Updated Edition With a New Preface

Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.

Lila Abu-Lughod is Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (California, 1993) and editor of Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (1998).

"[A] brilliant study of moral constraint and personal expression . . . detailed, immediate, and superbly composed. Some books extend discussions, others launch them. This is one of the latter." —Clifford Geertz, American Ethnologist

"Ms. Abu-Lughod presents a fascinating, fresh interpretation of the mechanics of the twin codes of Bedouin behavior: the ‘code of honor’ against which ‘real men’ are tested and the ‘code of modesty’ which she sees as a means for those falling short of ‘real manhood,’ whether men or women, to attain moral worth. The argument is compelling—it makes sense of honor killings, the veiling of women and a seemingly excessive sexual modesty. There is a certain excitement here, as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place."—Inea Bushnaq, The New York Times Book Review

"Veiled Sentiments is surely the most sensitive and probing analysis available today of interpersonal relations within a segmentary tribal society—of the relation of the social ideology of Awlad Ali society (paralleled in much of Arab society even today) to the daily actions of men and, especially, women. . . . Veiled Sentiments is certainly the most successful (and valid) example for Middle Eastern literature of the ‘new ethnography.’" —Louise E. Sweet, Middle East Journal

"A valuable contribution in many areas, giving us new dimensions of nomadic and Arab culture, poetry, women, and gender roles and a fresh way of looking at the interrelatedness of the ideology and politics of sentiment. An outstanding anthropological ethnography of the Bedouin of the Egyptian desert, as well as an unusually skillful analysis of gender and social structure as it is expressed through women’s poetic discourse.” —International Journal of Middle East Studies

"A truly extraordinary book--beautifully and modestly written, remarkably insightful, consistently compelling." —Edward Said, author of Out of Place: A Memoir

Honorable mention for the 1987 Chicago Folklore Prize