Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  1. Ibn Hazm, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love, English translation by A. J. Arberry (London: Luzac & Company, LTD, 1953), p. 34. For the purist who wants to read the Arab original, and it is worth it since the translation is regarded as blasphemous, see Tawq al Hamama: Fi al-Alfa wa l-Ullaf, Faroq Sa’d, ed. (Beirut: Manchourat Maktabat al Hayat, 1972), p. 70.

  2. To learn more about this song, read Ella Shohat, “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Films, Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds. (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 48.

  3. For more information on “t” and “s,” see ibid., p. 11.

  4. I later learned, reading Matthew Bernstein’s introduction to Visions of the East, that this song was the object of great controversy between the Disney Company and the American Arab Antidiscrimination Committee. The Committee attacked Disney for racist stereotyping and won the case. Disney was forced to change the lyrics that went, “I come from a land, a faraway place, where they cut off your ear, if they don’t like your face.” See Bernstein,, op. cit., p. 17, note 20.

  5. Sir Thomas Arnold, Painting in Islam: A Study of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture (New York: Dover Publications, 1965), p. 106.

  6. In the sacred sources, be they the Bible or the Koran, Zuleikha is depicted as a loser since Yusuf defeats her adulterous scheme by resisting her seductive moves. But the Persian poets give a happier ending to their “Zuleikha and Yusuf” stories. In their version, the prophet Yusuf, after rejecting Zuleikha in his youth, meets her again later, but hardly recognizes her, as she has grown old, ugly, sick, and destitute. Then, miraculously, he restores her beauty and health — a scene often depicted in miniatures. “The poets carried the story far beyond the point reached in the Book of Genesis or in the Quran,” explains Sir Thomas Arnold in Painting in Islam. “Potiphar dies and Zulaykha is reduced to a state of abject poverty, and with hair turned white through sorrow, and eyes blinded by continual weeping, she dwells in a hut of reeds by the roadside, and her only solace in her misery is listening to the sound of Joseph’s cavalcade as from time to time it rides past.” One day, Joseph recognizes Zuleikha and “He then prays to God on her behalf, and her sight and her beauty are restored to her.” Ibid., p. 108.

  7. Quotation from The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, translated by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (New York: Mentor Books, n.d.), p. 177.

  8. In Arabic, “wa qalu: la yajuz an takuna qiçata l’ichqi mina l’qur’an” (“And they said: It is impossible that a love story can be part of the Koran”). From Shahrastani, Al Milal wa-Nihal (Beirut: dar Ça’b, 1986), vol. 1, p. 128. The author died in the year 547 of the Hijira (twelfth century). A good translation of this book is the French one by Claude Vadet, Les Dissidences en Islam (Paris: Geuthner, 1984). The Ajaridite position on Joseph is on page 236.

  9. According to the 1996 Unesco Statistical Yearbook, the percentage of women teaching in universities or equivalent institutions is 30% in Egypt, 28% in France, and 22% in Canada.

  10. According to the 1996 Unesco Statistical Yearbook, the percentage of women enrolled at the third level of engineering in universities or equivalent institutions is 17% in Turkey (13,941 women out of a total of 81,176 students) and 17% in Syria (6,670 women out of a total of 38,675). In the Netherlands, the percentage of female students in third-level engineering is 8.4% (1,896 women out of a total of 22,475) and in the United Kingdom, 7.7% (12,261 females out of a total of 159,041).

  11. According to the 1996 Unesco Statistical Yearbook, the percentage of women enrolled in engineering in Algeria and Egypt is 11.7% and 12.7% respectively, while only 9.65% in Canada and 10.66% in Spain.

  3

  On the Western

  Harem Front

  You would not believe how excited I get when strolling through a German bookstore, where you are free to open the books, and even sit and read comfortably on stools discreetly placed in corners for that purpose. In Rabat, a bookstore owner might throw you out if you dared to touch any of his displayed publications: You are supposed to buy the book before enjoying the sensuous pleasure of opening it. In a country where bargaining and touching goods are an integral part of the buying game, books are probably the only items that escape these traditional rituals. You can’t touch the books and you can t negotiate the prices, which explains the extraordinary pleasure I have in Western bookstores, and why I dream of creating the first Rabat Café mit Buchhandlung (bookstore/café).

  Excitement reached its peak for me in Berlin one memorable afternoon when Hans D. allowed me a glimpse of his personal harem, by looking up his favorite authors in one of that noisy city’s miraculously quiet spots: the Savigny Platz art bookstore. The first book he selected was Scènes Orientales, where nude contemporary women posed before the camera of a male photographer in carefully choreographed harem scenes that imitated famous paintings such as Ingres’s Turkish Bath (1862). 1 What most surprised me, as someone from the Third World, was the price of the book — about $30. “Are there enough buyers for such an expensive book?” I asked Hans, shocked, and he nodded. “Of course.” The author had a French-sounding name (Alexander Dupouy), the publisher was German, the date of publication was recent (1998), and the text was in both French and German. “Europeans may disagree about elemental things such as beef and chickens,” commented Hans wryly, “but our harem fantasy contributes greatly to our unification.” I couldn’t help laughing out loud at that, but then immediately felt embarrassed when the other bookstore customers turned around to see me holding a huge, pornographic book. I only relaxed when I remembered that I was in Savigny Platz, nearly 2,000 miles away from Rabat. Relieved, I put the book back and dutifully followed my teacher, who had by now moved on to the architecture section.

  Using a ladder, Hans brought down from the top shelf a book from the 1930s entitled The Harem: An Account of the Institution as It Existed in the Palaces of the Turkish Sultans by N. M. Penzer. According to Hans, the book’s opening paragraph is still a valid definition of what Westerners think of when they envision a harem. “From early childhood,” writes Penzer, “we have heard of the Turkish harem and have been told that it is a place where hundreds of lovely women are kept locked up for the sole pleasure of a single master. And as we grow up but little is added to this early information. . . . Most of us still imagine that the Sultan — is or, rather was — a vicious old reprobate, spending all his time in the harem, surrounded by hundreds of semi-naked women, in an atmosphere of heavy perfume, cool fountains, soft music, and over-indulgence in every conceivable kind of vice that the united brains of jealous, sex-starved women could invent for the pleasure of their lord.”2

  What shocked me when I read this paragraph was that Penzer was not afraid of the harem women’s jealousy, even though he explicitly described them as being sex-starved. Only if his women were denied brains and the capacity to analyze their situation, I thought, could jealousy function as an incentive and actually increase women ’s desire to please men. Because when women are granted brains, trouble is sure to erupt. Sex-starved women with brains killed their masters in many Muslim harems because they understood that the competition was unfair, that it was artificially arranged. Favorite wives and concubines suffocated or poisoned caliphs out of jealousy. Caliph al-Mahdi, the founder of the Abbasid dynasty, is one famous victim of harem jealousy, poisoned one lovely August afternoon in A.D. 785 by one of his favorite women who was madly in love with him. A major problem that the harem master faces is the total transparency of his emotional state; everyone always knows who is his favorite woman of the moment. That favorite tries to hang on to her status by carefully observing her master’s every move, and often notices before he does when his attention starts to shift toward a new rival. In the case of Caliph al-Mahdi, the favorite explained later when mourning over his corpse, the poisoned meal had actually been intended for her rival. “I wanted to keep you for me alone,” cri
ed the bereaved woman. 3

  When I asked Hans about this aspect of jealousy, which seemed to me extremely important, I discovered that not only did he completely agree with Penzer, but he even suggested that my position was suspect.

  “Maybe your caliph had a problem, maybe he had paranoid tendencies,” he said, smiling and raising his fists like a boxer in an imaginary ring. “Fatema, since we are embarking on a scientific comparison of men’s psychic differences in our respective cultures, we ought to consider the possibility that Western men are less afraid of women than are Muslim men.”

  I asked Hans to please not attack my caliphs and indulge in sarcasm, because that s what men do everywhere, harem or no harem, to avoid getting into a serious discussion. Generously, he agreed and came to my rescue by reminding me that he was taking the “harem probe” seriously, and had put our names down on a waiting list to see the very popular Scheherazade ballet, originally choreographed by Sergey Diaghilev. Meanwhile, Hans said, I had to do some homework. What about making a list, he suggested, of the words used by Turks and Arabs when describing a harem woman? Intrigued by the idea, I promised to look up definitions associated with the harem so as to see whether, at least at the level of terminology, we could stumble on some enlightening differences between our cultures. I figured I could easily browse through a few dictionaries while comfortably seated in another Berlin bookstore, Arabisches Buch, and confidently promised that I would be ready with my definitions before the ballet.

  But just before leaving the Savigny Platz, Hans rushed to the back of the store as if remembering something at the last minute, and, after a few words with the young man at the information desk, disappeared into the bookcases. A moment later, he was back, triumphantly waving a glossy volume like a flag. The book had a gaudy blue cover on which sprawled a huge nude woman endowed with massive buttocks and Medusa-like black hair that swirled around her distended bosom. I spotted two of the few German words I knew, “Arabischen Nachten,”in the subtitle. 4 What does “Geschlechter Lust und List in den Arabischen Nachten ” mean? I asked Hans in a low voice, so that no one else would hear. “Sexual desire and voluptuousness in the Arabian Nights” was his instantaneous translation. The book was a recent edition (1985) of Scheherazade’s tales, illustrated by an East German artist. Yet his rendition of the Muslim storyteller was totally unfamiliar to me. I would never think of Scheherazade as nude and plump. Even though the climate is temperate in the Arab world, only delusional women in mental asylums discard their clothes. And as for plumpness, I associate it with a relaxed vision of the world. I put on weight when I am happy and lose it when I get in trouble. For my generation, who grew up on the oral tradition of storytelling, before television, heroines lose weight only when they worry. To be plump is a sign that a woman is in control of her fate.

  So to my mind, Scheherazade must be thin. She has a violent husband, she is in fear of her life; I imagine her tense and strained. And what happened to Scheherazade’s political messages, I wondered, before putting the book back on the shelf. Maybe the artist had a deficient copy of The Thousand and One Nights? But when I shared my thoughts with Hans, he gave me a lecture about democracy and pluralism.

  “Maybe the German artist did have the same copy that you re familiar with,” he said, “but read a different message. What about the right to freedom of thought, interpretation, and expression?” Once again, Hans seemed to be cleverer, more modern, and more democratic than me. Poor Scheherazade must be turning in her tomb and cursing me, I thought to myself — I am doing so poorly compared to men when it comes to wit and intellectual agility. It is at moments like these, when my self-esteem starts to wane, that I fall back on my Sufi streak and remind myself that to learn from foreigners, you need to go through bouts of humility. How disagreeable it is to be humble! But on that day, I did not have to go through my self-flagellation for long, because Hans looked at his watch, as Westerners so often do, and abruptly announced that he had to hurry. I hate it when Westerners look at their watch right when I am about to share an important philosophical discovery with them. And they always seem to be doing so, thus increasing the value of their own time and depreciating mine. I am forever telling myself that next time I will surprise them by interrupting them in mid-sentence, and saying with an important air, while gesturing at my watch, “I have to run.” But I never seem to have the discipline to do this in a timely fashion. Oh, well, I said to myself, coming back to my Sufi heritage, as long as you learn something, feeling unappreciated is part of the deal.

  Of course, as it turned out, there was no time to go through the list of harem-related words and definitions that I painstakingly prepared later that afternoon to impress Hans. When we met in front of the theater where Scheherazade was running, we had to stand in a long line to get in, and I soon saw that, unlike in Rabat, people don’t carry on conversations in queues in Berlin. Silence is more becoming. I was shivering with the cold, but I tried to summarize my findings anyway, in order to gauge Hans’s reactions and learn something about his inner thoughts. Unfortunately, we were not standing face to face, so that I could scrutinize him carefully, but side by side. But I had no choice. So I started bravely with “odalisque.”

  “Odalisque” is the word most commonly used in the West for a harem slave. It is a Turkish word, and has a spatial connotation, as it comes from the word oda, which means “room.” “Literally,” explains Alev Lytle Croutier, a Turkish author born in a house that had previously been occupied by the harem of a pasha, “Odalisque means ‘the woman of the room,’ implying a general status of servant.”5 Servant is also the meaning of jarya, the Arab word used for a harem slave. But while both literally mean the same thing, there is an important linguistic difference. While odalisque refers to a space, jarya refers to an activity. “Jarya means servant (khadim ). . . . It comes from ‘Jariy,’to run. Jarya is a person at the service of someone else. She is attentive to the master s wishes and runs to grant them.”6 When I uttered the words “master’s wishes,” Hans nodded approvingly and remarked triumphantly that he now much preferred jarya to odalisque. In fact, he said, he would be happy to lead a media campaign to convince Europeans to switch to the Arabic word.

  Female slaves, be they Arab jarya or Turkish odalisques, were either bought in slave markets or captured as booty after battles and wars. Self-education and the acquisition of artistic skills were the only ways in which the slave woman could gain visibility and be noticed by the harem master. “Odalisques with extraordinary beauty and talent,” writes Alev Lytle Croutier, “were trained to become concubines, learning to dance, recite poetry, play musical instruments, and master the erotic art.”7 In this sense, the Turkish odalisque is very similar to the Japanese geisha, I told Hans, the latter being, to quote an expert, “used to describe girls or women who had acquired the skills of dancing and singing.”8 I then concluded my short speech by quoting Jahiz, a ninth-century Arab writer who in several essays analyzed the jarya’s predicament, declaring it completely irrational not to expect a talented woman to try to use her power and skills to dominate her master. The kind of love (’isq ) inspired by a talented jarya “is a plague which reduces men to utter vulnerability,” Jahiz explains, because she entraps men in a complicated emotional cocoon woven together out of multiple emotions operating at different levels. “This ’isq includes and nurtures many kinds of affects,” Jahiz notes. “It links together the feeling of love (hub), erotic passion (hawa), affinity (mushakala), and the inclination to keep the companionship going (ilf).”9

  At this crucial moment of my recitation, just when I was expecting to reap some valuable information about Western men’s psyches, the long queue in which we’d been standing vanished, and we found ourselves rushed into the opera house to deal with a more pressing issue: how to get to our seats when everyone else was already seated. And finally, once seated, all I could get from Hans was a sarcastic dismissal of Jahiz, who is one of my favorite authors.

  “Fatema, how old was your Jah
iz when he wrote this?” Hans said, taking me totally by surprise. “His concept of love is that of an adolescent. He expects too much: love, erotic passion, affinity, etc. . . . Have you heard of the Romantics? . . . Now we have to shut up.” And that was that. Hans had just knocked down my beloved Jahiz, and I had to shut up because, unlike at the Rabat Mohamed V Theater, where you can continue conversing long after the curtain rises, here in Berlin we would have been thrown out if we had not focused on the show in rapt silence.

  Well, actually, I am happy I did shut up, because it was after that memorable ballet, and the thought-provoking discussions it aroused, that I had my first inkling of the absence of fear of women in the Western harem. To my surprise, the ballet’s Scheherazade lacked the most powerful erotic weapon a woman has her — nutq, or capacity to think in words and penetrate a man’s brain by using carefully selected terms. The Oriental Scheherazade does not dance like the one I saw in the German ballet. Instead, she thinks and strings words into stories, so as to dissuade her husband from killing her. Unlike the Scheherazade in the German book I’d seen earlier, who emphasizes her body, the Oriental Scheherazade is purely cerebral, and that is the essence of her sexual attraction. In the original tales, Scheherazade’s body is hardly mentioned, but her learning is repeatedly stressed. The only dance she performs is to play with words late into the night, in a manner known as samar.