Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  I could not help but laugh out loud when I went back to the Louvre to compare my Muslim miniatures with Ingres’s odalisques — they were so different. I tried to imagine what would have happened if Ingres had met Shirin face to face in the Bois de Boulogne woods. Would he have stripped her of her arrows and horse in order to paint her? Would he have taken away her silk caftan and clothes as well? And what about Immanuel Kant, who said knowledge kills a woman’s charm, so that an educated woman might as well have a beard? At the thought of a fake beard under Shirin’s lovely chin, I started laughing so merrily that the elegant French security guard on the Louvre s solemn and dark first floor, where La Grande Odalisque is imprisoned forever, asked me to either chuckle more quietly or leave at once. I chose the second option and headed toward the rue de Rivoli exit, with my head up.

  The romance of “Khusraw and Shirin” is part of the Khamseh (“Quintet”) written by the poet Nizami (1140-1209). It has been illustrated innumerable times by Muslim painters, be they Persian, Turk, or Mughal. Shirin and her beloved Khusraw came from different countries: Khusraw was a Persian prince, the son of King Hurmuzd, and Shirin was the niece of the Queen of Armenia. Though this is typical of Muslim legends and tales, as though preparing us for an unavoidable pluralism to come, one can’t help but wonder how they came to know each other, especially since the princess was secluded in her aunt’s luxurious palace. Well, Khusraw first fell in love with Shirin in a dream; “he dreamed he would ride the world s fastest horse, Shabdiz, and gain a sweet and beautiful wife named Shirin.”6 Soon thereafter, Khusraw heard from his friend Shapur, who had visited Armenia, about a lovely princess named Shirin, the niece of that country’s queen. When Shapur realized how powerful his friend’s passion for his dream woman was, he rode back to Armenia with a strategic plan that worked beautifully: “Shapur sparked Shirin’s interest by hanging portraits of Khusraw on trees and explained how she could join the prince in Persia.”7 And guess what? The secluded princess did not hesitate a minute. Instead, she simply jumped on “the fastest horse in the world” and started her irresistible, impulsive journey in search of love. And, “after fourteen days and nights, exhausted and covered with dust, she came to a gentle pool and stopped to bathe.”8 What a singular moment, that extraordinary point in time when a secluded woman turns into an adventurer, rides alone for weeks through strange forests, and then stops to bathe in a wild river as if it was all completely natural. Shirin bathing in the wilderness has been obsessively celebrated by Muslim miniature painters ever since.

  Meanwhile, Khusraw, forced by political events to leave Persia, was riding in the opposite direction, toward Armenia, when he happened upon a beauty bathing in a pool, her aristocratic identity betrayed by her magnificently adorned horse waiting nearby. This scene of “Khusraw watching Shirin bathing,” wherein the heroine is depicted as a mysterious horsewoman swimming in wild forests, is another landmark of Muslim miniatures.9 But, of course, during this first encounter, neither Shirin nor Khusraw spoke to each other — otherwise we would have no legend. Instead, “astounded by her beauty, Khusraw quietly drew closer. Startled, Shirin hid herself in her long tresses, dressed, and rode off. Although Khusraw desired the exquisite maiden for his own, he never guessed her identity. Nor did Shirin recognize Khusraw, though later she wondered if the handsome horseman was the prince.”10 Both lovers then departed, looking for each other in opposite directions, a theme universal in its pathos, because we all spend our brief lives doing just that, even if we physically share our beds with the same person every night for years. Always we carry an image in our head of a better partner, of an ideal person, which blurs our chances of finding happiness.

  Falling in love with an image or picture is, I guess, an allegory of what happens to all of us. We start our emotional quest for happiness with an image tattooed on our childhood psyches, and cross days and nights, rivers and oceans, looking for that ideal someone who comes closest to our fantasy picture. The love motifs in Muslim painting and storytelling remind us that happiness is about traveling far to meet the different other. Falling in love is about crossing boundaries and taking risks.

  Falling in love with an image is a theme echoed in many of the tales in The Thousand and One Nights. In “The Prince Who Fell in Love with the Picture,” for example, a Persian prince is captivated by the portrait of a woman from Ceylon. This implies a lot of travel, as we can surmise from the following summary: “A young prince entered his father’s treasury one day, and saw a little cedar chest set with pearls, diamonds, emeralds, and topazes. . . . On opening it (for the key was in the lock) he beheld the picture of an exceedingly beautiful woman, with whom he immediately fell in love. Ascertaining the name of the lady from an inscription on the back of the portrait, he set off with a companion to find her. Having been told by an old man at Baghdad that her father at one time reigned in Ceylon, he continued his journey thither, encountering many unheard of adventures along the way.”11

  Love between a man and a woman is by necessity a hazardous blending of alien cultures, if only because of the sexual difference, which is a cosmic frontier, an existential boundary. In the Muslim psyche, to love is to learn about crossing the line to meet the challenge of the difference. It is also about discovering the wonderful richness of humanness, the plurality, the diversity of Allah’s creatures. One of the most quoted verses of the Koran, and one that I particularly love, reads: “And we made you into different nations and tribes, so that you may know about each other” (Sura 49:12). The Arabic word “to know” in this verse, ’arafa, comes from ’Arif, meaning a leader chosen by his group because he has accumulated knowledge by asking many questions about things he did not know.12 To understand this Muslim emphasis on learning from differences, one has to remember that Islam originated in the desert (present-day Saudi Arabia) and that Mecca’s prosperity as a center of trade in the first years of the Muslim calendar was due to travelers constantly crossing through on roads linking Africa with Asia and Europe. Unlike the racist stereotype that most Westerners have of Islam, which they reduce to a jihad, or sacred war, this religion spread from Arabia to Indonesia through trade routes, via travelers talking to one another and learning from one another s cultures. Writes historian Marshall Hodgson: “During the five centuries after 945 (Abbasid dynasty), the former society of the caliphate was replaced by an international society that was constantly expanding, linguistically and culturally, ruled by numerous independent governments. This society was not held together by a single political order or a single language or culture. Yet it did remain, consciously and effectively, a single historical whole. In its time, this international Islamicate society was certainly the most widely spread and influential society on the globe.”13 That fascinating and enriching diversity is a strong message that comes through in many Muslim fantasies, and I think it explains why citizens in my part of the world are so interested in the Internet and digital technology, despite widespread illiteracy and poverty.”14 (Although the unexpected mushrooming of “cyber-cafés” in Moroccan shantytowns may also be due to young people trying to connect with strangers and thereby obtain visas to emigrate!)15

  In the early Muslim world, discovering other cultures meant fantasizing about the opposite sex. Sindbad never missed an opportunity to fall in love, and married whenever he reached a new island, taking advantage of his right to be polygamous. To take the risk of falling in love with a foreign woman, and vice versa, is a powerful dream in many Muslim legends, tales, and paintings. Sometimes, to dramatize the “foreignness” of a woman for a man in love, she is described as being an extraterrestrial creature. Such is the case in the tale of “Jullnar of the Sea,” which Scheherazade narrates to Shahrayar on their two hundred and thirtieth night. Jullnar is discovered on the seashore by a slave trader, who sells her to the king who rules the land. The king falls madly in love with her, largely because she behaves quite strangely. Jullnar shares his bed and shows him tenderness when they make love, yet sometimes he catches her
behaving in mysterious ways. It is the tiny things, the small gestures, that make men realize how great is the distance separating them from the women they embrace. In Jullnar’s case, the sea often seems to attract her more than the king who loves and cherishes her: “When in the evening, the king went in to her, he saw her standing at the window, looking at the sea, but although she noticed his presence, she neither paid attention to him nor showed him veneration, but continued to look at the sea, without even turning her head toward him.”16 Yes, the feminine as the locus of strangeness and unpredictability haunts Islam, the only world religion that legally enforces women’s seclusion through Shari’a, or sacred law.

  Women in love in Muslim miniatures always have some sort of problem, which they often solve by taking boats and crossing oceans. Shirin has to do this as well, and as we see in many of the paintings depicting her sea voyage, her entire crew is female.17 This comes as no surprise to a woman such as myself, reared in a traditional household, since my illiterate grandmother nurtured my imagination long ago by telling me about Ghalia, the Moroccan equivalent of Shirin. From age three to thirty, when television reached Morocco, and silenced the grandmothers, I heard the story of Ghalia again and again. Daily, Ghalia jumped “seven seas, seven rivers, and seven channels” to solve what at first seemed insoluble problems. And on the day I took off on a flight from Casablanca to Malaysia for my first conference there in 1987, I remembered Ghalia and felt that my grandmother would have approved of me if she were still alive. The message that you got as a little girl in my Muslim world, before television, was that life is tough, and that in order to reach the imaginary palace of the legendary prince, you had better be ready to perform onders like Ghalia because nothing is easy or certain. Older women would tell little girls, “You have to work hard to snatch a little minute of happiness.” Yes, I was never told that life was going to be easy for me. Never. I was told that even a minute of happiness involves much work and concentration. I was never told that a prince would make me happy. Instead I was told that I could create happiness if I concentrated enough, and that I could make the prince happy — and vice versa — if I liked him enough.

  Princes in Muslim tales and legends always have problems as well. Even if a woman is deeply loved and living in a luxurious harem, you can expect her prince to get into political trouble and his dynasty to come to an end. A woman must always be ready to jump onto a horse and cross alien territories: Uncertainty is a woman s destiny. And to finish Shirin’s story, she keeps on riding and riding through unknown lands, encountering numerous unexpected adventures, until she finally meets and marries Khusraw. Her unlimited energy is an inspiration to Muslim painters and to Muslim women as well.

  Mobility as an important characteristic of the beloved woman is also central to Sufi mystics like Ibn ’Arabi, who describes the female lover as being Tayyar, or, literally, “endowed with wings”18 — an idea that the Muslim miniature painters often tried to capture. When Ibn ’Arabi undertook his long journey to Mecca in the thirteenth century, he was forced to reflect on the nature of love, that extraordinary feeling that gives human beings a chance to reach toward divine perfection.19 It is well known that the Sufi mystics, starting with Ibn ’Arabi, have always had trouble drawing a line between love inspired by the divine and love inspired by a woman.

  Ibn ’Arabi was born in Muslim Spain, in Murcia, in 1155, and undertook the journey to Mecca, six thousand miles away, in search of spiritual teachers who would help him grow. But he fell in love — not part of his plan — when he was admitted to the home of his teacher, Imam Ibn Rustum. “When I sojourned in Mecca in 585 [1206 in the Christian calendar],” Ibn ’Arabi writes, “I met there a group of excellent persons, men and women, highly educated and virtuous. But the most virtuous of all . . . was the master and learned Imam Abu Shaja’ Zahir Ibn Rustum. . . . This master, may God have mercy on him, had a daughter, a slender virgin, who charmed whoever looked at her, and whose presence enriched conferences and introduced happiness in the hearts of its speakers. Her name was Nizam.” What seduced Ibn ’Arabi above all was Nizam’s intelligence: “She was a religious sciences expert (alima) . . . She had magic eyes (sahirat at-tarf), Iraqi wit (’iraqiatu addarf) . . .” And Nizam, as one might expect, was also eloquent: “When she decides to express herself, she makes her message clear” (in afçahat, awdahat) and “when she decides to be brief, she is incomparably concise” (in awjazat, a’jazat).20 Nizam’s quick mind enabled her to captivate everyone’s attention in the majliss, or intellectual gatherings, that her father held in his house.

  What is remarkable about Ibn ’Arabi’s story is that he decided to make his erotic feelings for Nizam public, instead of keeping them to himself, because for him the difference between divine love and the erotic transport that an eloquent woman can stir in a man is slight. In one of his poems, which was scandalous then, and is still regarded as a sinful document by some today, Ibn ’Arabi tries to clarify his emotional turmoil by describing how easy it is for the boundaries between the divine and the erotic to vanish. Conservative religious authorities in Aleppo, Syria, condemned Ibn ’Arabi’ s poem as nothing more than a prurient, lust-filled document with no spiritual content whatsoever. And that is when Ibn ’Arabi took up his pen to write Translator of Desires (Turjuman al Ahswaq), a fascinating book about love as enigma and cosmic mystery. In it, he tries to translate the subtleties of desire for the rigid conservatives who were unable to grasp sophisticated feelings. But paradoxically, in so doing, Ibn ’Arabi confirms the slippery nature of attraction and the yearning of all human beings to cross boundaries toward the “other,” be it the opposite sex or the divine. This celebration of sensuality as mobile energy, so strong in Sufism, also seems to animate Muslim artists when they portray adventurous women crossing rivers on fast horses, and vividly contradicts the morbid passivity of women that we find in Western harems.

  A few days before I left Paris, Christiane, my French editor, invited me to one of her favorite restaurants, in order to share with me some of her insights into the Frenchmen’s harem fantasy. She warned me in advance that “Le Restaurant du Louvre” was pretentious, très bourgeois, and not very welcoming to tourists — all of which I found to be true. As I entered the restaurant, I felt as if I were stepping into a very exclusive French household whose rituals I was likely to violate, just because I came from another culture. My heavy, noisy silver bracelets and necklace looked utterly déplacé and so did my jacket, which was nothing more than a colorful shortened caftan. But when Christiane came in, heads turned to look at her with appreciative admiration. Like most French women in important positions, she always dresses in black, and in unusually bold outfits. On that day, she was wearing a Yamamoto stretch silk dress with one shoulder totally bare, and looked down at the crowd as if she had just landed from a much more refined planet. “Remember what I told you about the pretentiousness of this restaurant,” she murmured while seating herself on one of the luxurious gilded sofas. “This is one of the rare spots in Paris where aristocrats have the guts to exhibit their family jewelry to proletarians like me who have to work eight hours a day to pay taxes to the Republic.”

  I could not refrain from laughing. I am always amazed at how revolutionary the French are in their daily discourse, constantly attacking the privileged classes and the priests, all while voting to maintain both in office. Before calling for the waiter, Christiane took out her mirror and lipstick and started making herself up, as if we were entirely alone, while calmly continuing to study the “aristocrats.”

  “Can you believe it?” she said. “Two centuries after the Revolution, the aristocrats are just as insolent as ever.” Christiane’s voice could definitely be heard by our neighbors, but she didn’t seem to care. Instead, she focused on her mirror and ran her hand through her short blond hair, making it look even wilder than it already did.

  I admire French women because they don’t hesitate to get into fights in cafés, demanding that waiters not neglect them, while I
hesitate to squander my energies fighting in Moroccan public places, where men often push women aside to get to the head of queues. Vicariously, I enjoy witnessing my Parisian friends’ ceaseless revolution. However, this time, I wanted Christiane to stop her republican crusade and focus on a more urgent matter.

  “Is there a link between Kant’s philosophical concept of beauty and Ingres’s passive model of the harem beauty?” I asked her. “Someone has to clear this up for me so that I can give my poor mind a rest for a while.”

  Christiane started by reminding me that in the West, men had kept women out of the arts professions for centuries, and forbade them, just as the Greeks had their slaves long before them, from painting pictures. She quoted Margaret Miles, an American professor of the history of theology, who stated that “The social practice of professional painting also insisted on the painter’s maleness, as academies in which figure drawing and painting from nude models were taught did not admit women until the end of the eighteenth century.”21 Christiane was surprised that I hardly knew anything about a new branch of art literature that focuses on “Le Regard” (“The Gaze”), and started dictating all the titles that she thought I ought to read on that topic — when I interrupted her. “Don’t give me any more books to read — just summarize the essentials,” I begged her, not wanting to have to pay any more excess-luggage duties than I already undoubtedly faced, when taking the Paris-Casablanca flight. Christiane complied by saying that for centuries in her culture, painting, just like thinking, was considered to be an exclusively male privilege. “And what do I mean by the gaze?” Christiane contemplated, sipping her glass of champagne. “Well, look, Western men did not, for example, unlike the painters of Muslim miniatures, represent themselves in the harems they painted. In Ingres’s harem, you don’t find the male partner. Maybe a slave occasionally, but not the master.”