Changing Stories

In Changing Stories: Postmodernism and the Arab-Islamic World some recent ideas current in postmodernist theoretical discourse are critically investigated and pragmatically applied to concrete issues relating to the contemporary Arab-Islamic world. In particular Jean-Francois Lyotard's distinction between grand narratives (or master stories) and small stories (or local narratives) is taken by the authors as a starting-point and point of reference and in various ways they address the legitimacy and applicability of this distinction. After a general introduction nine separate articles deal with the predicament of Palestinian women in the occupied territories, Dutch development-aid discourse in Gaza and the West Bank, Islamism and modernism in Tunisia, modernist and postmodernist political discourse in Egypt, feminism in Egypt and, as a travelling theory, in the Arab world as a whole, juridical and educational attitudes towards Turkish and Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, and the concept of the Islamic city.The volume should therefore be of interest not only to those concerned with Middle Eastern studies but also to anyone wanting to keep abreast of the latest currents in critical and theoretical discourse.