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Bibliography of Palestinian Oral History: With a Special Focus on Palestinian Women, Faiha Abdulhadi, ed. (Palestine: Directorate of Gender Planning and Development, 1999). A documentary bibliographic study that aims at empowering women through focusing on women’s positive contribution. It moves women’s experiences and voices from the field of orality to the written and documented, hence also recording and preserving women’s voices.
The study, both in Arabic and English languages, is a comprehensive bibliography that comprises entries on all that was written on Palestinian oral history. It is divided into two parts; the first part is a survey of sources using Palestinian oral history. It includes entries of books and articles that were published in both Arabic and English. The second part comprises an annotated bibliography of Palestinian oral history that also includes entries of both books and articles written in both languages.
 
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Women, Religion and Morals by Nawal al-Sa’dawi and Heba Ra’ouf Ezzat (Syria: Dar al-Fikr, 2000). The book is part of a series of debate books issued by the Syrian publishing house with the title, “Dialogues for a New Century”. The project presents certain topics to be approached by two separate researchers from two different intellectual currents, with the aim of exposing diverse viewpoints towards the same subject and discovering common areas. It comprises two essays each contributed by  one of the book’s writers, followed by commentaries where each of them responds to the other’s essay. This issue presents the different perspectives of Dr. Nawal El-Sa’dawi, the famous Egyptian feminist writer and Heba Ra’ouf Ezzat, writer, media activist, and Assistant Lecturer at the College of Political Science Cairo University, on gender, feminism, and women’s relationship to religion and social and moral systems. The book therefore presents an interesting opportunity for the reader to contemplate and compare the two approaches, attempting either to establish a preference or a midway balanced view. However, the tone and attitude displayed in the ‘commentary’ part of the book are characterized by violent reactions and sharp criticism on both sides. Whereas Nawal Al- Sa’dawi marginalized the validity and importance of religious awareness or commitment in reaching liberation and justice for Arab women, Heba Ra’ouf rejected completely the role that feminist activism or research can play in directing attention to women’s problems and issues.
 
 
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Victims and Heroines: Women, Welfare and the Egyptian State, by Iman Bibars (Zed
Books – London, 2001), is a book that shows how women in developing countries suffer from poverty and inequality. Bibars looks at a very large category of socially deprived women in Egypt, those who support and manage their own households. She investigates how those women cope with poverty and how they seek to extract benefit, welfare and pensions in particular from both state agencies and religions (Coptic as well as Muslim) welfare organizations. In both cases, the researcher finds that Egyptian women encounter serious gender bias which is especially directed against those women forced by circumstances to head their own households.
 
 
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The second issue (summer 2001) of the newsletter Women and Civilization introduced as a forum for Muslim Women Studies – is out. The newsletter is published by the Association for Studying Women in civilization (ASWIC – Cairo), with Editor in Chief Dr. Amani Saleh. This issue’s theme is “Women’s Biographies in Islamic History”. It contains valuable research on women’s various roles across Muslim history, as politicians, theologians, mystics… etc.
 

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