Book Maps Arab Women Scholars in Social Sciences and Humanities

"Dalil al-Bahithaat al-Arabiyyat fi al-Uloum al-Insaniyya wa al-Ijtimaiyya"

(Guide to Arab Women Researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities)

Edited by Noha Bayoumi

Published in Beirut and Casablanca by the Lebanese Women Researchers Group and the Arab Cultural Center, 1999.

BY MAHMOUD SAEED

Whenever I find a reference book I remember all the Arab historians who have excelled in writing reference books, documenting bits and pieces of information, especially about great authors and artists, classifying and identifying their works in detail. For example, Abu-Hayan al-Tawhidi, who was fond of statistics and comparisons, documented all 600 professional singers in Baghdad in the 11th century.

Although hundreds of years separate Abu-Hayan al-Tawhidi and today's information revolution, when I started reading "Guide to Arab Women Researchers" I found the tradition of documentation surviving against great odds.

This book answers an urgent and important question: Do Arabs have women researchers? Perhaps just as many Arabs as non-Arabs would ask this question. Undoubtedly, many are aware that Arab women scholars and researchers exist, but few know the specifics: their identities, numbers, the diversity of their specializations, or even how they can be located or contacted. This book promises to rectify this problem.

This reference is an elaborate database of more than 361 women researchers in the fields of literature, languages, economics, statistics, history, architecture, education, geography, demography, law, political science, public relations, psychology, psychiatry, natural sciences, environment, philosophy, the arts, and more. The editor, Noha Bayoumi, worked on the book with two other members of the Lebanese Bahithat Group, Fadia Hoteit and Maryam Ghandour. She explains that the book was born as a response to the lack of serious research and scholarship in the Arab world; the Meeting of Arab Women Researchers, organized by the Lebanese Women Researchers Group in July 1996, recommended writing this book to facilitate communication among themselves.

Compared with other Arab reference resources, "Guide to Arab Women Researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities" adopts the latest up-to-date methods of documentation. One distinguishing feature is the method of alphabetizing the researchers' names. Unlike earlier references which followed a standard of first to last name, this book adopts the Western style by listing family name first.

No matter how prolific and well-known some researchers may be, they are all allocated an equal space of at least one page of the book. An additional index provides a list of the researchers according to their specialization. Because Arabic names are often misspelled when they are transliterated into English, the book lists names in Arabic and in English. The editor has avoided wasting space on unnecessary information. Instead, one reads about the institutions with which the scholar is associated, the type of work she does, the major subject in which she is a specialist, the highest degree earned, her published works, awards received, her major position held as well as secondary jobs, and languages commended. Perhaps most importantly, the book lists addresses, fax and telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses.

Much in this book would interest the reader, and I found the research interests of these women scholars particularly fascinating. A case in point is the Egyptian researcher Samia Hassan El-Saaty, who wrote a book about the names of the Egyptians and their social meanings which I have often consulted while probing the roots of certain names.

However, the book does have some limitations. Most glaring is the omission of important women in the social sciences and humanities. I also noticed that a good number of quite accomplished women who may belong to an older generation are missing. Unless the book's emphasis is exclusively on contemporary scholarship, there is no excuse for such omissions. Of course, the editor explains that they sent questionnaires to everyone but not every form was returned, which would account for some of the gaps. The information provided on the authors is likewise uneven in some cases; one reason perhaps is that the researchers themselves may not have provided a complete resume. All in all, these limitations do not diminish the value of this work.

This article appeared in Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 33 (Fall 2000)

Copyright (c) 2000 by Al Jadid