14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Going west post-11 September
Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, Fatema Mernissi, New York: Washington Square Press, 2001. pp228
Fatema Mernissi's new book Scheherazade Goes West landed in my hands last summer. Then came 11 September. I forgot about Scheherazade. Well, not completely. After the initial shock she returned to my mind and I began to worry about the woman. Going west after September? It was not a good time to travel. Would she be stopped at JFK? Never mind that her nail clippers would be taken from her; this was happening to everyone. But would she be let in and then how would she fare once inside? What about racial profiling? How does she look? Her name? Muslim? That alone might get her in trouble. And her origins? People wonder -- Arab, Persian, Turkish? Anyway, for most it would spell the same thing, "Arab." I fretted. Then, I brightened up. I said to myself if anyone can handle the trip it is Scheherazade. And, maybe she can even set the story straight.
Odalisque, Auguste Renoir, 1870; below: In the Harem, Tunis, Sophie Anderson
Scheherazade and Fatema Mernissi. The two wise and witty dames, are consummate storytellers and truthsayers, to say nothing of well credentialed. Mernissi with her PhD in sociology and Scheherazade with a thousand and one tales to her credit, which would surely earn her a doctorate in the modern world (though doctorates don't always save people's heads). How does Scheherazade do in the West? Mernissi checks this out. Of course, things get complicated. Travel, foreigners, borders, boundaries, culture, woman, gender, fears, fantasies, representations, "realities." Reading Scheherazade pre- and post-11 September, is there a difference?
Westward ho! The good news for Scheherazade is that her travels are virtual, so she is spared annoyances that might be in store for more corporeal travelers. Scheherazade saved her head once, that was enough for her --and for us, as it guaranteed her lasting presence. For Mernissi, who is of the here and now, it's a little trickier. Anyway, she's a gutsy woman and bolts west with Scheherazade on a voyage of discovery. If you get confused between the actual and the virtual it's a sign you are doing well in your reading of Scheherazade Goes West. Somewhere between the two, we suppose, lurks the "real" or should we say "truth/s"? One day while casting about the web, I found a lady who was not confused. She was a literal reader (of whom we have all too many these days whether in East or West). Scheherazade/Mernissi irritated her no end. She found the pair foolish and learned nothing. One might say, all the insights flew past her as she was left fuming on the world wide web.
Insights galore are precisely what the book holds for us. These, Mernissi reminds us, are what the Sufis call lawami or flashes of understanding. But in order to catch these bolts of light one must be in what these mystics call "a state of receptivity." As Mernissi readied herself to be alert when she set out -- heeding her grandmother's advice that travel and crossing boundaries was a path to knowledge -- so must we as we tag along with her. Like her we must be all eyes and ears. We must access history, observe the present, and be prepared to dispense with preconceptions, ready to think anew to catch the flashes.
So what was Mernissi trying to figure out? She found that words do not necessarily mean the same thing in East and West. It all started when she was on tour promoting her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, a multi- genre work (memoir, autobiography, fiction). She saw that westerners' understanding of harem was very different from her own. Westerners -- and we immediately see she is referring to male Westerners -- grinned or showed embarrassment at the very mention of the word harem. She found this knee-jerk reaction most peculiar. "How can anyone smile when invoking a word synonymous with prison?" she asked herself. The question continued to nag her. She was determined to unravel the mystery. And, she would enlist the help of the inscrutable westerners, let them unmask themselves. Tres Mernissi this.
Mernissi tosses us a key in the book's subtitle: "Different Cultures, Different Harems." Lo and behold, Mernissi discovers two harems! The "Western harem" and the "Eastern harem." Both Scheherazade (a grand vizier's daughter in ninth- century Baghdad) and Mernissi (daughter of a prominent Fez family in mid-20th century Morocco) had grown up in "eastern harems" that protected domestic space of the urban elites where gender segregation and the domestic cloistering of women was practised. Mernissi, and many others who knew the harem from the inside, such as the 19th century Cairene Aisha El-Taimuriyya, likened this space of everyday life to "prison" or a "cave of isolation" with its stern order and strict rules. Women in eastern harems (mostly but not completely finished now) Mernissi tells us, were savvy, subtle, and, when necessary, sassy (yes, subversive).
What about Scheherazade? She is familiar to the West. But is she known? In the West, Mernissi no longer recognises her. Could there be an "eastern Scheherazad" and a "western Scheherazade"? Our original Scheherazade seemed to have undergone a "culture change" in the West. Two harems, two Scheherazades, two cultures. What was going on? Mernissi needed all the lawami she could get.
So once in the West, she must have taken a deep breath and then begun to ask questions, listen, and observe non-stop. The fog begins to lift. She tells us what the West tells her. (With one strong exception, we observe that it is the male West announcing itself.) What better way to footnote? This latter-day Scheherazade meanwhile is suggesting that the West listen to the East about the East. To learn from the East? For some, this might be getting heavy. Especially, post 11 September.
At a time when people are talking globe what is this East-West stuff? Well, the East and the West are (still) there as Mernissi knows when she bumps up against them. East and West, she sees, are geographical locations and imaginary landscapes. They are ideas and practices, fantasies and preferences. They are constructs and compass points. Our intrepid author deftly navigates through these distinct yet merging waters. She does not employ East and West as strict modernist binaries (this is not Mernissi), rather she uses East and West as magnifying lenses she to look through (pun intended).
Aha! The Westerners Mernissi met were not talking about the "real" harem she knew from childhood and (eastern) history. The Westerners' harems were figments of imagination and its first-cousin fantasy. To deconstruct her deconstruction (if I may), her Western harem is what the West imagines the Eastern harem to be, and at the same time, a male fantasy package of women and sex (male West packaging itself with Mernissi tying the ribbons). Fantasy as conquest of the Other. Woman. The East. Oops! The next step, demonisation? It's getting scary.
Reading Western literary and philosophical works, looking at Western art, watching opera and ballet, conversing with Western men (and one savvy woman, who equals at least four men), Mernissi delineates the disparate contours of the Western and Eastern harems. "My harem," she says, "was associated with a historical reality. Theirs was associated with artistic images created by famous painters who reduced women to odalisques or by talented Hollywood moviemakers, who portrayed harem women as scantily clad belly-dancers happy to serve their captors (in turn captured by Tania Kamal Eldin in her snazzy film Hollywood Harems). In the real Eastern harems women were fully dressed. In Western harems women were in various states of undress or nudity. In Eastern harems women were active, intelligent. In the imaginary Western harems they were passive, all body, no mind. In the former sexuality was part of life, in the latter sexuality was all of life. Are we on the same planet? (The question alone should allay peoples' fears that globalisation is leading to homogenisation.)
"My harem," Mernissi says, "was associated with a historical reality. Theirs was associated with artistic images created by famous painters who reduced women to odalisques."
So what happens to Scheherazade in the West? In the East she had a head, she used it, and she saved it. In the West she became all body and was consumed. "The Oriental Scheherazade does not dance like the one I saw in the German ballet," says Mernissi. "Instead, she strings words into stories. Unlike the Scheherazade in the German book I'd seen earlier, who emphasizes her body (depicted nude and plump), the Oriental Scheherazade is purely cerebral, and that," Mernissi insists, "is the essence of her sexual attraction. The only dance she performs is to play with words late into the night." She was even killed once in the West. Edgar Allen Poe did it -- in cold ink! He had the temerity to tack on an extra tale to her thousand and one, calling his "The Thousand and Second Tale" and therein he made Scheherazade "submit to her fate (death) with good grace." Good grief, gasped a shaken Mernissi who is nothing if not quick on the rebound. "A Muslim woman today is much like her: Words are the only arms she has to fight the violence targeted against her. Before a Muslim woman consents to die, she must fight. Scheherazade said so." But who would want to target a Muslim woman, and why? Let's think about this one.
The Eastern Scheherazade is learned, talented, and clothed. Moroccan scholar Abdessalam Cheddadi notes that "Schherazade is introduced to us with the credentials of a perfectly accomplished faquih, a Muslim religious authority." She knows the Qur'an, fiqh (jurisprudence), and other religious texts, along with philosophy, literature, medicine, history, and "the sayings of sages and kings." She is adept in psychology (though not a discipline in her day) and is familiar with the mundane and commonplace. Scheherazade transcends divisions between the religious and the secular (in ways many contemporary women are scrambling to re-learn).
Sheherazade was smart, knew it, and used her smarts to challenge the King. She used her head to save her body while those unfortunates before her had used their bodies (or had their bodies used) only to loose their heads. Mind you, says Mernissi, Muslim women have never forgotten that lesson! "In the Orient, to use the body alone, that is, sex without a brain, never helps a woman change her situation. Scheherazade shows a woman can rebel by using her brain." She gets the King to stop the carnage. Not only that but "Shahrayar officially admits that a man should use words instead of violence to settle his disputes." Now this is a thought for the modern world. Mernissi continues, "Scheherazade commands words, not armies, to transform her situation, and this adds yet another dimension to the tales as a modern civilizing myth. They are a symbol of the triumph of reason over violence." No wonder Scheherazade is a "political hero, a liberator in the Muslim world."
The Eastern Scheherazade uses her stories to subvert power, dismantle hierarchies, and accommodate difference -- a pluralist project. Mernissi (as other scholars in recent decades) identifies Scheherazade's tales as feminist narratives (yes, we know the word was invented more than a thousand years later but it's content we're talking about). Objecting to the killing of women because they are women/bodies and putting a stop to this -- and to the idea that a woman is only body -- qualifies as a feminist project, call it what you like. While modern Western painters were portraying their Eastern women as ever-willing and available bodies -- sex objects -- (ah the bonanza of ahistoricity) real Eastern women were finding liberation in their modern world. The very same decade that Matisse was painting odalisques in France, Ataturk was promulgating feminist laws in Turkey, notes Mernissi. In Egypt feminist women themselves were fast burying their harem past "the days of seclusion are over," Saiza Nabarawi snapped at a government minister who wanted to stem the tide. She accused him straight out of "oriental atavism" (that Matisse meanwhile was so seductively preserving on canvas).
Mernissi senses that men in the West do not fear women whereas in the East men fear women and their (disruptive) power. This threatening female force is the fitna Mernissi first spoke about in her now classic 1976 Beyond the Veil. Fearing women, Eastern men control them by confining them spatially. "In the Orient, men use space to dominate women." In the West, she argues, men master woman through image. "In the Occident, men dominate women by unveiling what beauty ought to be. Could it be that men achieve power over women by manipulating time via images."
Women in the East rebel against spatial controls. In the West they conform to image- controlling mechanisms -- beauty codes, fashion -- and become complicit. (The feminist West figured this out too; Mernissi cites Wolf, for example). Structures are set for subversion in the Eastern harem and for submission in the Western harem. Read on, it is well worth walking through this with Mernissi.
Mernissi gives readers a capsule close-up of the East, by which she means the Islamic East. For the male East the "problem" of women is not small, if women are a frightening disruptive force. As a controlling mechanism, forcible confinement alone will not do. Religion is enlisted. Mernissi tells readers who may not know that the Shari'a, or "Islamic law" has been used historically to "legally enforce women's seclusion." This man-made law enshrined sexual inequality, flying in the face of the principle of equality of all human beings enshrined in the Qur'an, (revered as the word of God). Mernissi says that "no one contests the principle of equality, which is considered to be a divine precept." Maybe at a deeper level everyone knows this but admitting it and acting on it is something else. Still Mernissi has a point, a (religiously-backed) notion of equality lurking around is discomforting to conventional hierarchies. Hence those in power use interpretation to announce and enforce "truths." Mernissi argues that imposing inequality when the Qur'an enunciates equality, sets up a fundamental tension; it produces a dynamic of rebellion of women who know and act. Scheherazade epitomises this. Remember she emerged in the same ninth century that saw the consolidation of the four basic schools of Islamic jurisprudence so saturated with patriarchal thinking, after which "the doors of ijtihad (independent reasoning, or in the vernacular, using your head)" were declared closed. Scheherazade didn't hear this (or didn't pay attention) and acted on the Qur'anic principle of equality, and of justice. Our heroine knew and practised her religion.
As for Western men's notion of representation as control, this haunts Mernissi. "This idea of the image as weapon that condenses time and devalues reality made me very uncomfortable. If the west has the power to control me by manipulating images, I thought, then who are we if we do not control our images?" Indeed!
Mernissi talks about talking and listening together, about dialogue with the other. Scheherazade dialogued with the King, if dialogue is communicating, catching the ear, having something to say, and to some effect. The trope of dialogue, of transcending power differentials, the divide between East and West, between genders pervades Mernissi's book. Scheherazade was out to save her life before the King -- and those of others -- and she did. But how will she fare in the West today?
Mernissi wrote her book well before 11 September but it almost seems to have been written as a post-September book. Or is this because the need to know the other has become more urgent? For many now we are talking life and death. We are in a world where made-in-the- West images are spun and respun "getting bigger and bigger" and realities are obscured, consigned to confinement. Today we have a new King out there in the West who sees the world in a zero-sum contest between good and evil. Can our Scheherazade, bold and brilliant as she is -- and she's been around longer than our new King (some thousand-plus years), communicate with the King and will he listen and stay his hand?
Go West, Scheherazade bi-salaama, in peace. We are with you. Readers, give her the reception she deserves. And watch out for the lawami. Distinguish between the fire of knowledge and the fire of destruction.
Reviewed by Margot Badran
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page