The Middle East has a long tradition of recounting lives originally for didactic purposes. Until recent times Muslim societies in the Middle East had adhered closely to the methods of traditional, uncritical narrative. A recent upsurge of interest across many disciplines in this genre, however, has inspired this thought-provoking introduction to the issue of how to build strategies for writing Middle Eastern lives. In this volume, an impressive array of scholars, biographers, and critics from the disciplines of anthropology, history, political science, and psychology explore the diversity of approaches both to writing biography and to reading self-narratives. - Jacket flap.