In "Women in the Arab World", El Khayat reviews the conditions of, past and modern reason, and the position of Arab womwn in their society. The innate conservation of Arab women in their society. The innate conservatism of Arab culture has at its core the traditional attitude to women. At the head of the road leading to the future beckons a relentless dilemma.

The author looks at the condition of minority groups in Europe and in the Islamic world and opines that their conditions were generally better within multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empires, than within modern national boundaries. The dilution of centralization within nation states may help safeguard the ethinc identity of minority groups.

Stahl argues that men determine the social structures of Islamic and Cristian societies on both shores of hte Mediterranean. By and large Mediterranean communities tend to share similar outlooks to property that emerge very clearly in the transmission of property from one generation to the next especially at marriage.

In Mediterranean society honour is closed bound with the familial obligations of men. The ability of men to support their kinship group is as important as their ability to control the sexuality of their wives and daughters. However their exist regional contrasts in the way women's sexuality is controlled.