Substance abuse among women in the Arab Muslim world is often cloaked in secrecy or denied outright by researchers and members of the general public. The few studies that have addressed this issue have virtually all concluded that substance abuse among women, particularly Muslim women, in the Arab world is rare (Amir 2001, Soueif 1998, Weiss et al. 1999). For example, Weiss et al. (1999) in a review of the literature on substance abuse in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan found that in one populatio…