CHERYL BENARD
277
awful husband, one had to spend a lot more time with him than one
would in the East.
2
Elizabeth Cooper, who visited villages and hospitals all over
the Islamic world around the turn of this century, had a much more
encompassing view. She was distressed at the practices she encoun–
tered, including female infanticide, forced marriages, and abandoned
divorcees, but did not want the readers of her book,
The Harem and
the
Purdah,
to think her a feminist:
"If
the Western woman comes . .. with the fair gifts of intellectual
advancement and broadened life, her Eastern sister presents the
even more precious charms of obedience, modesty and loyalty
which are the priceless jewels in the crown of the world's woman–
hood."
The opposite mix of ambivalence was more common: to ad–
mire everything about the East
except
the subordination of women.
Isabel Arundel was ecstatic when her husband, the diplomat and ad–
venturer Richard Burton, was posted to the Mideast. She wore Ori–
ental clothing, furnished her home in the Oriental style, and would
in later years outrage her neighbors in the English countryside by
burying her husband in an Arab-style tomb. At the same time, Isabel
was not the sort of person to be content with the Victorian ideal of
femininity, much less the Arab one. In her home in Syria, she forced
Arab guests to sit on chairs and serve tea and cakes to their wives, an
educational effort that led to a rapid decline in the numbers of her
Arab visitors. But on the whole, Isabel, like most women of this
earlier period, found their visit to be so exciting and exotic that
judgement was suspended in the light of the overwhelming strange–
ness of their adventure.
In the 1970s,. the emerging "anthropology of women" moved
into the discipline and went out into the field with all the elan and
critical energy of the women's movement of that time, to which it
considered itself affiliated. Existing theoretical models were exam–
ined, their bias exposed; methodological approaches were devised that
would better register the perceptions and experiences of traditional
women; empirical data and explanatory frameworks that seemed to
2. Quoted
in
Women in Islam
by
Naila Minai, N.Y. 1981, p. 45 .
