Contains eight studies by women specialists from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Sudan.

This book presents and discusses the logic and method of social science research adapted mainly for instruction at Arab universities and for research in Arab countries, but with applicability beyond the region. It illustrates major concepts and methods pertaining to research with examples of previous studies carried out in the Arab world and with exercises using Arab Barometer and other datasets. The book situates itself between a regular methods textbook and an annotated list of major concepts and methods, and includes an introduction, three chapters, and four appendices.

In modern Egypt, the pace of Islamic resurgence has increased as in other Muslim societies. Throughout the twentieth century, Egyptian women have fought fiercely for political participation and for legal and educational reform to improve their status. To many of them, the adoption of a new form of the veil seemed retrogressive and ominous. This book explores the history of Muslim women and the debates over gender, which have developed since the golden age of Islam. It considers the opinions, goals, and ideals of fifty Egyptian women, veiled and unveiled, and compares their views to the gender ideology of the contemporary Islamists. Women's social backgrounds are examined in the context of the Egyptian state and its social policies.

This book addresses east-west understandings of Arab women as portrayed through translated media. The vast majority of media studies on Arab women are western-based. They study the effect of western stereotypes in western media depictions of Arab women. There is a vast scholarly literature tracing western stereotypes of Arab women from medieval times to the present. From 1800, the dominant western stereotype of Arab women depicts them as passive and oppressed. Thirty years of social science media research in the west has shown that media images of Arab women reinforce this two hundred year old stereotype. Much of this research has studied silent "image bites" of Arab women, where women are pictured in veils and their own voices are replaced by western captions or voice-overs. This book sets out to answer this question. To answer it, we contracted with a global news translation service from the Middle East to collect and translate a sample of 22 months of new summaries from 103 Arab media sources belonging to 22 Arab countries. Filtering the summaries that contained one or more female keywords (e.g., woman, mother, aunt, sister, she) yielded 2, 061 summaries between September 2005 and June of 2007. Using the 2,061 summaries as input data, a coding scheme was developed for "active" and "passive" female behaviors based on verb-phrase analysis and conventions of English-language news-reporting.

The contributors discuss issues central to the debate about the "proper" study of Arabs and Islam, methodological perspectives on the study of the Arab World, urban studies, women's studies, economics and economic policy, foreign policy and strategic studies.

This book, first published in 1986, examines the literature on administration, human resources and development in the Arab world. It emphasizes contemporary societies and their internal dynamics, the least known and most critical aspects of Arabic studies.

Freedom HouseOs innovative publication WomenOs Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Progress Amid Resistance analyzes the status of women in the region, with a special focus on the gains and setbacks for womenOs rights since the first edition was released in 2005. The study presents a comparative evaluation of conditions for women in 17 countries and one territory: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine (Palestinian Authority and Israeli-Occupied Territories), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The publication identifies the causes and consequences of gender inequality in the Middle East, and provides concrete recommendations for national and international policymakers and implementers. Freedom House is an independent nongovernmental organization that supports democratic change, monitors freedom, and advocates for democracy and human rights. The project has been embraced as a resource not only by international players like the United Nations and the World Bank, but also by regional womenOs rights organizations, individual activists, scholars, and governments worldwide. WomenOs rights in each country are assessed in five key areas: (1) Nondiscrimination and Access to Justice; (2) Autonomy, Security, and Freedom of the Person; (3) Economic Rights and Equal Opportunity; (4) Political Rights and Civic Voice; and (5) Social and Cultural Rights. The methodology is based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the study results are presented through a set of numerical scores and analytical narrative reports.