Scheherazade Goes West
Fatema Mernissi follows the harem into Western literature, art and psyche, sharing fascinating insights on misogyny in Middle Eastern and Western culture along the way.
During her book tour for Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, she was surprised by Western male journalists’ gleeful attitudes toward harems and decided to investigate. She found that these Western men, aided by Matisse, Kant and Ingres, understood women in harems to be silent, obedient and always sexually desirous. But Arab men have feared the women in their harems who might revolt at any time.
Mernissi understands the root of the difference to be that Islam teaches (and Arab men believe) that men and women are equal, including in intelligence, and that a woman’s knowledge, curiosity, and eloquence are incredibly sexy traits. Western men, however, believe that beauty and brains do not coexist in women and are, in fact, inversely proportionate.
Of course, Mernissi is not suggesting that men of these cultures consciously believe these things, but that these are deep and formational assumptions that show up in many ways in these societies (and she gives great examples).
But Mernissi does not let her beloved religious and cultural heritage off the hook. She calls the harem oppression of women through space, primarily denying access to public spaces, and considers the veil to further deny this access.
In the West, argues Mernissi, women are oppressed through time, through image. The harem of “size 6” which limits value and visibility of women to an image of a certain kind of 14-year-old girl. “Both Naomi Wolfe and Pierre Bourdieu come to the conclusion that insidious ‘body codes’ paralyze Western women’s abilities to compete for power, even though access to education and professional opportunities seem wide open, because the rules of the game are so different according to gender. Women enter the power game with some much of their energy deflected to their physical appearance that one hesitates to say the playing field is level” (page 218).
Filed under: books on June 20th, 2008 by Anna Lisa
Hi Anna Lisa, I met you fairly recently at a RAFTS meeting. I happened upon your blog while looking for other local bloggers.
I read Scheherazade Goes West last year! I really enjoyed it.
More recently I borrowed a book from my sister that portrayed various women explorers dating as far back as the Medieval and Renaissance periods to the present. I think the title of the book was, in fact, Women Explorers.
At any rate, one of my favourite stories from the book told the story of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (whom you may have heard of previously) She is credited (unfortunately, not as credited as Jenner) for bringing the small pox vaccine to the western world from Turkey in the 17th century.
I thought it ironic that the women of the harems felt that western women were certainly more oppressed than they considering the corset that Mary wore. They pitied her and felt that their garments, including the veils, gave them greater freedom of movement both publicly and at a basic physical level.
The western world’s obsession with shaping women’s bodies runs deep and is very old. I wonder what began it?
Thanks for starting a conversation on this piece. I am also loathe to buy into either the “Islam/Orient oppress women in need of our saving” or the “Western patriarchy is really the worst ever and women elsewhere are so liberated” biases. The challenge seems to be, as always, to dig in and discern just how our various cultures are harmful to women and can be improved, regardless of comparisons, because such comparisons can never be objective as they suppose themselves to be - and subjectivity is a much more useful space to work for change from.
Okay.
I like the idea of looking at how my US culture creates harems for women, too, if not in visible space than in mental space. We know that women are encouraged to hold their bodies in such ways that take up less space than men, to cross their legs and wear tight clothes and to just make do with less in life…. this is a fertile arena for thoughts. Thanks for the ‘hmmmm’ moment!