Scheherazade Goes West Read online

  During the caliphs’ time, the indoor majliss “took place in superbly decorated rooms. Floors and walls were made of marble or were covered with silk brocade embroidered with gold thread. The caliph’s raised throne was adorned with a variety of precious stones, while along the walls to the left and right of the throne were couches with ebony frames for the audience and the musicians.”2 Wine and the mixing of the sexes heightened the sensuality of the majliss, which when they were especially successful lasted all day and all night.

  Now, when it comes to the drinking of wine, Islam forbids it (Sura 5:91). However, Muslims are just like Christians, Jews, and Buddhists — they know what is proscribed as sinful, but do not necessarily always obey the sacred prescriptions, or else they would be angels. And precisely because wine is forbidden, it is linked in the Muslim psyche to pleasure as a revenge against decay and the fleeting hours pushing us irreversibly toward death. Since antiquity, Muslim countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia have been known for their production of delicious wines, which was one reason the Romans occupied that part of the world for centuries. Archeological missions operating in the Mediterranean today often bring to the surface Roman shipwrecks that had foundered while transporting North African wine and olive oil. Also, many historical records refer frequently to the drinking of wine in hedonistically inclined Berber Morocco, especially in Badis and other Mediterranean cities of the north. Reported Mohamed al Ouazzane, also known as Leo Africanus, in his sixteenth-century memoir: “Badis is a small city on the Mediterranean . . . its population is divided into two groups, the fishermen and the pirates who go in their boats to raid the Christian coasts. . . . There is an important street in the city inhabited by the Jews where one could buy wine considered delicious by most of the inhabitants. The people of this city go almost daily, whenever the weather is fine, on their boats and enjoy themselves drinking and singing in the midst of the sea.”3

  Also in the sixteenth century, at least one Muslim emperor, Jahangir, the ruler of India, was known to be a heavy drinker. As for the poet Omar Khayyam, whose verses are still sung by many in the Muslim world today, he devoted most of his poetry to a celebration of wine as an extreme hedonistic pleasure — with a rather morbid undercurrent. In his poetry, the pleasure derived from wine makes one aware of the passage of time and the fleeting charms of our strictly numbered days. This philosophical connection between wine, fleeting happiness, and decay explains why Khayyam’s poetry is still sung today, both by those who drink and those who do not:

  Let not sorrow wither the joyful heart

  Nor stones of affliction wear away your season of happiness.

  Nobody knows the hidden future —

  Wine, a lover, and enjoying the heart’s desire all you need.

  Short measures are best of everything except wine

  And wine is best from the hand of courtly beauties. . . . 4

  Even today, in many of the Muslim countries along the sunny Mediterranean, the local demand for wine is so consistent that rising prices due to increased taxes do not seem to affect sales. But what about the ancient Muslim rulers, one might wonder — did they drink? Well, since many of their lives are described in great detail by historians, we do know that many Arab caliphs, Turkish sultans, and Mughal emperors enjoyed their wine. What is unusual about the Arab rulers is that they usually hid their fun behind the hijab, which literally means “veil.” According to Jahiz, my favorite, witty ninth-century writer who frequented the Abbasid court, caliphs in general, including Harun Ar-Rachid, sat behind the veil when drinking. “If someone says he has seen Ar-Rachid drinking anything but water, be sure he is lying,” wrote Jahiz. “Only his favorite jarya witnessed his wine-drinking. Sometimes, when a song moved him, he will display his joy, but without exaggeration.”5

  The majliss ceremonies unfolded according to strict protocol. However, explains Jahiz, talented jarya, who competed with male poets and musicians, could subvert the rules quite easily because their talents heightened their sexual attraction. This opened up enormous opportunities for women slaves who came to Baghdad as booty after conquests. By competing in the arts and sciences, they could not only climb the social ladder, but also raise their value in the slave market, and thereby subvert the ruling male hierarchy altogether. Since the slave buyers were by necessity the richest and most powerful men in the Muslim world, a woman could use her intellectual proficiency and professional achievements to narrow the distance between her and the decision-makers.

  And here we stumble upon a key, albeit hidden and potentially fatal, trap of the harem: A man in love risks becoming a slave of his jarya. Intellectually and professionally competent jarya became the rulers of their masters’ minds and senses, thus acquiring an enormous influence that was completely divorced from their capacity to bear children — the only ability that gave slave women legal status (known as Umm walad, or mother of a child). Seduction of the master through an intense physical and intellectual exchange was considered to give him exquisite pleasure. “This kind of jarya offers the man a scale of pleasures which are rarely combined,” explains Jahiz, who was reputed to be both physically ugly and extremely interested in decoding the magic of attraction, because many senses are involved at once” in “one of the most irresistible and dangerous kinds of seductions.”

  During this era, the conflict between the sexes was in a way managed like the conflict between cultures. Though loaded with antagonisms, it enriched whoever dared to engage in it. To fall in love is to experiment with the different, to open oneself up to the risky pleasures of unfamiliar sensations and emotions, in a place where fear and the desire for discovery are fatally connected. To take part, one needs two precious assets: a lot of free time to invest in the relationship and the courage to become vulnerable. Men of the era who wished to engage in an erotic exchange with a talented woman had to learn to write poetry, to put feelings into rhythmic words. Harun Ar-Rachid’s poetry was decidedly second-rate, but the surprising thing about him is that he did not feel ridiculous trying.

  Harun Ar-Rachid was a man who used what Roland Barthes calls “the sensuous charge of words”: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.”7 Although Harun Ar-Rachid had thousands of jarya and often fell in love, he could get emotionally entangled with only one woman at a time. Only once did the brave caliph get emotionally tied up with three beauties simultaneously and the result was particularly lousy poetry.

  The names of Harun’s three beauties were: Sihr, which means “Magic”; Diya, which means “Radiance”; and Khunt, which means “Femininity.” And here is the elaborate result of the caliph’s attempt to rub languages with three ravishing creatures at the same time:

  Sihr, Diya, and Khunt are sihr, diya, and khunt

  The first stole one third of my heart and the others ran a ay ith the rest . . .

  The three ladies lead me by the bridle,

  and manage to occupy every single inch of my heart . . .

  Is not that strange that the entire planet obeys me,

  and I obey these ladies who are precisely set on rebelling against me.

  All this is due to the power of love,

  which grants them a mightier sway than the supremacy I have. 8

  Once the caliph had finished writing down these words, he asked a musician to put them to music and sing them at the next majliss. But since Harun much preferred listening to talented jarya, who were professional wordsmiths, I suspect that he knew his limitations and had no illusions about his talent as a poet. Instead, he focused on being attractive and stocked up on thousands of shirts and robes. When the list of what he owned became public after his death, Muslim believers must have been baffled by their prince’s extravagant taste. Writes Al Fadl Ibn al-Rabi:

  When Muhammad al Amin succeeded his father Harun al Rachid as Caliph in the year 193 (A.D. 809), he ordered me to count the clothing, furnishings, vessels and equipment in
the stores. I summoned the secretaries and store-keepers and continued counting for months, during which I inspected treasures which I did not dream the caliphal stores contained. . . . The list of contents was as follows: “4,000 embroidered robes, 4,000 silk cloaks lined with sable, mink, and other furs, 10,000 shirts and shifts, 10,000 caftans, 4,000 Turbans, . . . 1,000 hoods . . . 1,000 capes of various kinds . . . , 1,000 precious china vessels . . . , many kinds of perfume . . . , 1,000 jeweled rings . . . , 1,500 silk carpets . . . , 1,000 silk cushions and pillows . . . , 1,000 washbasins . . . , 1,000 ewers . . . , 1,000 belts, 10,000 decorated swords, 150,000 lances, 100,000 bows, 1,000 special suits of armor, 50,000 common suits of armor, 10,000 helmets, 150,000 shields, 4,000 pairs of half boots, most of them lined with sable, mink, and other kind of furs, with a knife and a kerchief in each half boot, 4,000 pairs of socks, 4,000 small tents with their appurtenances.”9

  To appreciate how far our caliph had gone in violating the rules of austerity that his dynasty was supposed to abide by, one has to remember that the Abbasids avoided luxurious attire and stuck to one basic color — black. “It has been the tradition for the caliph,” explains one tenth-century expert, “to sit on an elevated seat on a throne covered with pure Armenian silk, or with silk and wool. . . . The caliph wears a long-sleeved garment, dyed black, the outer garment is either plain or embroidered with white silk or wool. He does not, however, wear sigillatum (patterned) silk brocade or decorated garments.”10 Without a doubt, as Imam Ibn al-Jawzi said, the hardest of all struggles for a Muslim leader is not against the Christian enemy, but against his own passions. Even the Prophet Mohammed, in one of his hadiths (sayings reported by his disciples after his death), according to Ibn al-Jawzi, identified resisting one’s passions as being “the big jihad” (al jihad al akbar), and fighting the enemy as being only “the small jihad” (al jihad al asghar).11

  Harun Ar-Rachid seems to have been much more successful in waging the small jihad than he was in the big one. One time, when he was brooding about whether to purchase ’Inane, a famous attractive poetess whose price was very high, Asma’i, one of his close companions, asked what was bothering him. The caliph confessed that it was ’Inane who was giving him trouble, but added, “It is only her poetry which attracts me to her.” Asma’i then tried to tell the caliph, as politely as he could, that he did not believe a word he’d said. “Sure, there is nothing to be attracted to in ’Inane but her poetry, Sire,” he said. “Would the Commander of the Faithful have been enchanted to have sexual intercourse with al Farazdaq for example?” At that, “Harun Ar-Rachid burst into such a deep laughter that his head went backward.”12 Farazdaq was a famous but extremely coarse male poet who excelled in describing battle scenes.

  For a caliph, chanting poetry or playing chess with an attractive jarya was not like engaging in the same activities with a man. Of course, the caliph was free to choose a male partner if he liked, and homosexuality was quite acceptable in the multicultural, cosmopolitan, and tolerant Abbasid court. Sexual preference was regarded as just one more difference between people. You could choose to either keep to your own sex or venture to open yourself up to the unknown. One of the most sophisticated and wittiest stars of the Abbasid court was the Persian poet Abu Nuwas, who read fiery verses extolling young men’s beauty. But even he was sometimes taken in by a woman’s wit and dazzling intelligence and was known to have had affairs with exceptional jarya from time to time.

  The overriding message one gets from reading the twenty-four volumes of The Book of Songs (Kitab al Aghani), which records in extraordinary detail how the caliphs enjoyed themselves, is that homosexuality did not carry with it the dangers that heterosexuality did. A heterosexual encounter implied taking much greater risks because one had to confront the foreign and embrace the different “other.” Incidentally, the Arabic language is rich with words for sexually attractive handsome young men, such as ghulam, which literally means “page,” that carry clear homosexual connotations; while in the West, even the term “homosexuality” was not commonly used until the 1880s. And then, it was used only by medical doctors and psychiatrists who referred to it as a sickness.13

  But to get back to the Abbasid court, a heterosexual encounter was regarded as an adventure, a door leading into the unknown. A man needed a certain amount of heroic courage if he was to challenge his familiar self and jump into a passionate love affair with that most unpredictable of all strangers — a woman. A woman who was by definition also an enemy, since the harem had turned her into a prisoner.

  The story of the Ghulamiat, or page girls, is quite revealing of this idea, which seems so strange to us today — that one needs special courage to engage in heterosexual involvement. When Princess Zubaida discovered that her son Amin, whom she hoped would become heir to the throne, had homosexual tendencies, she was sure she could “cure” him by dressing attractive girls like Ghulam, as young slave-boys. In so doing, she launched a whole new fashion in Baghdad: “Zubaida chose young girls remarkable for the elegance of their figures and the charm of their faces,” writes Mas’udi, the ninth-century historian. “She had them wear turbans and gave them clothes woven and embroidered in the royal factories, and had them fix their hair with fringes and love locks and drew it back at the nape of the neck after the fashion of young men. She dressed them in close-fitting, wide-sleeved robes called qaba and wide belts which showed off their waists and their curves. Then she sent them to her son Amin. As they filed into his presence, he was enchanted. He was captivated by their looks and appeared with them in public. It was then that the fashion for having young slave girls with short hair, wearing qaba and belts, became established at all levels of society. They were called page-girls (ghulamiat).”14 The “ghulamiat”were the Arab equivalent of the European “Les Garçonnes,” fashionable women who dressed like men in the 1920s.

  By the ninth century, Baghdad had become openly tolerant toward the foreign cultures of former enemies such as the Romans and the Persians. This new acceptance brought wealth and glory to the Arabs, who, up until the advent of Islam, had lived as marginal nomads in the Arabian desert. However, tolerance and cross-fertilization did not mean absence of conflict. Abbasid courts were torn by strong rivalries between Persians and Arabs (which are still so evident in the Middle East today — remember the 1980s Iran-Iraq War). And the conflict between the sexes was equally dangerous, especially when attraction came into play. Locking up thousands of women in harems was a drastic measure taken by caliphs who wished to minimize risk by making rejection impossible. If a woman did not care for her master, she could not slam the door and leave. But even within the harem’s supposedly safe walls, the caliph had to take risks by expressing his emotions. Which brings us back to the Western men’s harem.

  What happens to a man’s emotions when female beauty is an image — and that image is fabricated by the man himself?

  What happens to emotions when we turn away from Harun Ar-Rachid’s harem, where the caliph got entangled in intense erotic exchanges involving all his senses, to the painted harems of Ingres and Matisse or the filmed harems of Hollywood? How can a man get involved with a real woman — his wife or lover — when at the same time he is involved with a painted or filmed image?

  It was at this point that I decided to revisit that most glorious, influential, and invincible of European harems — the one created by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Reproduced on thousands and thousands of book covers, CDs, and magazines all over the West, his harem may date back to the nineteenth century, but is more present than ever in our digital age.

  If I could infiltrate Ingres’s harem, I thought, I might be able to understand some of the mysterious secrets of Western men’s psyche, as well as their emotional and erotic landscape. If I knew more about Western men’s feelings toward women, I might have fewer quarrels with Kemal. He was constantly telling me, whenever I raised my voice in Chateaubriand, the restaurant near the university where we and our colleagues flocked for couscous in the aftern
oon, “Fatema, I am always amazed by how much you know about Arab history and the Abbasids, and how little you know about me.” This kind of sentence would break my heart. I would feel guilty, apologize, and try to reach for Kemal’s hand, but he always stopped my self-flagellation by reminding me that, like most Moroccans, he did not appreciate couples touching each other in public. “Please, Fatema, restrain yourself,” he would say. “Have you not seen the Dean of the University sitting on your left, and our Mullah-like conservative Benkiki on your right?”

  I desperately needed to increase my knowledge of men and their enigmatic reactions. It shocked me to realize that, even after so many decades of trying to understand Kemal, I still managed to drive him so crazy sometimes that he stopped seeing me for weeks or even months. Of course, on those occasions, I always mobilized the entire university population to intervene on my behalf and help me win his forgiveness, but it still took time for things to get back to normal. Understanding how a man’s mind and emotions work is definitely not an easy task for a woman. I have managed to learn new skills in my life, like mastering foreign languages and using a computer, but when it comes to figuring out how men’s emotions work, I have not advanced much.

  But to get back to my harem obsession: What happens to shifting boundaries and unstable privileges when the filmed or painted harem image is introduced as a strategic component of sexual dynamics? Could it be that Ingres’s odalisques were a kind of shield to protect him from his own emotions? I could not wait to get back into Monsieur Ingres’s world.