Books: Scheherazade Goes West

I bought Scherezade Goes West as an impulse buy at Half Price Books a few months ago. I was interested by the idea of a book by an Eastern Muslim women who had spent a lot of time in the West talking about the challenges she faced travelling in the West and the differences she saw. After wading through my library books, I picked this up. It was absolutely not what I expected, but I still enjoyed it.

The biggest change that I found from what I expected when I picked the book up was that it is much more focused than I expected on feminism in the East and West. I still found it very interesting and full of things I had no idea about, but I'm a little disappointed that it didn't have a bigger picture. I learned a lot about Muslim culture (mostly in Morocco, which is where the author lives) and about its recent history with women. I also learned a lot of traditional stories that were told about Muslim women and got to understand a lot more about the Thousand and One Nights, which are stories that I love and have been reading since I was little. (Even if you don't think you know them, you probably do: Aladdin, Sindbad and Ali Baba are all characters from Scherezade's stories. Side note--they are absolutely worth reading, but you'll have to get them in several volumes. Above I have a link to just the first volume, as the only complete set I saw on Amazon was $2500 dollars, and even I don't love my books that much.) Throughout the narrative, the author's points and observations are held together by her struggle to understand Scherezade, harems and their different perceptions in the East and West.

One of the largest things that turned me off about this book is unfortunately something that give feminism a bad name; far too much of it was focused on the ways that men enslave and entrap women. Many of her observations were probably accurate to a degree--she looked at the different ridiculous expectations that women are held to (or hold themselves to) from wearing a veil in the East to wearing a size 4 in the West. However, she had a bad habit of continually blaming those restrictions specifically on men, rather than looking at society as a whole. If you can overlook this, though, Scheherezade Goes West is a really interesting, easy to read introduction to the differences between Eastern Muslim and traditional Western roles and views of women. I'm very glad I read it and I would recommend it, but I do very much wish that it had contrained more information about how an Eastern Muslim woman, brought up in such a different culture, perceived the Western world and the misconceptions that she found on both sides.