Men have always held the rule in the Middle East based on the concepts of Islam. Subduing women's right they maintain a 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 a 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 identity. In the years before women and children were considered part of the background. While the male child was given 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. Yet, in the end, their policies reinforced much of the economic and poli

Summary: This is a 2 page paper that describes the role of the former colonial powers in promoting the enmity in the geopolitics of the Middle Eastern countries as they focused on oil and piled one state against the other.

The Middle East dominates world energy exports. It has about 64% of the world's proven oil reserves and 34% of its gas reserves. According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), it exported an average of 17.7 million barrels of oil a day (MMBD) in 1995. This was 47% of the world total of 37.7 MMBD. The DOE projects that Middle Eastern oil exports will reach 39.8 MMBD by 2020. This will be 60% of the estimated world total of 66 MMBD. Similar estimates are not available for gas exports, but Algeria, Libya, Iran, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE will play an important role as world suppliers.

Although colonial policies often worsened the position of women, they ultimately produced an elite that was armed with ideas and methods of resisting the colonizers and, at the same time, pressing for reform and change at home. Women had already achieved much knowledge in religious matters, even to the point of teaching other female scholars the traditional sciences of Islam. With the spread of the printing press, women, like men, could more easily spread their writings to the public.

The construction of gender roles and relations within the social setting these roles and relations are changing. The boundaries characterized by the weight of Islam and authenticity in gender discourse, ideas on women's exclusion from public space, female domesticity, and their restriction to indirect access to power all reflect a past in which the gender system under girded a family-based organization of access to wealth and power. These boundaries are, more fixed in some parts of the Arab world than in others, but they are at least recognizable features of public discourse and social organization almost everywhere.

Summary: This is a 2 page paper that outlines the role of ethnicity in the middle east and attributes it to the socio-political problems that were created due to the colonial intervention during the nineteenth century.

The sparring states began to fight over the oil and the power and the friends of old turned into enemies. The fear that the independent States of the Middle East might someday join forces with their Soviet neighbor and the West would lose that oil was the cornerstone of the West's Middle East policies . It promoted a focus on the oil and caused the enmity to rise in the geopolitics of the Middle East.

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Approximate Word count = 1757
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)