Arab Women S Tales Of Identity And Folk Beliefs

From the stone age to the cyber age, women and men have experienced the world differently. Out of a cosmos of goddesses and she-devils, earth mothers and madonnas, witches and queens, saints and whores, a vast body of women's folklore has come into bloom. International in scope and drawing on more than 130 expert contributors, this encyclopedia reviews the myths, traditions, and beliefs central to women's daily lives. More than 260 alphabetically arranged entries cover the lore of women across time, space, and life. Students of history, religion and spirituality, healing and traditional medicine, literature, and world cultures will value this encyclopedia as an indispensable guide to women's folklore. In addition, there are entries on women's folklore and folklife in 15 regions of the world, such as the Caribbean, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Entries provide cross-references and cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected bibliography of print and electronic resources. Students learning about history, world cultures, religion and spirituality, healing and traditional medicine, and literature will welcome this companion to the daily life of women across time and continents.

Folktales are instrumental in ensuring the survival of oral traditions and strengthening communal bonds. Both the stories and the process of storytelling itself help to define social, cultural and political identity. For Palestinians, the threat of losing their heritage has engendered a sense of urgency among storytellers and Palestinian folklorists. Yet there has been remarkably little academic scholarship dedicated to the tradition. Farah Aboubakr here analyses a selection of folktales edited, compiled and translated by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana in Speak, Bird, Speak Again (1989). In addition to the folktales themselves, Muhawi and Kanaana's collection is renowned for providing readers with extensive folkloric, historical and anthropological annotations. Here, for the first time, the folktales and the compilers' work on them, are the subject of scholarly analysis. Synthesising various disciplines including memory studies, gender studies and social movement studies, Aboubakr uses the collection to understand the politics of storytelling and its impact on Palestinian identity. In particular, the book draws attention to the female storytellers who play an essential role in transmitting and preserving collective memory and culture. The book is an important step towards analysing a significant genre of Palestinian literature and will be relevant to scholars of Palestinian politics and popular culture, gender studies and memory studies, and those interested in folklore and oral literature.

This book has tales that portray situations involving parents and paternal figures, courtship and marital relations, siblings, and boy and mother's brother.

This book provides a general overview of the identity crises BMB (believer from Muslim background) women in Jordan go through and reasons for it. Traditionally, persecution from family, community, or the secret police is thought to leave these women with newfound faith. However, even before persecution exposes their new faith, many initial believers give up seeking the new truth and return to their previous phase due to a serious identity crisis. This phenomenon is found to occur particularly often among female BMBs because of their unique circumstances in the religious and sociocultural contexts of Jordan. Through an examination of BMB women's narratives, this book explores how Muslim women form their identities and what they experience in the process of conversion.

This study refutes both the Western dominant paradigm of modernity and the Eurocentric stereotype of traditional Muslim culture, and demonstrates that rural Egyptians have their own paradigm of secular modernism that does not negate religious or sacred orientations. Islam is associated with ongoing attempts at religious purification and cultural unification and is inimical to cultural homogenization encouraged by Western globalization. Provides a holistic interpretation of the interplay between religion and folk cosmology, challenging the stereotypes that relegate traditional people to backwardness and a peripheral space or locality. Within this Muslim society the global/local nexus is one of ongoing creative integration, not separation. The cosmology can best be understood in the context of its totality, encompassing both visible and invisible zones. Muslims articulate personal or private order as well as social order within their cosmology. This cosmological view, endowing people with a unique imaginative sense of engagemenet with a supraphenomenal reality, accentuates the belief that divine cosmic invisible higher power surpasses any other power. Such a belief represents an inexhaustible source of spiritual and emotional empowerment that may be politically mobilized in certain critical moments and depicted as a religious, holy struggle, or jihad.

This volume examines the complex issues faced by women and girls around the world, both historically and today. Its multidisciplinary focus will appeal to any scholar interested in communication and gender studies.

By analysing the folk stories and personal narratives of a cross-section of Palestinians, Sirhan offers a detailed study of how content and sociolinguistic variables affect a narrator's language use and linguistic behaviour. This book will be of interest to anyone engaged with narrative discourse, gender discourse, Arabic studies and linguistics.