Eugene Rogan (ed.) Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, the Islamic Mediterranean Series, London.

Publication: Kadin/Woman 2000

Publication Date: 01-DEC-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Eastern Mediterranean University

Eugene Rogan (ed.) Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, the Islamic Mediterranean Series, London. New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers in association with The European Foundation, Strasbourg, France. ISBN 1-86064-698-0

Outside In, On the Margins of the Modern Middle East is a book published by I.B. Taurus who as publisher developed the publication of a series of scholarly books on specialised topics about Middle Eastern Studies. This book is the product of several workshops and conferences organised with the aegis support from the European Science Foundation's collaborative project, entitled "Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World", by a collective of scholars and deals with the social history of the Middle East during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This review will focus mainly on women issues as marginalised in society.

Eugene Rogan edits the collection of essays in the book. The contributors are Francois Georgeon, Rudolph Peters, Mine Ener, Khaled Fahmy, Eugene Rogan, Eyal Ginio, Julia Clancy-Smith, Jens Hanssen, Sami Zubaida and Kharin Van Nieuwkerk.

Eugene Rogan, the editor of the book, explains the aim of the book in the introduction. Rogan described the process of publishing these papers about the study of marginality, which is considered to be a distinctive division of 'history from below'. The articles written by different authors attempted to elucidate how the notion of marginality changed with time. The themes discussed by each author are trying to focus on individuals and sheds light on the shifting boundaries of marginality in Ottoman Greece and Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia.

The subject of the book deals with the marginal people in different cities of the Middle Eastern countries that are currently emerging as modern states. The years of transition are always rather difficult and cause social problems with people at extreme ends. The heroes dealt with in the articles are not the intellectual and elite people, who are beyond their society because of the education they have obtained abroad, but on the contrary, they are the people who are below the margin in point of economical level as well as moral values. These are most likely individuals who do not conform to social or legal norms and therefore may well be relegated to a marginal status in society. Among these are the poor people, prostitutes, alcoholics, criminals, patients of psychological disorder and...

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