Suddenly, during these book interviews, I felt trapped in a strangely solemn and dramatic situation totally out of place in the usual mundane world of book promotion tours. I felt that if I said, “Yes, I was born in a harem,” I would immediately create a problem for both my interviewers and myself. Why is this happening? I kept wondering. My feminine intuition, which starts functioning at full speed when strange things occur, was alerting me to the fact that these smiles had sexual undertones that I couldn’t read. The journalists were perceiving a “harem” that was invisible to me.
I called Christiane, my French editor in Paris, for a Western woman’s perspective.
“Sure, their smiles have to do with sex,“ she said, and then added, “Why don’t you push them to be more talkative?”
That is when I decided to reverse roles by interviewing the male journalists who were interviewing me. “Why are you smiling?” I would ask softly when yet another one exhibited signs of excitement. “What is amusing about the harem?” This two-way exchange turned my ex-interviewers into helpful informants who soon taught me that we were not talking about the same thing: Westerners had their harem and I had mine, and the two had nothing in common.
Apparently, the Westerner’s harem as an orgiastic feast where men benefited from a true miracle: receiving sexual pleasure without resistance or trouble from the women they had reduced to slaves. In Muslim harems, men expect their enslaved women to fight back ferociously and abort their schemes for pleasure. The Westerners also referred primarily to pictorial images of harems, such as those seen in paintings or films, while I visualized actual palaces — harems built of high walls and real stones by powerful men such as caliphs, sultans, and rich merchants. My harem was associated with a historical reality. Theirs was associated with artistic images created by famous painters such as Ingres, Matisse, Delacroix, or Picasso — who reduced women to odalisques (a Turkish word for a female slave) — or by talented Hollywood moviemakers, who portrayed harem women as scantily clad belly-dancers happy to serve their captors. Some journalists also mentioned operas like Verdi’s Aida or ballets like Diaghilev’s Scheherazade. But whatever image they referred to, the journalists always described the harem as a voluptuous wonderland drenched with heavy sex provided by vulnerable nude women who were happy to be locked up.
This is indeed a miracle, I thought as I listened to the Westerners’ descriptions. Muslim male artists are much more realistic when it comes to envisioning the harem as a source of erotic bliss. Even in their fantasies, as expressed in miniature paintings or in legends and literature, Muslim men expect women to be highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system and therefore unlikely to enthusiastically satisfy their captors’ desires.
Many of the Muslim courts employed artists who illustrated art books with miniature paintings. The paintings were not hung on walls, or exhibited in museums, but were kept as a private luxury, to be enjoyed only by the rich and the powerful, who could contemplate them whenever they liked. Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting, in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited. From the eighth century onward, Muslim dynasties invested consistently in secular painting. The Umayyad princes decorated their pleasure house of Qusayr ’Amra (in what is now the Transjordan desert, near the Dead Sea) with huge frescoes, while the sixteenth-century Safavid dynasty of Persia raised the art of miniature painting to its highest peak. Most of the miniatures illustrated legends and love poems, and were thus an opportunity for both writers and painters to express their fantasies about women, love, passion — and the risks involved therein.
In both miniatures and literature, Muslim men represent women as active participants, while Westerners such as Matisse, Ingres, and Picasso show them as nude and passive. Muslim painters imagine harem women as riding fast horses, armed with bows and arrows, and dressed in heavy coats. Muslim men portray harem women as uncontrollable sexual partners. But Westerners, I have come to realize, see the harem as a peaceful pleasure-garden where omnipotent men reign supreme over obedient women. While Muslim men describe themselves as insecure in their harems, real or imagined, Westerners describe themselves as self-assured heroes with no fears of women. The tragic dimension so present in Muslim harems — fear of women and male self-doubt — is missing in the Western harem.
The most talkative of the male journalists I met during my book tour were the Mediterranean Europeans. They would define the harem, with sly laughter full of malice, as “a wonderful place where beautiful women are sexually available.” Many sophisticated Frenchmen, on the other hand, associated the harem with paintings depicting brothels, like those by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Au Salon de la rue des Moulins, 1894) and Edgar Degas (The Client, 1879). Most of the Scandinavians just blushed and smiled at the mere mention of the “forbidden” word, letting me infer that politeness and good manners require that some embarrassing subjects best be avoided. The exception to this rule were the Danes, who behaved more like their French and Spanish colleagues by bursting into merry laughter at first, and then, when slightly encouraged, going into great detail about the luxurious embroidered silks that the harem women wear, their long and uncombed hair, and their supine, patiently waiting positions.
Many American journalists described the harem women as Hollywood-inspired dancing slaves. One even started whistling the song that Elvis Presley, dressed as an Arab, performed when he invaded a harem to rescue a sequestered beauty in Harum Scarum (1965):
I am gonna go where the desert sun is, where the fun is;
go where the harem girls dance;
go where there’s love and romance . . .
To say the least, go East, young men.
You’ll feel like the Sheik, so rich and grand, with dancing girls at your command.
When paradise starts calling, into some tent I’m crawling.
I’ll make love the way I plan. Go East
and drink and feast.
Go East, young men. 2
Jim, a Paris-based American journalist who earns his living by writing about films, taught me a Hollywood expression regarding sexy Oriental movies that I had never heard before: “t and s.” The letter “t” stands for “tits” and the letter “s” for “sand.” 3 As we were talking, the Disney version of Aladdin, which appeared in 1992 shortly after the Gulf War ended, came up, and another journalist hummed the opening song of the movie. 4
Other Americans remembered the 1917 and 1918 Twentieth Century Fox screen versions of Aladdin and His Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or the 1920 Kismet, while the multiple versions of The Thief of Baghdad seemed to be a cultural landmark of sorts in Western men s psyche. Some quoted the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks version, others the 1940 version, and still others, the 1961 French-Italian version starring Steve Reeves. The 1978 television version, where the caliph of Baghdad was none other than Peter Ustinov, was also mentioned. And an elderly journalist quoted The Sheik (1921) with Rudolph Valentino while smiling and caressing an imaginary mustache.
When I envision a harem, I think of a densely populated place where everyone is always watching everyone else. In Muslim harems, even married men and women have great difficulty finding a private place in which to caress each other. As for the married women in the harem, sexual gratification is impossible since they must share their men with hundreds of frustrated “colleagues.” So when you think calmly about what a harem is, pornographic bliss is a totally unrealistic expectation. Even if a man kills himself at the task and stuffs himself full with aphrodisiacs, which were an important component of the harem culture, court chronicles reveal that even the most entranced of lovers could outdo himself only sometimes, and then only with that single woman he adored, for as long as his flame kept burning. Meanwhile, the other wives and concubines had to live with their frustrations. So how, I wondered, did Western men create their images of an idyllic, lustful harem?
&nbs
p; In Western images of harems, women have no wings, no horses, and no arrows. These Western harems, unlike Muslim ones, are not about terrible sex-wars during which women resist, disturb men’s schemes, and sometimes become masters, confusing caliphs and emperors alike. One of the women most often portrayed in Muslim miniatures — be they Persian, Turkish, or Mughal — is Zuleikha, from the biblical legend of Joseph, as narrated in Sura 12 (Verse 12) of the Koran under the title “Yusuf.” The story unfolds in Egypt, where Zuleikha, a mature woman married to a powerful man, Putiphar, falls madly in love with the handsome Yusuf when her husband brings him home, expecting her to adopt him as a son. The miniatures show her as an aggressive female sexually harassing the pious Yusuf, who miraculously resists her seductive moves, thus maintaining law and order. The miniatures echo the tragic potentiality of adultery, especially when initiated by a sexually frustrated married woman. However, although the Koran narrates the main events of the legend, Muslim artists do not refer, strangely enough, to the sacred text as the source of their inspiration. Instead, they claim the two giant Persian poets, Firdawsi and Jami, who both wrote a “Yusuf and Zuleikha” epic, the first around A.D. 1010, and the second around 1483. 5 And, although the sacred and profane sources have strikingly different endings, both share one single feature: Zuleikha’s capacity to neutralize law and instate chaos.6
But to get back to the texts. Although I myself cannot, unfortunately, read either Firdawsi or Jami in the original, being illiterate in Persian, I am always bewitched whenever I read Sura 12 of the Koran, so powerful is its poetry. Sura 12 describes Yusuf as a handsome young man who is a victim of sexual harassment: “And she, in whose house he was, asked of him an evil act. She bolted the doors and said: Come. He said: I seek refuge in Allah!” (Sura 12:23).7 The Arabic expression used in the verse, “rawadathu ’an Nafsih,” is quite explicit: It literally means that she harassed him sexually.
The Sura of Yusuf starts with suspense, in which the reader is invited to help solve a riddle: Who attacked whom? Was it Zuleikha who physically assaulted the pious Yusuf, whose shirt was torn to pieces (12:26), or was it Yusuf who attacked Zuleikha? No wonder the legend is so obsessively reproduced by Muslim artists — its topic is not so much adultery as its probability. Men can make marriage laws and declare them sacred, but there is always a possibility that women will not feel bound by them. And it is this small chance that women might not obey and thereby destabilize the male order that is so striking a component of Muslim culture in both historical reality and fantasy.
As one might expect, Zuleikha, the adulteress, is denied the privilege of having her name in the Koran; she is referred to only as “she.” There is also a sect, the extremist “Ajarida,” that refuses to admit that the Sura of Yusuf is part of the Koran. According to Shahrastani, a Persian writer of the twelfth century, the Ajarida claim that “A love story cannot be part of the Koran. ”8 This might sound logical, if love is considered to be a threat to the established order, but it is the logic of extremism, not of Islam. And this distinction is crucial if we are to understand what is going on in the Muslim world today. Yes, there are Muslim extremists who kill women in the streets of Afghanistan and Algeria, but it is because they are extremists, not because they are Muslim. These same extremists also kill male journalists who insist on expressing different opinions and introducing pluralism into the political dynamic. Islam, both as a legal and a cultural system, is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable “other.” All the passionate if not hysterical debates about women s rights taking place today in Muslim parliaments from Indonesia to Dakar are in actuality debates about pluralism. These debates relentlessly focus on women because women represent the stranger within the Umma, the Muslim community. It is no wonder that the first decision of Imam Khomeini, who paradoxically declared Iran a republic in 1979, was to ask women to veil. Elections, yes. Pluralism, no. The Imam knew what he was doing. He knew that an unveiled woman forces the Imam to face the fact that the Umma, the community of believers, is not homogeneous.
In Islamic societies, politicians can manipulate almost everything. But thus far, no fundamentalist leader has been able to convince his supporters to renounce Islam’s central virtue — the principle of strict equality between human beings, regardless of sex, race, or creed. Women, like Christians or Jews, are considered to be the equal of men in Islam, even though they are granted a minority status that restricts their legal rights and denies them access to the decision-making process. Women in most Islamic nations can participate in their countries’ respective decision-making bodies, but only indirectly. Women have a legal status similar to the dhimmi (“protected”) status of religious minorities and are represented in parliament by a wali or wakil . Since the wali or wakil (literally, “representative”) is necessarily a Muslim male, women and minorities are condemned to invisibility to keep the fiction of homogeneity alive.
To understand the dynamics in the Muslim world today, one has to remember that no one contests the principle of equality, which is considered to be a divine precept. What is debated is whether Shari’a, the law inspired by the Koran, can or cannot be changed. The debate is therefore reduced to “who” made the law. If it is men who made it, then the text can be reinterpreted; reform is possible. But extremists who oppose the democratization of the laws claim that Shari’a is as divine as the Koran and therefore unchangeable. The scandalous trial of the Egyptian Abu Zeid, an expert in the historicity of the Koran, who was sentenced as a heretic by a fundamentalist judge in an Egyptian court in August 1996, is but one such dramatization of this clash between the pro-democracy Ijtihad camp (Shari’a can be reformed because it is man-made) and the extremists who oppose it.
Once again, women are the focus of this debate because sexual inequality is rooted in Shari’a, but even the most fervent extremists never argue that women are inferior, and Muslim women are raised with a strong sense of equality. This could explain why women have emerged, in spite of extremism, as political leaders in many Muslim countries, from Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and Tançu Shiller in Turkey, to Megawati in Indonesia. It could also explain why Muslim women have aggressively infiltrated many university faculties and professional fields thought of as masculine — such as engineering — in spite of their very recent access to education. In the 1990s, the percentage of women teaching in universities or equivalent institutions in Egypt was higher than in either France or Canada. 9 The percentage of female students enrolled in engineering courses in Turkey and Syria was twice as high as in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands. 10 The percentage of women enrolled in engineering courses in Algeria and Egypt was higher than in Canada or Spain. 11
One can easily predict that women will stir even more violent debates in the decade to come, as globalization forces both Muslim states and their citizens to redefine themselves and create new cultural identities, rooted more in economics than in religion. The fear of the feminine represents the threat from within; the debate about globalization, the threat from without; and both discussions will necessarily be focused on women. Femininity is the emotional locus of all kinds of disruptive forces, in both the real world and in fantasy. And, to get back to my book tour, it is this apparent absence of the feminine as a threat in the Western harem that fascinated me.
Exploring this enigmatic puzzle soon became my pleasurable obsession — pleasurable because, in the end, learning from travel and from talking to strangers did turn out to be the wonderful, enlightening experience that the Sufis and Yasmina had promised me it would be. For a university professor such as myself, who spends most of her days in either deadly silent libraries or in desperately slow Internet searches, talking to foreigners in comfortable Western cafés or lavish art bookstores was a thrilling privilege. And the secret to gaining enlightenment, I soon discovered, was to increase one s listening capacity. Where to start? Well, by shedding your arrogance, or at least trying to, and by respecting the other. Respecting a W
esterner is a heroic achievement for a Muslim, a tour de force, because Western culture is so aggressively present in our daily life that we have the impression we already know it thoroughly. But in fact, as my vulnerability when facing the Western journalists made me realize, we Muslims know very little about Westerners as human beings, as bundles of contradictory hopes and yearning, unfulfilled dreams. If we could see Westerners as vulnerable, we would feel closer to them. But we confuse Westerners with Superman, with heartless, robotlike NASA architects who invest all their emotions in crafting inhuman, exorbitantly expensive spaceships to discover faraway galaxies, while neglecting their own planet. I was stunned to realize that a Western man s smile could destabilize me because I had already decided that he was a potential enemy. I had skinned him of his humanism. All my Sufi heritage, I was shocked to discover, did not protect me against the most obvious form of barbarism: the lack of respect for the foreigner. Which is, I suppose, why this book became so enriching and therapeutic for me in the end, despite many ups and downs.
My obsessive inquiry into the nature of the Western harem gave me the chance to deepen my relationships with old Western friends and to make new ones. Two journalists especially — Berlin-based Hans D. and Paris-based Jacques Dupont — became friends, so generous were they in providing me with pertinent books, key visuals, and valuable comments, all of which helped me grasp the power of the feminine as a barrier between East and West. Hans D. helped me with the thoroughness of a German tutor when he commented on the Scheherazade ballet that he had invited me to see, and made me understand that women’s obsequiousness, their readiness to obey, is a distinctive feature of the Western harem fantasy. Jacques, on the other hand, highlighted with the humor and self-mockery that is so unique to Parisians something that is frightening to admit in serious conversation today: What attracts him to a woman, at least at the level of fantasy, is the absence of intellectual exchange. Through his comments, he clarified for me the second distinctive feature of the Western harem: Intellectual exchange with women is an obstacle to erotic pleasure. Yet in real or imagined Muslim harems, cerebral confrontation with women is necessary to achieve orgasm. Could it be that things are so different in the West? I wondered. Could it be that cultures manage emotions differently when it comes to structuring erotic responses? I was so baffled by these strange discoveries that I started with the basics: searching through dictionaries in both cultures, checking elementary words such as “odalisque,” “desire,” “beauty,” “attraction,” “sexual pleasure,” and so on, and listening carefully to what the Western men had to say.
Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems Page 2