Unveiling the Harem: Elite Women and the Paradox of Seclusion in Eighteenth-Century Cairo

10. Epilogue

258 Epilogue European male travelers to Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries connected the harem and veiling to the almost complete subjugation of women under Islam. European male travelers routinely degraded Egyptian harem women in their writings as submissive, not particularly beautiful, rather simple-minded, childlike, and bored with their confinement. For these travelers, who knew very little about Islam and had almost certainly never been inside an elite home, the harem and veiling were evidence of the superiority of Western civilization where women were not shut away in harems. The Comte de Volney, who visited Egypt and Syria between 1783 and 1785, attributed what he considered the miserable condition of women to Muhammad and the Qur’an for not doing women the honor of treating them as part of the human species. He also claimed, incorrectly, that the government deprived women of all property and personal liberty and made them dependent on a husband or father, a situation that he described as slavery.1 It was not uncommon for male travel writers in the eighteenth century to describe Mamluk women as slaves or captives of lascivious men, women who were valued only for their sexuality and beauty. C. S. Sonnini, who visited Egypt between 1777 and 1778, described the women of the Mamluks as “[p]erpetually recluse, or going out but seldom , and always with a veil, or, to speak more correctly, with a mask which entirely covers their face . . . And for whom are so many charms thus carefully preserved: For one man alone, for a tyrant who holds them in captivity.”2 Writers like the Comte de Volney and Sonnini, while astute observers of their surroundings, knew very little about Islam or about Mamluk Epilogue • 259 family life and almost certainly had never been invited into a Mamluk home or into a harem. Nevertheless they wrote with certainty about the miserable condition of Mamluk women whose low status they attributed to their seclusion in the harem and to the oppression of Islam. As Edward Said argued, the construction of knowledge about the Orient was based on the dichotomy between the Western self and the Eastern other and the alleged superiority of Western civilization and Christianity to the civilizations of the East and of Islam.3 Stuart Hall, the cultural studies theorist, said in his lecture “Race: The Floating Signifier” that society creates meaning through classification and that the classification of difference is linked to power.4 Western civilization was part of a system of classi fication created in the West that relegated Islam as a religion and Eastern civilization to a position of inferiority. To a great extent, the inferiority of Eastern cultures was represented by their women, who were at once the cause and the effect of the decline and decay of the indigenous civilization. Characteristics that were attributed by Western observers to harem women were extended to include all women, and those images or representations were highly sexualized. However, we have the theoretical tools and archival evidence to dismantle the Orientalist representations of travelers and writers of two centuries ago. We can begin by acknowledging that the social practices of seclusion and veiling do not have a fixed and universal meaning that transcends time and place. Rather we should understand them as socially constructed practices whose meaning is embedded in the history, culture, politics, and gender system of any given historical period and that change over time. The harem and veiling were not the sole determinants of women ’s status and the meaning of these practices was not fixed or permanent but relational and subject to change. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a comparison of two harem women, Nafisa al-Bayda, whose life spanned the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Huda Sha‘rawi, who was born in the late nineteenth century and died in the twentieth. Both grew up in large extended households that practiced polygamy and concubinage; both belonged to the elite in their particular time periods, lived in harems, veiled when they left their homes, and attained status, influence, and even power within their households and in the wider society. 260 • Epilogue Nafisa ended her days in 1816 in Cairo as a harem woman who had acted to aid her husband, Murad Bey, in his ultimately futile fight against the French occupying forces to return the Mamluks to power. It seems...