Reviews 505

B. R. PRIDHAM, ed., Contemporary Yemen: Politics and Historical Background and

Economy, Society, and Culture in Contemporary Yemen (London: Croom Helm,
1985). Pp. 271,250.

The ancient world's Arabia felix became the contemporary Middle East's terra incognita.
Although the paucity of materials on Yemen has been partially alleviated in the past
decade by several ethnographies, political histories, and valuable but difficult-to-locate
technical reports, this two-volume set is the first major collection of original research on
North and South Yemen. As such, it represents a benchmark in Yemeni studies, useful to
the generalist for its rich, contoured profile of the political economy of southwest Arabia
and to the specialist as an indication of the "state of the art" in Yemeni studies.
Fruits of the first generation of largely exploratory research in the region, the thirty-
eight short entries range in tone from academic to journalistic to technical. Despite the
diversity represented by nine nationalities and at least as many disciplines, coherence
emerges from the common emphasis on fundamentals of political and economic develop-
ment in the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the People's Democratic Republic of
Yemen (PDRY). Questions asked are primary, pragmatic, and policy oriented; the field
has not yet moved beyond discovery and explanation into esoteric theoretical discourse.
The separate yet intertwined experiences of the two Yemeni states are traced in the first
volume. Grochenour's investigation of the uneven, sectarian penetration of Islam, and
Mandaville's analysis of the impact of the Ottoman Tanzimat set the historical stage. The
process of modern state formation begins with two revolutionary movements; Douglas's
account of the liberal Free Yemeni movement that overthrew the Imam, and Lackner's
history of the more radical National Liberation Front's struggle against British colonial-
ism document extensive cross-fertilization between them. Zabarah's interpretation of the
social revolution in the North, and Al-Abiadh's portrayal of the concomitant struggle to
modernize government institutions parallel Bukair's assessment of three alternative designs
for South Yemeni independence. Peterson makes the juxtaposition explicit in his com-
parison of nation-building in the YAR and the PDRY.
Each regime faces special domestic and international challenges yet also the prospects
of a common destiny. Dresch presents the northern tribes' resistance to YAR central
authority in historical perspective. Wenner characterizes the PDRY as an "Arab political
maverick," while Shamiry shows its more serious side, the judiciary, and Anthony
considers the strengths and weaknesses of its Communist party. Halliday and El Azhary,
respectively, then evaluate each Yemen's position vis a vis its most influential outside
benefactor: the USSR for the People's Republic, and Saudi Arabia for the YAR. Yemeni
unity—anathema to both Soviets and Saudis, but increasingly appealing to many
nationalists and observers—is addressed by Nagi and Braun in the closing essays.
Volume Two surveys socioeconomic changes. Naumkin and Abdulsadiq both describe
challenges in socialist development planning for the South, concentrating on key di-
mensions of agricultural management, human and natural resource maximization, and
economic growth. Formulation and implementation of indicative plans for the YAR's
more heavily privatized economy are treated in a series of sectoral analyses, including
Saqqaf's examination of fiscal and budgetary policies and a number of short items
connected by the common threads of agriculture and employment, savings and invest-
ments, and education and culture.
Water- and labor-intensive agriculture is the mainstay of the Yemeni economy. Kopp
surveys the ecological diversity (from alpine heights to arid plains) and hazards (chiefly
overexploitation of water and forest resources) within which the agricultural system
operates. This is complemented by Mundy's and Brunner's case studies of two regions
506 Reviews

where prospects for mechanized commercial farming seem most auspicious, the Red Sea
plain and the Marib valley. Weir appraises the economics of qat (somewhat similar to
cocaine on the leaf, qat is the popular intoxicant in Yemen and the northern highland's
most lucrative cash crop) production and distribution in the very different ecosystem
of the northwest mountains, establishing a farm-market linkage that dovetails with
Schweizer's mapping of dynamic changes in the pattern of weekly markets. The macro-
economic picture isfleshedout in Harvey's discussion of deficit spending for consumption
and Rajab's history of the YAR banking sector.
Both economies experienced massive labor migration during the past decade. Over $1
billion a year was remitted to the YAR's seven million inhabitants, and nearly half that
amount was sent home annually to two million South Yemenis. Three authors focus on
the impact of migration. Al-Kasir argues that the resulting farm labor shortage dis-
courages grain cultivation but stimulates qat production and petty entrepreneurship.
Based on evidence from a northwest highland district, Swanson rejects the hypothesis that
remittances are a viable source of capital for local development investments; Meyers, on
the other hand, finds that migration does help provide vocational expertise and private
capital to stimulate a nationwide, particularly urban, construction boom.
The discussion of political and economic change raises further questions about what
might be broadly termed "cultural development." In a trilogy on education in the YAR,
Clark, al-Iryani, and Alkhader show a system beginning "from scratch," as it were,
without teachers or schools, in 1962. Al-Noban's study of education in the PDRY,
included in the first volume because it approaches the issue in terms of nation-building,
dramatizes the very different strategies needed to transform the legacy of British edu-
cational policy. Myntti's research on indigenous notions of preventative health care in the
Hujariya also has implications for educational policy, as do Muheirez's observations on
the mix of colonial and Yemeni cultural influences in Aden and its hinterland. Last, and
perhaps surprisingly for some foreign readers, the final three selections on architectural
heritage and the tourism industry provide a kind of summing up. Lewcock analyzes
architectural conservation efforts in the context of technical considerations, the con-
struction boom, popular skills and values, and sight-seeing attractions. Al-Hamdani and
Clark, one as a policymaker and the other as a visitor, summarize the potential and
prospects for traveler services, pointing out that they are significant in at least two ways:
as a sector of close YAR-PDRY cooperation, and as a critical component in how
foreigners perceive "happy Arabia."
The editor declined to impose any of these connections or subthemes on the collection,
which lacks either a substantive introduction or an explicit arrangement of the essays.
This reflects a certain proclivity of Yemen scholars to write to one another, especially in
cases such as this where the papers were originally prepared for a conference on Yemen at
Exeter University's Centre for Arab Gulf Studies. Consequently, materials are somewhat
less accessible to "outsiders"—students of the Middle East, traditional societies, or
development administration generally—than they might otherwise be. A "roadmap" for
nonexpert readers would be useful, for instance, in understanding where the regional case
studies fit into the materials on history, land use, periodic markets, and migration. The
several ethnographic portraits happen to zero in on communities along the perimeters of
North Yemen: There are two studies of the northwest mountains and one from the north-
central plateau, all near Saudi Arabia; two sets of data drawn from the Hujariya, just
north of the YAR-PDRY border; and farm studies from the coastal plain and the Marib
region, which bracket the interior mountains and most closely approximate environmental
conditions in South Yemen. Readers needs to be aware that these represent social and
economic diversity rather than a composite picture.
 Reviews 507

Essential for any scholar or library specializing in the Arabian peninsula, the set is also
recommended to other students of social change in the Third World. Although the
overview is more complete for North than for South Yemen, the comparison between the
colonized, subsequently socialist PDRY and the formerly autocratic, now very bourgeois
North is of theoretical interest to political economists. Because of the quality and
originality of the scholarship, and the range and importance of the topics covered, anyone
seeking a primer in Yemeni studies is well advised to begin here.

Political Science Department SHEILA CARAPICO

University of Richmond

ELIZABETH W. FERNEA, ed., Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of
Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). Pp. 368.

Women and the Family in the Middle East, subtitled New Voices of Change, is a wide-
ranging collection of essays, poems, short stories, and miscellaneous excerpts, all of which
focus on women and their experiences in today's Middle East. With the exception of three
sociological essays and a short interview, the authors are women, and most of them are
native to the region. In fact, a distinguishing feature of the volume is that it introduces the
reader to a number of young poets and writers whose work is made available in
translation for the first time. Among these are the Syrian Ilfat Idilbi, the Iraqi Lamica
c
Abbas clmarah, and the Egyptian Fathiyyah cAwada, to name a few. One cannot but be
grateful to Elizabeth W. Fernea, the editor of the volume, and to the various translators
for their efforts to make these women's voices more widely heard.
In addition to the poems and short stories the volume includes articles that discuss
women and their lives in the context of wage labor, family relations, laws of personal
status, and public education, as well as that of urban poverty. As is usually the case with
material on the Middle East, Egypt gets the lion's share. This reflects the relative
accessibility of Egypt to researchers and the availability of a fairly large number of
Egyptian social scientists producing data on their own country. In contrast, Saudi Arabia,
Syria, Jordan, the.Yemens, Iraq, and the Gulf are hardly represented. But then, it is
perhaps not fair to ask of any one collection to have adequate subject and area coverage.
Of the many excellent articles in the volume, some deserve special notice. This is the
case, for example, with the article by N. Toubia on female circumcision in the Sudan.
Toubia, who is the first Sudanese female surgeon, treats this highly emotional and
controversial subject with authority and a finely modulated feminist sensibility. In the
course of a few well-argued paragraphs, she manages to demystify this barbaric custom
and to locate it in its proper political context. She writes, "this aggression against female
sexuality is only a part of the total process of subordination of women to facilitate the use
of their reproductive and productive powers by the patriarchal society" (p. 155). An
article by F. Milani discusses how one Iranian woman, the poet Forugh Farrokhzod,
rebelled against and actively challenged this patriarchal society. Milani compares
Farrokhzod's life and career with that of another Iranian poet, who chose to accept and
even glorify her assigned role—the traditionalist Tahereh Saffar-Zadeh. Another tra-
ditionalist, Zaynab al-Ghazali, is the subject of a fascinating interview by V. Hoffman. An
Egyptian and the self-proclaimed "mother" of the Moslem Brotherhood, al-Ghazali's
interview offers a glimpse into the motivation and logic of an Islamic activist, one whom
Sadat considered dangerous enough to be put in jail.