Waters of Asia.” Four harem women and two female servants are having a picnic in a park on the eastern shores of the Bosphorus; the women are wearing full hijab and niqab—their faces are entirely covered except for their eyes. I hope they are smiling. They are sitting on the ground on a tablecloth with bags and baskets of provisions nearby. It is unclearwhether these are paid models or simply ordinary harem women who have agreed to pose for the photographer, one Basil Kargopoulo.
I wonder: How do they eat all the food they’ve brought? Do they smuggle it up under the heavy material that covers their noses, mouths, and jaws? Or do they flip the mask up when no one is looking and take a hurried bite—as if it is too shameful for women to eat or to be seen enjoying themselves in public?
Some early nineteenth-century British female travelers to Egypt and Turkey noted ironically that harem-confined women did not have to wear restricting steel corsets as the British women did. The Brits envied and sometimes romanticized the loose Turkish clothing, which was not only comfortable but also never went out of fashion.
Look: I’ve admitted that I spend my writing days dressed in flowing caftans. And I wear ethnic jewelry, which in the last decade I have color-coordinated with my filmy blouses and my nail polish. Yes, I could pass for an Eastern woman in another era. I steer clear of exotic excess—no time for it, but I appreciate it in others. Despite my strongly negative view of the burqa, I rather like the colorful and often shimmering kerchiefs that some religious Muslim women wear to great advantage. They are stunning with their many earrings, bracelets, and necklaces.
Ironically the nineteenth-century harem dwellers could not believe how confined their female Western visitors were in their corset stays, hoops, and bustles, which the Eastern women insisted on examining in detail. However, the Western reports showed us the price exacted by imprisonment in the harem.
In 1837 on a visit to Istanbul, the British-born Julia Pardoe noted that the Turkish harem women were indolent, childlike, and uneducated, and could only “live in the moment.”
How very Zen of them!
In 1846 the British-born author Harriet Martineau visited the Arab Middle East. She writes about the harems of Cairo:
Everywhere they pitied us European women heartily, that we had to go about travelling, and appearing in the streets without being properly taken care of—that is, watched. They think us strangely neglected in being left so free, and boast of their spy system and imprisonment as tokens of the value in which they are held. The difficulty is to get away, when one is visiting a harem. The poor ladies cannot conceive of one’s having anything to do. All the younger ones were dull, soulless,brutish, or peevish. . . . There cannot be a woman of them all who is not dwarfed and withered in mind and soul.
In 1865 the British governess Emmeline Lott also described the confined Egyptian women as apathetic, leading lives of “irksome monotony,” which they bear by “puffing on [opium-laced] cigarettes constantly . . . [these are] the caged beauties of the East.”
If women are weakened both physically and intellectually, and if they also believe that they are worth less than men—they will certainly be grateful for male protection. A woman reared in a harem knows that a woman is not valued for her educated brain or fearlessness but rather for her obedience, chastity, marital fertility, her ability to birth sons, and her willingness to live with cowives without complaint. Many harem women were happy to have cowives, slaves, and daughters-in-law because they needed help with the household and child-rearing chores—and with their husbands’ need for sexual pleasure and more sons. The harems that Martineau visited represented another world, another set of values.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, my colleague Fatima Mernissi published a rather
I wonder: How do they eat all the food they’ve brought? Do they smuggle it up under the heavy material that covers their noses, mouths, and jaws? Or do they flip the mask up when no one is looking and take a hurried bite—as if it is too shameful for women to eat or to be seen enjoying themselves in public?
Some early nineteenth-century British female travelers to Egypt and Turkey noted ironically that harem-confined women did not have to wear restricting steel corsets as the British women did. The Brits envied and sometimes romanticized the loose Turkish clothing, which was not only comfortable but also never went out of fashion.
Look: I’ve admitted that I spend my writing days dressed in flowing caftans. And I wear ethnic jewelry, which in the last decade I have color-coordinated with my filmy blouses and my nail polish. Yes, I could pass for an Eastern woman in another era. I steer clear of exotic excess—no time for it, but I appreciate it in others. Despite my strongly negative view of the burqa, I rather like the colorful and often shimmering kerchiefs that some religious Muslim women wear to great advantage. They are stunning with their many earrings, bracelets, and necklaces.
Ironically the nineteenth-century harem dwellers could not believe how confined their female Western visitors were in their corset stays, hoops, and bustles, which the Eastern women insisted on examining in detail. However, the Western reports showed us the price exacted by imprisonment in the harem.
In 1837 on a visit to Istanbul, the British-born Julia Pardoe noted that the Turkish harem women were indolent, childlike, and uneducated, and could only “live in the moment.”
How very Zen of them!
In 1846 the British-born author Harriet Martineau visited the Arab Middle East. She writes about the harems of Cairo:
Everywhere they pitied us European women heartily, that we had to go about travelling, and appearing in the streets without being properly taken care of—that is, watched. They think us strangely neglected in being left so free, and boast of their spy system and imprisonment as tokens of the value in which they are held. The difficulty is to get away, when one is visiting a harem. The poor ladies cannot conceive of one’s having anything to do. All the younger ones were dull, soulless,brutish, or peevish. . . . There cannot be a woman of them all who is not dwarfed and withered in mind and soul.
In 1865 the British governess Emmeline Lott also described the confined Egyptian women as apathetic, leading lives of “irksome monotony,” which they bear by “puffing on [opium-laced] cigarettes constantly . . . [these are] the caged beauties of the East.”
If women are weakened both physically and intellectually, and if they also believe that they are worth less than men—they will certainly be grateful for male protection. A woman reared in a harem knows that a woman is not valued for her educated brain or fearlessness but rather for her obedience, chastity, marital fertility, her ability to birth sons, and her willingness to live with cowives without complaint. Many harem women were happy to have cowives, slaves, and daughters-in-law because they needed help with the household and child-rearing chores—and with their husbands’ need for sexual pleasure and more sons. The harems that Martineau visited represented another world, another set of values.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, my colleague Fatima Mernissi published a rather
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