GUESTS OF THE SHEIK: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village

"Where Freya Stark wrote of the Marsh Arabs, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea goes into the deep interior of desert Iraq in 1955, some fifty years later." A delightful, extremely well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, Guests of the Sheik is an account of the author's two-year stay in the tiny rural village of El Nahra in southern Iraq. To help her anthropologist husband gather data, Mrs. Fernea agreed to dress only in the all-enveloping black veils of the women of the harem. Although she shared a small mud-brick cottage with her husband, her daily life was spent only with the women of the town, for in this polygamous society there existed no social communication between the sexes. The hardships were many but the rewards greater, especially for the readers of this extraordinary narrative: this volume gives a unique insight into a part of Middle Eastern life seldom seen by the West and life of the women who have no outwardly apparent role in society, but whose thoughts and ideas are now emerging with force and helping to shape modern Middle Eastern society. "Lives are hard, repetitively hard and unrelenting in all respects. Men live by the goodwill and social standing of those a rung above. And they, by those above them. Tribal status among other tribes, and status within the tribe, dictate where a man may work, whom he might marry and how his children will or will not prosper. Honour is a concept as much alive then as it is today." Paperback, facsimile reprint of the 1965 original, 346 pages, small remainder mark.