Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  One of Nur-Jahan’s assets was her age. She was not a young and blushing virgin when she married Jahangir in 1611, but a thirty-four-year-old widow whose husband, a dignitary who had held a post in Bengal, had died under mysterious circumstances. His death was suspicious because everyone knew that Jahangir had loved Nur-Jahan since childhood; “After the unexplained death of this embarrassing husband, she returned to the heart of the imperial court, and married Jahangir a few months later.”15 Another unusual detail was that Nur-Jahan was a foreigner in India — she was a Persian and, as such, a Shi’ite.16 To marry Jahangir, who, like most Mughal rulers, belonged to a Sunni (orthodox) dynasty, was like sliding into a minefield. Yet Nur-Jahan was clever enough to create a Shi’ a lobby within the court, by placing men of her family in key positions. She “surrounded herself with a clan comprising, among others, her father, Itimad ud-Dawla, a Persian adventurer who had become Jahangir’s prime minister, and her brother Asaf Khan.”17

  But if Nur-Jahan had been merely a sportswoman or an astute harem lady who surrounded herself with men of her camp, she would not have had the extraordinary impact that she has had on the Islamic cultural scene in general and on the arts in particular. She also had a flair for public relations, on two distinct levels. First, she stepped directly into the artists studios and negotiated new ways of representing women, love, and conjugal intimacy in art, by appearing beside her imperial husband at events she initiated. Second, she became involved as an art collector, thus indirectly influencing fashion and taste. “We know that Mughal women of the noble class and imperial family were considerable traders . . . running their own boats and developing their own list of commodities, and that of them, the two most illustrated were Jahangir’s mother, Maryam al-Zaman, and Nur-Jahan. . . .”18 Nur-Jahan’s influence as an aggressive trader was so well known in diplomatic circles that between 1617 and 1618, she was even appointed “protectress” of the British Embassy.19

  As Nur-Jahan was familiar with both Islamic and Western painting, she must have realized that her Mughal husband, Jahangir, who was half Indian, was not faithfully reproducing the tradition of the Persian miniature. She must have realized that he was using painting for political propaganda purposes by borrowing darshana from his Hindu childhood, and thereby framing himself as an Indian god.20

  Darshana, which literally means “seeing” or “viewing,” refers to the religious ritual of the Hindu gods, who occasionally reveal themselves to their worshipers, thus allowing them the privilege of gazing at their images. “Just as a Hindu god is said to give darshana to worshippers who gaze at its image,” states Michael Brand, an expert in Indian art, so Mughal emperors “would appear for the public each morning at a special palace window and later to assembled nobles within the palace audience hall.”21

  In the Hindu tradition, a human being who is privileged enough to experience darshana, to gaze at the god he worships, is believed to catch some of his power. By “sighting a revered person, sacred image or place, and taking into oneself their inherent religious power, devotees of Hindu gods receive through the eye contact some of their magic energy.22 But by elaborating on this Hindu darshana, the Mughal emperor broke a major taboo of original Islam: the prohibition of the personality cult. A Muslim ruler’s primary qualification is modesty and humility. Al-Hakim, a Muslim ruler who pretended to be God in eleventh-century Egypt, for example, was immediately judged by the general Cairo population to be a crazy man who had lost his mind.23 So it is only within this Hindu-influenced context that we can accurately understand the importance of the new Mughal miniature portraits with their accurate renderings of the Emperor’s and Nur-Jahan’s features.

  Before leaving Nur-Jahan behind in the seventeenth century, I was tempted to ask the following question: Did Muslim history remember this incredibly subversive queen? To answer this query by myself would have taken hours or even days at the noisy and stuffy Rabat Mohamed V University library. But an Arab woman has at least one advantage over a man: If she calls an Islamic expert in fields such as history or Shari’a (religious law), and asks him for help, tradition decrees that he provide her with the requested information. The Shari’a expert that I usually contact often shows me the relevant pages in his own books and even lets me borrow them for a few days so that I can copy them. So I made a few telephone calls and within a few days was told about Omar Kahhala’s portrayal of Nur-Jahan.

  As recently as 1955, I learned, Omar Kahhala, an Egyptian scholar of Turkish origin, gave to Muslim women a fantastic gift: five volumes containing hundreds of profiles of “Women Celebrities in the Arab and Muslim World.” Nur-Jahan, of course, is on the list, and Omar’s description of her, which barely mentions her emperor husband, makes Scheherazade’s princesses look miserably limited. “She was an Indian Queen, had grace and beauty,” he writes. “She knew both Persian and Arabic and had a perfect knowledge of both cultures. She was accomplished in music and other sophisticated arts (al adab ar-rafi’a). She managed her kingdom in a perfectly rational manner, set taxes, and examined closely the country’s daily affairs. She used to appear at a window of the palace to display herself to the kingdom’s princes and to review armies’ parades. Money was coined in her name which appeared together with that of her husband. It was reported that she used to go hunting with other women of her palace and that they rode the fastest of horses just like men.”24

  The passive odalisques painted by Ingres and his more modern heirs such as Matisse did not exist in the Orient! Persian miniatures held no secret for Matisse, who insisted on the importance of his 1910 visit to an Islamic art exhibition: “Persian miniatures . . . showed me the full possibility of my sensations.25 And why wasn’t Matisse interested in Kemal Ataturk’s ideal of beauty, in Turkish women throwing away their veils and flying planes? It seems strange that in the 1920s an Oriental military man like Ataturk was dreaming of liberated women, while a man like Matisse, bred in a democracy, was dreaming of odalisques and an Islamic civilization that he confused with women’s passivity.

  What is the mystery behind the ideals of beauty inscribed in the psyches of men of different cultures? I kept asking my male university colleagues after I returned from my book tour, until Professor Benkiki, my favorite fundamentalist, silenced me with this remark:

  “Fatema, why are you so obsessively preoccupied with what men think? A good Muslim woman your age should stop focusing on men and start doing something for illiterate women who need help from privileged women like you. Why don’t you forget about men and focus on prayers so that Allah may forgive you your sins.”

  It took this extremely aggressive remark by my conservative colleague to alert me to the idea that my obsession was a good one. “If your idea disturbs a conservative man, hang on to it,” I said to myself. “It will probably lead to important discoveries.” Therefore, I stopped bombarding Professor Benkiki with questions concerning men’s fantasies and accepted the fact that I would have to live with this enigma for months to come.

  That next summer, I went to Temara Beach, between Rabat and Casablanca on the Atlantic Coast, and tried to forget about Ingres and Matisse and their harems. Instead, I listened to the roaring ocean, looked at the wonderful sunsets, and dove into the high tidal waves for hours when the moon was full. I did everything I could to forget about men’s fantasies and thus conform to Professor Benkiki s definition of an ideal Muslim woman. I prayed and meditated, though I did so while standing in the ocean. This is a small but essential detail whose meaning probably escapes my dear colleague: Modern Muslim women have gained access to the ocean. They have pulverized the harem frontier and gained access to public spaces. Veiled or unveiled, we women are in the streets today by the millions. To meditate in a harem, sitting inside four walls, is completely different from meditating while standing in the Atlantic waves. In the ocean, I feel connected to the cosmos — I am as powerful as Scheherazade’s “Lady with the Feather Dress.” With access to state-paid education, computers, and the Internet, Muslim omen hav
e gained wings.

  Kemal completely agrees with my theory that the ruling male elites of the Muslim world have already lost their battle against women, and that the extreme cases of violence against women that occur in Afghanistan and Algeria are a sign of the beginning of the end of misogynous Muslim despotism. “Women have emerged as a huge civic force pushing for democracy and fighting against injustice in our part of the world,” he often says, “because basically, unlike in the Christian West, Muslim men believe women to be their equals. They grant them brains and energy and the capacity to rebel and challenge hierarchies. Now, Fatema, you are the winners.”

  When Kemal starts being so nice and supportive of me and of my theories, I start wondering if he is not just trying to seduce me again into making my aphrodisiac fish tagine, which involves a huge investment of time and money on my part. The most difficult thing is to find the supposedly aphrodisiac fish, the Qurb, in the first place. Qurb is the Arabic word for “coming closer,” and ever since I first arrived in Rabat as a student, I have heard about its wonders. In my hometown of Fez, which is three hundred kilometers from the sea, we never knew that such a magical fish existed. But here, you can t get Qurb easily because the whole Rabat population is always looking for it, scavenging the fish markets along the beaches that stretch toward Casablanca. To increase your chances of finding the treasure, you have to be out searching at five A.M. But fortunately, at least we Rbati, or people from Rabat, don t have to compete with the three million citizens of Casablanca. The Casablanca people are like Americans: They focus on money, not sensuality.

  Anyway, over the years I have learned so much about Qurb, and how to combine the right spices to make it a paradisiacal delight, that I have gained a reputation at the University, which has helped a lot in furthering my career. All of my male and female colleagues happily volunteer to provide me with any information I need in exchange for a bite of Qurb. And, of course, I keep my recipe a secret to protect my monopoly. Oh, I could tell you the ingredients that I use — a generous mix of fresh coriander, fresh ginger, garlic, and young olive oil from Chawen, a mountainous city near Tangier. But I am not going to divulge the proportions I use. . . .

  So, you are beginning to understand what I mean by investing time and money in this precious Qurb tagine. Not that I am complaining, because the results are wonderful. However, it is not so much how you prepare the fish as the conditions under which you serve it that heighten its sensuality. The Qurb ought to be served on a terrace overlooking the ocean on the fourteenth night of a lunar month, when the moon is full and round. Yet even though I involved myself in various complicated but rewarding aphrodisiac recipes and spent many days swimming or just resting on the beach, my obsession with the European harem enigma kept taking hold of me.

  As usual, whenever I am besieged by complicated questions I cannot answer, I behave as my grandmother Yasmina advised. “Forget about the whole thing,” she often said. “Don’t ever complicate your life. A woman’s life is a tricky enough path as it is. Try to be good to yourself: Simplify things as much as you can.” And that is when I decided not to finish this book. I stopped writing and started going to Mbarek, my favorite silver merchant’s shop in the medina, to buy beads and try to focus on making some amber necklaces. I also tried, despite the rowdy Rabat traffic, to catch the sunsets at Temara Beach. Yes, indeed, I tried everything I could to avoid any kind of philosophical reflection on love, sex, and fear, and focused on the spectacular Atlantic sunsets instead. So intent was I on creating some sort of peace for myself that I talked no more about men’s fantasies and harems.

  A few years passed, and then one day, I woke up in a foreign city and realized, as so often happens when you are far from home, that I did not have the right clothes. I was in New York, it was summer, and my clothes felt uncomfortable. So I ran to buy a skirt in an American department store. And there, a small incident occurred that, just as in the Sufi tales, gave me a flash of enlightenment. Some of my questions about the Western harem enigma were finally answered.

  1. Ellison Banks Findly, “Pleasure of Women: Nur Jahan and Mughal Painting” in “Patronage by Women in Islamic Art,” Asian Art, Vol. 2, Spring 1993. Published by Oxford University Press in association with Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, p. 79.

  2. Michael Brand, The Vision of Kings: Art and Experience in India (Canberra, Australia: National Gallery of Australia, 1995), p. 105.

  3. “The most dramatic change in the depiction of Indian Kings occurred at the Mughal court of North India at the end of the sixteenth century. This change marked the first appearance of painted portraits in which the creation of an accurate likeness was of prime importance. Although earlier portraits often incorporated some individual traits, the aim had been to represent the power of the king rather than his personality. . . . This new portraiture (usually small in scale and bound into imperial manuscripts or albums) was made for a restricted court audience, as part of an attempt to forge a new imperial image based upon Indian, Islamic and European visual models. Within the palace libraries, these historical portraits were juxtaposed with images of mythical and divine rulers, boosting the present ruler’s legitimacy.” Brand, op. cit., p. 105.

  4. Findly, op. cit., p. 78.

  5. For Sir Thomas Roe’s account of the Mughal Court, see The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619, as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, ed. William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), vol. 2, p. 478.

  6. This explains why so many conservative politicians and fundamentalist groups today, most linked to oil lobbies and interested in paralyzing democratic processes, invest money in promoting the veil, while statistics show that Muslim women have invaded many public spaces, including the labor market and the universities. See two of my recent articles that elucidate this link: F. Mernissi: “Palace Fundamentalism and Liberal Democracy: Oil, Arms and Irrationality” in “Social Futures, Global Visions,” Special issue of Development and Social Change, Vol. 27, April 1996, pp. 251-265; and “Arab Women’s Rights and the Muslim State in the Twenty-First Century: Reflections on Islam as Religion and State,” in Faith and Freedom : Women’s Human Rights in the Muslim World (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 34-50.

  7. The French version of UNESCO’s 1997 “Human Development Report,” which is where I got these statistics, uses the category of “Nombre de femmes dans l’encadrement et Fonctions techniques” (Chart 3, p. 172), which is defined thus on page 256: “Encadrement et Fonctions techniques: sont compris dans cette catégories les spécialistes le personnel technicien des domaines suivants: sciences physiques, architecture, ingénierie, aviation et marine (officiers inclus), sciences biologiques médecine, dentisterie, médecine vétérinaire, mathématiques, informatique, économie, comptabilité, droit, enseignement, religion, littérature, journalisme, sculpture, etc. . . .”

  8. Haleh Esfandiari, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997), p. 6. See also Azar Nafissi, “Veiled Threat: The Iranian Revolution’s Woman Problem,” in The New Republic, February 22, 1999, and a more recent book by an American writer, Christian Bird “Neither East Nor West” (New York: Pocket Books, 2000).

  9. Findly, op. cit., pp. 79-80.

  10. Findly, op. cit., p. 79.

  11. Hindus practiced parda, or the seclusion of women, just like their Muslim conquerors.

  12. Ibn Batouta, Rihla (Voyage), written in 1355. The Arabic edition I use is that of Dar Beyrouth, 1985 edition, p. 329. An English edition with a commentary by H. Gibb was published in 1985, but I prefer to use my own translation. For a French edition, see the translation by de Defremery et Sanguinetti (1853-1859), Ibn Battûta: Voyage, published in three volumes, La Découverte, Maspéro, 1982. Vol. II, p. 214.

  13. Ibn Batouta, ibid., p. 330.

  14. Ibid, p. 329.

  15. Valerie Berinstain, India and the Mughal Dynasty (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997),
p. 78.

  16. The split of Islam into Sunni (orthodox) and Shi’a, which was at the beginning a split between Arabs with divergent interests, later became an instrument of Arab-Persian rivalry and Persian nationalism, known in Arabic as shu’ubiya. But it is only in the sixteenth century, under the Safavid dynasty, that Shi’ism became the official religion of Persia, now known as Iran. See Michel Mazzaoui, The Origins of Safawids: Si’ism, Sufism, and the Gulat (Weisbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1972). On shu’ubiya, the Arab-Persian rivalry, from the Arab point of view, see the texts by Jahiz and others in Bernard Lewis, Religion and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), chapter 9, “Ethnic Groups,” page 199 and following. The Arab-Persian rivalry is manifested at the level of the language as well: Most of the people conquered by the Arabs forgot their previous language, history, and identity, and were merged into Arabic-speaking Islam. The Persians, however, sustained both by their recent memories of imperial greatness and by current awareness of their immense contribution to Islamic civilization, recovered and reasserted their separate identity. See Bernard Lewis, Islam, op. cit., vol. II, introduction. On the question of orthodoxy and dissent, see a short summary in “Orthodoxy and Shism” in H. Gibb, Mohamedanism (Oxford Univ. Press, 1980 reprint) p. 73 and following. A more in-depth analysis is that of Henri Corbin’s section on “Le Chi’isme et la philosophie prophétique” (pp. 49-153) and on “La pensée Shi’ite” (pp. 437-496) in Henri Corbin, Histoire de la Philosophie Islamique, Gallimard, Paris, 1964.