106 The Harem and Seraglio

According to Fatima Mernissi the Moroccan Muslim feminist there are two distinct kinds of Harems: the Harem where the wives and concubines of one man lived and the Harem were the extended family of a patriarch lived. In ‘Dreams of Trespass, tales from a Harem childhood’ Mernissi as a young girl constantly tries to define the concept of Harem. One definition was: a safe space for women where everything was kept out that was ‘Haram’ or bad. Another definition was that women who according to male perception were cause of all disorder (Fitna) had to be kept hidden away from the world. The most famous, politically savvy and enduring Harem, the one that inspired horny western painters in the nineteenth century like Ingres and Delacroix, was the Harem of the Ottoman Sultans in Istanbul the Seraglio in the Topkapi Palace. It is said that the Ottomans were for a century or more looking from the other side of the Bosporus jealously at the fabulous city of Constantinople with its visible domes and invisible royal ‘Seraglio’. The women of the Christian Byzantine ‘Seraglio’ were not allowed out at all and if they for some reason had to go out they had to be heavily veiled and accompanied by armed eunuchs. Western writers criticize the 12th century Byzantine biographer Anna Comnena as being terrible vague on locations, dates and battles. They obviously didn’t take into account the fact that she wouldn’t have had the necessary knowledge locked up as she was in the Seraglio of the palace. When Constantinople finally fell into the hands of the Ottomans in 1453 they introduced into their culture two things: Domes and ‘Seraglio’. Read all about it in: The Imperial Harem: women and sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire by Leslie P Pierce. However Harems were already introduced into the Muslim world during the Abbasid Califate (8th to 13th century). The drawing is of the White or Women’s Stronghold, the building that housed the Harem of Iligh.

104 Muslim women strike out

After The Koran, the life of Mohammed and the Hadith I went on to some Muslim philosophers, historians and the like. It was interesting stuff, but it couldn’t hold my interest till I got to the Islamic Feminists. Now that was something to get excited about. I’ve reached adulthood during the second feminist wave in the seventies. The feminism of the white, secular, educated middle classes some people called it and I think it was true. Although it didn’t feel that way when I was living it. This feministic wave petered out after some offending laws were changed and the ‘military industrial complex’ got hold of it, to express it brutally. Feminism became a dirty word once again. However it caught on in unlikely places and in different guises: with women of colour and with religiously inclined women. Ever since Modernism struck the Islamic World there have been women speaking out on misogyny in Islamic society. Among them were Nawal Al Saadawi from Egypt and Fatima Mernissi from Morocco. In the eighties with the hardening attitudes towards Islam and the heightening confusion and identity crisis within the male dominated Islamic World Muslim women also became stirred up. They wanted change but they wanted it on their own terms. They knew as no other that Islam has little to do with modern western thought. That said: they abandoned any notion that western feminism could help them. They felt they needed to go back to the essence of Islam to be able to make the leap forward. In academe they were initially supported by similar movements among Jewish and Christian women. But soon enough they were out on their own as Amina Wadud calls it fighting ‘Inside the Gender Jihad’.

94 The Geert Wilders Effect

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who heads a influential ‘single issue’ party in the Dutch parliament. His ‘single issue’ is ridding Europe and in particular The Netherlands of everything Islamic. As even he recognizes that it is democratically impossible, he attacks the religion relentlessly within the boundaries of the law and freedom of expression, but not within the boundaries of human decency. Among his proposals: to scrap article one of the Dutch constitution the non-discrimination principle, closing the borders for non-western immigrants and putting a moratorium on the opening of Islamic schools and mosques both for at least 5 years, a ban on foreign Imams and preaching in other languages but Dutch, that Muslims if they want to stay in The Netherlands are only allowed to read a censured version of the Koran and a tax of Euro 1000,- on the wearing of the Hidjab. He also likened the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, called the Prophet Mohammed a child molester and a pig, opinionated that ‘we’ are suffering from an invasion of ‘Islam’ which aim it is to transform The Netherlands into ‘Nederarabia’ a province of an Islamic super state Eurabia (this last remark is quite funny really). There are a lot of people who vote for him (his party is the second largest in parliament) because ‘he dares to say it instead of covering the ‘truth’ with soothing words and denials’. A majority of Dutch people believe in one way or the other that Islam forms a real thread against ‘our culture’. They believe that Islam is intrinsically violent and threatens our ‘freedom’ and our ‘democratic rights’. Is that really true? Does Islam stands for forced conversions, dictatorship, violence against women and the killing of anybody who isn’t a ‘true’ believer? I’d better find out and I finally took Dawood’s translation of the Koran from the shelf.

93 Dawood’s Penguin Koran

Through Pop Art I became interested in Islamic art. And I wasn’t the only one. In the sixties and seventies carloads of Islam related trinkets, posters and handicrafts of all kinds were brought back home by backpackers and other tourists. The bright colours of the prints and the decorative patterns of the Arabic script were viewed as prime examples of popular art. It was never meant to be ‘artistic’ but it had still a natural artistry. By now probably most of these ‘trophies’ have been thrown out with the trash or have disintegrated over time. As a souvenir from the era I still cherish a screen print ‘scored’ in Afghanistan of a drawing of a brightly coloured rose bush with the 99 names of Allah, carefully framed and hung next to a historic poster of the first Andy Warhol exhibition in Great Britain. But I didn’t leave it at that. In 1967 on my way to or from India I bought in Teheran or Kabul (I can’t remember) a Penguin paperback edition of the Koran translated by N.J.Dawood and published in 1956. At the time I did my utmost to read it but it was so full of admonitions that I quickly got put off. And anyway I was told that the ‘Qu’ran’ has to be read in Arabic. Otherwise you couldn’t get to the divine meaning of the text. As they told me: ‘There are many Bibles but there is only one Qu’ran.’ Meaning the Bible you can read in whatever translation, but the Koran you cannot. Was I really interested in reading a divine text be it Islamic or other? I don’t think so. It was the cultural effects the text had had on the believers I was interested in. Of that I got plenty of experience. In the end it took Geert Wilders for me to take Dawood’s Penguin translation from the bookshelf again.

91 Generalisations about Pop Art and Islamic Art

My first trips east left undoubtedly the most enduring impressions. I studied art in a time that ‘rationalisation’ was the most prominent feature in Western art. It permeated all levels of the prevalent culture. Being in art school I had the feeling that things were happening on a cultural level that were me. I was connected. Pop replaced figurative art. Numerical systems akin to cybernetics were dominating abstract art. In fashion simple lines and pret-a-porter transformed ‘Haute Couture’. In literature the French Nouvelle Vague concentrated on the cool description instead of emotion. Even in cinema the laws of storytelling were challenged by notions of ‘real life’. Pop culture seemed to do away with the ‘originality’ of individual expression. We were seeking the ‘common denominator’ and we were aiming for the ‘highest’ common denominator. By being ‘ordinary’ we hoped to become less ‘ego centric’ human beings. A lot of these ‘modern’ notions I found to my amazement back in Islamic Art. For me simply stated: ‘Islam’ was the popular culture of the Islamic world and the Koran was the ‘common denominator’. Calligraphy, numerology and mathematics that combine both in a ‘rational’ way were the artist’s tools of expression. This ‘rationalisation’ was used to conceptualize spirituality. For me the results were very much the same level as what I saw in the contemporary art of where I came from. The beauty of the mathematical patterns of shapes in all forms of calligraphy, architecture and crafts and its availability to all was totally ‘Pop’ to me. It opened up an interest in Islam.

90 Generalisations about the Islamic world and me

When in 1966 I made my first trip east hitchhiking, I was struck by the division in the Muslim world between the realm of men and of women. As a foreign traveller I would only meet men. Men peopled the street and kept shop, men talked to strangers and offered rides. It was a men’s world. It was not much different from what I was used to in my own country. Except that in my own country I as a woman was supposed to participate publicly in this state of affairs. In the Muslim world women didn’t have to participate or were not supposed to. I walked around in public spaces as a curiosity, a brazen anomaly: young, blond and foreign. Finally it was obvious to the whole world who I was: not fitting in. I felt comfortable with it. And just like at home it seemed difficult to reach out to women. However when I met women it was on their own terms and always without the meddlesome intervention of men. What a relief! At the time Muslim men seemed lost. They roamed the streets and they roamed in their heads. They didn’t seem to know who they were and what they were supposed to do to be themselves. On the international platform there was a Cold War going on with both the US and the USSR trying to convince the Muslim men their side was the one to follow to get the best, most and happiest. Popular culture was flown in from America and Europe and made them question their own culture. Pan-Arabism was urging them to become ‘modern’ or miss out. The Muslim men were cranky and unsure and were feeling more and more insecure. On the other hand this cultural, political and moral upheaval all passed by the majority of women. As they didn’t have to participate they could stay themselves and stayed comfortable in their own culture. In the West they tended to call Muslim women ‘backward’ but I loved their self-confidence and conviction. Something I lacked myself as a thoroughly modern girl.

89 Am I an ‘Orientalist’?

People often ask me if it is through Bert Hogervorst and her Flying Hippo travel organisation that I travelled sketching through the Middle East and Morocco. They are surprised when they hear that from the age of 19 I’ve travelled and even lived and worked in the nearby Islamic world. Ever since as a child I was read from the Thousands and One Nights (with illustrations of Rie Kramer), I’ve had a fascination for the ‘East’. One could call me an ‘Orientalist’. However Orientalism and the Orientalist does have a patronizing and disparaging connotation. Nineteenth century British and French male travellers come to mind. They were lured on by perverse fantasies of alluring, sex-crazed women locked up in Harems. They would use the excuse of ‘study’ to scan the place for colonial purposes and they would undertake expeditions solely to establish ‘scientifically’ their own and their religion’s superiority over the indigenous Islamic and Jewish population. I don’t know if I fall under that definition of an ‘Orientalist’. I’m an elderly woman from a European country and a Lesbian to boot and I don’t have the tendency to ‘go native’. Maybe that could make me a sexist with neo-colonial tendencies and feelings of moral superiority. The only thing that I know for sure about myself is that I’ve always felt myself at home and safe in most of the Islamic countries I visited. Paradoxically I was also spurred on by an exiting sense of the dangerous unknown like so many travellers before me.