This volume provides intimate anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic communities in the West. Amid increasing political turmoil and economic precarity, Muslim men around the world are enacting nurturing roles as husbands, sons, fathers, and community members, thereby challenging broader systems of patriarchy and oppression. By focusing on the ways in which Muslim men care for those they love, this volume challenges stereotypes and showcases Muslim men’s humanity.
Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. A specialist on Middle East gender, religion, and reproductive health issues, she is the author of six award-winning books, including The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. She is also co-editor of this Berghahn Book series on Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality.
Nefissa Naguib is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Much of her work has focused on rupture and displacement, particularly in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. She has written on memory and diaspora, food activism and the politics of water, and local responses to global crises. Current research centers on Syrian refugees arriving in Norway by way of the Arctic Circle. Her most recent monograph is Nurturing Masculinities: Men, Food, and Family in Contemporary Egypt.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Marcia C. Inhorn and Nefissa Naguib
PART I: MUSLIM MEN IN LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Chapter 1. Gender Troubles in Shatila, Lebanon: Bodies that Matter (the Fidāʾiyyīn’s Heroism) and Undoing Gender (the Shabāb’s Burden)
Gustavo Barbosa
Chapter 2. A Man in Love: Men, Love, and Hopes for Marriage in Cairo
Mari Norbakk
Chapter 3. Shaping a “Different” Masculinity: Subjectivity, Agency, and Cultural Idioms among Afghan Pashtun Men
Andrea Chiovenda
Chapter 4. From Soft Patriarch to Companionate Partner: Muslim Masculinity in Java since the “New Order”
Nancy J. Smith-Hefner
Chapter 5. “Supportive” Masculinities and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome: Changing Gender Relations in Contemporary Urban India
Gauri Pathak
PART II: MUSLIM FAMILY LIFE AND MEN AS CARETAKERS
Chapter 6. Teaching Him to Care: Labor and the Making of Working-Class Men in Urban Egypt
Farha Ghannam
Chapter 7. The New Kurdish Man: Men as Refuge-Granters, Doting Family Members, and Romantics
Diane E. King
Chapter 8. Am I Muslim or Just Kazakh? Politics of Care in Postsocialist Kazakhstan
Ainur Begim
Chapter 9. Brothers in Islam: Faith and Care among Muslim Men in Brazil
Gisele Fonseca Chagas
Chapter 10. How to Be a Man: Everyday Care and Piety among South Asian Muslim Men in Barcelona
Guillermo Martín-Sáiz
PART III: MUSLIM MEN IN PRECARIOUS TIMES
Chapter 11. General Tarzan the Coach: Humanitarian Detours in the Career of a Central African Man-in-Arms
Louisa Lombard
Chapter 12. “And What Will Our Children Eat?” Dispossession and Food Insecurity among Makonde Men on Tanzania’s Swahili Coast
Vinay R. Kamat
Chapter 13. Moral Masculine Intimacy: The Care and Protection of the Living and the Dead among Muslim Migrant Men Living in Greece
Tina Palivos
Chapter 14. Casualties of Fatherhood: Syrian Refugee Men and Nurturance in the Arctic
Nefissa Naguib
Chapter 15. Searching for Love and Test-Tube Babies: Iraqi Refugee Men in Reproductive Exile on the Margins of Detroit
Marcia C. Inhorn
Book Reviews
“This volume is an important correction to various types of literature, from within anthropology as well as from other disciplinary fields… it will become a significant contribution to the field of masculinity in general and to Muslim men in particular.”
—Leif Manger, University of Bergen
