Explores discourses on gender and representations of women in modern Iraqi fiction. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.

In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba'th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a 'female', through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the 'woman question' became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba'th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq.

Hailed as one of the most important books ever written on the state of the modern Middle East, this brave and controversial work confronts the rhetoric ofArab and pro-Arab intellectuals with the realities of political brutality in the Arab world.

“With passion and commitment,” an exiled Iraqi woman recounts her time organizing resistance to Saddam Hussein and imprisonment in Abu Ghraib (Nawal El Saadawi, author of Zeina). In 1970s Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was at the height of its influence in the Middle East and popularity throughout the West. But a group of activists recognized the disastrous potential of the regime as its charismatic leader, Saddam Hussein, came to power. Haifa Zangana was among those who resisted Saddam’s rule, a small group of whom were captured and imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. Now, from a distance of time and place, Zangana writes about her incarceration, the agonizing loss of comrades to torture and death in prison, her safe yet haunted life so far away from friends, family, and her beloved country, and the ways memory conspires to make us forget. In this poetic, emotionally-tinged memoir, the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London “drags politics down from the realm of the abstract into the mud, fear, and loneliness of personal experience and psychological ruin that is life under dictatorship” (Christian Parenti, author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq).

Caught up in a terrifying war, facing choices of life and death, two Iraqi sisters take us into the hidden world of women’s lives under U.S. occupation. Through their powerful story of love and betrayal, interwoven with the stories of a Palestinian American women’s rights activist and a U.S. soldier, journalist Christina Asquith explores one of the great untold sagas of the Iraq war: the attempt to bring women’s rights to Iraq, and the consequences for all those involved. On the heels of the invasion, twenty-two-year-old Zia accepts a job inside the U.S. headquarters in Baghdad, trusting that democracy will shield her burgeoning romance with an American contractor from the disapproval of her fellow Iraqis. But as resistance to the U.S. occupation intensifies, Zia and her sister, Nunu, a university student, are targeted by Islamic insurgents and find themselves trapped between their hopes for a new country and the violent reality of a misguided war. Asquith sets their struggle against the broader U.S. efforts to bring women’s rights to Iraq, weaving the sisters’ story with those of Manal, a Palestinian American women’s rights activist, and Heather, a U.S. army reservist, who work together to found Iraq’s first women’s center. After one of their female colleagues is gunned down on a highway, Manal and Heather must decide whether they can keep fighting for Iraqi women if it means risking their own lives. In Sisters in War, Christina Asquith introduces the reader to four women who dare to stand up for their rights in the most desperate circumstances. With compassion and grace, she vividly reveals the plight of women living and serving in Iraq and offers us a vision of how women’s rights and Islam might be reconciled.

A unique and revealing portrait of Saddam Hussein's Iraq which was every bit as authoritarian and brutal as Stalin's Russia or Mao's China.

By exploring how translation has shaped the literary contexts of six Iraqi woman writers, this book offers new insights into their translation pathways as part of their stories’ politics of meaning-making. The writers in focus are Samira Al-Mana, Daizy Al-Amir, Inaam Kachachi, Betool Khedairi, Alia Mamdouh and Hadiya Hussein, whose novels include themes of exile, war, occupation, class, rurality and storytelling as cultural survival. Using perspectives of feminist translation to examine how Iraqi women’s story-making has been mediated in English translation across differing times and locations, this book is the first to explore how Iraqi women’s literature calls for new theoretical engagements and why this literature often interrogates and diversifies many literary theories’ geopolitical scope. This book will be of great interest for researchers in Arabic literature, women’s literature, translation studies and women and gender studies.

The UAE¿s relatively open borders, economy, and society have won praise from advocates of expanded freedoms in the Middle East while producing financial excesses, social ills such as prostitution and human trafficking, and relatively lax controls on sensitive technologies acquired from the West. Contents of this report: (1) Governance, Human Rights, and Reform: Status of Political Reform; Human Rights-Related Issues; (2) Cooperation Against Terrorism and Proliferation; (3) Foreign Policy and Defense Cooperation With the U.S.: Regional Issues; Security Cooperation with the U.S.: Relations With Iran; Cooperation on Iraq; Cooperation on Afghanistan and Pakistan; U.S. and Other Arms Sales; UAE Provision of Foreign Aid; (4) Economic Issues.

In the Fourteenth Edition of The Middle East, Ellen Lust brings important new coverage to this comprehensive, balanced, and superbly researched text. In clear prose, Lust and her outstanding contributors explain the many complex changes taking place across the region. New to this edition is a country profile chapter on Sudan by Fareed Hassan. All country chapters now address domestic and regional conflict more explicitly, and all tables, figures, boxes, and maps have been fully updated with the most recent data and information.

"There is something to learn, literally, on every page here."--Cynthia Enloe, from the foreword "This is a fluent and highly informed account of the women of Iraq during a time of ever increasing political turmoil, economic disaster and foreign invasion. It gives a fascinating insight into the way Iraqi society really works and is far superior in quality to most of what has been written about Iraq in war and peace."--Patrick Cockburn, author of Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq