Mujahababes

MujahababesBy Allegra StrattonMelville House Publishing 280 pages $15.95

Allegra Stratton, a 25-year-old BBC producer, explores youth culture in the Middle East in an engaging, often haphazard, piece of reportage. Travelling through Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Kuwait, she has few contacts in the region, bar a television station in Beirut. Instead, her methodology is to talk to anyone who seems to be her age.

Mujahababes refers to the litany of contradictions in young people's attitudes to religion, politics and pop culture, epitomised by the veiled women who wear tight skinny jeans. Stratton encounters the teenager who joined Hizbollah to get rid of his acne, the Saudi equivalent of Rupert Murdoch and girls who debate the merits of "veiling" versus plastic surgery, all set against the backdrop of a changing political landscape.

This is not an expert's view on the Middle East, but rather a raw first-person encounter and Stratton is refreshingly unafraid to ask naïve questions.