Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  Or was it perhaps that Madeleine Ingres did feel jealous but was afraid to show it? Are Western women who enjoy monogamy discouraged from expressing their jealousy as a price for that privilege? With that thought, I rushed over to the huge bookstore in the Louvre basement, bought more books on Ingres, and sat in a sunny café on the rue de Rivoli to scavenge for information about Madeleine Ingres.

  What I found was scanty, but I did learn that historians know enough about Ingres’s private life to conclude that the couple shared delightful moments. Financially, Ingres was quite well off and was regarded as one of the “top twelve most privileged artists of the French Republic.”11 He was generous and entertained often and quite lavishly. He also enjoyed going to the opera and had a tendency to stuff himself with pastry. Furthermore, he took real pleasure in posing in the nude, a practice that he’d started as a young artist in David’s atelier, where students traditionally posed for one another; “there has survived a copy of a student drawing of Ingres posing in the nude, short and somewhat stout, but striding vigorously forward holding an elegant bow.”12 Later, “a willingness to strip in order to further the cause of art stayed with him. . . . He posed nude as the Virgin Mary for his own painting The Vow of Louis XIII, persuading a friend to sketch him as he worked out the position of the legs.”13 And around 1840, when Ingres was nearly sixty, “he began running around the room in a state of undress before throwing himself, panting, onto a mattress.”14 He was described then by a contemporary as “a little man obese and squat . . . without the fear of appearing comic. . . .”15

  When moved, Ingres expressed his emotions — especially tenderness. He did not hesitate, for example, to write a letter to Madeleine saying how much he missed her presence during the ceremony when Charles X awarded him the Légion d’Honneur in 1824. “When my name was pronounced in the midst of the cheers,” he went on, “my poor legs and my face must have given away the state of extreme vulnerability I felt when I had to cover the distance separating me from the king to receive the Croix (cross) he gracefully bestowed on me. . . .”16 Ingres also confessed to Madeleine that he had cried; “You would have cried too if you were there, just like I am still doing while writing to you about it.” Ingres was then forty-five and, unlike those men who grow more narcissistic with success, he seems to have mellowed and grown appreciative of the tenderness and emotion he felt toward Madeleine. During this period, he once advised a husband, posing for him for a portrait, to look at his wife so “that his eyes soften.”17 Ingres’s fascination with women’s emotions, and his attempts to capture their fleeting moods and changing fashions, also contributed to his portraits’ appeal.

  So it was no wonder that Ingres was devastated when Madeleine, his confidante for more than thirty-five years, died in 1849. Then nearly sixty-nine, he felt so lonely that he decided to remarry three years later. Again he asked friends, this time the Marcottes, to help him arrange his new marriage, and on the 15th of April, 1852, he wed Delphine Ramel. At age forty-two, the new bride was almost thirty years younger than him — a point he often reminded her of — and belonged to a comfortable middle-class family. Before their marriage, she had lived with her father, a mortgage administrator in Versailles.

  This second marriage seems to have been as happy as the first. Wrote Ingres to a friend in 1854: “I see nobody or rarely a few friends who have the kindness to admire my present life. My excellent wife is adjusting very well to this way of living. She creates solitude for me and embellishes it almost every evening with two sonatas by the divine Haydn which she interprets very well and with true feeling. Sometimes I accompany her.”18

  Yet, in the midst of this conjugal bliss, Ingres began to paint The Turkish Bath, one of his most diabolically voluptuous harems, filled with nude women. The year was 1859, and this time, with the younger Delphine at his side, he seems to have been more emboldened than before as far as his harem fantasies were concerned. Instead of introducing one single odalisque into his monogamous marriage, as he had with Madeleine, he now introduced more than twenty Turkish women, only one of whom looked like Delphine. “The Turkish bath resembles a world both real and imaginary, an erotic fantasy crystallized within the distorting lens of a convex mirror . . . ,” writes critic Robert Rosenbaum. “In the head of the nude leaning against the pillow in the right foreground, the plump features of Ingres’s new wife, Delphine Ramel, may be recognized.”19

  It took Ingres more than three years to finish his Turkish Bath, considered by Edward Lucie-Smith, the author of Sexuality in Western Art, as a “particularly complex kind” of image-anchored eroticism.20 According to him, The Turkish Bath is “a hymn to the glory of the omnipresent feminine body — there are nudes everywhere we look; they fill the whole picture-space as if the artist suffered from horror-vacui. . . . These women are animals, herded together and preparing themselves for the pleasure of the male (whom in any case they cannot refuse to satisfy). Secondly, the implications are strongly voyeuristic: we are looking in at a scene normally forbidden to the male gaze.”21

  At least one Frenchwoman, Princess Clotilde, the wife of Prince Napoleon, got extremely jealous of The Turkish Bath. Shocked by so much nudity, she forced her husband to get rid of the painting. He gave it back to Ingres, who did not waste a minute before repainting the canvas. “The artist then transformed the painting en tondo and to that end diminished it by a vertical strip and enlarged it on the left with another strip. The transformation was important for in this way a large part of the nude woman in the foreground to the right had disappeared and the pose of her neighbor had changed. Then he added the set table in the foreground, the bather seated on the edge of the basin, and all the figures in the back above her. Then the drapery was cut out. . . .”22

  And who bought the now-changed painting that every French husband was hesitant to acquire? A Turk! A Muslim man. “In 1864, the work was still in Ingres’s studio; it was bought a little later (20,000 francs) by Khalil Bey, the Turkish ambassador in Paris.”23 But four years later, in 1868, the ambassador sold the painting to a French buyer, who sold it again, and it was not until 1911 that it became a possession of the Louvre. Why, I wondered, had Ambassador Khalil Bey gotten rid of the painting? Had his wife nagged him, or had he simply felt a pressing need for French francs? Perhaps, like other Turks of his epoch, he was totally bored with harems; as was mentioned earlier (chap. 7), Turkey in the 1860s was in the midst of one of the most important cultural revolutions to shake despotic Islam. Despotism and the corrupt rule of the Ottoman sultans were being blamed for the sweeping advance of Western colonization, best symbolized by the occupation of Algeria by French troops in 1830. Algeria had been an Ottoman colony, and its occupation fueled a nationalism that took the form of radical reformist movements. Most notable among them was the “Young Turks,” who blamed despotic institutions, starting with the harem, as the cause of the Muslim military defeats. The Young Turks promoted the first state-run girls’ schools in the 1860s, and four decades later, in 1909, banned the harem altogether, while encouraging women to enter the professions. Could it be that Ambassador Khalil Bey was in some way embarrassed to own an expensive Parisian harem, and sold it in order to appear “politically correct” on the home front? That is the kind of question I ought to ask my colleague Benkiki back in Rabat. Like all fundamentalists, Benkiki hates the Young Turks, especially their leader Kemal Ataturk, and therefore knows a great deal about Turkey’s Revolution, which culminated in the 1920s, when Turkey was declared a republic and Kemal Ataturk became its first president. The abolition of the Caliphate (the office of the Caliph) was declared official in 1924.

  The influence of the Turkish Revolution reverberated throughout the Muslim world. Thanks to it, the first schools for girls were established in Morocco — schools that I attended in the 1940s and without which I would have been a desperately frustrated illiterate. I often wonder what I would have done had I been raised illiterate. What comes to my mind most frequently is clairvoyance. Yes, I would have bec
ome the best clairvoyant in all the Kingdom of Morocco. Why? Because clairvoyants sell hope and build self-confidence by insisting on their clients’ capacity to change the situation in which they find themselves. Hope is what women need to make sense of their senseless lives. Yes, I would have peddled hope. Hope is my drug and official addiction. Pessimism is the luxury of the powerful. I can’t afford it.

  The enigma of all this is that no trace of the incredible feminist transformation first of Turkey and later of other Muslim countries was to be found in Western paintings. In the 1930s, when Matisse was painting his passive odalisques, Turkish magazines were reproducing photographs of armed female Ankara University students in military uniforms. Sabiha Gokçen, the first Turkish woman pilot, was pictured flying planes in 1930, while Sureya Agoaglu, a lawyer, was appearing in the Turkish courts to defend her clients throughout the 1930s.24 A wealthy Turk like Khalil Bey had to migrate to Paris to find harems for sale.

  All the harem women that Ingres fantasized about and painted nonstop for fifty years were idle, helplessly passive, and always pictured indoors, reclining on sofas in an embarrassingly vulnerable nudity. Yet this fantasy of passive harem women does not exist in the Orient!

  Ironically, in the Orient — land of harems, polygamy, and veils — Muslim men have always fantasized, in both literature and painting, about self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women. The Arabs fantasized about Scheherazade of The Thousand and One Nights; the Persians painted adventurous princesses like Shirin, who hunted wild animals across continents on horseback; and the Mughals, or Turco-Mongols, from central Asia, gave the Muslim world wonderful erotic paintings filled ith strong, independent-looking women and fragile, insecure-looking men. No wonder that in a rapidly modernizing Turkey, photographs of women flying planes or manning guns ere constantly reproduced in magazines.

  What kind of women haunt Muslim artists’ fantasies? What kind of women did they paint when dreaming of beauties? These were the questions Claire and Jacques wanted me to answer after I exhausted them raving about Ingres and his incomprehensible emotions.

  1. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (De l Esprit Des Lois), translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 270.

  2. See Alain Grosrichard s introductory chapter to his book The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (New York: Verso, 1997).

  3. Daniel Ternois (Introduction) and Ettore Camesasca (text), Ingres, translated from the Italian into French by Simone Darses (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), p. 83. The translation from French to English is my own.

  4. Pierre Angrand, Monsieur Ingres et son Epoque (Lausanne-Paris: Bibliotheque des Arts, 1967), op. cit., p. 9.

  5. “The mission finally left Tangiers in June and, after putting in at Oran, disembarked in Algiers on the 25th of the same month. During this three day stay, Delacroix seems to have been able to arrange a visit to the harem of the dey’s reis. From this came one of the most famous of all Orientalist paintings, Women of Algiers in their Quarters (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Delacroix remained haunted by his African journey. Using his sketches and notes, he painted the scenes he had witnessed.” From The Orientalists: Painter-Travellers, by Lynn Thornton (Paris: ACR edition, Poche Couleur, 1994), pp. 68-69.

  6. Ternois and Camesasca, op. cit., p. 85.

  7. Robert Rosenblum, Ingres (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), p. 52.

  8. Rosenblum, Ingres, op. cit., p. 66.

  9. Rosenblum, Ingres, op. cit., p. 66.

  10. Alev Lytle Croutier, Harem (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), op. cit., pp. 34 35.

  11. Angrand, op. cit., p. 217.

  12. James Fenton, “The Zincsmith of Genius,” New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999, pp. 21-28. The quote is from page 21.

  13. Ibid., p. 21.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. H. Lapauze, “Le Roman d’Amour de Mr Ingres,” Paris, 1910, pp. 282-287, quoted by Pierre Angrand, op. cit., footnote number 2, p. 48.

  17. The portrait was that of Cavé. In Pierre Angrand, La Vie de Mr Ingres, op. cit., p. 211, footnote number 2.

  18. Letter to Pauline Guibert, dated 6 September 1854, quoted in Angrand, p. 247.

  19. Rosenblum, Ingres, op. cit., p. 128.

  20. Edward Lucie-Smith, Sexuality in Western Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 180.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ternois and Camesasca, op. cit., 118.

  23. Ternois and Camesasca, ibid.

  24. Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

  11

  Aggressive Shirin Hunts for Love

  Who are the women painted by Muslim men in miniatures? Are they fictional characters, legendary figures, or real queens and princesses? Is there a tradition of painting in Islam? Does not Islam forbid representation of human figures? These were the questions that my French friend Jacques bombarded me with when I told him about feminine images in Muslim paintings.

  The Muslim world has a fantastic tradition of painting, in which the Persian genius especially expressed itself fully. Romance was celebrated, as well as epic voyages and battles, and women were well represented. Often, they were depicted as aggressively involved in changing the world and constantly on the move — riding horses like Princess Shirin in “Khusraw and Shirin,” or camels, like Zuleikha in the biblical story of Joseph. But, before going any further, let us address the question of Islam’s censorship of human representation.

  The censorship of images in Islam began mostly because the pagan Arabs worshiped no fewer than 360 idols in the temple of the Kaaba, the shrine of Mecca. According to the eighth-century author Hisham Ibn al-Kalbi, one of the few historians to describe the pagan pre-Islamic scene, some of these were ançab, or simple stones, and others were açnam, or statues of human figures.1 The pre-Islamic Arabs also fabricated small clay statues of their favorite gods to protect their homes, in their practice of domestic cults. Many of these worshiped divinities were goddesses, which could be an additional reason for Islam s ban on representation. The Prophet’s own tribes worshiped three Arab goddesses — Al-lat, al Uzza, and Manat.

  When the Prophet conquered Mecca, he destroyed the pagan divinities, cleaned the shrine, and declared that only one God should be worshiped.2 The exact verse of the Koran that bans images also forbids three other sins: wine, gambling, and divination. “O ye who believe! Strong drink (khamr) and games of chance (maysir) and idols (ançab) and divining arrows (azlam) are only an infamy of Satan’s handiwork. Leave it aside in order that ye may succeed” (Sura 5:89).3 However, we know that not all Muslims are angels; some drink wine, others gamble, yet others — mostly women — indulge in divination and magical practices, and some paint representational images. Certain nations, such as Persia, already had a strong artistic tradition when they came to Islam and did not stop producing representational images simply because of their new religion. On the contrary, the Persians enriched Muslim culture by introducing to it their impressive cultural heritage, and taught Arabs and others the art of miniature painting. Persian artists were often invited to the Turkish and Mughal courts to help produce illustrated manuscripts in book-making ateliers.

  Two more reasons explain why the ban on representational images was not enforced throughout the Muslim world. The first is that Muslims made a logical distinction between religious art and secular art. Inside the mosque, unlike inside the church, there were — and are — no representational images. But in the homes of wealthy men, miniature paintings were prized, and some powerful caliphs and sultans even had their own artists ateliers. Unlike in the West, the rich did not think about sharing their paintings with the poor, and even today, most Muslim art is still in the hands of the rich and the powerful. The concept of the museum is purely a Western import, which explains why museums in our part of the world are usually poorly endowed, i
ll equipped, and often deserted. The second reason that representational art has always existed in Muslim countries is that Islam has no sacred clergy, as does the Catholic Church, for example, to enforce conformity. There is no such thing as an infallible religious authority such as the pope in orthodox Islam, for instance.

  So, what kind of images of women do we find in Muslim painting? What happens to emotions and the power structure in cultures where men dare to transgress God’s recommendation to avoid human representations and go ahead and paint their fantasies? How did these daring Muslim men represent women and the emotions such women stirred in them? Did these men respect the Shari’a (religious law), with its ideal of the harem and sexual segregation, or did they violate it? Bencheikh, one of the most eloquent of Arab writers, summarizes it thus, in words that apply as much to today s world as yesterday’s: “Love opens horizons and destabilizes certainties. A man in love invents himself as something other than what he was. A woman in love discovers the multiple selves that one desires in her. Freedom in love is conceived of as surmounting and going beyond the limits of the self.”4

  To help us understand the ideal of feminine beauty in Muslim fantasies, as expressed in painting, let us focus on Princess Shirin, who was a purely secular heroine and is one of the most painted women in Muslim art. Like Scheherazade, Shirin is a Persian name. But if Scheherazade is a literary heroine, Shirin is her equivalent in art. A secluded princess who leaves the harem of her birth the moment she falls in love, she is often portrayed riding alone through the woods, chasing after Prince Khusraw, or bathing in isolated ponds, with her horse keeping a watchful eye over the scene. When she finally finds Prince Khusraw, the two of them are portrayed hunting wild beasts together, and when Khusraw “sabers a lion” to impress her, she instantly reciprocates by spearing a wild ass.5 And if we are to judge by the miniature paintings of her adventures, Shirin is not disturbed one bit, as I would have been, by the death of the wild beasts. Her features are calm; her heart is not bleeding with tenderness.