Women of Fes Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco by Rachel Newcomb (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 248 pages.)

Abstract

The city of Fes, the once “bourgeois citadel” (J. Berque’s words) of Morocco
and once the world’s most populous city (1170-80), has in modernity been
unhappily bypassed for coastal trading hubs and global mega-cities. Material
and symbolic elements of Fassi power persist, however, and anthropologist
Rachel Newcomb’s finely researched and written ethnography identifies them in upper-middle-class women’s gender identity. In so doing, Women of Fes helps the fields of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and Islamic
studies to illuminate the often-neglected power of class to shape gender in the
Muslim Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating, not pointedly, that
class divides women within as much as across cultures.
Newcomb’s book concerns women of, not merely in, Fes, namely, a class
of women of “original” Fassi families navigating the social ruins and new
opportunities of daily urban life. Its disparate topics – urban rumors, women’s
NGOs, reforms of the Moroccan Muslim family code (mudawanah), flexible
kinship, public space, a dépassé lounge singer – shift the book’s center
from class to gender and public life. Her skillful identification of class issues
within the latter, however, gives the book a necessary coherence ...