OUR WOMEN ON THE GROUND

A collection of essays by dedicated journalists on the many hurdles they face as women in the field of Middle Eastern newsgathering—edited by Lebanese British journalist Hankir and introduced by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour.

In many cases, these conflict-zone reporters were inspired to become journalists due to heart-rending stories among their own families and friends. “To become a journalist in some of these places takes a special kind of courage for a woman,” writes Amanpour. “It can mean defying family and community, and it brings unique challenges and entails sacrifices specific to women.” These stories from the field are rare and remarkable, especially because the writers are “twice burdened,” according to Hankir: Not only do they hail from places that mistreat women worse than anywhere in the world; they are also “some of the most repressed reporters in the world.” The book is divided into five sections: “Remembrances,” “Crossfire,” “Resilience,” “Exile,” and “Transition.” In “The Woman Question,” Hannah Allam, covering the war in Iraq for McClatchy Newspapers, writes of the “unspoken understanding that if you delved too deeply into women’s lives, you risked being labeled as soft, or missing the point.” A Lebanese journalist covering the wars in the Middle East for American newspapers, Nada Bakri became deeply disenchanted with the profession after the death of her husband and son’s father, New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, in Syria in 2012. Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah (“On a Belated Encounter With Gender”) recalls the 2011 Arab Spring activism in terms of responding to her father’s conflicted feelings about her being a journalist. Egyptian photojournalist Eman Helal writes of being routinely restricted from “hard news” assignments and then finding her story in the harassment of women protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011. Others, such as photographer Amira Al-Sharif, who was born in Saudi Arabia but raised in Yemen, write that being women allowed them to cover stories that men could not.

A timely, engaging work that reveals why the journalist’s profession is so important and so endangered.