1. Discuss the changing role of men, women, and children in the Middle East between 1800-1914'.
             Men have always held the rule in the Middle East based on the concepts of Islam. Subduing women's rights they maintain tight control on the women and rarely did the women emerge from behind the veil. However, the picture is not as bleak as it may seem. The changing roles of men and women have not been a new feature, but women have seen freedom from cultural bindings for some time (Esman and Rabinovich 1998). While the men held the reigns of power women began to seek their own identities. In the years before women and children were considered part of the background. While the male child was given the freedom to do as he liked the female child was bound in the same chains of repression that the women were. However, as the roles of the men and women underwent a change the child's role automatically underwent a transition in society.
             In the modern period (beginning with the nineteenth century), the single most important influence on the role of women was the encounter with the West in the form of colonialism. Colonialists wrote much about how "backward" Muslim women were. In the end, their policies reinforced much of the economic and political "backwardness" and continued the oppression of women. In Egypt, for example, when Muhammad Ali turned the state economy into a supplier of cotton and grain for Europe, rural women and their families suffered. In the name of progress, British administrators in Egypt took apart a rural health system that was providing basic services for the rural poor. They replaced this system with a corps of (mostly European) male doctors, unlikely to succeed in bringing services to Egyptian women or the rural poor. Lord Cromer insisted that it was "uncivilized" for women to be treated by female midwives or doctors, given that in Europe women were being treated by male doctors. In the 1880s, Lord Cromer and his fellow...