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June 2, 2002
REVIEWS: Exploding the myth
Scheherazade goes West: different cultures, different harems is a fascinating book by an Arab feminist from Morocco. Fatema Mernissi is a professor of sociology at the university of Rabat and is widely considered one of the greatest living scholars of the Quran. She has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard and Berkeley.
Her recent books are the veil and the male elite, Dreams of trespass: tales of harem girlhood and beyond the veil. In Scheherazade goes west she offers a provocative look at the differences between Arab and Western views of sex, eroticism, relationships and love. In the process, she challenges the Western assumption that women have it much better in the West than almost everywhere else.
In 1994 when she went to promote her book Dreams of trespass, she was perplexed when Western audiences reacted to the word harem as though she had uttered something obscene. Actually the opening sentence of the book is “I was born in a harem.” Eager to understand this phenomenon, she began to study European and American art, dance and literature.
She discovered that whereas in Islamic miniatures and literature, Muslim men represent harem women as active participants who ride horses or are uncontrollable sexual partners, Western artists such as Matisse, Ingres and Picasso show them as nude and passive creatures where omnipotent men reign supreme over obedient, brain-dead women.
Such perceptions, says Mernissi, are yet another example of the cultural misconceptions forming the great divide between the East and the West. To the Easterner, a harem means a private space but is also synonymous with a literal and figurative prison. In other words, harem is a state of mind when someone dictates to you how you should be.
In a brilliant chapter, “Mind as erotic weapon” Mernissi explains the true significance of the often misunderstood tale of Scheherazade in the West.
The Thousand and one nights also known in the West as The Arabian Nights is a tragedy that begins with king Shaharyar’s betrayal by his wife resulting in his violent revenge where he slaughters hundreds of virgins after marrying them for one night. However, the story ends as a fairy tale owing to Scheherazade’s intellectual capacity to read her husband’s mind.
There is a political dimension to The thousand and one nights. The king was not looking for sex. He was looking for a psychotherapist, says Mernissi. Westerners who have misread this story fail to realize that this is a political story. Scheherazade not only saved herself but the entire kingdom by slowly changing the mind of the chief decision-maker, the king. Here was a woman who through dialogue and not through the use of violent armies transformed a cruel despot to a civilized human being.
Furthermore, says Mernissi, there is a great feminist message in this story. The problem she says is that men are not capable of handling fear. They immediately resort to violence. Women, on the other hand, are natural dialogue-builders. Thus there is an inherent symbolism in the tale of Scheherazade. It links humanism with feminism. And, if we look further, the bond between political pluralism and feminism in today’s troubled Islamic societies was foreshadowed by the Scheherazade-Shaharyar tale.
Anyway, why did the enlightened West, obsessed with democracy and human rights, discard Scheherazade’s brainy sensuality and political message in their interpretation of the tale? Both the 1704 translation into French by Galland and the twentieth century ballets of Nijinsky used her body as the sole source of sexual pleasure. Then there was Edgar Allen Poe, who killed off Scheherazade and claimed that she enjoyed her own murder, in his story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheharazade.”
According to Mernissi the West’s understanding of this famous tale and the harem world is skin deep, cosmetic and superficial. “The storytellers yearning for a dialogue between man and woman found no echo in the West.” Why was that? Because Western men do not want to lose ground to their own women. Imagine what Kant , the great German philosopher, said when he mused that a woman’s beauty was to be found in her silence.
In her chapter entitled “Intelligence versus Beauty,” Mernissi explains Western male fantasies of the harem by saying that “Could it be that Ingres’s odalisques were a kind of a shield to protect him from his own emotions?” In other words, Kant’s ideal of a brainless beauty, the power of painted images like Ingres’s “Turkish bath” and Hollywood movies like Elvis Pressley’s “Harum Scarum” point to three major weapons or “images” used by men in the West to dominate their women.
The reason, she says that Matisse was not interested in painting a dynamic and brainy Mughal queen like Nur Jahan skillfully hunting tigers or Kamal Ataturk’s ideal of beauty in Turkish women throwing away their veil and flying planes was that the Western men did not want to stop oppressing women.
Mernissi has spent much of her life trying to cross boundaries, seeking solidarity among women in finding common ground. Recently with the Islamic diaspora, she finds it her mission to rehabilitate the image of the Muslim world, particularly that of the Muslim women. She quotes Naomi Wolf author of the beauty myth who states: “A Western cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, it is an obsession about female obedience.”
Although it is difficult to classify this book which at times is scholarly and at times playful, Mernissi’s message is clear. She wants the West to understand that Muslim women are diverse with different views on the role of religion in their lives. “The Taliban,” she says, “is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.” Muslims are not stuck in the Stone Age. They too are concerned with modernity and reform. From burqa to miniskirt, she emphasizes, it is the same form of male oppression against women worldwide.
Different cultures, different harems.
Scheherazade Goes West
By Fatema Mernissi
Washington Square Press
ISBN: 0-7434-1243-5
228 pages. $14.00
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