BuzzFlash Reviews

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“Muhajababes will disabuse you of your preconceptions of the Middle East forever.”

-—The Times Literary Supplement

“Fascinating. . . . Muhajababes is direct, energetic, and unpretentious.”

-—Guardian

“Littered with funny, often charming moments. . . . [Allegra] Stratton has a candid style, not only with the reader, but with her respondents, who clearly open up to her in confidence. . . . It is a world that should be visited . . . [and] Muhajababes provides a valuable passport.”
-—The Australian

From the publisher:

Two-thirds of the Middle East’s population is under twenty-five, with an explosive growth in the number of college graduates. Allegra Stratton, a twenty-five-year-old producer for the BBC, traveled to Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Kuwait City, and Damascus to understand what daily life is like in Arab and Muslim youth culture.

There she found a massive media industry of music videos and scantily clad pop stars vying with the voice of conservative Islam condemning Western culture and immodest dress. But for most young Muslim women, there is no conflict:

They were cigarillo thin and Coco Chanel chic. Both wore black-nylon boot-cut hipster trousers and high heels, carried baguette handbags and wrapped around their heads were black, sheer headscarves as tight as the rest of their outfits. Darah commented: “The results of video-clips are these girls. I call them muhajababes.”

"Muhajaba” means girl who veils . . . but look at them. They’re babes.

From a review in Salon by Laura Miller:

Rewish," or "al Rawshana," is a colloquial Arab term that means "hip" and also "distracted or confused," according to Allegra Stratton's "Muhajababes," a lively (and rewish) exploration of youth culture in several Middle Eastern nations. One of the many people Stratton interviewed for her book -- a bike-glove-wearing female member of a dance troupe that inexplicably describes itself as "an R&B band" -- told Stratton that the region's booming under-25 demographic is being made ever more rewish by their exposure to two seemingly opposed forces: racy pop music videos full of gyrating, pulchritudinous singers like Haifa Wehbe and what Stratton calls the "piety trend," which has more and more young Muslims heeding the call of TV mullahs to abandon smoking, drinking, displays of flesh and premarital sex.

The result is a new breed of mermaid-like creatures, spotted by Stratton all over the streets of Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai and Damascus. These are "muhajababes," from "muhajabe," a term for the veil. Zina, a girl Stratton met in a Cairo cafe, is a classic example. Her hair was covered with "a flower-patterned headscarf" but she was also wearing heavy makeup and jeans so tight she couldn't fasten the top button. When Stratton asked Zina why she also smoked (widely considered "haram," or forbidden, to observant Muslims), Zina grew "frosty." Then she explained: "If I smoke and wear the headscarf you know that I'm not one of them [that is, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamist group]. You know that I'm Islamic. That I am devout. But I'm also different ... If you know what you're looking for then you'll see being a Muslim these days is a different thing."

Stratton, a British journalist, didn't begin her research knowing quite what she was looking for, but she had a thesis, taken from Western scholars of the contemporary Middle East. These professors are predicting a major sociopolitical shakeup in the region, based on demographic patterns resembling those seen before in upheavals in Western history, such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution. "What creates unrest," Stratton writes of this theory, "was not just an increase in the numbers of young people but also in the numbers of educated young people with no increase in jobs."

About the Author:

Allegra Stratton studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. She is currently a producer on BBC Newsnight and prior to that she spent three years producing BBC1's This Week programme. Before the BBC, Allegra worked on the foreign desk at The Times. She has written for the Independent, The Times and the New Statesman. She lives in London.

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