Scheherazade Goes West

Rating:
Summary: Mernissi offers impressions rather than definitions
Review: After reading a few other critiques on this title, a few reviewers may need to reconsider the intent of the text. Mernissi is hardly deliniating a definitive narrative on the sexual mentality of men/women or East/West; however, she provides a series of impressions that can create a complex, intriguing innerdialogue as well as spark useful discussion among adults interested in the related topic dynamics. Overall a wonderfully written book intermingling Mernissi's personal experiences, history, literature, and art. I highly endorse this book.

Rating:
Summary: Author needs to travel more, read more books
Review: I enjoyed "Dreams of Trespass" the author tries to follow it up with a book written on her book tour. This ends up being a disaster, this is the writers first trip to the West, her history, and knowlegde of the West is zero. She spent her childhood school years just memorizing the Koran. Despite her degrees in history, her history of the West is very poor. When introduced to the writngs of Kant, she assumes that he is still a role model on the philosophy of women in the western world.
The saddest part is when she writes about her collegue Kemal, no matter how much he abuses her verbally, she always crawls back for his approval, while trying to tell us how liberated she is.
I feel sorry for all her fears, and she has many, having crossed roads, that thank god, I didn't have to cross.
So give this book a skip, hopefully the author made enough money on it to travel a bit more and read alot more before she writes another book about the West

Rating:
Summary: Good as far as it goes
Review: I hope the author takes another, longer tour of the US. Most of her conclusions about the "harems" of "Western men" are only applicable to European men, far better educated and more culturally refined than us guys here. We surely do have or desire our harems today--a man's "stable" of pretty women who will let him get away with making the rounds as often as time and money allows. A huge issue she raises is control: how do guys keep their women? And how do those women, who at some level consent to being kept, fight back and control their man? What role does beauty play, what role intelligence, what about economic empowerment, and what about religious values? How does jealousy impact the decisions made by both the women and the man? And perhaps most importantly, is the US truly making progress toward women and men treating each other as equals? Or have we just found more sophisticated ways of manipulating each other? The author suggests Westerners should be much slower to criticize Islam, because we have our own problems that are as bad or worse. Very thought-provoking.