Books by miriam cooke

This book offers a collection of journal entries, interviews, fiction, and poetry by twentieth-century Middle Eastern and South Asian women writing about war and political conflicts. It reflects the realization that through their writing, women have created a new mythology of the war-peace paradox.

In the 1970s, one of the most torrid and forbidding regions in the world burst on to the international stage. The discovery and subsequent exploitation of oil allowed tribal rulers of the U.A.E, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait to dream big. How could fishermen, pearl divers and pastoral nomads catch up with the rest of the modernized world? Even today, society is skeptical about the clash between the modern and the archaic in the Gulf. But could tribal and modern be intertwined rather than mutually exclusive? Exploring everything from fantasy architecture to neo-tribal sports and from Emirati dress codes to neo-Bedouin poetry contests, Tribal Modern explodes the idea that the tribal is primitive and argues instead that it is an elite, exclusive, racist, and modern instrument for branding new nations and shaping Gulf citizenship and identity-an image used for projecting prestige at home and power abroad.

An account of dissidence in Hafiz Asads Syria, describing how intellectuals tried to navigate between charges of complicity with the state and treason against it.

In 1928, a young Lebanese woman, Nazira Zeineddine al-Halabi, wrote a book called "e;Unveiling and Veiling"e;, an indictment of patriarchal oppression in which she boldly stated that the veil was un-Islamic, directly challenging the teachings of wiser"e; male scholars. Considered by many an attack on Islam, it rocked the Muslim world and was banned by many clerics, although it quickly went into a second edition and was translated into several languages. In this latest addition to Makers of the Muslim World series, Miriam Cooke offers an intimate portrait of the life and work of this pioneering champion of Islamic feminism.

The Lebanese War has seen the publication of many more works of fiction by women than men and this book challenges the theory that men write of war and women of the hearth. The author terms these women "The Beirut Decentrists" and traces the transformation of consciousness among them.

Women Claim Islam presents the literature of contemporary Islamic feminist authors, and analyses their strategies for self-definition and self-empowerment.