A History of Women’s Seclusion in the Middle East: the Veil in the Looking Glass

Ann Chamberlin dedicated A History of Women’s Seclusion in the Middle East: The Veil in the Looking Glass to Umm Ismail:

“I never saw her face, […] nor could I […] understand a word she spoke. […] Yet, her quiet confidence […] and the obvious reverence in which she was held by husband, children, friends, and neighbors knocked the flimsy supports out from my brash Western feminism, sending it into a free fall which finally came to rest in this book.”

Harems have an ignoble opinion in the West although they have also been romanticized. Mostly what we know is that we don’t know. The separation between male and female spheres of life puzzles us along with its economic feasibility to men in the Middle East who have provided for female members of their families and strangers in the harems without any marital advantages sometimes as opposed to ceding that responsibility to a state which could rarely match their generosity.

Ann Chamberlin majored in Archeology of the Middle East, traveled to Israel, North Africa, Turkey and Jordan. She wrote nine historical novels and is a renowned playwright. She is an American, a wife and a mother.

She has compiled information from pre-recorded and historical sources on women’s harems in the Middle East. From archaeological excavations through cave paintings to literary sources and architectural blueprints she has combed through available sources yet did not find much to describe the harem (from “haram” for “sacred” mostly) in more detail except for “there is never any sense, as clings to our Western use of the word, of prison. It is sanctuary, holy, inviolable, not crushed and dominated.”

Ann Chamberlin gathered and reviewed an impressive body of available knowledge and arrived at a conclusion that although not much is preserved historically or open to research to outsiders it seems that the pattern of seclusion might not be oppressive as many have suggested. On the contrary: the seclusion might be empowering.

In the absence of sources this book steers away from the Middle East considerably to look at the human history in general and the movement of humans away from their communities into the industrial centers and the negative results of severing the ties with the community of origin and the difficulties of raising children without the support of a group such as an established community or an extended family.

There are other academic works on the Middle East such as either Jewish Mind or Arab Mind by Raphael Patai, a Hungarian Jew who spoke several Middle Eastern languages and remains a top notch expert in the field. He enriched his theoretical knowledge through real life experience. He was friends with many Jews and Arabs and visited Middle East.