Guests Of The Sheik Analysis

In Elizabeth Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik, her experience in El Nahra is the quintessence of the traditional Islamic role of women in society. Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun, although it is set in a similar time period, shows the change between the culture of the rural areas versus the culture of the more urban area, even though there are some similarities between the two. Finally, in Kamil al-Khatib’s novel Just Like a River, and the film SOS in Tehran, more modern and Western ideas begin to infiltrate into the culture of the Middle East, creating an extremely noticeable tension between the two different statuses of women. Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik provides the reader with an illustration of the most traditional form of Islamic and Middle …show more content…
Three women show up, only one of which Elizabeth recognizes, and they say to her “We hear you can’t cook rice… If you will open your gate, we will come in and show you how to cook rice, so your husband will be pleased with your food,” (Fernea 86). They go in and spend the afternoon teaching Elizabeth how to cook rice the El Nahra way. These three women who barely know her and theoretically have little reason to care about whether or not she can cook rice walk to her home and teach her their way. This shows a certain compassion that is present between the women in El Nahra. It appears that they are an extremely tightly knit group, and they are always willing to give up some of their time or material things to help another of them feel better or happier. In this case, the women gladly give up their afternoon to teach Elizabeth how to cook so that she can better please Bob. There is such weight placed upon one’s skill in cooking that the women believe that her inability to do it could tangibly impact her relationship with her husband and the women are willing to invest their own time to make this less likely. This is part of the traditional Middle Eastern societal role of women, in which they live to provide for their husband above all else. In El Nahra, there is no space for Western ideas, and throughout Fernea’s work there is no noticeable tension between …show more content…
Rather, there is also a tension between the older generation and the new generation of characters. One of the main characters, Chief Sergeant Yunis, is a grizzled military commander. He wishes to maintain the status quo and does not wish to adopt the western ideals that the younger characters in the book wish to adopt. Dallal, his young daughter, on the other hand, is enthralled by the idea of the West and wishes nothing more than to be a part of it and to change Syria for, what she believes is, the better. This generational rift is what causes a lot of the issues in this text, and it comes to a breaking point when Yunis kicks Dallal out of his house for coming come late. I would argue that in the viewpoint of most western people, coming home late can be a bad thing but it is not something that would lead to a child being expelled. This is the type of interaction that really creates tension, where western ideals and traditional ideals

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The Guests Of The Sheik Analysis