A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East

The Veil in the Looking Glass

J Dianne Garner, Linn Prentis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780789029836
• eBook ISBN: 9781134731596
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Learn how the seclusion of women can be used as a feminist defense against exploitationand as an empowering force

Internationally acclaimed author Ann Chamberlin's book, A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East: The Veil in the Looking Glass is a critical interdisciplinary examination of the practice of seclusion of women throughout the Middle East from its beginnings. This challenging exploration discusses the reasons that seclusion may not be as oppressive as is presently generally accepted, and, in fact, may be an empowering force for women in both the West and East. Readers are taken on a controversial, belief-bending journey deep into the surprising origins and diverse aspects of female seclusion to find solid evidence of its surprising use as a defense against monolithic cultural exploitation.

The author uses her extensive knowledge of Middle Eastern culture, language, and even archeology to provide a convincing assertion challenging the Western view that seclusion was and is a result of women's oppression. A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East goes beyond standard feminist rhetoric to put forth shocking notions on the real reasons behind women's seclusion and how it has been used to counteract cultural exploitation. The book reviews written evidence, domestic and sacred architecture, evolution, biology, the clan, the environment for seclusion, trade, capital and land, slavery, honor, and various other aspects in a powerful feminist argument that seclusion is actually a valuable empowering force of protection from the influence of today's society. The text includes thirty black and white figures with useful descriptions to illustrate and enhance reader understanding of concepts.

A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East discusses at length:

• prehistoric evidence of seclusion
  
• the sense of honor in the Middle East
  
• a balanced look at the Islamic religion
  
• the true nature of the harem
  
• the reasons for the oppression by the Taliban
  
• the positive aspects of 'veiling'
  
• seclusion as a defense against capitalist exploitation
  
• and other challenging perspectives!
  
  

A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East is thought-provoking, insightful reading for all interested in women's history, feminism, and the history and culture of the Middle East.

Chapter 1

Seclusion at Work

An anti-Taliban petition widely circulated online compared the fundamentalist Afghan government’s “war” on its own women “to the treatment of Jews in pre-Holocaust Poland. Women must wear full burqa,” the petition continues,

the windows of their homes must be completely screened… they cannot work, they are forbidden to go out in public without a male relative. Women are banned from all professions….Women cannot be seen by outsiders and they are not to be heard even in their homes, where they must wear silent shoes and obey and serve silently. (Quoted in Githango, 2001)

Many of the thousands in the West who signed this petition assumed such conditions existed in other places they associated with the word “seclusion.” This probably included a spread both in space, to any place crosshatched for “Islam” on a world map, and in time, back to the darkest and most depraved of pasts: the fair white maid stretched helpless at the feet of the dark, foreign, evil enemy.

Now compare this vision to that discovered by an English lady at the turn of the twentieth century. “The term seclusion can be misleading,” she wrote, if we think of quiet and peace when we hear the word. In contrast to the Taliban’s enforced silence, the harem, or zenana in India, was “a crowded, noisy, even raucous place.” During a dinner party in the harem of an Indian woman she attended,

in addition to large numbers of women guests, there were about fifty servants and slaves all running around apparently at random. The mistress would direct them from wherever she was in a loud shrill voice. [The English lady] asked her Indian friend “if Indian ladies generally had such loud voices and commanding tones,” and she laughed and said, “Well, if they have not to begin with they soon acquire them.”… It takes a strong-minded woman, and one with no mean executive ability, to keep peace and harmony in an Eastern zenana. (Copper, 1915:176)

So which image is most accurate?

I was asked much the same question in Turkey concerning my trilogy of novels set in the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century: “At one point, you give the impression that entering the harem is a nightmare; ‘the belly of the beast,’ you call it—dark, evil, serpentine. In another place we see bright colors, the loud chirp of birds and the laughter of women echoing off tile. Which is it?”

“But you see,” I replied, “in one reference, we are in the point of view of someone for whom the harem is the antagonist to his goals. In the second, we are in the mind of a woman who has discovered the harem as the passage to her dreams of power.”

How fiction reflects reality came home to me in the reactions of Turkish, mostly women, readers who said, tears of gratitude running down their faces: “You’ve captured just how it was. My grandmother told me, and this is just how it was.” Other readers, men mostly, told me they threw the book in fury after just a few pages. “You got it all wrong,” they fumed. “The Ottoman Empire was the time of our glory. It was a time of purity, not like the Western corruption of today. No Ottoman woman would behave as wantonly as you’ve portrayed her. She wouldn’t have been allowed to live.” (I may editorialize that if indeed the Ottoman Empire were a time of such paradisiacal purity— control—as these gentlemen imagine, I fail to see the glory in it.)

There’s the crux of the problem. If a person’s mind runs to black and white, perfect good and perfect evil, whether living in the East or the West, and this person cannot hold the possible truth of two contradictory views at once, he or she is obliged to choose one view of the harem over the other. He or she chooses the Taliban’s evil, since it’s the simplest, the easiest, to compartmentalize and control, to sell something to. Whether you’re a rabid feminist or a Muslim fundamentalist, it is the same, and the two poles feed off each other. I’ve faced the same thing from Catholic fundamentalists when I’ve written about Joan of Arc, Jews when I took on King David, Protestants with Adam and Eve. Nobody has a corner on purists with causes to die for.

Since I assume the reader can find scores of books eager to paint the millennia-old institution of veils and grilles with the blackest brush possible, this will not be my purpose here. Decades of study of the history of the institution have led me to these conclusions:

1. Seclusion began as a counterweight to urban—yes, early capitalistic—culture with its greed for the exploitation of women’s and children’s lives, indeed their very souls.
2. Women were instrumental in both seclusion’s rise and its maintenance over the centuries, not because they were benighted and suppressed but rather were attempting to maintain some control within ever-increasing patriarchy.
3. Seclusion’s religious overtones are part and parcel of the institution as it stands in opposition to an increasingly materialized world. The religion of the institution’s origins, uncomfortable as it may make proponents of “Islamic dress,” is pre-Islamic, polytheistic, and goddess centered.
4. Human-caused ecological crises are enmeshed with both urbanization and straitening social institutions.

I hope to lay out my case in the chapters that follow. First, a word about my sources. For a society that says it is intent on breaking down barriers, scholarly disciplines in the West remain remarkably intent on keeping them up. Paradoxically, this study about maintaining and building barriers between men and women will skip through the literature of anthropology and archaeology, history and sociology, as well as times and places that may make the purist’s hair curl. My excuse for this is the counterpoise of impression, of allegory, against the dead weight of our current scientific monolith.

Indeed, “my excuse for venturing across disciplines, continents and centuries,” exactly echoes that of Marvin Harris (1974:vii): “The world extends across disciplines, continents and centuries. Nothing in nature is quite so separate”—no, not as the harem from the “real” world, but “as two mounds of expertise … such efforts must be made more responsive to issues of general and comparative scope.”

Thus, for the present chapter, I have created a montage of vignettes, for the purist shocking in their range of time and place but more modern than early, that I hope may help to illustrate how the practice of seclusion works in women’s lives. Understanding the mechanics will help clarify the purpose to which the edifice was built in the first place, not as a static prison, but as a social tool, a help to women, all different kinds of women, in their daily activities.

Examples

One story I particularly like is that told in the novel Palace Walk by Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz (1990). The mother of the family in this story, Amina, hasn’t been out of the house since she was married, but one day when her husband al-Sayyid Ahmad is out of town, her grown sons encourage her to visit the local shrine of a saint whom she reveres. She finds the outside world bewildering. Unable to maneuver well in it, she is hit by a car; her collarbone is broken. Her escapade now cannot be hidden from her husband, who acts as the law of honor requires and divorces her.

I tell this in support of seclusion? Wait; the story is not over yet. First, let me tell the story of a friend of mine, living in the United States, whom I’ll call Teresa. She had been married for seven years and had two children when her husband “Bill” divorced her. He wanted to be a millionaire, and a wife and two kids were putting a drain on the resources. This, too, it seems to me, is a point of “honor” or prestige in our society, as marrying a younger, more attractive woman might be. Al-Sayyid Ahmad, the Egyptian husband, and Bill the American are both dealing in the ultimate currency of their respective male hierarchies of value. Both, we may editorialize, have equally silly reasons to break up a marriage.

In the American case, however, no one stands up and says so. Teresa, never one to sit around when she wasn’t wanted, weaned on tales of independence, agreed to offer no contest to the divorce. She was busy helping the children adjust to this difficult time, busy trying to find a job, and so very willing to make the parting short and sweet that she didn’t bother to hire legal counsel. Imagine her horror when, arriving in court at the appointed time, she found herself confronted by a battery of lawyers. It wasn’t until later that she was able to realize the full impact of what hit her that day. Before, she had always left the financial details to Bill. She had no mind for it, and it was of such concern to him that he made himself good at it. To her grief, she learned the difference between having an ambitious, abrasive, hardheaded man fighting for herself and her own, and having that same ambition turned against her. Teresa had inherited quite a substantial sum from her grandparents and, while she and Bill were married, she had had no objection to Bill using that money to buy a boat and invest in a small rental duplex. Without thinking, and confused by the flood of legal jargon, she agreed in court that, since she had no interest in sailing nor in being a landlord, Bill might as well keep his little projects.

“Too late I realized I’d give my right arm to have half of that duplex for me and my children to live in,” Teresa said after she’d been unable to keep up payments on their nice suburban home and she found herself living with her mother (also single) in a tiny apartment, trying between their two skimpy salaries to make ends meet and give her children some sort of future.

Now let us see what happens to Amina, the Egyptian woman. Plenty of Middle Eastern divorces end right where we left her. We are all acquainted with the sorrows of mothers bereft of their children who, of course, belong to their father’s clan. However, at least at this point, Amina is in her father’s house with her bride-price and gifts (which are traditionally hers to keep), and her children are with their father. The broken-up couple and their children have what Teresa and her children do not: financial security. For Amina, however, yet one more trump card exists. The final court in this case is not before a hoard of briefcases and pinstripe suits that jump to the same tune as her husband.

Enter Mrs. Shawkat, the neighborhood’s rich widow. According to Shawkat’s scales of justice, al-Sayyid Ahmad’s actions are criminal. Cutting across lines of pride and class, widow Shawkat offers to have her son marry the family’s daughter if al-Sayyid Ahmad will swallow his pride and take his wife back. How can he refuse? For honor he divorced; for honor he will take Amina back again. Of course, these situations don’t always work out so nicely in real Middle Eastern life. Howver, the mechanisms are in place and can be resorted to by the people with greater or lesser success as fortune—not the pocket-book—wills.

“Provision for the consequences of divorce are particularly important in Muslim society,” writes Nadia Youssef (1978:81-82) in a sociological study.

The divorced woman’s right to return to her parental home is undisputed. The legal codes relieve her of a considerable portion of child care responsibilities since religious family law assigns guardianship to either the maternal or the paternal grandparents, until such a time as the ex-husband uses his prerogative to claim custody rights over his children…. The acknowledgement of economic obligations for [the] care [of the divorcée and the widow] is considered an unquestionable duty

in return for which the duty to keep the family’s moral strictures seems reasonable enough. What seems unreasonable is the fact that, though she realizes this fully, Youssef makes another statement: “It is only when family responsibilities for the economic support of female relatives begin to be questioned that the present structure of control and the prerogative of male family members to impose restrictions on their women will” be weakened (1978:77). “May it only happen soon!” Youssef seems to say. She doesn’t see that this weaked control is the cause of feminized poverty in America.¹

For our next example, consider the “intent, self-confident faces” seen on a group of female activists in Iran early in this century: “It would be hard to believe that these are women who have emerged from centuries of purdah if we did not know that purdah involves an active underlife” (Boulding, 1976:720).

A pivotal part of this underlife is the bathhouse. With its alternate days for men and women to congregate, the bathhouse plays an important part in creating this unity and self-confidence. It plays such a large part in traditional women’s lives that the subjects of a film on women in Morocco² insisted that the filmmakers (Western women) come with them to the baths and film. The Western women carefully took all the shots so you can’t see individual faces, but no woman came that day who didn’t want to. Crowds showed up. The Moroccan women knew their naked bodies would be seen all over the world, but this weekly congregation of women was too vital in their minds for prudery. It is in this light we can understand the statement, “The bathhouse alone probably fomented more than one revolution” (Boulding, 1976:720), including perhaps this one over whether Iran should make peace with a belligerent Russia on its borders:

Three hundred veiled women marched out from the harems of Teheran [sic] to the assembly …, tore aside their veils and confessed their decision to kill their own … sons if the deputies should waver…. Many of the women held pistols under their skirts or in the folds of their sleeves. (Boulding, 1976:721)

The feminine point carried this day.

The feminine point also carried the day in the story told by Farid al-Din Attar in his biography of the eighth Christian century Sufi Hasan of Basra. A woman comes to the saint with a complaint against her husband in such a desperate and witless state that she has forgotten to veil herself (Levy, 1957). Rather than being cause for locking the “poor” woman up, however, such a ploy never fails to touch the heart of the potentate.

It did so as early as the time of Muhammad’s birth in North Yemen, whence comes the tale of Ruma, the wife of St. Arethas, as told in the letter of Simeon, bishop of Beit-Arsham. It was during the persecution of the Christians by the ruling Jews in Yemen that Ruma was brought before the persecuting king. As she pleaded for her people, she removed her veil in distress. At this all the courtiers were stupefied “because ever since she was a girl, no man had seen her face” (de Vaux, 1935:413).

The veil has often been used as concealment for male weaponry— sometimes in male causes, sometimes not. The old 1930s film Algiers records a historical incident of women helping to gun-run the French blockade of the Casbah. Many types of contraband, including banned literature, can be hidden in the harem, as the very popular book Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi, 2003) testifies.

However, Ayatollah Khomeini’s minions deluded themselves when they entered the home, the private rooms, of a woman teacher. This was not a return to the inviolable traditional harem. When they discovered banned books there—by Flaubert, Zola, Rousseau—for which discovery the teacher was hauled out and executed (Morgan, 1984), this was the harem invaded, violated, and forcibly drawn to the male power monolith, as in the greatest crimes of the West. The original harem would protect—indeed, encourage—such deviance. Upper-class Ottoman women were the first to read (in French) books banned from their country. None of the men making the rules, in true, earlier “tradition,” would dare invade a woman’s personal space to tell her what she might read.

Veils have escorted women safely out of the country when the authorities wanted them to remain in one place, as in the case of Halidé Edib Adivar, a Turkish nationalist at the turn of the century (Fernea and Bezirgan, 1977:167-192). Even men have even been known to hide successfully among their veiled female relatives when they suddenly became unpopular with the powers that be, or in “Arabian Nights” fashion with forbidden romance in mind.

Western men have claimed that the harem hid an infestation of lesbianism. Perhaps this did not exist in either the degrees or the beastliness that these men imagined, but why not? No male would charge a woman with anything if it was between consenting parties behind harem walls. Such a public parade would be too great a blow to his honor.

The best source of the concrete examples is often the anthropological literature, but this is unevenly fruitful. For this study, we demand, first of all, that the fieldworker have close, even intimate access to the lives of women in seclusion. Therefore, she must be a woman. There is “abundant evidence” among male fieldworkers “of an almost grotesque inability even to suspect what women do” (Illich, 1982:88). The same blindness appears pandemic in a world that has embraced men’s values wholeheartedly—except, perhaps, to the wife and mother who, having given all her energy to “The Man” all day comes home to “women’s work.”

Even many female anthropologists from the West have failed to give seclusion a sympathetic eye, either because of androcentric prejudices they bring to the field with them—they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Seclusion at Work
• Chapter 2. Ancient Veiling
• Chapter 3. Domestic Architecture
• Chapter 4. Architecture: The Sacred
• Chapter 5. Balance in the Paleolithic: Sacred Time, Space, and Persons
• Chapter 6. Evolution
• Chapter 7. Biology
• Chapter 8. The Clan
• Chapter 9. Environment for Seclusion
• Chapter 10. Trade
• Chapter 11. Capital and Land
• Chapter 12. Liberation of the Individual
• Chapter 13. Cities of Power
• Chapter 14. Vernacular Gender
• Chapter 15. Slavery
• Chapter 16. Honor
• Chapter 17. Masscult
• Chapter 18. Women’s Tongue
• Chapter 19. For Men Only
• Chapter 20. The Fate of Seclusion in the West
• Chapter 21. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index