Suchergebnisse

The voice and face of Egypt -- Childhood in the Egyptian delta -- Beginning in Cairo -- Media, style, and idiom -- "The golden age of Umm Kulthūm" and two cultural formations -- "The voice of Egypt": the artist's work and shared aesthetics -- Umm Kulthūm and a new generation -- Legacies of a performer -- Glossary -- Notes -- References -- Sources for the illustrations -- Index

A well-known journalist in Cairo, Rajā' al-Naqqāsh, wrote that, as a child, he thought "listening to Umm Kulthūm" meant "listening to singing." When the adults around him listened to singing, they listened to Umm Kulthūm, thus "singing," in his youthful experience, equated to "Umm Kulthūm." While this attitude would be rare in Egypt now as listeners have moved other music into the domains of their daily life, Umm Kulthūm remains a formidable presence as she has been for nearly a century.

This history of Middle Eastern women is the first to survey gender relations in the Middle East from the earliest Islamic period to the present. Outstanding scholars analyze a rich array of sources ranging from histories, biographical dictionaries, law books, prescriptive treatises, and archival records, to the Traditions (hadith) of the Prophet and imaginative works like the Thousand and One Nights, to modern writings by Middle Eastern women and by Western writers. They show that gender boundaries in the Middle East have been neither fixed nor immutable: changes in family patterns, religious rituals, socio-economic necessity, myth and ideology-and not least, women's attitudes-have expanded or circumscribed women's roles and behavior through the ages