
In "Excellent Daughters," Katherine Zoepf unveils the secret revolution of young Arab women quietly transforming their societies. Endorsed by Anne-Marie Slaughter as offering "insights countless political treatises cannot match," this intimate portrait challenges everything you thought you knew about female empowerment in the Middle East.
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A seventeen-year-old girl in Damascus has memorized the entire Qur'an and dreams of becoming a genetic engineer. A Lebanese woman dances on bar tops at night but returns to her parents' home before dawn. A Saudi finance lecturer launches a campaign that will transform her country-not by demanding women drive, but by insisting they sell lingerie. These aren't contradictions. They're the lived realities of young Arab women navigating a world where ancient codes collide with modern aspirations, where the veil can represent both constraint and empowerment, and where a generation is quietly rewriting the rules while honoring the traditions that shaped them. When we think of religious revival, we rarely imagine it as liberation. Yet for women like Enas, the hijab isn't a cage-it's armor. Growing up in Syria's devout Sunni merchant class, she belonged to Islamic scholarly aristocracy. By age ten, she'd memorized the entire Qur'an. At seventeen, she taught younger children while planning to study biotechnology. When questioned about potential conflicts between faith and science, she scoffed. "We believe that our studies are also a way of serving God," she explained with the confidence of someone who'd never seen a contradiction between the two.