Edward Said, a literary scholar and public intellectual, spent much of his lifetime ruing the way Westerners represented the Islamic world. “What America refuses to see clearly,” he wrote months before he died in 2003, “it can hardly hope to remedy.” A fascinating exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston brings the region into sharper focus. She Who Tells A Story collects the work of 12 contemporary female photographers and film-makers from the Middle East. At a time when American and European views of the Islamic world tend to be filtered through a lens of fear and anxiety, these images offer a more nuanced portrait of a culturally complicated place.

Read More: Behind the Veil

See also: The Middle East Through Women’s Cameras

The most famous storyteller in Middle Eastern culture is a woman, Scheherazade. In the “Thousand and One Nights,” she told stories to save her life. Her exalted status lends a grim irony to the fact that the lives of women in much of the Middle East are radically circumscribed — and it lends a defiant irony to the title of She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers From Iran and the Arab World. Organized by Kristen Gresh, the show runs at the Museum of Fine Arts through January 12th, 2014. Gresh is the MFA’s Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh assistant curator of photographs.

Read More: The Middle East Through Women’s Cameras