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Romancing the Harem
| Article
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15968 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1989 |
2,441 Words |
| Author
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Madeline C. Zilfi
Madeline C. Zilfi is associate professor of Middle Eastern
history at the University of Maryland and the author of The
Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age. |
HAREN
The World Behind the Veil
Alev Lytle Croutier
New York: Abbeville Press, 1989
224 pp. $35
Most Western travelers to the East never saw the inside of a Muslim house, much less its harem, but they seldom hesitated to expound on the subject to all who would listen. European artists, homebound in France or England, tried to capture the reality of the harem but only succeeded in adding another imaginative layer to the lightweight tales spun by the whirlwind traveler.
In the nineteenth century, Europeans began to arrive in the Middle East in greater numbers, and many stayed long enough to make their way in Ottoman and Persian social circles. Women's lives and preoccupations and the image of the harem, while still shrouded, came into sharper focus. At the same time, the erosion of traditional society under the impact of modernizing reforms and European colonization evoked a small but steady stream of indigenous novels and memoirs that revealed some of the secrets of the Middle Eastern harem.
Yet with all of that, the world of the harem remains mysterious and elusive. The fault, if it can be called that, has to do with the institution itself. The harem--from the Arabic, literally "the inviolate"--refers to the women's quarters of a private house and, by extension, to the women themselves. Neither the rooms nor their inhabitants were to be known by males outside the family. Veiling, state-enforced prohibitions on unaccompanied travel, and social norms that
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