Beyond the Purdah of the Mind

Beyond the Purdah of the Mind pursues a feminist reading of four autobiographies by three Arab women writers in an attempt to address the objectification of Arab women's identities in the veil-discourse and the incarceration of their agency in the binary-thinking with its predication of voice on the clothing item of the veil, whose absence or existence is presumed to herald either liberation, emancipation and agency or oppression, suppression and silence. The book’s argument is that contrary to popular thinking and Western stereotypes, Arab women speak through both the empowering silence of the hijab and the relationality of patriarchal connectivity to produce a connective Arab female’ register of the self. The latter vocalize women’s roles in the making of Arab modern identity and history in face of the divisive binarism of the self/other identity-politics and the destruction of masculine orchestrated wars.

Riham E. A. Debian is a lecturer at Institute of Linguistics and Translation, Alex University. She has contributed to Women Writing Africa: the Northern Region, New York: Feminist Press, 2005. Her current research interest is the gender politics of religious fundamentalisms.