Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East By Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002, 2d ed 411 pages.)

Abstract

Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, now in its second edition, is a collection of songs, articles, poems, and letters, as well as manuscripts, related to life in the Muslim Middle East. The authors, a mix of wellknown (and less well-known) scholars and writers from the Middle East and the West, seek to give readers an intimate look at the everyday life of the region's Muslim inhabitants in the hopes of addressing and dispelling some common stereotypes.
Everyday Life is divided into five sections, each of which contains var­ious essays, stories, and so on. Section One focuses on family life, birth, adolescence, marriage, and death. The first piece is Erika Friedl's collec­tion of traditional songs from southwestern Iran about such events as childbirth and marriage. Susan Schaefer Davis examines how childrearing has changed in north-central Morocco from the 1970s to the present. In the next story, "Explosion," Lebanese journalist Emily Nasrallah depicts the tragedy of a young girl who parts from her mother at a supermarket and dies in an explosion. Next is an essay by Margaret A. Mills about an arranged marriage in Afghanistan. Jenny B. White ("Two Weddings") compares and contrasts traditional and modem Turkish weddings. In "Editing al-Fajr: A Palestinian Newspaper in Jerusalem," Bishara Bahbah talks about the experiences and challenges he faced as the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem-based al-Fajr. Next is an excerpt from popular Moroccan novelist Driss Chraibi's "The Son's Return," in which he discusses the generation gap when a Moroccan immigrant to the West returns to visit his grandfather ...