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Christian Dittus
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English

EXCELLENT DAUGHTERS

Katherine Zoepf

The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World

In the Arab countries, girls and young women are living in the crucible as battles over the future of the region are, increasingly, being fought in the domain of women's rights. Only a generation ago, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi wrote that, in the Middle East, an unmarried adolescent girl was “a completely new idea where previously you had only a female child and a menstruating woman who had to be married off immediately so as to prevent dishonorable engagement in premarital sex.” Today, young Arab women outnumber men in universities, and some are facing down tradition in order to delay marriage, and to pursue professional goals. Thousands of young women are attending Qur'anic schools—and using the training to argue for greater rights from an Islamic perspective. And, during the Arab Spring, young women helped to lead antigovernment protests.

In 2004, Zoepf began working in Damascus as a stringer for the New York Times. Zoepf lived in Syria before its civil war, and she documents a complex society in the midst of soul-searching about its place in the world and about women's changing roles. In Lebanon, she documents a country whose women must balance extreme standards of self-presentation with Islamic codes of virtue. In the United Arab Emirates, Zoepf reports on a generation of Arab women who've found freedom in living independently. In Saudi Arabia she chronicles driving protests and women entering the retail industry for the first time. She reports from Egypt in the aftermath of Tahrir Square to examine the crucial role of women in the popular uprising.

Over ten tumultuous years in the Arab world, journalist Katherine Zoepf has been documenting the lives of the generation of Arab women who, until now, have been the great, untold story of the Middle East.

Katherine Zoepf lived in Syria and Lebanon from 2004 to 2007 while working as a stringer for The New York Times; she also worked in the Times's Baghdad bureau in 2008. She is a fellow in the Breadwinning and Caregiving Program at the New America Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New York Observer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, among other publications. She is a graduate of Princeton University and the London School of Economics.
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Published 2016-01-01 by Penguin Press

Comments

If the lines of the battle Zoepf documents seem fixed, ... that may be because “Excellent Daughters” is one of those rare books reported from a region best known as a crisis zone that are not themselves crisis journalism. What Zoepf chronicles is something subtler: the internal pressures and counterpressures influencing the Arab world toward a form of social change that is by no means inevitable. Zoepf's knowledge of Arabic, her open and inquisitive mind, her combination of lucidity and empathy ...allow her to understand these women's lives on their own terms without losing her footing either in their world or in ours. Read more...

Excellent Daughters takes us behind the veil –exploring the lives, experiences and beliefs of young Muslim women in rapidly changing societies across the Middle East. The stories Katherine Zoepf tells are engrossing in their details and their ability to take us into a world that is hidden from us by the prescriptions of Islam and Muslim men. Equally important, however, they offer insights into the modern Arab world that countless treatises on ‘the politics of Islam' or ‘the future of the Middle East' cannot match. - —Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America, and former Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State, 2009-2011

Katherine Zoepf has written an unforgettable book. Deft and haunting, smart and empathetic, beautifully observed and sometimes heartbreakingly tragic, Excellent Daughters should be required reading for anyone who cares about the condition of women or indeed the condition of the world. This is a landmark work of non-fiction that is both astonishingly intimate and globally important. - —Liza Mundy, a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family.

Zoepf fluidly merges memoir with reportage while showing the Arab world from a unique perspective In her absorbing, window-opening book, Zoepf reveals the variety of women's lives and interests away from political headlines and conventional stereotypes, and their power, often by small steps, to transform their world.

Spain: Ediciones B

This moving book is an act of cultural translation of the very first order. — Andrew Solomon

With superb reporting brio, and smart cultural analysis Katherine Zoepf conjures in vivid detail a hidden world that is often caricatured and misunderstood. Her portraits of these women are graceful and absorbing. She offers a rare and moving vision of the Arab world in flux. — Katie Roiphe

Portugal: Leya; Iceland: Salka; Polish: Poznanskie;

Katherine Zoepf's book is so well written, so well reported and so well calibrated that it demands to be read over the course of an evening. During that evening I learned a great deal about the modern Arab world and the role of women in it, and also how they will remake that world in profound ways within our lifetimes. — Peter Bergen