ABSTRACT
Almost certainly, the question of women and their social role excites the curiosity and elicits the condemnation of a western audience more easily than any other issue concerning Islam and Islamic societies. Any honest discussion of the question should begin with this admission, and with an attempt to uncover the roots of the fascination and the revulsion which grip so many western observers of the Islamic world. A good deal of the western fascination is of a prurient nature. The Orientalist tradition in art, literature, perhaps even music (if one thinks, for example, of Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic meditation on the heroine of the Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade) is obsessed with the female image. This image, as reflected in artifacts of western culture, is by no means uniform, but one of its most salient features is the presumed voluptuousness of the eastern woman. The paintings of the French painter Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904), for example, are replete with depictions of sensual odalisques cavorting in erotic splendor or nude slave girls being probed and examined by lascivious prospective owners. To be sure, there is plenty in Near Eastern cultural traditions to fan the flames of this fire: the Thousand and One Nights itself is a treasure trove of erotic stories, many of them based on the assumption that women are possessed of an insatiable sexual appetite. But the way in which westerners have studied and understood Near Eastern societies and cultures has highlighted and accentuated these elements: one need only think, for example, of the Orientalist and adventurer Sir Richard Burton, whose English edition of the Thousand and One Nights certainly reveled in the work's sexual themes, and who also sought out and translated erotica ranging from the famous Sanskrit work, the Kama Sutra, to a sixteenth-century Arabic treatise on sexuality, The Perfumed Garden.
