Will I love Guests of the Sheik?

This book is an amazing introduction to the Middle East, despite it being written decades ago.

When I first lived in the Middle East, I realized that I had to learn a whole new framework of customs, practices, and expectations if I wanted to fit in. This book is still the best guide to values and practices, despite many changes since it was written.

Newly-married to a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Fernea traveled to a Shia Muslim village in faraway Iraq in the mid-1960s. While Bob Fernea sets out to meet the officials in… show more.

Fernea describes a lost culture in a small Iraqi village, El Nahra, in 1956, where her husband Robert was conducting ethnographic research. She met with women in the village, learned the language and culture then wrote her own study of 1950s women. The book presents insights into the life of rural Iraqi women at a time of poverty and hardship.

In the late 1950s, Fernea accompanied her anthropologist husband to a small village in Iraq. While he spent his days on his research, she was left with the local women, living like them and learning their language. While welcoming this outsider into their midst, the Iraqi women find her ways strange and perplexing. Knowing almost nothing of the local culture when she arrives, Fernea writes movingly about their reactions and her own comparisons with American culture. She describes the evolution in her thinking as she learns more about the values and beliefs that motivate them. This book offers a chance… show more.