A few years ago, at a conference on Middle Eastern women in Bellagio, Italy, an anthropologist asked me, “How exactly does a historian of gender go about researching her field?” It was a surprising but valid question, given the relatively recent origin of the field of Middle Eastern gender history. The short answer is that since there are often a small number of historical documents that deal directly with women's issues, much of Middle East gender history is about rereading existing texts, asking how their authors conceptualized masculinity and femininity for their time. The historian must also have a keen eye for silences and gaps in historical records, which can be very revealing. One also needs to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to capture those subtle transformations in gender roles that are not reflected in historical accounts. Forays into poetry, short stories, novels, cartoons, cinema, as well as works by cultural anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics, and economists of the region can yield great results.

Perhaps the best way to answer the question, and also shed light on the theoretical orientation of this book, is to take the reader through the processes that led to its writing. Initially, I had hoped to explain the underlying gender dynamics of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and its aftermath, here building on the important contributions of Eliz Sanasarian (1982), Parvin Paidar (1995), and more recently Hamideh Sedghi (2007) on women's history and gender policies of the twentieth century.