Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  Samar is one of the many Arabic words loaded with sensuality. Though literally, it simply means to talk in the night, it also implies that to talk softly in the darkness can open up incredibly rich veins of feeling. Samar reaches its perfect state when there is a moon; “the shadow of the moon” (zil al qamar) is, in fact, another meaning of samar. In the shadow of the moon, the lovers fade into their cosmic origin and become part of the shimmering sky. In the shadow of the moon, dialogue between a man and a woman — as difficult as it seems during the day — becomes a possibility. Trust between the sexes has a better chance to flourish when the conflicts of the day have faded. The Oriental Scheherazade is nothing without the fluid yet so intense hope of samar. You hardly pay attention to her body, so powerful is the spell of her fragile call for dialogue in the quiet night.

  What on earth, I wondered as I remembered this, is the exact meaning of orgasm in a culture where attractive women are denied brain power? What words do Westerners use for orgasm if the woman’s brain is missing? Intercourse is by definition a communication between two individuals; actually, in Arabic, one word for intercourse is kiasa, which literally means “to negotiate.” And what has to be negotiated in sexual intercourse is the harmonization of expectations and needs, which can be accomplished only when the two partners use their brains. Scheherazade survived because she realized that her husband associated sexual intercourse with pain instead of pleasure. To get him to change his associations, she had to work on his mind. If she had danced in front of that man, he would have killed her as he had all the others before her.

  When I consulted the Random House dictionary, I found that the English meaning of “orgasm” does not differ much from the Arabic. First, says the dictionary, orgasm means the physical and emotional sensation experienced at the culmination of a sexual act. Second, the word indicates an instance of experiencing this sensation. And third, orgasm refers to “an intense or unrestrained excitement.” Both orgasm and excitement share the same Greek origin, whose meaning is to swell and literally expand beyond one’s normal limits: “orgasm(us),” says the dictionary, “comes from the Greek orgasmos, excitement. Orga(ein), to swell, to be excited.” At least one Arabic word for sexual pleasure has exactly that meaning: “Ightilam,” writes Ibn Manzur in his fourteenth-century Arab dictionary, “is to go beyond the limits, exactly like the ocean when it swells and its waves pound with a disturbed beat (kal bahr haj wa dtarabat amwajuhu).”

  Communication is vital for achieving pleasure, for two individuals to take the risk to venture simultaneously beyond their own limits, at that very critical moment when regular beats are disturbed. So why does Scheherazade, the super-communicator, lose her ethereal dimension, her vaporous quality, when she travels West?

  Is there a link between the fleshy nude painted by the German artist, the dancing Scheherazade of the German ballet, and the puzzling fearlessness of Western men in the harems of their Western minds?

  Do Western men reduce seduction to body language?

  Is seduction divorced from intense communication?

  Who is the Scheherazade created by Western artists?

  What weapons do men endow her with to enable her to seduce them?

  But before figuring out who the Western Scheherazade is, we must first know a few things about the original Scheherazade. Only then will we be able to compare fantasies and learn from both cultures.

  1. Alexander Dupouy, Scènes Orientales (Tubingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998).

  2. N. M. Penzer, The Harem: An account of the institution as it existed in the palace of the Turkish Sultans with a history of the Grand Seraglio from its foundation to modern times (London: Spring Books, 1965), p. 13. First edition published by Harrap in 1936.

  3. Ibn Hazm (Al Andalousi), “Man mata maqtulan mina l’khulafa” (“Those Who Died From Violent Deaths Among the Khalifes”) in Ar-Rassail (Short Essays ) (Beirut: Al Mouassassa al ’Arabia li-Dirassaat wa-Nachr, 1981), vol. II, p. 102.

  4. The complete title of the book is: Die Herrin Subeide Im Bade, order Von Der Geschlechter Lust und List in den Arabischen Nachten, produced by Horst Lothar Teweleit, illustrated by Irmhild and Hilmar Proft (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1985).

  5. Alev Lytle Croutier, Harem: The World Behind the Veil (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), p. 9.

  6. The Arab dictionary I will be using throughout this text is Lissan al Arab, literally “The Tongue of the Arabs,” by Ibn Manzhur (Cairo: Dar al Maarif, 1979). The author Ibn Manzhur was born in Cairo in 1232 and died 1311.

  7. Croutier, op. cit., p. 30.

  8. Fernando Enriques, “The World of the Geisha,” in Prostitution and Society (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1962), Vol. II, p. 309.

  9. Jahiz, “Kitab al Qiyan” (“The Book of the Singing Jarya”) in Ar-Rassail (Short Essays) (Cairo: Maktabat al Khanji), vol. 8, pp. 166-167.

  4

  The Mind as Erotic Weapon

  Scheherazade is the Persian name of the young bride who tells the stories in The Thousand and One Nights. These stories are of “various ethnic origins, Indian, Persian, and Arabic.”1 The tales, which are a symbol of Islam’s genius as a pluralist religion and culture, unfold in a territory that stretches from Mali and Morocco on the Atlantic Coast of North Africa to India, Mongolia, and China. When you enter the tales, you are navigating in a Muslim universe that ignores the usual borders separating distant and divergent cultures. For instance, in the tales, Persians speak Arabic and emerge as leaders in nations that do not share their cultural heritage. Scheherazade is the Arabic pronunciation of the Persian tchihr, which means “born,” and âzâd, which means “to a good race” — in other words, aristocratic. Her husband, Shahrayar, is also Persian; his name is a contraction of the Persian words shahr and dar, meaning “owner of the kingdom.”2 Yet in her bedroom, Scheherazade does not speak Persian to her husband, a proud descendant of the Sassanian dynasty, 3 but rather narrates the tales in Arabic. And although Shahrayar is Persian, “he lived and ruled over the islands of India and Indochina.”4 However, the tales’ cosmopolitan grace, their capacity to transcend cultural boundaries, does not extend to the relationship between the sexes. That is portrayed as an abysmal, unbridgeable frontier, a bloody war between men and women.

  The Thousand and One Nights begins as a tragedy of betrayal and revenge, and ends as a fairy tale, thanks entirely to Scheherazade’s intellectual capacity to read her husband s mind. When the stories begin, Shahrayar’s younger brother, Shahzaman, is ruling happily over “The Land of Samarcand,” only to return to the palace one day to find his wife in the arms of a “kitchen boy.”5 He kills the two of them and decides to leave his kingdom for a while, in the hopes of healing his wounds. He sets out to visit his older brother, Shahrayar.

  Running away from the crime scene works for only a few days. One morning, the depressed Shahzaman looks out the window into his brother’s harem garden and thinks he is hallucinating:

  While he agonized over his misfortune, gazing at the heavens and turning a distracted eye on the garden, the private gate of his brother’s palace opened, and there emerged, like a dark-eyed deer, the lady, his brother’s wife, with twenty slave girls, ten white and ten black. . . . They sat down, took off their clothes, and suddenly there were ten slave girls and ten black slaves dressed in the same clothes as the girls. Then the ten black slaves mounted the ten girls, while the lady called, “Mas’ud, Mas’ud,” and a black slave jumped from the tree to the ground, rushed to her, and, raising her legs, went between her thighs and made love to her. Mas’ud was on top of the first lady, while the ten slaves were on top of the ten girls, and they carried on till noon. Then the ten slaves put on the same clothes again, mingled with the girls, and once more there appeared to be twenty slave girls. Mas’ud himself jumped over the garden wall and disappeared, while the slave girls and the lady sauntered to the private gate, went in and, locking the gate behind them, went their way.6

  The wife’s sexual betrayal of her husband, King Shahrayar, reflects
and mirrors the political betrayal of the master by the slave. In Arabic the sentence “Mas’ud was on top of the first lady” (wa mas’ud fawqa a-sit)7 seems to sum up the entire harem tragedy: the woman’s fatal need to topple the hierarchy built by the husband who has locked her up, by siding and copulating with his male slave. The woman’s betrayal of her husband is built into the very structure of the harem; it is the hierarchies and frontiers that men erect to dominate women that predetermine women’s behavior. In the adulterous, criminal scene of The Thousand and One Nights, the harem frontiers are also porous, fragile. They can be easily blurred and erased; men can easily dress up as women and enter unnoticed.

  But to get back to Scheherazade, she arrived at Shahrayar’s palace years after the garden incident, by which time Shahrayar had killed not only his wife and her slave Mas’ud, but had also systematically beheaded hundreds of innocent virgins, marrying each one at night and killing them at dawn. “He continued to do this, until all the girls perished, their mothers mourned, and there arose a clamor among the fathers and mothers. . . .”8 We see here once again how sex and politics mingle in the Nights. What started as a war between the sexes has turned into a tragic political upheaval, with bereaved fathers rebelling against the King. Now only one privileged father, the King’s Vizier, who has carried out the death sentences, still had two virgin daughters: Scheherazade and her younger sister, Douniazad.

  While the Vizier frantically tries to plot an escape for his daughters, Scheherazade insists on sacrificing herself and confronting the King in the hopes of stopping the killing. This is why Scheherazade can be seen as a political hero, a liberator in the Muslim world. “Father,” she says to the distraught Vizier. “I would like you to marry me to King Shahrayar, so that I may either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest.”9 She has a scheme in mind that will prove to be successful: to weave spellbinding stories that will captivate the King, leaving him hungry to hear more — and save her life.

  To change the mind of a criminal who is intent on killing you by telling him stories is an extraordinary achievement. In order to succeed, Scheherazade has to master three strategic skills: control over a vast store of information, the ability to clearly grasp the criminal’s mind, and the determination to act in cold blood. The first skill is of an intellectual nature, requiring a wealth of knowledge, and Scheherazade’s encyclopedic erudition is described in the first pages of the book: “Scheherazade had read the books of literature, philosophy, and medicine. She knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted with the sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise, and refined. She had read and learned.”10 But knowledge alone does not enable a woman to influence men in power; witness the enormous number of highly educated women involved in social movements in the West today, who are nonetheless unable to keep modern Shahrayars in check. Hence the interest in analyzing Scheherazade’s highly successful story.

  Our heroine’s second talent is of a psychological nature: the ability to change a criminal’s mind by using words alone. To use dialogue to disarm a killer is a bold strategy, and in order to succeed, the victim must have a good understanding of the criminal’s probable moves and know how to integrate them into unfolding events, as in a game of chess. We have to remember that the King, the aggressor, does not talk to Scheherazade in the beginning. During the first six months of her storytelling, he keeps silent and listens without uttering a word. So Scheherazade has no way of knowing what is going on in his mind, except by watching his facial expressions and body language. How to continue talking in the night without making a fatal psychological miscalculation? Much like a military strategist, who uses his knowledge to foresee future events, Scheherazade has to guess, and guess accurately, because the slightest mistake will be fatal.

  Scheherazade’s final talent is her cold-blooded capacity to control her fear enough to think clearly and lead the dynamic interaction with the aggressor instead of being led. Scheherazade only survives because she is a super-strategist of the intellect. She would have been killed if she had disrobed like a Hollywood vamp or Matisse’s odalisque and stretched out passively in the King’s bed. This man is not looking for sex, he is looking for a psychotherapist. He is suffering from acute self-loathing, as we all do when we discover that we have been cuckolded. He is furious because he does not understand the other sex or why his wife betrayed him.

  Despite her powerlessness, Scheherazade manages through an accurate reading of a complex situation to change the balance of power and reach the top. This is why, even today, many women like myself who feel totally helpless in politics admire Scheherazade. Some Westerners who misread her story and reduce her to frivolous entertainer might view her as a bad role model for modern women. But I think that if you situate her accurately in her political context, her pertinence as a role model becomes quite clear. She saves not only herself but also an entire kingdom by slowly changing the mind of the chief decisionmaker, the King. The British author A. S. Byatt is correct when she stresses that although the story “appears to be a story against women” at first, because of the enormous inequality between Scheherazade and her husband, the woman ends up completely taking over.11 Ultimately, the King both renounces his macabre project of beheading his brides at dawn, and — through Scheherazade’s subtle influence on his beliefs, motivations, and inner psyche — acknowledges that he was completely wrong in being angry with women. “O Scheherazade, you made me doubt my kingly power (zahadtani fi mulki) and made me regret my past violence towards women and my killing of young girls.”12

  This last sentence, in which a violent despot acknowledges that dialogue with his wife changed his entire world view, has inspired many famous twentieth-century Arab writers to grant Scheherazade, and by extension all women, the status of civilizing agents. Peace and serenity will replace violence in men’s intentions and deeds, predicted the influential Egyptian thinker Taha Hussein, if they are redeemed by a woman’s love. In his Scheherazade’s Dreams (Ahlam Scheherazad), published in 1943, the storyteller becomes a symbol for the many innocents who were engulfed by the Second World War — a war that, while instigated by the West, also affected all Arabs and, indeed, the entire planet.13 The King in Hussein’s book symbolizes men’s incomprehensible and tragic craving for killing. Only after listening to his captive for years does Shahrayar realize that she is a repository of a precious secret. If only he can grasp who she is and what she wants, he might achieve emotional growth and serenity:

  Shahrayar: Who are you and what do you want?

  Scheherazade: Who am I? I am the Scheherazade who offered you the pleasure of listening to my tales for years because I was so terrified of you. Now, I have reached a stage where I can give you love because I have freed myself from the fear you inspired in me. What do I want? I want my lord, the King, to have a taste of serenity. To experience the bliss of living in a world free of anxiety. 14

  Redemption, in Taha Hussein’s work, starts when a dialogue is established between the powerful and the powerless. Civilization will flourish when men learn to have an intimate dialogue with those closest to them, the women who share their beds. Taha Hussein, who was blind, handicapped, and unfit to take part in wars — just like women — reawakened in the 1940s the symbolism inherent in the medieval Scheherazade tales — that linking humanism with feminism. Any reflection on modernity as a chance to eliminate despotic violence in the Muslim world today necessarily takes the form of a plea for feminism. Regardless of where you are, in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, or Algeria, when you zap through Muslim television or leaf through the written press, the debate on democracy soon drifts into a debate on women’s rights and vice versa. The mysterious bond existing between pluralism and feminism in today s troubled Islamic world as eerily and vividly foreshadowed by the Scheherazade-Shahrayar tales.

  In The Thousand and One Nights, Shahrayar officially admits that a man should use words instead of violence t
o settle his disputes. Scheherazade commands words, not armies, to transform her situation, and this adds yet another dimension to the tales as a modern civilizing myth. They are a symbol of the triumph of reason over violence.

  Which brings me to emphasize a final point completely missing in Western artists’ fantasies of Scheherazade. In the Orient, to use the body alone, that is, sex without a brain, never helps a woman change her situation. The King’s first wife failed miserably because her rebellion was limited to body politics — i.e., allowing the slave to mount her. Cuckolding her husband only traps a woman in a suicidal mission. But Scheherazade teaches that a woman can effectively rebel by developing her brain, acquiring knowledge, and helping men to shed their narcissistic need for simplified homogeneity. She teaches that there is a need to confront the different other, and to insist on the acknowledgment and respect of boundaries if dialogue is to be achieved. To learn to enjoy the fluidity of dialogue is to savor situations where the outcome of battle is not rigidly fixed, where winners and losers are not predetermined.

  Abdesslam Cheddadi, a Moroccan historian and one of the most astute analysts of Islam today, states that the first key message of The Thousand and One Nights is that “Shahrayar discovers and becomes convinced that to force a woman to obey marital law is an impossibility.”15 But, adds Cheddadi, as revolutionary as this conviction is, it is less subversive than the tales’ second message: If we admit that Shahrayar and Scheherazade represent the cosmic conflict between Day (the masculine as objective order, the realm of the law) and Night (the feminine as subjective order, the realm of desire), then the fact that the King does not kill the queen leaves Muslim men in unbearable uncertainty regarding the outcome of battle. “By allowing Scheherazade to stay alive, the King suspends the law he established himself,” writes Cheddadi.16Paradoxically, it is Shahrayar, the male, who becomes paralyzed, by granting Scheherazade the right to live, speak, and thrive. “Law and desire balance each other and seem to come to a kind of suspenseful immobility, but ith no guarantee that at any moment one or the other will resume its own movement.”17 At the end of the tales, men in the Muslim world can be sure of only one thing: The battle between the sexes, if representative of the battle between emotion and reason, has no end.