Veiled Sentiments

From her text’s first pages, Abu-Lughod informs readers that both her experience as a woman and her interest in gender motivate her study of the Bedouin. Although her role as “daughter” in the Haj’s house brings her “acceptance,” she notes immediately she must be “dependent” upon his family (17). Being a respectable woman among the Awlad ‘Ali not only inhibits her self-expression but also limits her work as an ethnographer.

Honor, in Bedouin society, is most interesting to Abu-Lughod for the ways in which it informs women’s lives. Women render this value problematic; indeed, women themselves are the problem, marked off by their veils and belts, both symbols of their “natural” (124) difference and insufficiency. Because Abu-Lughod is most often limited to female circles, she sees their experiences most intimately; because she is a woman, she comes closest to experiencing the culture of honor as a “native” (277) from a view that is distinctly gendered. Gender becomes important, in Awlad ‘Ali society, not only because Abu-Lughod begins with an interest in women, but also because Awlad ‘Ali social organization sexually segregates women.

The experience of being a woman is more than—and different from—the hierarchical position accorded to women. Abu-Lughod examines poetry because it unlocks insights that she cannot, because of the culture of modesty to which women (who recite the poems) are bound, ask about directly.