Rating: 
Summary: Interesting look behind the scenes
Review: Geraldine Brooks uses her experience as a journalist in Islam countries to write about the plight of Muslim women. She details some of the customs in these countries, from the veiling and seclusion of women to the "honor killings" of adulterous women by their male relatives. She points out the double standard and the hypocrisy of men who oppress their wives and yet whose own behavior is dishonorable and certainly not what the Koran demands of them. She describes the life of Muhammed and shows that many of the tenants of the religion he founded are based on making his own life more comfortable. This is an interesting and thought-provoking book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book ...has info about Ayatollah Khomeini
Review: It is an interesting book with information about the shias in Iran and particularly how the atmosphere was like during the time of Ayatollah Khomeini. I think girls would enjoy this book more than guys because it is written by a female which makes it even more interesting as she writes about her experiance in Iran during the time of the islamic revolution in 1979. I read this book sometime back and i still remember the interesting quote which I read on the first page of this book by Hazrat Ali. It is an interesting read for someone who wants to get a glimpse of the time of the islamic revolution in Iran.
Rating:
Summary: A great book on Women in Islam
Review: Brooks officiates herself as an authority on the Arab world and on Islam. Her knowledge is that of a journalist, not a scholar. She is not any different from the extreme muslim fanatics that view the Western world as decedant and corrupt world. They view the West with their own narrow and biased eyes. She and they are in the same camp. They both generate misleading hate and add to confusion by looking on each other's world in extremist disposition. Brooks tries to be objective in her review only to discredit herself immediatly with her sanctimoneous rejection of edicts in Islam that are not any different from what exists in Judaism. You do not see any comparative paragraphs on how Judaism treats Jewish women!! Some of her translations of Quran are incorrect as well. There is good and bad in any society and in any faith. Satirizing Islam and blurring the lines between the faith and tradition is not acceptable. Also pulling on weak hadiths and selecting exreme cases to say "look ... here what Islam stands for and here is what the Arabs are all bout" is to say the least rediculous. If I wrote a book about the West that depicts it as the world of AIDS, wife beaters, prostitution, teenage pregnancies, drugs, rape, and dumping of the elderly in terrible nursing homes and turned ot the world and said ... look this is what the West is all about!!! am I being true to my readers! No ... I would be simply misleading them by officiating myself as a false authority to cover bias and prejudice and that is exactly what Brooks does. We should of course believe that her being a Jewish feminist has nothing to do with her nasty coverage of Islam and of the Arab world ... give me a break!
Rating: 
Summary: A candid and shocking look into an Arabics woman's world.
Review: I read this book in only a few days, because with everything going on in the world today, I felt I had to educate myself, to the best of my ability, about what is happening in the Arab world. Coming from a Western country, with a Western mentality regarding the equality of men and women and the separation of church and state, I wanted to try to understand what it is like to live in a muslim country, as a muslim woman. What I learned about these women's way of life shocked and saddend me, because it is so foreign to me that I have a hard time processing what it must be like for them.
What I learned in this book I will carry with me for the rest of my life, because it has helped me to have a greater understanding of the Arab world, that could not be different from mine. I learned that in extremist muslim countries the women must be veiled, basically, at all times, they may not look at other men, they must not touch unrelated men, meaning they may not even shake hands with unrelated men, they should not speak to unrelated men, because their voice may cause the men to lust after them, in Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive, the list goes on.
I respect other people's religion, but this book is about what the woman are subjected to that the Koran says nothing about, but is enforced by the fundamantalists, claiming it to be for the women's own good. These woman are to this day subjected to "Honor" killings, meaning women are killed for dishonoring their male relatives, for example if they are suspected of no longer being virgins, and genital mutilation, their clitoris is scraped away to reduce sexual desire; the Koran does not support these things. The author says it best in the following passage: "If some nintety million little boys were having their penises amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet."
Women need to know what is going on with other women around the world, not only so that we can possibly help, but also gain some undertanding of what these women have to deal with before some of us sneer at a woman covered from head to toe, because most of us think they all have a choice. The majority of women do not have a choice, they are controlled by their male relatives, in a society that caters to males, who are sanctioned, by the Koran, to beat their wives if necessary. I respect a muslim woman for wanting to be covered and other religions expressions of faith, but we need to open our eyes to the women whose lives are out of their hands and run by men.
Please, read this book, it will broaden your horizons and hopefully help you understand, well, at least to some extent.
Rating:
Summary: Really Improved My Opinion of Ayatollah Khomeni and Iran
Review: I'm an American woman who has lived overseas in Morocco for twelve years. My friends and I are reading this book for our monthly bookclub selection. None of us was able to put the book down, once we started it. We all read the book in one or two days. The author is a journalist who spent considerable time in the Middle East, reporting from various countries. Although this is not a scholarly work, it is well-researched. The book focuses on her own personal experiences in each country, and ancecdotes from various women she met in each country. For me, the most interesting parts of the book discussed the home and personal life of the Ayatollah Khomeni. After reading this book, my opinion of both him, and of Islamic life in Iran, went up by about 300 percent. The author met and interviewed his wife, and various family members. He was a fairly modern, new-age husband, and playful father, who even got up in the middle of the night and gave his kids their bottles, and changed their diapers. The only thing he was quite strict about was the Islamic religion. Anyone who is interested in the lives of women in the Middle East should read this book. The book is as accurate today as it was when it was written.
| 
