San Antonio College Library

In Africa, as in so many other places, sports have traditionally been a man's world. And until recently, women entered at the risk of being scorned or laughed at. But the amazing Sahar El-Hawary and her female soccer team are no joke. She is the first women's referee in North Africa and also the first female member of the Egyptian Football Federation. She has put women's soccer on the map -- not just in her native Egypt but also in the entire Arab...

There is a long history in the West of representing Middle Eastern women as uniformly oppressed by Islam, by Islamic law, and by men. Stereotypical views of Middle Eastern women today maintain that they are without legal rights, do not attend universities or have jobs outside their homes, and are not full citizens of their countries because they cannot vote or hold public office. Similar misinformation circulated in the eighteenth century when European...

Samia Serageldin's heroine, the daughter of a politically prominent, land-owning Egyptian family, witnesses the changes sweeping her homeland. Looking back to the glamorous Egypt of the pashas and King Faruk, Serageldin moves forward to the police state of the colonels who seized power in 1952 and the disastrous consequences of Nasser's sequestration policies. Through well-chosen portraits and telling descriptions of the era's fashions and furnishings,...

In Intimate Outsiders, the art historian Mary Roberts brings to light a body of harem imagery that was created through a dynamic process of cultural exchange. Roberts focuses on images produced by nineteenth-century European artists and writers who were granted access to harems in the urban centres of Istanbul and Cairo. Invited guests, these Europeans were "intimate outsiders" within the women's quarters of elite Ottoman households. At the same time,...