Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East
The Egyptian Women's Movement

"...the book does a wonderful job explaining and providing a theoretical context for understanding the movement...the book represents a welcome addition to scholarship on women in the Middle East, international development, and globalization." Choice

"sensitively researched and brilliantly written." Middle Eastern Journal

"The individual articles are accessible to undergraduates while the entire collection would provide graduate students with an excellent summary of the best recent innovative scholarship on gender in the Middle East. This collection would work well for courses in anthropology, political science, Women's Studies, Middle East studies, or cultural studies.... Throughout the work, Al-Ali interrogates dichotomies that often figure in feminist analyses of women's lives: public versus private, universal human rights versus cultural specificity, the authentic or traditional versus Western imports, and East versus West. Part of what makes this book so intriguing is that she takes these discussions into new arenas that few other scholars have explored." National Women's Studies Association Journal

"...the book sheds important light on the educated segment of the secular feminist movements in contemporary Egyptian society." Studies in Contemporary Islam