Stephen Sheehi. Foundations of Modern Arab Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. 245 pages, endnotes, selected bibliography, index. US$59.95 Cloth ISBN 0-8130-2732-2

how hurtful. To bring about the New Person Shahidian longs for, Iranians, like anybody else, not only need to question language, symbols, and relations of oppression, but need psychoanalysis. Between the lines of Shahidian's book lies what one can see everywhere in Iran: women are the hope of the nation. Although no organized women's movement is possible (despite the title of the book), women carry modernism in Iran, maybe precisely because, unemployed and living "in private" as most of them they arc, they have less at stake than men when they think and act critically.