The Nine Parts of Desire

 

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brooks does an excellent job of balancing history, current events, and personal anecdote in this nonfiction look at women in Islam. While I don't think she ever quite understood why a woman would elect to follow some of the Moslem practices voluntarily, her explanations of the Koran and how they are now interpreted were especially eye-opening. I agree that a political system that dictates a religion to its people will always lead to oppression, I also appreciated that some of the most heinous crimes against women in the Middle East are not actually part of the Koran or Moslem beliefs, but rather appropriated practices, or practices that have been corrupted.

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Educating the women so that they could read the Koran for themselves was the keystone in the Eriteans' patient campaign against genital mutilation.

Once, discussing cruelty, he cited intercourse without foreplay as a form of cruelty to women.

Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic tradition because they aren't considered sexually active, and in the Muslim tradition because they are.

"If the men could come in here and be with us, they would end up dominating and telling us how to run things.  I prefer to run my own show."

Now, thanks to Hamas, women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures.