Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travelers' Perception of Middle Eastern Women PDF
Preview Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travelers' Perception of Middle Eastern Women
VEILED HALF-TRUTHS VEILED HALF-TRUTHS Western travellers’ perceptions of Middle Eastern women SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY JUDY MABRO I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd Publishers London • New York First published in 1991 by I.B.Tauris &C Co Ltd 45 Bloomsbury Square London wcia zhy 175 Fifth Avenue New York ny iooio Paperback edition published in 1996 In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue New York ny iooio Copyright © 1991,1996 by Judy Mabro Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint Excerpts from In Search of the Forty Days Road by Michael Asher, Longman Excerpts from A Cure for Serpents by the Duke of Pirajno, Eland 1985 Excerpt from Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger, Penguin 1987 All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mabro, Judy Veiled half-truths. Western travellers’ perceptions of Middle Eastern women. i. Middle East. Society. Role of women. I. Title 305410956 ISBN I 86064 oz7 3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by WBC Print Ltd, Bridgend For Felicity, Floreeda, Frances, Nevine and Nyla with love CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Preface to the Second Edition ix Introduction 1 1 ‘AU We Have WiUed, or Hoped, or Dreamed’ 28 2 Hidden Mysteries 40 3 Death out for a Walk 51 4 Lifting the VeUs 64 5 The PUgrim Was in Ecstasy 98 6 The Voice of Sex Crying in the Wilderness 118 7 Conversations of Profane Love 137 8 Slaves to Prejudice 155 9 As to the Position of Women 173 10 A Complete State of Captivity? 197 11 Very Questionable Society 223 12 Which Was the Greater Outrage? 255 References for Introduction 265 Sources 268 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The ideas of many authors have helped me in compiling the anthology, but I would particularly like to acknowledge Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women, Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient, Edward Said, Orientalism, Anne Summers’ WE.A. class in Oxford on women in nineteenth-century England, Lynne Thornton, La Femme dans la peinture orientaliste, and the writings of coundess feminists from many countries. Where the tide of a book is given in French, the translations are my own, but I would like to thank Robert Mabro for help and for listening to interminable pieces being read out, when ever I found something that incensed me even more than usual. I would also like to thank Léonie Archer, Marion Farouk Sluglett and Charles Webster for reading a first draft of my introduction; Mourad Wahba for drawing my attention to several texts; Camillia Fawzi El-Solh for passing on interesting articles and books; Kathleen Howey for translating Italian sources; Diane Ring at the Middle East Centre Library, St Antony’s College, Oxford; and Père Maurice Martin at the Collège de la Sainte Famille, Cairo, who enabled me to read a large number of books in a very short space of time, by knowing what I wanted to read before I did myself. Most of all my thanks go to Anna Enayat of I.B.Tauris, whose idea it all was and who understood that hassling people is counter-productive. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION There are two things to be said about this anthology. First, it is not a selection of readings about the lives and thoughts of women in the Middle East, but concerns the way in which Western travellers, mainly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chose to depict these women in their travel books, guides and memoirs. It is also concerned with fact and fiction regarding the position of women in European societies at that time - the ideas which travellers took with them about women’s place in society. For this reason, the material has been arranged around the observers’ ideas and prejudices. Secondly, this anthology does not pretend to be an objective selection of readings - what anthology can honesdy claim that? It is a highly personal and subjective choice (taken from about one-third of the books I read), which nevertheless reflects the way in which women in the Middle East and North Africa have been portrayed in the West. The legacy of these writings can be found in newspapers, magazines and films today. As in earlier centuries, writers remain fascinated by the veil and by the imagined lives of Muslim women. This was very evident when the marriage was announced in 1995 of former world cricketer and playboy, Imran Khan, with a young English heiress, Jemima Goldsmith. Some of the reporting can only be described as apoplectic. Despite the fact that the couple would be leading a privileged life in Pakistan, photographs and head lines proclaimed that Jemima would be living in the backstreets of Lahore, in a state of virtual slavery, veiled from head to toe. The old confusion of images from the Arabian Nights, applied indiscriminately to a wide geographical area, was nicely repeated X Veiled half-truths in a Spanish magazine which showed her wearing a Pakistani shalwar and kameez and described this as traditional Arab dress.1 Three circumstances in the world in 1995 are of particular relevance to the way in which Western travellers and the media perceive and portray Middle Eastern women: the growth of activist Islam in the world, the run-up to the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, and the increase in tourism to countries with a majority Muslim population — in particular Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco. The result of the first is that it is virtually impossible to discuss any aspect of women’s lives in the region without considering the role of Islam. Indeed, to believe some con versations and media reports, every moment of a woman’s life there is in some way ruled by the religion. In fact, for the women living in these widely varying communities: legislation, customs and traditions, affected or inspired by interpreta tions of the Qur'an and the Shari'a, combine to define concepts of female roles and status ... these concepts may vary from one class or generation to the other as well as over time, just as they may differ from one Muslim country to another. In addition, Muslim women’s lives and the choices they face are influenced as much by patriarchal social arrangements as they are by religious ideology.2 Nevertheless, generalizadons abound on the subject of women’s lives in Muslim countries, even though there are 51 very diverse countries in the world describing themselves as Muslim (if we take current membership of the Islamic Conference). Even the 20 or so countries of the Middle East and North Africa with which this anthology is concerned do« not constitute the homogeneous world that the polidcal Islamists like to portray and the Western world dislikes and fears. Secondly, in the two decades between the first UN Con ference on Women in Mexico in 1975 and the 1995 Beijing conference, much attention has been paid by development agencies to the position of women in Third World countries. Women’s organizations have often been highlighted as targets for projects and a lot of information exists about women’s groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Indeed, in magazines
The list of books you might like
