannot rely on the improvements to womens' lives that occurred during the time of the Prophet to defend Islam today. It is sadly true that any religion that literally relies on a Sacred Text from hundreds of years earlier--Christianity included--will inevitably fail to respect the notions of individual liberty and equality that are the ideals of the modern world.Brooks' book was written over 6 years ago. The trends she identifies are very disturbing, but except for some vague familiarity with Ayatollah Khomeini, few Americans had any of this on their radar screens before 9/11. A book like this will hopefully lead to some better understanding of this complex subject.

I've passed my copy around to friends and family

After stumbling into the Women's Studies section of my favorite independent bookstore, one of the titles that grabbed my eye was this one. It not only gave me an amazing insight into the lives of Muslim women (something no man would ever get first-hand), but I also received a broad grounding in the basics of Islam and it's history. Although many reviewers have not spoken well of her depiction of Muslim women, I find her descriptions dovetail well with the other books I have read that are also first-person accounts by female journalists. Like any writer, she most certainly reflects her own cultural biases, but the bigger picture rings true.My copy is stained and dog-eared from all of the friends and family I have loaned my copy to, calling it a "must read" for anyone who wants to understand the Middle East better.