Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  “I was eleven when Soeur Bénédictine, my teacher at our neighborhood Catholic school, took us to the Louvre one Saturday afternoon,” he said. “And she must have noticed my confused sexual awakening because she murmured softly in my ear, ’Dear little one, don’t look so intently at the paintings.’”

  Yet I found the odalisque’s nudity to be troublesome. In Muslim harems, as I explained to Jacques, women are not nude. Only crazy people go about naked. Not only do women in harems keep their clothes on all the time — except to go to the hammam — but they often dress like men, in trousers and short tunics. And in fact, the first Europeans who were lucky enough to glimpse a sultan’s court were very surprised by the androgynous silhouettes of the women. The Frenchman Jean Thévenot, for example, already startled to see that harem women were not veiled, was shocked to discover that they “dressed just like men,” and described in detail the agile movements that the harem pants and short tunics allowed.7

  The first Christian to describe a Turkish sultan’s seraglio, or harem, was Thomas Dallam, sent from England to Constantinople in 1599 on a very special mission: to make sure that a precious organ, a gift to the sultan from the King of England, worked properly.8 Dallam arrived in Constantinople in August, and for a month, the sultan allowed him daily access to the seraglio in order to install the musical instrument. Although he was not allowed to go beyond the men’s courts, and was forbidden entrance to the harem, Dallam did manage to catch a glimpse of the sultan’s concubines playing in their well-protected court one day. And to his amazement, he discovered they were dressed like men:

  When I came to the grait the wale was verrie thicke, and graited on bothe the sides with iron verrie strongly; but through that graite I did se thirtie of the Grand Sinyor’s concobines that weare playinge with a bale in another courte. At the firste sighte of them I thoughte they had bene yonge men, but when I saw the hare of their heades hange doone on their backes, platted together with a tasle of smale pearle hanginge in the lower end of it, and by other plaine tokens, I did know them to be women, and verrie prettie ones in deede.9

  These reactions of early Westerners to glimpses of the harem led me to think that in the West, men rely more on fashion to establish their distance from women, and more consciously emphasize their power through clothing. In the Orient, in contrast, in countries like Morocco, men and women even now still wear traditional clothes in the evening (Western clothes are identified with work), with the difference between the male and female djellabas residing more in details and choices of color. When I explained this to Jacques, he agreed that we had stumbled on a major difference between our two cultures.

  “In my harem, I prefer my women to be totally nude, just like Ingres’s Grande Odalisque,” he said in a ceremonious tone that censored any type of dissension. “Nude and silent — these are the two key qualities of my harem women.”

  “This is really bizarre,” I finally dared to comment, but only after we had left the Salle Denon and were heading toward the exit. “Muslim men seem to get a sort of virile power from veiling women and harassing them in the streets if they aren’t ‘covered’ properly, while Western men like yourself seem to derive a tremendous pleasure from unveiling them.”

  Jacques said that he had never thought about it that way before, but agreed that both nudity and clothing provided important clues when tracking down the different ways in which men imagine beauty and pleasure in the East and West. “One thing is for sure,” he added. “My odalisque cannot leave her room if I deprive her of her clothes. I don’t have to lock the door. She will never dare to step outside if I make sure she is totally nude.

  “And besides,” he concluded when we were in his car heading toward le Centre Georges Pompidou to meet the last of his favorite odalisques, who lived in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, “depriving women of their clothes greatly reduces the cost of maintaining a harem in Paris.”

  As we neared the final member of Jacques’s harem — Matisse’s Odalisque à la culotte rouge (Odalisque with Red Trousers)— he once again became mystically silent. “Here is my second favorite odalisque, after the Ingres,” he whispered as he stood in awed admiration in front of the painting. He then bowed elegantly to her, and turned his head just in time to catch the smiles of the crowd of tourists around us, who were sharing his pleasure. But I felt sorry for the poor odalisque: Except for her red culottes hanging loosely around her hips, she was wearing nothing but a completely open chiffon shirt, which left her breasts awkwardly bare. Lying vulnerably on a low mattress, with her arms behind her head and the drapes around her pushed to the background, she seemed totally exposed. She looked sad and lonely, lost in her own thoughts.

  I said to Jacques that I would not describe her as being beautiful because she looked so troubled, and he agreed that there was something strange about her extreme vulnerability.

  “Maybe insecure men like myself are attracted to that,” he mumbled. “Our emotions are such a mystery.” He then added that it had taken him a long time to choose this as his favorite odalisque from among the many that Matisse had painted. For a while, he had thought that the artist’s Odalisque à la culotte grise who dwelt in another Parisian palace, the Musée de’l Orangerie, not so far away, was seductiveness incarnate. And before that, when he was younger, Jacques confessed with a sly smile, he had been smitten with the Odalisque with Raised Arms (1923), now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

  “Matisse must have run out of culottes when he got to her,” Jacques said, “because she has nothing on but transparent white chiffon, draped around her ample hips. Plus she wears an extraordinarily dreamy gaze that makes you want to wake her up.” At one point, Jacques added, he had even considered switching harems altogether — to those of Picasso. Surprised, I confessed that I had never heard of Picasso painting odalisques and harems. But Jacques said that the modernist’s odalisques were “oozing” with brutal sex. “Picasso painted no less than fourteen harems and drew numerous sketches between the end of 1954 and the beginning of 1955,” he said. “They are known as variations of Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement.”10

  Just as we were about to leave the room, I noticed that Odalisque with Red Trousers was finished in 1921, and I had what the Sufis call lawami’, or an enlightening flash. That date is important in Muslim history, as it is the year when women’s liberation occurred in Turkey, as part of a nationalist struggle for liberation. In the 1920s, when Matisse was painting Turkish women as harem slaves, Kemal Ataturk was promulgating feminist laws that granted Turkish women the right to education, the right to vote, and the right to hold public office. As a consequence of those laws, which were to transform the entire Muslim world, no less than seventeen women were elected to the 1935 Turkish parliament — the first representative body ever to be democratically elected in Turkey, which up until then had been ruled by the powerful Ottoman dynasty.

  Throughout the 1920s, Turkey had been the site of a radical struggle waged by a movement known as the “Young Turks,” who fought against three things perceived to be intimately linked: despotism, sexism, and colonization. The Young Turks, led by Ataturk, blamed the sultan’s despotic rule for Muslim “backwardness,” which had led to widespread Western occupation. The Young Turks also attacked the harems and the seclusion of women, arguing that illiterate mothers could not help but produce ill-prepared sons and daughters. In 1909, the Young Turks banned the harem and the Turkish sultan was forced to free his ex-slaves — now citizens of the first republic in Muslim history. The Turkish civil code adopted in 1926 also outlawed polygamy, and gave equal rights of divorce and child custody to both men and women. Women’s enfranchisement soon followed, with women granted the right to vote in local elections in 1930, and in national elections in 1934.11

  “Kemal Ataturk campaigned against the veil and forced feminist reforms as a strategic component of nation-state building among the countries of the Middle East and Europe,” writes Denitz Kandiyoti, a leadi
ng Turkish expert on women.12 This connection between democratization and feminism as a way to end colonization then reverberated throughout the Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, producing a widespread concern for women’s education and other reforms. The first Moroccan schools for girls, which I attended, opened in the 1940s, and were the result of a similar nationalist movement. Ataturk’s reforms and military successes also succeeded in halting the European advance on Turkish territories, making him a hero for many. Therefore, the passive Turkish women that Matisse painted in the 1920s are more French than they are Turkish, as they existed in his fantasies only.

  Yet somehow, I thought dispiritedly as I studied the painting, the Frenchman’s odalisque seems to be more powerful than reality, because even now, eighty years after Ataturk, many Westerners still believe that in the Orient, things never change. They believe that Muslim men and women never dream of reform or aspire to be modern.

  I kept looking at the 1921 date inscribed on Odalisque with Red Trousers, dumbfounded that a Western painting, an image created by Matisse, could keep Turkish women in slavery, when in reality, they were entering politics and the professions. Could it really be that an image has more power than reality? I wondered. Is reality that fragile?

  This idea of the image as a weapon that condenses time and devalues reality made me very uncomfortable. If the West has the power to control time by manipulating images, I thought, then who are we if we do not control our own images? Who am I — and who makes my image? I couldn’t even begin to answer these questions, and since some strange truths need time to be digested, I tried to make myself relax, to spend a whole day gazing at the magnificent Seine. I owe it to myself, I thought, to forget about all these bizarre musings and just enjoy the sensuous feeling of being alive. Too many women have lost the drive to be happy because they become obsessed with analyzing their situation.

  That memorable afternoon with Jacques, I clearly saw the invisible link between three seemingly disparate things: Kant’s ideal of the brainless beauty, the power of the painted image, and Western movies. All three are major weapons used to dominate women in the West, I realized, and the image is a way to condense time. It does not matter if in actuality Turkish and European women in the 1920s were liberating themselves; in much of Western imagination, Matisse and others like him were in control of both time and female beauty. In the Orient, men use space to dominate women; Imam Khomeini, for example, ordered women to veil when stepping into public space. But in the Occident, men dominate women by unveiling what beauty ought to be. And if you don’t look like the picture they unveil, you are doomed. Is this what Kemal was insinuating when he suggested that Western men use something besides space to control women? Could it be that here men achieve power over women by manipulating time via images? What a strange contrast between the two cultures.

  When I shared these strange ideas with Christiane a few days later, she gave me a tiny book, which she said was as important to understanding the Western concept of beauty as was Kant — De Pictura by Leon Battista Alberti, written in 1435. Alberti, Christiane said, was a Renaissance man who identified the painted image as one of the foundations of Western civilization and explored its power to subjugate time. “Painting possesses a truly divine power,” Alberti wrote, “in that not only does it make the absent present (as they say of friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living many centuries later.”13 No wonder, Alberti went on, philosophers like Socrates and Plato, as well as emperors like Nero, Valentinianus, and Alexander Severus, “achieved distinction in painting.”14 But there was also another important link that Alberti made, Christiane said, which was pertinent to the enigma of the Western harem: the connection between the painted image and the creation of something of value. Writes Alberti: “How much painting contributes to the honest pleasures of the mind, and to the beauty of things, may be seen in various ways but especially in the fact that you will find nothing so precious which association with painting does not render far more valuable and highly prized. Ivory, gems, and other similar precious things are made more valuable by the hand of the painter. Gold too, when embellished by the art of painting, is equal in value to a far larger quantity of gold.”15

  A third thing that struck me when I read Alberti was that slaves in Greece were forbidden to paint. “The excellent custom was especially observed among the Greeks that free-born and liberally educated young people were also taught the art of painting together with letters, geometry, and music. . . . The art was held in such high esteem and honored that it was forbidden by law among the Greeks for slaves to learn to paint.”16

  So maybe there is no perverse connection between the painted image and time as war-machine after all, I thought. But if there were one, the euphoric smiles that the word “harem” evokes among Westerners would be more comprehensible; since the male artist controls the image of beauty, his harem is a safe place, filled with nude and silent women. It does not matter much if, in actuality, the women do have brains and are intelligent, as long as they hide it. It is a question of role-playing and theater — just like with the veil. The fanatics who force women to veil in Afghanistan, Algeria, and elsewhere do not denigrate women’s intelligence; instead, their war is about access to public space. Men have to keep the monopoly over the streets and the parliaments; women have to veil to show they don’t belong. Veiling is a political statement.

  When stepping into the street, the veiled woman agrees to be a shadow in the public space. Power manifests itself as theater, with the powerful dictating to the weak what role they must play. To veil on the Muslim side of the Mediterranean is to dress as the ruling Imam demands. To be considered beautiful on the European side of the Mediterranean is to dress as the market-Imam commands. It might be an interesting therapy, I thought, for both men and women in the East and West to switch cultures and roles in order to clarify what is going on. Maybe I should seriously consider creating a travel agency during my retirement, to help people dance between cultures. But before doing so, I had better make sure that my theory is right. Otherwise, I will go bankrupt the first year.

  But how do I make sure that I am right? I asked myself. I guess I must just carry on bombarding foreigners with questions.

  What happens to women who refuse to conform in the West?

  Women who do not conform to Kant’s image of the silent beauty will be punished as ugly — or worse. Edgar Allan Poe’s assassination of Scheherazade now seems totally logical, even the norm. If intelligence is the monopoly of men, women who dare to play clever will be stripped of their femininity. How sophisticated and how subtle! Kemal is right: Western men are cleverer than Muslim men. In this kind of war zone, no blood needs to be spilled.

  Thinking just such thoughts had given me a headache and abruptly ended my visit to Jacques’s harem. I asked him to drop me off in front of my hotel. He was sorry to hear of my plight, but reminded me of my promise to introduce him into Harun Ar-Rachid’s harem.

  Yes, I will, I agreed — but only after I get some rest. Tomorrow, I will go searching for fragrant mint tea and couscous in the twentieth arrondissement, where there is a large concentration of Arab immigrants. I need to get a taste of my native medina. I am feeling homesick. I miss the sun and the drinking of mint tea in the late afternoons, with the muezzins of the minarets frantically chanting the end of the day. Maybe diving into Arab history and Harun Ar-Rachid’s Baghdad will help me too.

  1. Hilal al-Sabi, Rusum dar al Khilafa (Rules and Regulations of the Abbasid Court), translated by Elie Salem (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1977), p. 21. Hilal al-Sabi died in 448 of the Muslim calendar, A.D. 1056.

  2. Fernando Henriques, Prostitution and Society (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962), vol. II, p. 15.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid., vol. II, p. 56.

  5. Norbert Elias, La Civilisation des Moeurs, French translation of Uber den Prozess der zivilization, which appeared in 1939 (Calmann Levy, 1973), p. 280.

  6. Robert Rosenbl
um, Ingres (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), op. cit., p. 86.

  7. Jean Thévenot, Voyage du Levant (Paris: F. Maspero, 1980), op. cit., p. 123.

  8. N. M. Penzer, The Harem (London: Spring Books, 1965), p. 32.

  9. Thomas Dallam, Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), p. 74. Dallam visited Constantinople in 1599.

  10. “Delacroix, la Couleur du Rêve No. 1” (Paris: Bibliothèque Des Expositions, Issued on the occasion of the Delacroix Exhibition at the Grand Palais, April 10 July 20, 1998), p. 55. For more on Picasso’s erotic series from a woman’s point of view, see Rosalind Krauss, “The Impulse to See,” in Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 51-78.

  11. Denitz Kandiyoti, “From Empire to Nation State: Transformations of the Woman Question in Turkey,” in Retrieving Women’s History: Changing Perceptions of the Role of Women in Politics and Society (Paris: UNESCO, 1988), p. 219.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 60.

  14. Ibid., p. 62.

  15. Ibid., pp. 60-61.

  16. Ibid., p. 63.

  8

  My Harem: Harun Ar-

  Rachid, the Sexy Caliph

  When I think of the harem, my imagination drifts to the first two Arab dynasties, the Umayyad (661-750), whose capital was Damascus, and the Abbasid (750-1258), whose capital was Baghdad. Both dynasties ruled the Muslim empire after the death of the prophet Mohammed in the year 11 of the Muslim calendar (632 of the Christian calendar).1 Despite there having been fifty-one Arab caliphs during the reign of these first two dynasties, only one comes rushing to my mind: Caliph Harun Ar-Rachid.2

  The name Harun Ar-Rachid has been triggering the imagination of countless Arabs ever since his reign in the ninth century. He inspired many of the tales from The Thousand and One Nights because of his magical combination of qualities: physical beauty, youth, athleticism, intelligence, love of learning and the sciences, and military success. Harun Ar-Rachid also seems to have had a rich emotional and sexual life. He was not afraid to love, to express his emotions, or to explore the passionate feelings that women stirred in him. Harun Ar-Rachid often confessed that when a man falls in love and expresses his emotions, he becomes vulnerable and jeopardizes his capacity to control women. But this capacity to express his feelings and admit his vulnerability when in love is one of the secrets of Harun’s lasting spell. I, myself, like everyone else, am of course scared of making a fool of myself by declaring my love to a man who might not care for me at all. Whence my admiration of Harem Ar-Rachid’s courage to show his emotions and run the risk of being ridiculed. In at least one of the tales in The Thousand and One Nights, he is described as an unfortunate husband, betrayed by an unfaithful jarya who seduces his own musician.