Suzanne Gauch. Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam.

• Position: BOOKS IN BRIEF, Spring 2008 - Book review

Suzanne Gauch. Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 224 pages. Paper $59.99.

Suzanne Gauch illuminates the legacy of Shahrazad as a complex one. Its mission is to overthrow oppressive images of Muslim women. She mainly criticizes Western translators, even Hollywood or Disney incarnations of one or another of her retold stories like Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Alibaba and the Forty Thieves. She claims that they make Shahrazad silent by making her voice absent. "Instead of presenting the stories they tell as the product of Scheherazade's brilliance, daring initiative, and political acumen, filmed versions of Nights stories depict women lavishly, yet revealingly, attired harem beauties, slaves to the pleasure of their masters" (ix).

Gauch counters this in how Shahrazad was a courageous woman who was able to postpone her execution and was able to divert the king from his obsession with women's infidelity. The moment king Shahrayar renounces his vengeance she stops telling stories and she no longer is a spokeswoman for the abilities of women. In fact she devotes herself to her duties as queen and mother. Interestingly, though her stories count about 270, Antoine Galland, the first European translator lived up to his title arriving at the thousand and first night. In sum, and as a result of the various Orientalist sources, western media images of Sharazad present Arab Muslim women as silent, oppressed, exploited, and uneducated victims.

Gauch examines how post-colonial writers and filmmakers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia reclaimed the storytelling of Shahrazad...