Guests of the Sheik: Ethnography of an Iraqi village

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, Random House, re-issue 1995

Though Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s book was first published in 1969,  her writing provides useful insights into daily life, for Arab women in  a particular place (rural Iraq) and time period. “A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Fernea’s two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman.” (Random House website)

Reading “Guests of the Sheik” left me in tears. My father was born and raised in southern Iraq right around the time that Elizabeth Warnock Fernea moves there. I grew up on stories from that period and I appreciated getting the women’s story from this book, it felt like a complement of the stories I heard in childhood. As I read “Guests of the Sheik” I frequently wondered how I would react if I was in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea shoes. Would I feel at home in that environment? Would I feel as a tourist? I don’t know, but I do hope that one day when I do visit Iraq that I will feel as much love for the land and its people as Elizabeth Warnock Fernea did. (Amazon website review)