Scheherazade Goes West Hardcover – May 22, 2001 by Fatema Mernissi (Author)

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Fatima Mernissi's unclassifiable book, at turns scholarly, playful, watchful, and admonitory, perfectly juxtaposes the relations between men and women in Europe with those in the Muslim world. In Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, there is a studied casualness in Mernissi's observations, which she presents as a series of discoveries reached through conversations with friends, through reading and travels, and through her own lived experience as a liberated Moroccan woman, a feminist professor of sociology at a Moroccan university. In 1994, Mernissi traveled to 10 Western cities to promote her bestselling book, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, a luxury not available to her illiterate grandmother Yasmina, to whom the harem was a prison, rather than the idealized sanctuary of Western myth.
The contrasts Mernissi discovered between East and West were not as simple as one might imagine. In Berlin, for example, she leafed through pornographic German photo books of "harem women," produced for an eager audience of Western men, and in Paris, she accompanied a male friend on a walking tour of his favorite odalisques, from Ingres to Matisse, while he explained how comforting an insecure man found these nude, silent women. While the medieval caliphs tended to prize intelligence and erudition among the women of their harems, Western writers have lauded beauty over every other quality; as Kant put it, a learned woman "might as well even have a beard." In deceptively light prose, Mernissi introduces the sexual politics of Islam to a Western audience, while pointing out the inconsistencies and illogic in the Western tradition. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
For Western men, the very word harem typically provokes voluptuous sexual fantasies in which men have their way with vulnerable women who are happy to satisfy their needs, observes Mernissi, feminist sociologist and Koranic scholar. In Islamic culture, by contrast, the harem is seen as the site of a dangerous, sexual power struggle in which powerful women resist male domination. The mythical Scheherazade, who recounted enough tales to fill One Thousand and One Nights, models this female power, Mernissi (Beyond the Veil) argues. In a cerebral rather than physical seduction, Scheherazade recounted complex tales to her king, using her nutq her ability to penetrate a man's brain by using the right words. So subversive was that power that her stories were published in Arabic only a century after appearing in French, and they remain a target of Muslim censorship. Using a wide range of Islamic sources etymology, art, religious law, cultural history Mernissi develops a nuanced analysis of the sexual power of Islamic women. By probing Western representations of Scheherazade in ballet, Hollywood movies, painting she also reveals the West's tendency to misconstrue the harem. Unfortunately, Mernissi's navet, about the West mars the book. After a few casual chats, some skimming of peculiar or derivative sources and a trip to a designer's shop in New York, she concludes that Western women are as tyrannized by the pressure to be a size 6 as Islamic women are by the veil. Additionally, Mernissi's stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling can be irritating. More troubling, she never returns to her initial mission to understand the Western image of the harem.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
When Moroccan sociologist Mernissi went on tour to promote her 1994 book, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, she was perplexed when Western audiences reacted to the word harem as though she had uttered something salacious. Eager to understand this phenomenon, she began to study European and American art, dance, and literature. Her queries revealed that the non-Arab world sees the harem as a "peaceful pleasure-garden where omnipotent men reign supreme over obedient...sexually available women." Western translations of The Thousand and One Nights further prove the point. Unlike Arabic renderings, the versions Mernissi uncovered depict women as brainless. This shocked her, since the stories she grew up with focused on Scheherazade as a woman whose passionate rhetoric swayed a king. "The Oriental Scheherazade is purely cerebral," she writes. "In the original tales, Scheherazade's body is hardly mentioned but her learning is repeatedly stressed." Mernissi's research exposes an array of misrepresentations and misunderstandings and reveals the ways misogyny both Eastern and Western limits human imagination and stifles communication. Brilliant and convincing, this is a provocative multicultural critique. Highly recommended for all libraries. Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Fatema Mernissi is a professor of sociology at the University of Mohammed V in Rabat, Morocco. An Islamic feminist whose books have been published in twenty-six countries, she is the bestselling author of Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, The Veil and the Male Elite, and Beyond the Veil.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: The Tale of the Lady with the Feather Dress

If by chance you were to meet me at the Casablanca airport or on a boat sailing from Tangiers, you would think me self-confident, but I am not. Even now, at my age, I am frightened when crossing borders because I am afraid of failing to understand strangers. "To travel is the best way to learn and empower yourself," said Yasmina, my grandmother, who was illiterate and lived in a harem, a traditional household with locked gates that women were not supposed to open. "You must focus on the strangers you meet and try to understand them. The more you understand a stranger and the greater is your knowledge of yourself, the more power you will have." For Yasmina, the harem was a prison, a place women were forbidden to leave. So she glorified travel and regarded the opportunity to cross boundaries as a sacred privilege, the best way to shed powerlessness. And, indeed, rumors ran wild in Fez, the medieval city of my childhood, about trained Sufi masters who got extraordinary "flashes" (lawami') and expanded their knowledge exponentially, simply because they were so focused on learning from the foreigners who passed through their lives.

A few years ago, I had to visit ten Western cities for the promotion of my book, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, which appeared in 1994 and was translated into twenty-two languages. During that tour, I was interviewed by more than a hundred Western journalists and I soon noticed that most of the men grinned when pronouncing the word "harem." I felt shocked by their grins. How can anyone smile when invoking a word synonymous with prison, I wondered. For my grandmother Yasmina, the harem was a cruel institution that sharply curtailed her rights, starting with the "right to travel and discover Allah's beautiful and complicated planet," as she put it. But according to Yasmina's philosophy, which I later discovered she had adopted from the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, I needed to transform my feelings of shock toward the Western journalists into an openness to learn from them. At first, I had great difficulty doing so and started wondering if perhaps, due to my age, I was losing my capacity to adapt to new situations. I felt terrified of becoming stiff and unable to digest the unexpected. No one noticed my anxiety during my book promotion tour, however, because I was wearing my huge Berber silver bracelet and my red Chanel lipstick.

To learn from travel, one must train oneself to capture messages. "You must cultivate isti'dad, the state of readiness," Yasmina used to whisper conspiratorially in my ear, so as to exclude those whom she regarded as unworthy of the Sufi tradition. "The most baggage carried by strangers is their difference. And if you focus on the divergent and the dissimilar, you get 'flashes.' " Then she would remind me to keep this lesson secret. "Teqiyeh, secrecy, is the name of the game," she would say. "Remember what happened to poor Hallaj!" Hallaj was a famous Sufi who was arrested by the Abbasid police in a.d. 915 for publicly proclaiming in the streets of Baghdad: "I am the Truth" (Ana l'haq). Since Truth is one of the names for God, Hallaj was declared a heretic. Islam insists on the unbridgeable distance between the divine and the human, but Hallaj believed that if you concentrate on loving God, without intermediaries, a blurring of the boundaries with the divine becomes possible. Arresting Hallaj disturbed the Abbasid police, because to arrest him -- a man who declared himself made in the image of God -- was to affront God himself. Nonetheless, Hallaj was burned alive in March 922, and since I have always believed that staying alive is preferable to self-immolation, I kept Yasmina's instructions regarding travel an absolute secret, and grew up so intent on realizing her dream that crossing borders still terrifies me.

Throughout my childhood, Yasmina often told me that it is normal for a woman to experience panic when crossing oceans and rivers. "When a woman decides to use her wings, she takes big risks," she would say, and then would add that, conversely, when a woman doesn't use her wings at all, it hurts her.

When Yasmina died, I was thirteen. I was supposed to cry, but I did not. "The best way to remember your grandmother," she told me on her deathbed, "is to keep alive the tradition of telling my favorite Scheherazade story -- 'The Lady with the Feather Dress.'" And so, I learned that story -- narrated by Scheherazade, the heroine of The Thousand and One Nights -- by heart. Its main message is that a woman should lead her life as a nomad. She should stay alert and be ready to move, even if she is loved. For, as the tale teaches, love can engulf you and become a prison.

At age nineteen, when I took the train to register at Mohamed V University in Rabat, I crossed one of the most dangerous frontiers of all my life -- that separating Fez, my medieval hometown, a labyrinth-like, ninth-century religious center, from Rabat, a modern, white metropolis with wide open city gates, situated on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. At first, I felt so terrified of Rabat, with its large avenues, that I could not even move about without Kemal, a fellow student who happened to be from my neighborhood in Fez. But Kemal kept repeating that he was confused about my feelings for him. "I wonder sometimes if you love me, or if you just need me as a buffer against the thousand other men who have flocked here from all over Morocco to register at this university," he would say. What I resented most about Kemal in those days was his incredible ability to read my mind. But one reason I became fond of him was that he knew Yasmina's tale by heart. However, his version was the official one, published in the book version of The Thousand and One Nights (better known to many English readers as The Arabian Nights). And he told me that illiterate women like Yasmina were more subversive than educated ones both because they introduced heretical distortions into the tales and because they used storytelling, that oral medium, to escape censorship. Throughout Muslim history, he said, the oral tradition has reduced even the most tyrannical of despots to powerlessness.

According to Kemal, the first distortion that Yasmina introduced into her favorite tale was to feminize its title. In the book version of The Thousand and One Nights, the story is called "The Tale of Hassan al Basri," Basra being a city in southern Iraq, at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and trade roads heading toward China. But the tale that I inherited from Yasmina was entitled "The Lady with the Feather Dress," and it opens in Baghdad, then the capital of the Muslim empire. From Baghdad, Hassan, a handsome but bankrupt youth who had squandered his entire fortune on wine and gallant company, sailed away to strange islands to seek his fortune. Gazing at the sea from a high terrace one night, he was struck by the graceful movements of a large bird who had alighted on the beach. Suddenly the bird shed what turned out to be a dress made of feathers, and out stepped a beautiful naked woman, who ran to swim in the waves. "She outdid in beauty all human beings. She had a mouth as magical as Solomon's seal and hair blacker than the night....She had lips like corals and teeth like strung pearls....Her middle was full of folds....She had thighs great and plump, like marble columns." But what captivated Hassan Basri the most was what lay between her thighs: "a goodly rounded dome on pillars borne, like a bowl of silver or crystal."

Smitten with love, Hassan stole the beauty's feather dress while she was swimming and buried it in a secret tomb. Deprived of her wings, the woman became his captive. Hassan married her, showered her with silks and precious stones, and when she bore him two sons, relaxed

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Washington Square Press; First Edition (May 22, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0743412427
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0743412421
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.035 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 0.87 x 8.74 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,015,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1,114 in General Anthropology
#3,459 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)
#6,269 in Women's Studies (Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars    76 ratings