27 August 2015, The Tablet

Headscarves and Hymens: why the Middle East needs a sexual revolution

by Mona Eltahawy, reviewed by Jane O’Grady

 
Headscarves and Hymens: why the Middle East needs a sexual revolutionMona Eltahawy (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 256PP, £16.99)Tablet Bookshop Price £15.30 - Tel 01420 592974  What might be called “Enlighten­ment universalism” – the notion that we can, by means of reason, establish and extend freedom, rights, good government and just ways of living – is often disparaged. The trumpeted “we”, it is said, turns out to be “he”, the complacent white, Western, middle-class male; and we worry that perhaps the so-called “Enlightenment” was not a liberation after all, but just another, well-disguised, exercise in colonialisation.  But if it can be argued that Islamic State (IS) is not truly Islamic so, by the sam
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