The formation of modern gender roles in the intellectual circles of the nahḍa (literary-cultural revival) of the mid-19th to the early 20th-century, constitutes the focus of Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi's Gendering Culture in Greater Syria. What sets the book apart from much of the recent writings on gender in the Middle East during that period is that it looks at how both female and male identities formed and informed each other. Using what they call the “cultural products” of the nahḍa, such as novels, newspapers, and literary texts, the authors explore how “a culture ‘thinks’ at a particular historical moment, and how it works through the issues that eventually come to shape it” (p. 11). Although the reformulation of gender roles at home, within marriage, and in society at large often elicited fierce debates, it also resonated with a section of the readership of the time. Zachs and Halevi track those debates across works of fiction and non-fiction in order to explore the larger context and the interconnection between the cultural and political currents of the nahḍa.

The six main chapters of the book move somewhat chronologically as well as thematically. Chronologically, there is an overlap between the various chapters, but the book roughly progresses from debates on women and their rights starting in the 1840s, to Jubran Khalil Jubran's novella al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira first published in 1912. Along the way, the authors deal with well-known texts, such as Salim al-Bustani's Asma (1873), as well as authors whose literary production has not received as much scholarly attention, such as al-Bustani's sister, Alice (Riwayat al-Saʾiba, 1891) and Farida ʿAtiyya (Bayna al-ʿArshayn, 1912). Thematically, the main chapters cover the debate on women's rights (Chapter 1); the contemporary family in Salim al-Bustani's Asma (Chapter 2); the concept of murūʾa, or manly virtue (Chapter 3); and the discourse of domesticity (Chapter 4). Moving into the period after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the last two chapters (Chapters 5 and 6) show how male and female authors pushed the boundaries of the novel and the short story in order to critique existing social, cultural, and political practices. Zachs and Halevi argue that late nahḍa novelists created a “rehearsal space” for voicing “outlaw emotions” and formulating alternative values in opposition to prevailing gender norms (p. 146).

According to the authors, their book adopts a modular approach to the chapters in order to enable the reader to “focus on issues and texts of particular interest” (p. 12). But the unevenness of the themes and the weak connections between the chapters sometimes leaves the burden of analysis on the reader. A glaring example of this is how a new generation struggled to redefine gender roles and marriage against the practices of a previous generation. Zachs and Halevi return to this topic several times, including in the discussion of al-Bustani's Asma (Chapter 2) and Jubran's al-Ajniha al-Mutakassira (Chapter 6). Yet, the two works are separated by some forty years, during which Greater Syria experienced great societal, cultural, political, and economic transformations. What is the imprint of these changes on the debate's progression during that period? What are the tensions between the two ideals of marriage put forth, separated as they are by four decades? What does it mean to rebel against a generation that already had its own rebellion against the institution of marriage? Instead of forming a starting point for further exploration, these intergenerational tensions are flattened out by the descriptor “nahḍa”—a notoriously amorphous term—thereby giving little sense of how things developed over a period encompassing several decades.

The main strength of the book is that it engages gender in both its male and female manifestations, thus highlighting the interconnectedness between the two. The authors demonstrate this interconnectedness by looking at works of fiction as well as contemporaneous debates on the choice of a marriage partner, marriage as an institution, and the roles of men and women within the household. The chapter on murūʾa as an ideal of modern masculinity illustrates convincingly how writings that at first glance appear to be about women, were in some instances more about men, whereby the figure of the young “new woman” is deployed “as a vehicle to enable this shift to modern masculinity” (p. 67). Murūʾa deserves more exploration, however, as a concept with romanticized Bedouin connotations, deployed as an expression of a modern Arab cultural identity in a middle-class urban setting. References to “Arab culture” and “Arab values” are scattered throughout the book to describe the society of Greater Syria. But this “Arabness” is taken as a given despite the fact that in the period explored by Zachs and Halevi, “Arab” changes dramatically from indicating Bedouin, and often having negative connotations, to being embraced as a cultural identity. The chapter on murūʾa is thus a missed opportunity for exploring “Arab” as an evolving identity in the late Ottoman context and shedding some much-needed light on its gendered dimensions.

A more problematic aspect of the book is the lack of any real engagement with more recent works on the nahḍa. One of the authors’ stated aims is to “provide a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change” in order to engender “a fundamental historiographical revision in the understanding of this period” (p. 7). But the varied theoretical approaches deployed by the authors in order to frame their different chapters draw primarily on works that are not about the nahḍa, including scholarship on literary theory, English literature, gender, and feminism. This is striking given that the years before the publication of this book witnessed an explosion in “nahḍa studies,” introducing novel ways of reading literature from that period in terms of capitalism (Stephen Sheehi), class and gender (Ghenwa Hayek and Elizabeth M. Holt), and affective excess (Tarek El-Ariss). Such works have also done much to question the nahḍa as a homogenous project or movement.

In the conclusion, the authors claim to have integrated “the study of the cultural aspects of the nahḍa period with the social and economic changes accompanying it” (p. 151). Particularly class figures prominently in the book, with the authors and readers at the heart of Gendering Syrian Culture frequently described as “middle class” or “bourgeois.” Yet, despite the growing literature on the topic in the late Ottoman Empire and Egypt, the term “middle class” is left undefined, leaving a central link between cultural and socioeconomic changes conjectural and tenuous. The book's lack of critical engagement with recent works on the nahḍa and on class, leaves this reader with no real sense of the book's broader relevance and how its gender perspective contributes to a “fundamental historiographical revision” of the nahḍa.

Having said that, the material this book draws on is in and of itself rich and open to several avenues of interpretation and analysis. The authors are to be commended for weaving together lesser known authors and works with other seminal ones. The book also gives due attention to the earlier years of the nahḍa, tracing debates about marriage and women's place in society back to the 1850s and earlier, and tracing the emergence of a discourse on masculinity in the region back to the 1870s. Finally, the authors’ insistence that the discursive “rehearsal space” opened up in the years before World War I did not fail, but was rather put on hold in the interwar period, is an open invitation to further explore what happens when those spaces open up again in the following decades, particularly the years following independence.