The harem syndrome: moving beyond anthropology's discursive colonization of gender in the Middle East.

The importunate need to redirect the debate upon gender in the Middle East has l single commentator to suggest that "facile assumptions about the monolithic character 'Islam' or Arab culture plays in the seclusion, disempowerment, and oppression of women no longer pass as the accepted academic discourse upon the topic." (1) This valiant declaration, which sought to establish the proprieties of discourse upon gender in the Arab world, may have followed in banishing facile assumptions in favor of a more compound sense of the relationality between Islam and the construction of sex in the Arab world. Nevertheless, historical legacies, the