Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  I felt that I had stumbled on a radical difference between the East and West. As far back as I can remember, I have always been told, either directly when I committed a blunder or indirectly through a tale, that a stupid woman gets nowhere. I thought of Tawaddud, a science wizard and one of Scheherazade’s heroines. Yasmina, who was illiterate, would often ask one of my older, educated cousins to read that tale to me to make sure that I got the message right:

  The Caliph asked Tawaddud:

  “What is your name?” to which she answered,

  “My name is Tawaddud.” He then inquired,

  “O Tawaddud, in what branches of knowledge dost thou excel?” to which she answered,

  “O my lord, I am versed in syntax and poetry and jurisprudence and exegesis and philosophy; and I am skilled in music and the knowledge of the Divine ordinance and in arithmetic and geodesy and geometry and the fables of the ancients . . . and I have studied the exact sciences, geometry and philosophy and medicine and logic and rhetoric and composition; and I have learnt many things by rote and am passionately fond of poetry. I can play the lute and know its gamut and notes and notations and the crescendo and diminuendo. If I sing and dance, I seduce, and if I dress and scent myself, I slay. In summary, I have reached a pitch of perfection such as can be estimated only by those of them who are firmly rooted in knowledge.”15

  In this dialogue between the master and the slave, Tawaddud tries to sell herself. The few minutes of attention that the Caliph grants her is her chance to compete not only with the other women in the harem but also with all the male scholars and artists swirling around the palace, hoping to entertain the ruler. A harem woman had no other alternative but to invest in her intellect. To follow Kant’s advice, and cultivate intellectual mediocrity, would have been suicidal.

  According to Kant, women should not study geometry, astronomy, or history — all disciplines considered vital for any ambitious harem beauty who wanted to keep up with her caliph. Writes the philosopher: “Their charm loses none of its strength even if they know nothing of what Algarotti has taken the trouble to sketch out for their benefit about the gravitational attraction of matter according to Newton.”16 Algarotti was a count who in 1736 wrote a simplified summary of Newtonian optics, Newtonianismo per le Dame, addressed to women, on the premise that they were incapable of digesting the original.

  In addition to mathematics, history and geography are two other disciplines that can demolish a woman’s beauty, according to Kant: “In history they will not fill their heads with battles, nor in geography with fortresses, for it becomes them just as little to reek of gunpowder as it does the male to reek of musk.”17 And as for geography, a woman should know just enough to keep up with an entertaining discussion, but not enough to display any serious knowledge: “For the ladies, it is well to make it a pleasant diversion to see a map setting forth the entire globe or the principal parts of the world. . . . [But] it is of little consequence whether or not the women know the particular subdivision of these lands, their industry, power, and sovereigns. Similarly, they will need to know nothing more of the cosmos than is necessary to make the appearance of the heavens on a beautiful evening a stimulating sight to them, if they can conceive to some extent that yet more worlds, and in them yet more beautiful creatures, are to be found.”18

  Isn’t it strange, I thought upon reading this, that in the medieval Orient, despots like Harun Ar-Rachid appreciated defiantly intelligent slave-girls, while in enlightened eighteenth-century Europe, philosophers like Kant dreamt of silent women! Such a bizarre separation between feeling and reasoning! In Kant’s enlightened West, the world is not populated by a single race of humans who share the capacity to feel and think, but by two distinct kinds of creatures: those who feel (women) and those who think (men). A woman in his enlightened West is a creature whose “philosophy is not to reason, but to sense.”19

  What does all this mean? I wondered as I sat in the café. Is this why Poe assassinated Scheherazade? Is this why Western men are so euphoric in their harems?

  Yet at least Poe granted Scheherazade an unusual brain. Three years earlier, the French writer Théophile Gautier had also killed Scheherazade in his novella La Mille et Deuxième Nuit (1842). But he killed her because she had run out of inspiration.20 Poe killed her because she knew too much.

  Why do Western and Eastern men dream of such different beauty ideals and what does the beauty ideal tell us about a culture?

  Why would a progressive Western man like Kant, who was so concerned about the advance of civilization, want a woman with a paralyzed brain?

  Could it be that the violence against women in the Muslim world is due to the fact that they are acknowledged to have a brain, while in the West, they are often considered to be incapable of deep or analytic thought?

  At this stage, I suddenly felt very sick. I had heart palpitations. I looked outside to see if Jacques was back, and then remembered that he was always late, just like Moroccans. I looked at my atch: fifteen minutes more until our appointment. I know hy I am sick, I thought, it’s half due to Kant and half due to the three coffees I just drank. I kept forgetting that everything in the West, starting with its coffee, is much stronger than at home. Well, I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France, because I would like to be buried in Temara Beach, near Rabat. I then remembered that I had no written will and had not purchased my tombstone, as is traditionally done in Fez. All I had was “Maroc-Assistance,” an insurance that would ship me back home if I died in Christiandom. I shook myself — I had to stop these depressing thoughts, and had better take care of these matters as soon as I got back. But in the meantime, as Yasmina would say, “A woman should start with her easiest problems. Eliminate the small things you control.” So I ordered a healthy orange pressée and had just started to enjoy it when Jacques appeared.

  Our first destination was the Musée du Louvre, where Jacques’s oldest odalisque dwells, and our second, to the Musée du Centre Pompidou, home to his youngest. “I am not as lucky as the caliphs who could shove all the women they loved into one harem,” said Jacques. “In Paris, a man is forced to visit various museums regularly in order to piece together his harem.”

  Before entering the Louvre, Jacques changed his colorful Kenzo tie for a huge dark bow tie. “A man has to be extremely elegant and irresistibly handsome when stepping into his harem,” he said, and then dashed with a royal swagger through the museum’s entrance.

  1. From “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe (London: Everyman’s Library, 1998), pp. 332-349.

  2. For details on the scientific discoveries described by Poe, see notes 6 and 7 on page 346 and note 3 on page 348, ibid.

  3. Ibid., p. 349.

  4. Ibid., p. 332.

  5. D. Sidersky, Les Origines des Légendes Musulamanes dans Le Coran (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1933), p. 14. For the Koran verses concerning the Fall, see Sura 7:18-22 and Sura 20:121.

  6. Poe, op. cit., p. 334.

  7. Poe, op. cit., p. 334.

  8. Poe, op. cit., p. 349.

  9. Haleh Esfandiari, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997), p. 7.

  10. Ovid, The Art of Love, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1957), p. 46.

  11. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, translated from the German by John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991), p. 79.

  12. Ibid., p. 2.

  13. Ibid., p. 79.

  14. Ibid., notes 1 and 2 on page 121.

  15. “The Story of Abu al Husn and his slave girl Tawaddud,” from The Book of the 1001 Nights and a Night, translated by Richard F. Burton (London: Burton Club for Private Subscribers, 1886), vol. V, pp. 193 194.

  16. Kant, op. cit., p.
79.

  17. Kant, op. cit., p. 79.

  18. Kant, op. cit., p. 80.

  19. Kant, op. cit., p. 79.

  20. Not only did Gautier turn Scheherazade into a sterile storyteller who had lost her inspiration, but he also made her come to Paris to beg him to write new tales for her. But the King does not like the story that Gautier writes, and Scheherazade is killed, just like all the other brides before her. Gautier, La Mille et Deuxième Nuit (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993), p. 256.

  7

  Jacques’s Harem:

  Unveiled but Silent

  Beauties

  Once inside the Louvre, Jacques became very solemn and said that we now had to follow his sacred harem ritual. “First, I visit my harem baths,” he said, “so that I can see all of my beauties together. It makes it easy to count them and to make sure that no one has escaped. Then, I visit my favorite wife and we admire each other undisturbed.” With that, I understood that I was not supposed to ask too many questions, so as not to interrupt his dream, and quietly followed him upstairs. Here, he stopped in awed silence in front of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Turkish Bath, where more than twenty nude odalisques have been splashing in an intimate palace pool since 1862. The serene, relaxed atmosphere of the painting seemed familiar, reminding me of the hammam, or public baths, that I go to back home to forget about research and academic strife. Ingres, who never set foot in the Orient, had nonetheless managed to capture the baths’ most important quality: the simple, pure sensuality that comes with taking off your clothes and relaxing in a warm misty room.

  Hammams once flourished in the Islamic world and especially in medieval Baghdad. In the eleventh century, the scholar Hilal al-Sabi tried to establish how many baths existed in the city and was baffled by the astronomical estimates offered by the people he interviewed. “We found many among both the upper classes and the commoners who believed that the baths numbered 200,000 or more,” he wrote. “Some others said there were 130,000 baths, and others claimed 120,000. . . .” But eventually, after much sophisticated calculation, the author settled on 60,000 as the most likely number.1

  Deriving tremendous pleasure from the mere cleaning of one’s body, and turning it into sensual ritual, constitutes one of the major differences between Muslim and Christian cultures. Pampering oneself in a hammam, by massaging your tired skin for hours on end with fragrant ghassoul (clay perfumed with herbs), has absolutely nothing to do with the ascetic world of the Western sauna, which I experienced while in Stockholm, Sweden. There, I did not dare use ghassoul because the place was as clean as a surgical ward.

  From the start, Christianity condemned bathing as a lustful sin. “What of those who frequent promiscuous baths, who prostitute to eyes that are curious to lust, bodies that are dedicated to chastity and modesty?” warned Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, as early as A.D. 200. “Such washing defiles, it does not purify nor cleanse the limbs, but stains them. . . .”2 It is true that in Cyprian’s time, men and women frequented the public baths together, a legacy from the Roman tradition, when the baths “became little more than well-conducted brothels.”3 But this connection between the public baths and promiscuity is totally absent in Muslim culture, where, from the beginning, the strict separation of the sexes was the rule. In medieval Baghdad, the emphasis in the single-sex baths was to clean the body with a narcissistic sensuality that excluded paying attention to anyone else.

  Descriptions of bathing abound in The Thousand and One Nights, and baths are often used as preparatory rituals to important acts involving the crossing of new frontiers in time or space. When a traveler enters a new city, when a foreign woman enters a new palace, or when a youth is about to embark on a night of pleasure — all begin their journeys in the hammam. Since this conception of the bath as a cleansing ritual is completely lacking in Christian culture, it is not especially surprising that many Western artists were drawn to what they regarded as an exotic Oriental fantasy. In fact, it was not until the time of the Crusades that Westerners discovered the purely hygienic dimension of the bath. “Whatever inheritance the Dark Ages in Europe possessed,” writes Fernando Henriques in Prostitution and Society, “an emphasis on bodily hygiene was no part of it. It was not until the Crusades that Europe, adapting the idea of the Oriental hammam, began to appreciate the advantages of a public cleansing of the body.”4 For centuries, however, even this discovery did not change the Westerners’ strangely phobic attitude toward the baths. Historian Norbert Elias tries to explain this attitude by pointing out that many Westerners associated the baths with the danger of contracting the infectious diseases that plagued medieval Europe. “The idea that water is dangerous was transmitted from generation to generation,” he writes. “As a result, one finds suspicious if not repulsive reflexes toward baths and ablutions.”5 Thus, in the Western mind, to enjoy oneself in the bath had long been linked with terrifying dangers, be they sinful sex or devastating epidemics.

  Ingres’s imaginary Turkish Bath looked “normal” to me at first, because most of the women in the painting were not looking at one another, which is also usually the case in the Oriental hammam. We Muslim women don’t rush to the baths to look at our neighbors, and I myself don’t like to stare too much at who is sitting near me because I am likely to encounter a colleague from the university or one of my students or the wife of my building’s janitor. The rule in the Rabat baths is to concentrate on scrubbing off your dead skin with a harsh cloth, replenishing your oils with ghassoul, and then applying a light layer of henna paste to give your skin a nice hue. You avoid talking to your neighbors because it will spoil your concentration on sensuality. This atmosphere of complete self-absorption is also strong in Ingres’s Turkish Bath. Each of his odalisques is looking at some vague point on her narcissistic horizon, totally self-centered — probably the major reason, by the way, why women spend more time in hammams than do men; it is the only place where they are not asked to serve food or perform services for someone else. But what reminded me that Ingres’s Turkish Bath depicted a territory foreign to me was the fact that two of the women were erotically caressing each other. That would be impossible in a Moroccan hammam for the simple reason that it is a public space, often overrun with dozens of noisy children. Erotic pleasure in Morocco belongs in preciously sheltered private places. Like many of my compatriots, I am always amazed when I see Western men and women kissing each other in the streets, because for us, erotic intimacy does not belong out in the open, but is a miracle that one must protect in cocoon-like privacy. Yet when I shared this idea with Jacques, who was still staring at the Ingres, he said that as far as he was concerned, as long as there were no other men in sight, women could do whatever they wanted in his hammam. “Fatema,” he said, “you have to understand that when I step into my harem, even those women who are caressing each other will immediately stop what they are doing and turn to me. That is why this painting gives me so much joy.”

  The painted harem has another valuable quality that Jacques reminded me of as we rushed downstairs to the Salle Denon to meet his favorite odalisque. “Economics is where Western men are more clever than Muslim men,” he said. “My harem is paid for by the French Republic. Imagine how much it would cost me if I had to entertain and keep all those naked women by myself. And the taxes I would have to pay! Here, it is the duty of the Republic to take care of the paintings in expensive museums so that I can keep my fantasy going. All I have to do is put on my bow tie whenever I decide to visit these lonely ladies waiting in the dark to hear my steps.” I could not help but laugh at that, but I had to refrain from chuckling too loudly, because we had just arrived at Jacques’s favorite harem lady, Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque, finished in 1814.

  Immediately, I realized that I already knew the woman very well — she has been endlessly reproduced on book covers and in art magazines as the epitome of erotic beauty. Jacques told me that the best description he has ever read of her “indescribable” charm was that of the American Robert Rosenblum, a profes
sor of fine arts at New York University. “An idle creature of the harem,” quoted Jacques, “whose feet have never been wrinkled or sullied by use, the odalisque is presumably displayed passively for our delectation. . . . She reclines in padded luxury, fondled by satins, silks, furs, and feathers.”6 After that, Jacques stopped talking and disappeared into a silent reverie, his hand caressing his bow tie. But he was not the only one admiring her; dozen of other men, many of them tourists, were standing nearby, whispering in all kinds of European languages, from Finnish to Croatian, as they admired La Grande Odalisque. The shimmer of her skin was magnified by the darkness inside the huge, high-ceilinged room, and except for her turban and a feather with which she was fanning herself, she was totally nude. The painter had caught her from the back, at a vulnerable moment when she had turned her head, as if hearing footsteps behind her. Nudging me, Jacques murmured that the combination of nudity and vulnerability was one of the secrets of the magic spell of La Grande Odalisque.

  Jacques then added that meeting La Grande Odalisque had been one of the defining erotic moments of his sexual education. For his generation, he said, seeing nude women in real life had been close to impossible while growing up. Only when introduced to the history of art did boys and young men see nude women for the first time.