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 defined the extended family as society enough, eliminated whatever remained of the harem woman's ability to know or be known by the public.
Stories never told
Given the great divide between public and private life in traditional Islamic society, it is small wonder that the harem has come down to us either in bits and pieces from occasional eyewitnesses or as fully rendered but fictive--not to say feverish--products of the artist's imagination. In both versions there is beauty, mystery, luxury, and languor. And in both versions the most portrayed yet least revealed of harem subjects is the harem woman herself. It is the particular past of the harem woman that Alev Croutier's Harem: The World behind the Veil sets out to recover.
To the published works in Western languages and her native Turkish Croutier has added the photographs and oral record of her own family. The result is a magnificently illustrated "popular history." It is also, in part, a personal memoir. Croutier's family--aunts, uncles, grandparents, and servants--and her warm recollections of their stories and souvenirs are as much a part of the book as are Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and his Roxelana. The family material is welcome leavening for a tale so often told by uncomprehending outsiders. And, too, the juxtaposition of family experience with the adventures of sultans and sultanas is appropriate to explain what was arguably the chief distinction among harems, that between royal and non-royal households.
Most of the practices that we today identify with Islam grew out of a pre-Islamic inheritance of uncertain lineage. The
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