Guests Of The Sheik Summary

Power of Women in Guests of the Sheik In her ethnography Guests of the Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea retells her stories and experiences of the two years that she spent with her husband Robert (Bob) in the Iraqi village of El Nahra. Bob was a social anthropology graduate student at the University of Chicago, and he had been living with and studying the village of El Nahra before he brought Elizabeth in 1956 after they were married. The newlyweds would spend the first two years of their married lives in El Nahra. Bob doubly brought her there both because they were newly married and because he was not able to gather any information on the women of the village. He had hoped that Elizabeth would be able to integrate herself into the world of the women …show more content…
Elizabeth, who was hesitant in going to El Nahra to begin with, consistently complained about wearing an abayah, the traditional black cloak worn by Iraqi women, feeling as though the villagers would not see her as human if she did not follow their customs. In the beginning, Elizabeth had a difficult time assimilating into the societies due to her poor Arabic speaking skills and culture shock, but as she met more women, even befriending some, she was able to find a happiness in the village. Elizabeth even continued to correspond with her first friend Laila after she returned to the United States. Being a small Shiite village in Southern Iraq, the village follows the customs and traditions set forth by the Koran. The women of El Nahra are secluded in the closed society and have considerably less societal power than the men. As Elizabeth discovered as she integrated into their world, the women have worked around the norms to create ways in which they hold a form of authority, status, and power. The women of El Nahra have sourced their authority, status, and power through reputation, religious