Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems

by Fatema Mernissi

  9. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 71.

  10. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 71.

  11. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 71.

  12. Joan Acocella, “Secrets of Nijinski,” in The New York Review of Books, Jan. 14, 1999, p. 54.

  13. Gaylyn Studlar, “Out-Salomeing Salome,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (Rutgers, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 116.

  14. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 57.

  15. “Most decisively of all for the cinema, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with its staging of Cleopatra, Thamar, and Scheherazade, which toured in the United States in the teens, contributed decisively to the mise-en-scène of Orientalist cinema,” writes Matthew Bernstein in Visions of the East, op. cit., p. 4. The strong influence of the Ballets Russes on Hollywood is well described by Gaylyn Studlar in “Out-Salomeing Salome” in the same book.

  16. Studlar, op. cit., p. 116.

  17. Matthew Bernstein, op. cit., p. 11.

  18. Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, La Femme au temps des Colonies (Paris: Stock, 1985). The exact French quote is on page 25.

  19. Mme A. R. de Lenz, Pratique des Harems Marocains: sorcellerie, médecine, beauté (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1925).

  20. Knibiehler and Goutalier, op. cit., p. 25.

  6

  Intelligence Versus

  Beauty

  Poe killed Scheherazade in a horrible way in his “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade,” and even claimed that she perversely enjoyed her own death: “She derived, however, great consolation during the tightening of the bowstring. . . .”1 In Poe’s story, Scheherazade had informed herself about many of the West’s latest scientific discoveries, including sophisticated telescopes, the electro-telegraph, and the daguerreotype. But the King found these discoveries to be so unbelievable that he condemned her as a liar.2 “Stop” he said to her. “I cannot stand that, and I won’t. You have already given me a dreadful headache with your lies. . . . Do you take me for a fool? Upon the whole you might as well get up and be throttled.”3 To ignorant men, advanced scientific discoveries sound fictitious, hence Poe’s famous subtitle “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.”4 But Poe’s original idea, to turn Scheherazade into an avant-garde broadcaster informing Muslims about the West’s scientific inventions, would have enhanced her husband’s military power and allowed him to end the West’s occupation of the Orient. Scientific discoveries, after all, helped the West to equip its armies and occupy Muslim territories throughout the nineteenth century. When Napoleon successfully completed his swift second invasion of Egypt in 1801, his victory had more to do with the small crew of scientists who accompanied him than it did with his regular troops.

  In Poe’s story, Scheherazade calls upon Sindbad, now semiretired, to describe the latest technological achievements he had witnessed on his travels — inventions such as train engines and powerful telescopes revealing the secrets of the stars. If Shahrayar had listened, the Muslim world would have advanced faster and our Scheherazade would have survived. But instead, Poe betrays Scheherazade by making us associate her with Machiavelli and, even worse, with Eve. The corrupted Eve that is so central to Christianity does not exist in Islam, which has a much less misogynistic version of the Fall. For instance, the serpent who tempts Eve in the Bible does not exist at all in the Koran’s version of the Fall.5

  To make us suspicious of and ill-disposed toward Scheherazade, Poe cautions us that not only has the “political damsel” read Machiavelli, but also that she, “being lineally descended from Eve, fell heir, perhaps, to the whole seven baskets of talk which the latter lady, we all know, picked up from under the trees in the garden of Eden. . . .”6 And, as if that was not enough, Poe then inflates Scheherazade’s diabolical potential by making Eve look like a beginner. “In mentioning that Scheherazade had inherited the seven baskets of talk, I should have added that she put them out at compound interest until they amounted to seventy-seven.”7 With such a load to carry, no wonder the storyteller is doomed. But even more shocking to me is that Poe’s Scheherazade accepts her death! She does not run away or try to dissuade her morbid husband with words. No! She accepts her death passively: “As she knew the King to be a man of scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she submitted to her fate with a good grace.”8

  Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris. I was personally identifying with Scheherazade’s horrible situation. A Muslim woman today is much like her: Words are the only arms she has to fight the violence targeted against her. Muslim men can afford to be fatalists, but Muslim women cannot. Before a Muslim woman consents to die, she must fight — Scheherazade said so. My grandmother Yasmina had told this to me many times and I believe it to be a sacred truth. Witness what happened in Iran following the Islamic Revolution: Iranian women were transformed into fearless street fighters. Writes Haleh Esfandiari, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who worked as a journalist in her native Iran, “They gained a new sense of themselves as women by refusing to be intimidated or cowed by the authorities, by being forced to wage a daily struggle over the right to work, by learning to develop subtle strategies for resisting the dress code, by having to fight in courts for rights of divorce.”9

  During my book tour, I realized how fragile I am and how many fears I have. Yet learning how to transform my fears into an initiative to dialogue is a drive I share with the medieval storyteller. Yes, I live and breathe in the new millennium and I own many modern gadgets, including a computer and a car, but my fears of violence are similar to those of the medieval Scheherazade. Like her, I have to face the daily threat of political violence unarmed. Only words can save me. This is why I was so scared by Scheherazade’s American fate, and why, once in Paris, I could hardly admire the Seine River dancing along, so calm and so dignified. “That is what fear does,” I thought. “It blinds you to the world’s beauties.”

  I therefore decided to put myself through what I call “Arab psychotherapy.” This simply means that you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends. I almost lost the friendship of Christiane, my French editor, that way. An editor whose judgment I highly respect, she kept repeating that I was sabotaging my book tour by constantly talking about Edgar Allan Poe. “If you don’t focus on yourself when you are being interviewed by journalists, don’t expect them to do it for you,” she said. “They are likely to write about Poe and forget about your book.” Several times I promised Christiane that I would control myself, but of course I could not and kept raving about Poe and Western harems until I met Jacques, who treated me like a child by putting all his cards on the table.

  “Let’s focus on my interview first,” he suggested, “so that I can write something for my magazine to earn my living. Then I will help you examine Poe’s story and the harem enigma.”

  Although I found this proposition very logical, I could not help but react viscerally to his suggestion.

  “You talk like an Imam or a caliph,” I told him. “You will help me only if I accept your conditions. Can’t you rephrase your sentence more democratically — and be more explicit about the conditions you have in mind?”

  “I can be more explicit about the conditions, yes,” said Jacques. “I will do my best to help you by introducing you to my own private harem. I will give you a book to read first and then I will take you to two museums to meet my favorite odalisques. But in exchange for my precious contribution, you will have to introduce me to Harun Ar-Rachid and his harem. How does a caliph like him behave with his harem? I think that a pragmatic comparison between my harem and that of Harun
Ar-Rachid will enlighten us both.”

  I agreed, thinking that it would not be a difficult task to introduce Jacques to Harun Ar-Rachid. Like many Arabs I know, I am helplessly attracted to this “sexy despot,” as Kemal calls him, and have devoured all the medieval records describing his adventures in and outside the harem. I know everything about him, from what he liked to eat in ninth-century Baghdad to how he dressed, and, of course, all the details about his love affairs. All I needed to refresh my memory was a few hours in Paris’s Bibliotheque National, where you can find the most precious of Arab manuscripts, stolen by French generals during colonization. I was absorbed in contemplating this ironic link between colonization and the circulation of knowledge when Jacques brought me back to reality.

  “Now, to rephrase my suggestion more democratically,” he said, while caressing his elegant Kenzo tie, “this is something I must request, even though you might object. The fun of a collaboration such as this, for a French citizen like myself, impoverished by the heavy taxes of the Republic, is to talk like Harun Ar-Rachid.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, suspicious.

  “It means that you don’t interrupt me when I say something wrong,” Jacques said solemnly. “You write down your corrections on a yellow Post-it and give it to me discreetly a few minutes later.”

  I could not help but explode with laughter at that, while thinking about how familiar his request was: Moroccan men also often display their vulnerability to get what they want. Is this something that all Mediterranean men share? I wondered, as I searched Jacques for Mediterranean traces. But I found none. He was an elegant man in his fifties, tall and thin but with a sensual paunch sticking proudly out, neatly trimmed sideburns, and cynical eyes so blue that they seemed like a genii’s. However, those eyes were definitely not due to any genii connection, Jacques explained when I asked, but to his native Brittany. And that cynical touch that I had discerned was probably the result of “two divorces behind and many deceptions ahead.” He then confessed that Christiane, my editor, would have been his ideal odalisque were she not so vain and conceited. When I asked him to be more explicit, he explained that she captivated the attentions of dozens of men, who were totally mesmerized by her. “Most of her male authors are more or less in love with her,” he continued. “And so are we journalists, who rush to comment on the books she publishes, just to have the chance to drink a glass of champagne with her. So that gives you an idea of the extent of her harem.”

  Men are attracted to successful professional women in Paris, no doubt. But Jacques then explained that he could not stand the competition, and would ideally like to live with Christiane on a deserted island in the Pacific. Pulling out Ovid’s Art of Love, a book that he said only men in Paris peruse nowadays, he read aloud a wonderful poem:

  Lucky the man who can venture a bold defense of his loved one,

  Lucky the man whom she tells, “I didn’t do it!” (if true.)

  Made of iron, or mad, or a masochist, no doubt about it,

  Such is the fellow who craves proof beyond shadow of doubt.

  But I saw you, I say, and I was perfectly sober,

  Though I know what you thought — I was both drunk and asleep.

  I was watching both, I saw you waving your eyebrows;

  I could tell what you said when you were nodding your head.

  And your eyes were not dumb, nor the scribbles you made on the table,

  Dipping your fingers in wine, each of the letters a sign.

  Oh, and the double talk, too, under the innocent meanings,

  Messages broadcast in code — don’t think I misunderstood. 10

  I was baffled by Ovid’s poem, largely because it sounded so Arabic to me. Jacques was just like Kemal — so insecure and vulnerable, and yet irresistible. Ovid’s poem strongly reminded me of a popular 1980s poem put into music by Egyptian singer Abdelwahab, whose words men all over the Arab world could be heard humming whenever their partners were late. “Don’t lie! I saw you both together. . . .” (“La takdibi, ini ra’aytukuma ma’an”). I sang the song for Jacques, who reacted by telling me that things have not improved much since Ovid was born, in 43 B.C. And then we returned to the harem enigma.

  Art history was Jacques’s field, and I was eager for him to take me to the Paris museums and show me his favorite painted harems. His interest in the Orient gave him, as he put it, “the distance needed to reflect intelligently on the Parisian fate and also to fly to Marrakech when it snows on the home front.” He was also the youngest of three children, the others both girls, which he joked would be Freud’s explanation for the reason behind his harem addiction.

  Like many sensitive men, Jacques’s humor was his armor. It gave him that unsettling charm that also makes Arab intellectuals irresistible: You can never be sure whether they are serious or joking. They keep you guessing, and whenever you do go ahead and decide that they are serious, you soon discover that you are wrong. This kind of man discourages a woman from investing too heavily in him. It is not unusual for an Arab man to make you open up like a rose by repeating three times in a row that you are wonderful, and then forget all about you thirty minutes later. To jump to the conclusion that he is madly in love with you is suicidal.

  When I discussed Jacques’s charm with Christiane, she cautioned me against him. “As a journalist he has impact,” she said. “If he writes about a book, thousands of French citizens will rush to buy it. But as a man, I would not trust him.” When I asked her to elaborate, without of course telling her about Jacques’s secret plot to whisk her away to an uninhabited island, she said that editors work closely with journalists: “We form a modern harem right here in the middle of Paris, my dear.” I pressured her to be more explicit, and she replied that Jacques was a ridiculously jealous man who had trouble coping with modern women — he was “Un macho sympathique.”I then managed to make Christiane laugh when I retorted that in Rabat, I feel comfortable with macho men who express their negative feelings toward women openly. “It is the others who trigger my suspicion and drive me to the verge of paranoia,” I said.

  After this conversation with Christiane, I decided to go along with Jacques’s conditions. I let him grill me for his article and was relieved when it appeared in print on schedule. Then, Jacques started my initiation into his harem. His first step was to force me to read a mysterious book that he handed me in a café on the Rue de Rivoli, facing the Louvre. “This is the ideal café for self-torturing intellectuals,” he said as we met. “It has luxurious red-leather banquettes, huge ceilings that swallow the noise, and strong espresso. I will pick you up in two hours to meet my first odalisque. Two hours is enough for you to read this book.”

  The book he handed me was Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. The only way to understand Westerners, Jacques said before he left, is to read their philosophers. He then asked me if I knew Immanuel Kant. Since I never lie to hide my ignorance, because to do so is to miss fantastic opportunities for learning, I confessed bravely that I never read him. All I knew was that he as German and an important thinker whom all cultivated Europeans quote frequently. Jacques was amazed at my ignorance and asked me what I was required to read in high school. I replied that my primary education had been devoted to learning the Koran by heart, and my secondary years, to reciting pre-Islamic poetry. My chances of meeting Immanuel Kant in my native Fez had therefore been nil. At that, Jacques laughed and added that maybe that was a good thing, because Kant was not particularly nice to women. He was, however, key to understanding Edgar Allan Poe’s assassination of my storyteller, and a good way to begin exploring the Western harem enigma.

  According to Kant, a “normal” woman’s brain is programmed to “the finer feeling.” She must relinquish “the deep understanding, abstract speculations, or branches of knowledge useful but dry” and leave them to men. Writes Kant: “Laborious learning, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroys the merits that are proper to her
sex, and because of their rarity they can make of her an object of cold admiration; but at the same time they will weaken the charms with which she exercises her great power over the other sex.”11 This discovery of Kant’s split between beauty and brains scared me at first. What a terrible choice Kant’s woman has to face, I thought — beauty or intelligence. It is as cruel a choice as the fundamentalists’ threat: veiled and safe, or unveiled and assaulted. I wished I could throw away the unsettling book and just enjoy myself in the Paris café without obsessing about why men and women everywhere have so much trouble being happy together. But then I remembered Yasmina’s remark that travel is not about fun but about learning, about crossing boundaries and mastering the fear of strangers, about making the effort to understand other cultures and thereby empowering yourself. Travel helps you to figure out who you are and how your own culture controls you.

  Reading Immanuel Kant opened up new horizons for me. As I sat in that Rue de Rivoli café on that memorable morning, new questions rushed to my mind about both the West and the East, questions I later shared with both Jacques and Christiane, my Parisian mentors.

  Kant’s message is quite basic: Femininity is the beautiful, masculinity is the sublime. The sublime is, of course, the capacity to think, to rise higher than the animal and the physical world. And you’d better keep the distinction straight, because a woman who dares to be intelligent is punished on the spot: She is ugly. The tone in Kant’s book is as cutting as that of a Muslim Imam. The only difference between an Imam and Kant, who is considered to be “the chief luminary of the German Enlightenment,”12 is that the philosopher’s frontier does not concern the division of space into private (women) and public (men) realms, but into beauty (women) and intelligence (men). Unlike Harun Ar-Rachid, a caliph who equated beauty with erudition, and paid astronomic sums for the witty jarya in his harem, Kant’s ideal woman was speechless. For not only does great knowledge wipe out a woman’s charm, according to Kant, but exhibiting such knowledge kills femininity altogether: “A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme Dacier, or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, like the Marquise de Chatelet, might as well even have a beard.”13 Madame Dacier (1654-1720) translated the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other Greek and Latin classics into French, and the Marquise de Chatelet, the companion of Voltaire, won a prize in 1738 from the French Academy of Science for an essay on the nature of fire.14