Scheherazade Goes West

Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems is a non-fiction book by Fatema Mernissi, a scholar of the Koran and a feminist sociologist from Morocco. The book examines the differences between ideas about the harem in Western and Eastern traditions; the primary argument of the book is that Westerners have traditionally misunderstood the nature of the harem as a seat of female power and knowledge, and instead have portrayed harems as places of male sexual fantasy and male domination. Mernissi examines elements of Eastern and Western culture, art, and history to explore the role of the harem, making an argument that the harem has always been a place where women resist domination through intelligence, narrative, and the power of words.

The overarching theme of Mernissi's book is the figure of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights; known by many as the woman who stopped a violent king from killing her by entrancing him with a never-ending, woven series of stories. Mernissi is interested in the ways that Scheherazade is contrasted in Eastern and Western literature, and the way that, in turn, Westerners misunderstand the idea of the harem. In Western literature, film, and art, harems are portrayed as places where women are dominated, and where men are able to achieve their wildest sexual fantasies because women have been taught to obey them. In contrast, Mernissi argues that Scheherazade is an entrancing figure in Eastern literature precisely because she was intelligent and resisted the domination of the sultan. Rather than being a dominated woman, she is lauded as a powerful woman who uses her intelligence to have dominion over politically and economically more powerful men.

In order to make her point clear, Mernissi follows representations of Scheherazade in Eastern and Western culture. Some of her examinations include discussions of belly dancing, ballets, Persian miniatures, and stories by Edgar Allen Poe. She is interested in creating an argument about the sexual power of Islamic women, and does so by arguing against representations in Western literature and culture that portray Islamic women as obedient.



Part of Mernissi's argument revolves around contradictory ideas about love and sexual desire, or female sexuality, perpetuated through Western literature’s descriptions of harems. Mernissi argues that by defining women as obedient, and sexual desire as separate from intelligence, Westerners make an argument for romance without intellectual connection. On the contrary, the Eastern interpretation of the harem gives men and women equal power and puts discussion of story and philosophical ideas as a subject on par with sex and seduction. In this way, Mernissi says, Westerners separate the idea of feeling and reasoning in a way that is illogical, and ultimately damaging to women's ideas of themselves. This breeds, Mernissi says, the idea that an intelligent woman cannot also be a sexually attractive partner.

Through a discussion of cultural, psychological, etymological, and historical factors, Mernissi makes an all-encompassing argument for the power of Islamic women, discounting the Western idea that Islamic women are inherently more oppressed than their Western counterparts. Mernissi goes as far as to say that the need to be smaller than a size six in Western culture is no different than wearing the veil in Eastern cultures, making it clear that there is work to be done on both sides of the globe.

Fatema Mernissi is an Islamic feminist and scholar of Islam, the Koran, and sociology. Born in Fez, Morocco, she was raised in the harem of her paternal grandmother, where she grew up alongside other female servants and relatives. After leaving her family home, she studied at various French secondary schools and attended college at the Sorbonne in Paris. She became a prominent scholar of the relationship between Islam and women from the ancient to modern day. She has done a huge amount of work on the study of harems, and Islamic women in public and private spheres. Her first book, Behind the Veil, brought her international attention in the 1970s and 1980s when it was first published and translated in Europe and the United States. It is now considered a classic in anthropology and the study of Islam. She has also published The Veil and the Male Elite and a memoir on her girlhood in Morocco living in a harem, along with a large number of scholarly texts that haven't been translated from the original French.