Women of Fes

Abstract

The city of Fes, the once “bourgeois citadel” (J. Berque’s words) of Morocco and once the world’s most populous city (1170-80), has in modernity been unhappily bypassed for coastal trading hubs and global mega-cities. Material and symbolic elements of Fassi power persist, however, and anthropologist Rachel Newcomb’s finely researched and written ethnography identifies them in upper-middle-class women’s gender identity. In so doing, Women of Fes helps the fields of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and Islamic studies to illuminate the often-neglected power of class to shape gender in the Muslim Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating, not pointedly, that class divides women within as much as across cultures. Newcomb’s book concerns women of, not merely in, Fes, namely, a class of women of “original” Fassi families navigating the social ruins and new opportunities of daily urban life. Its disparate topics – urban rumors, women’s NGOs, reforms of the Moroccan Muslim family code (mudawanah), flexible kinship, public space, a dépassé lounge singer – shift the book’s center from class to gender and public life. Her skillful identification of class issues within the latter, however, gives the book a necessary coherence ...