The History Book Club discussion

This thread is focused on Kuwait.

Since we are doing the Middle Eastern challenge; setting up one thread per Middle Eastern country is a good idea.

The following book could focus on any of the nine countries where the author spent the most time and had Muslim women friends, namely Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and even Palestine.

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

by Geraldine Brooks

Synopsis on Goodreads:

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.

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.

Terrific.

I plan to read this one

Some really interesting adds Libby.

It is interesting that our poor embassies are alway besieged as if we had some magic wand to make other country's struggles go away - we cannot even solve our own. (smile).

Great adds on all of the Middle Eastern threads.

Thank you Teri for your add.

Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life

by Farah Al-Nakib (no photo)

Synopsis:

As the first Gulf city to experience oil urbanization, Kuwait City's transformation in the mid-twentieth century inaugurated a now-familiar regional narrative: a small traditional town of mudbrick courtyard houses and plentiful foot traffic transformed into a modern city with marble-fronted buildings, vast suburbs, and wide highways.

In Kuwait Transformed, Farah Al-Nakib connects the city's past and present, from its settlement in 1716 to the twenty-first century, through the bridge of oil discovery. She traces the relationships between the urban landscape, patterns and practices of everyday life, and social behaviors and relations in Kuwait. The history that emerges reveals how decades of urban planning, suburbanization, and privatization have eroded an open, tolerant society and given rise to the insularity, xenophobia, and divisiveness that characterize Kuwaiti social relations today. The book makes a call for a restoration of the city that modern planning eliminated. But this is not simply a case of nostalgia for a lost landscape, lifestyle, or community. It is a claim for a "right to the city"—the right of all inhabitants to shape and use the spaces of their city to meet their own needs and desires.

Days of Fear: The Inside Story of the Iraqi Invasion and Occupation of Kuwait by John Levins. (Motivate Publishing, 1997)

This is a finely detailed but long winded account of the Gulf War in Kuwait that was written by an American journalist who was living there when Iraq invaded. It is probably the most comprehensive account of this war that has been written.

(no cover) by John Levins (no photo) John Levins