Table Of ContentVEILED 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
