The Representation of Muslim Women in Renaissance England

Matar, Nabil I

doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1996.tb03631.x

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Bullock (2002: 20) emphasizes that such notions regarding the harem were part of an anti-Islam politics as exported by the Western quarters to the rest of the world. Similarly, Matar (2005: 142) establishes that the English socio-cultural discourse is distanced from the Muslim reality as it conceives the truth of the Muslim woman modeled on utopia. This is how they become inaccessible and “women of nowhere” for the Christian English viewers.…”

Section: The Institution Of Haremmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Accordingly, the writings of Paul Rycaut, the Consul of Smyrna, greatly shaped the perception of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th-century England. As Matar (2005) quotes Rycaut,European medieval and contemporary romances with their image of an apotheosized woman pursued by a multitude of desperate men happily gave way in the Ottoman dominion to numerous women awaiting the pleasure of a single man. The “Romance” idea of the woman imposing her will in the Christendom was satisfactorily off-balanced for Rycaut by the harem women most of whom had no will at all.…”

Section: The Institution Of Haremmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Empowerment through disempowerment: Harem and the covert female resistance in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

Ishaque

2018

Cultural Dynamics

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This article probes the dynamics of covert female resistance as evident in Fatima Mernissi’s only fiction work entitled Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood (1994). Mernissi’s memoir is a real account of her early childhood spent in a harem. The discussion explores the institution of the harem in terms of how it is believed to have disempowered/empowered its female inhabitants through history. With this in mind, it takes up a number of issues that surface in Fatima’s (Mernissi’s narrator in Dreams of Trespass) narrative, and which stand central to women’s situation in the harem of Fez. These include confinement and denial to spatial freedom to them, women’s desire to gain literacy and thus become intellectually enlightened, the potential of dreams, and one’s personal strength in transgressing the normative boundaries, and finally polygamy in the harem. The article argues how women’s disempowerment, designed by the patriarchal scheme of the harem life, ironically empowers them in specific ways. This view challenges the orientalist appropriations in relation to the female inhabitants of the place who are historically believed to be passive receivers of traditional patriarchy.

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Section: The Institution Of Haremmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Institution Of Haremmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empowerment through disempowerment: Harem and the covert female resistance in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

Ishaque

2018

Cultural Dynamics

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“…Only a tiny minority of Western traveler writers have presented a sympathetic depiction of their Oriental female travelees. For instance, according to Nabil Matar (1996), Western travelers in the Renaissance praised Oriental [Muslim] women for their "reticence, obedience, frugality, modest apparel and behavior" (p.61). Likewise, Lady Montagu, the wife of British diplomat in Turkey in the eighteenth century does not view the veil of Islamic women as the sign of their oppression.…”

Section: Representation Of Oriental Female Traveleesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Representation of Oriental Travelees and Locus in Jurgen Wasim Frembgen’s Travelogue: The Closed Valley: With Fierce Friends in Pakistani Himalays

Gholi

2016

Int. J. Appl. Linguist. Engl. Lit.

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The oft despised and ignored genre of travel writing was recognized as worthy of scholarly investigation in 1970s thanks to Edward Said’s Orientalism, the wave of deconstructionism, and postcolonialism (Calzati, 2015). For these scholars, travel writers do not present a transparent window to an alien space and its residents even though they normally claim it. For them the representation of the traveled terrain and travelees is an ideological construction which is tainted with the travel writer’s ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ and crafted through fictional devices. In this regard, by drawing on postcolonial methodology, the current study seeks to evince how Frembgen in his travelogue, The Closed Valley: With Fierce Friends in Pakistani Himalayas which narrates his voyage to Harban, a far-flung mountainous region in Pakistan Himalaya, reproduces the pitfalls of previous Western travel writers when he depicts his destination and travelees in negative terms. From his perspective, his timeless traveled locus is rife with violence, yet a space to escape from dehumanizing ambience of the West. Additionally, for him the women in this tribal region are tyrannized by husbands and victimized by Muslim extremists. Last but not least, he portrays this remote oriental space as an object of curiosity which needs to be salvaged textually. Keywords: Travel Writing, Timeless, Escape, Women, Violence, Curiosity

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“…Thus, it is possible to assert that the representation of Hurrem Sultan in those non-canonical male-authored seventeenth-century English plays deconstructs particular images of passive, sexually permissive, and decadent Eastern women image. In this regard, recent scholarly reevaluation of Eastern women provides a framework that challenges West's historical domination of the East and the particular Western discourse on Eastern women (Peirce, 1993;Matar, 1996;Kahf, 1999;Andrea, 2008;Yermolenko, 2010). The recent evaluations, hence, turn the attention to the women of the Sultanate who exerted an extraordinary influence on the central Ottoman government and international diplomacy especially in the sixteenth century (Peirce, 1993, p. vii).…”

Section: Introduction *mentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Greatest Empresse of the East”: Hurrem Sultan in English Restoration Drama

Gülter¹

2021

LITERA

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The interest in Ottoman court, history, and harem was on the rise in the aftermath of the Restoration of English monarchy. The Ottoman harem, especially, provided a fertile ground for the English playwrights. Thus, this study aims to analyze the representation of Hurrem Sultan who is regarded as one of the most prominent Sultanate women in Ottoman history in William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1663), Roger Boyle's The Tragedy of Mustapha (1668), and Elkanah Settle's Ibrahim, the Illustrious Bassa (1676). In those plays which deal with Sultan Suleyman's reign, English playwrights rewrite the siege of Rhodes, the death of Sehzade Mustapha, and the relationship between Sultan Suleyman and Ibrahim Pasha in a new dramatical context with a special emphasis on powerful Hurrem Sultan image. By taking a critical look at the representations of Eastern women in Orientalist discourse, this article covers arguments ranging from the Western representations of the harem to Ottoman women sovereignty in the sixteenth century. The common ground which the selected plays share is that there appears a powerful woman of Sultanate image as this study intends to explore. In this context, the present study indicates that the representation of Hurrem Sultan in selected Restoration period plays which depict her both as a powerful Eastern Empress and as an important political actor challenges the particular image of passive, sexually permissive and decadent Eastern woman embedded in other Western representations of the harem.

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The Representation of Muslim Women in Renaissance England

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Empowerment through disempowerment: Harem and the covert female resistance in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

Empowerment through disempowerment: Harem and the covert female resistance in Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

Representation of Oriental Travelees and Locus in Jurgen Wasim Frembgen’s Travelogue: The Closed Valley: With Fierce Friends in Pakistani Himalays

“The Greatest Empresse of the East”: Hurrem Sultan in English Restoration Drama

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