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Joumana Haddad is a Lebanese writer, journalist, poet, feminist and political activist. She sees the social and political dysfunction of Lebanon—and, indeed, of the whole Arab world—as rooted in its confessional politics and patriarchal social structures. The solution to Lebanon’s woes, in her view, lies in pulling down sectarianism and patriarchy. In I Killed Scheherazade, she delivers a devastating attack on the subordinate position of women in Arab society—and the social, religious and legal norms that enforce it—by telling the story of her own sexual awakening and intellectual liberation. She makes an impassioned case for the social and political and, in particular, sexual emancipation of women throughout the Arab world, arguing that sexual equality must be at the root of a general democratisation of the region. In a follow-up book, Superman is an Arab: On God, Marriage, Macho Men and Other Disastrous Inventions, she argues that patriarchy has had an appalling effect on Arab men and that their own liberation would follow on the heels of their sisters’, if they’d only let it.
