There is much to recommend to readers in Naomi Sakr's latest offering, a departure from her previous excursion into Satellite Realms (the name of her previous book), but in many ways a more important book. Where Satellite Realms froze to a moment the dynamic situation concerning transnational broadcasting, Women and Media in the Middle East tells a different story of the cross-border broadcasting in the Muslim world, mostly through the words of women.
This is a book that should not be confined to women's studies classes, though it would be appropriate there. Instead, it should be integrated through the curricula of the burgeoning number of journalism schools in the Middle East, mostly filled with thousands of young Arab women hoping some day to be a "famous" journalist. This book gives those hopefuls a dose of reality while at the same time leaving open the possibility that the historically dismal history of women communicators in the Middle East is a thing of the past. Women activists-many of them journalists and broadcasters-have made a difference throughout the region, as this book attests.
This book introduces the reader to women from Morocco to Turkey who overcame social, cultural and economic difficulties in film, newspapers, television and even the Internet. Thirteen authors contributed eleven chapters to this book, which ought to appeal to media and development scholars, political scientists, and sociologists interested in the Middle East. Their stories are as educational as they are inspirational.
Exceptional chapters from Sonia Dabbous, Zahia Samil Salhi, Sahar Khamis, and Lina Khatib draw symbolic meaning from women's struggles in their professions and as activists, thus becoming "mothers" of their nations, if not the region, since media products are often a shared feast. Magda Abu-Fadil contributes to this theme by examining the international role of female communicators to furthering global understanding of the condition of women in the Middle East, while Victoria Firmo-Fontan examines the role of women on Lebanon's controversial Al Manar, a television channel operated by Hizbollah.
Deborah Wheeler, one of two American contributors to this book, examines Internet usage in the Middle East, which, contrary to worldwide figures, is male dominated by a very wide margin, and how female users in the region seem not to consider developing a "global voice."
An unusual attribute of this book is how smoothly the reader can move from chapter to chapter because it has a 'single author feel" to it that students will appreciate. Most edited collections lack uniformity in writing style and voice, which this volume clearly has.
Other contributors to this volume are Benaz Somiry-Batrawi, Gholam Khiabany and Annabelle Sreberny, and Haya al-Murghni and Mary Ann Tetreault.
Dr. Sakrteaches in the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster, London.
--Transnational Broadcasting Studies Journal
