WESTERN ETHNOCENTRISM AND PERCEPTIONS OF THE HAREM LEILA AHMED In 1980, at the National Women’s Studies Association con- ference in Bloomington, Indiana, I attended a presentation on “Women in Islam,” and found myself hotly speaking up from the audience because the panel of three Arab women were, it seemed to me, presenting an unwarrantably rosy picture of women in Islam. Islamic societies were, if anything, surely rather remarkable — so had been my thought — for their unequivocal placement of women under the control of men, and their equally explicit licens- ing of male sexuality and exploitation of women. Islam had, as that panel maintained, brought about a number of positive gains for women in Arabia at the time, and had granted women certain rights, such as the right to own property (not granted to women in the West until the nineteenth century, and even, as with the right to bear witness, still not granted women, for example, under rab- binical law), and clearly one could not judge Islam to be more malevolent in its attitude to women than the other two monotheisms. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that this still did not warrant playing down Islam’s blatant endorsement of male superiority and male control of women, or glossing over the harsh- ness for women of, in particular, its marriage, divorce, and child custody laws. But this was over two years ago and before I'd lived in America. Now that I have, I see perfectly why the women making the presentation took the stand that they did. For if one is of Arabic or Islamic background in America, one is almost compelled to take that stand. And what compels one is not only that Americans by and large know nothing at all about the Islamic world, which is in- deed the case, despite America’s heavy embroilment in the area and despite the fact that Muslims constitute something like one quarter of the world’s population: it is, rather, that Americans “know,” and know without even having to think about it, that the Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982). © 1982 by Feminist Studies, Inc.522 Leila Ahmed Islamic peoples — Arabs, Iranians, whatever they call themselves — are backward, uncivilized peoples totally incapable of rational conduct. This is overwhelmingly the attitude of the media and of the society at large and also, unfortunately, often that of the smaller groups supposedly representing American informed opin- ion. I was, for instance, on a university panel quite recently discussing American relations with the Middle East, a debate which quickly resolved into a discussion of, quite simply, how the United States should deploy its military forces to protect “its” oil in the area — as if the area were culturally blank and populated by an ir- relevant people. To suggest that a military force and apparent con- trol in the area did not seem to be what in the end shaped events, that perhaps America should review its relationship with these peoples and become a little more aware of their histories, and of Islamic civilization, was evidently simply to be babbling irrelevant- ly. And of course it is of no conceivable interest to Americans that what is going on now in the area is a direct result of Western — and more recently of specifically American — action, and that American activities have been bringing about, far more directly than any Ayatollah or religious leader, the most widespread and vigorous revival that the Muslim world has known in over a thou- sand years. And never mind too, that societies which thirty, forty, and even fifty years ago had introduced laws granting greater rights to women are now revoking them, or are under pressure to revoke them. Just as Americans “‘know,” that Arabs are backward, they know also with the same flawless certainty that Muslim women are terribly oppressed and degraded. And they know this not because they know that women everywhere in the world are op- pressed, but because they believe that, specifically, Islam monstrously oppresses women. An American feminist said to me — and maintained it at great length citing numerous sources, all of them of course Western — that women, according to Islam, had no souls and were thought of simply as animals. But she was an unusual woman, not in her certain belief that Muslim women are oppressed beyond anything known in the West, but because she was able to cite detailed, although incorrect, information in support of her belief. Most American women who ‘“‘know”’ that Muslim women in particular are oppressed, know it simply because it is one of those ‘‘facts’’ lying around in this culture, and most freely admit that actually they know nothing about Islam or Middle Eastern societies. But there are of course those powerfullyLeila Ahmed 523 evocative words — for Westerners — harem, the veil, polygamy, all of which are almost synonymous in this country with female oppression. Whether the harem can justifiably be defined as ex- clusively a device for oppressing women, I shall discuss later. As for polygamy and the veil, it would be quite easy to argue that neither is by definition necessarily more oppressive than monogamy and no veil. Since the veil, its origin, and whether it is Islamic or not regularly provokes discussion, it should perhaps be briefly noted here that it is pre-Islamic in origin and appears to have been occasionally in use among all the peoples of the area, from the Greeks to the Persians, with the only clear exceptions being the Jews and the Egyptians. But although an occasional custom, it seems not to have been institutionalized until Islam adopted it. As a custom, therefore, it was evidently very con- genial to Islam, and as an institution, it is Islamic. Although universally perceived in the West as an oppressive custom, it is not experienced as such by women who habitually wear it. More than anything perhaps it is a symbol of women being separated from the world of men, and this is conventionally perceived in the West as oppression — a perception to which I will shortly return. Thus American women “‘know”’ that Muslim women are over- whelmingly oppressed without being able to define the specific content of that oppression, in the same way that they ‘‘know” that Muslims — Arabs, Iranians, or whatever — are ignorant, backward, irrational, and uncivilized. These are ‘‘facts’’ manufac- tured in Western culture, by the same men who have also littered the culture with ‘‘facts’” about Western women and how inferior and irrational they are. And for centuries the Western world has been systematically falsifying and villifying the Muslim world — and for centuries they did indeed have a powerful motive for do- ing so. From the time of the Crusades, until the disintegration of the Islamic empire early in this century, for nearly a thousand years, the Western world and the Muslim world have been inter- mittently at war; or they have been in the state of no-war that the United States and the Soviet Union are in now. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, however, they were locked in geographic proximity with Islam straddling and controlling the central regions of the known world and completely blocking Europe’s horizons and its access to the East and its wealth. It was of course in their attempt to circumvent this monster of an Islamic empire that the Europeans ended up in America. But the524 Leila Ahmed enmity of Islam and the West persisted long after that. Throughout this time the guardians of Western civilization, with the clergy at their head, produced volumes about the evil, ir- rational, and so forth, condition of the Muslims — naturally in- cluding statements about the degraded condition of Muslim women. Such degradation has been a theme for Christian Western men from the time they began writing about Islam. And given that the guardians and advocates of Christendom were also the guardians and advocates of the natural superiority of the male and his rightful control over the female, it is then interesting and amusing to ask why they should have been in any way shocked or concerned with the oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men. It was the harem on which they focused with fascination and loathing. The harem can be defined as a system that permits males sexual access to more than one female. It can also be defined, and with as much accuracy, as a system whereby the female relatives of a man — wives, sisters, mother, aunts, daughters — share much of their time and their living space, and further, which enables women to have frequent and easy access to other women in their community, vertically, across class lines, as well as horizontally. It is interesting then to discover, reading early Western accounts of the harem, that in permitting males sexual access to more than one female, the system often but not in- variably elicited from Western men pious condemnation for its encouragement of sexual laxity and immorality. But it was its sec- ond aspect, that of women being freely and continuously to- gether, and the degradation, licentiousness, and corruption that must inevitably ensue, which Western men viewed with con- siderable fascination. What recurs in Western men’s accounts of the harem is prurient speculation, often taking the form of down- right assertion, about women’s sexual relations with each other within the harem. Yet, however confident their statements, West- ern men had in fact no conceivable means of access to harems. Nevertheless, they wrote often with great assurance, as George Sandys did in describing the women of the sultan’s harem. He reported that ‘‘it is not lawful for anyone to bring ought in unto them with which they may commit the deeds of beastly unclean- ness; so that if they have a will to eat cucumbers, gourds, or such like, they are sent in unto them sliced, to deprive them of the means of playing the wantons.’! According to many Western men, such “beastly’’ lust and licentiousness could be found not