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Reading—and Enjoying—“Wiles of Women” Stories as a Feminist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Afsaneh Najmabadi
Afsaneh Najmabadi*
Affiliation:
Barnard College, Columbia University
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Extract

In a Beautiful Essay, Titled “Justify My Love,” Daniel Boyarin writes, “From almost the first sentence in my first preparatory course in reading the Talmud, I was charmed—in the full antique sense of the word.” So much so that he did not notice that “they [the characters central to the Talmudic narratives] were all men, or that the texts were primarily addressed to me just because I was a Jewish man. I failed to see the exclusions and oppressions that those facts encode and mystify.” Gradually, feminist awareness of these oppressions and exclusions, Boyarin explains, made his life disturbing and untenable, eventually producing a new endeavor, which he calls “to justify my love, that is, both to explain it and to make it just.”

The dilemmas eloquently written about in this essay are in many ways those I have navigated since, as a teenager, I fell in love with the seduction-temptation episode in the Joseph/Yusuf story.

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Articles
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Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 2: The Uses of Guile: Literary and Historical Moments , Spring 1999 , pp. 203 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

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References

1. An earlier version of this essay benefited greatly from comments and criticism in my graduate seminar on “Gender and Sexuality in Islamicate Cultures,” Columbia University, spring 1998. My thanks to Aneesa Sen, Judy Chen, Alessandra Ciucci, and Elisabeth Eaves. This paper was first presented at the Second Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies Conference, May 22-24, 1998, where I received invaluable comments and criticism. I wish to thank Jerome Clinton, Kathryn Babayan, Farzaneh Milani, Dick Davis, and Margaret Mills. Finally, my very special thanks to Houman Sarshar for numerous productive provocations.

2. Boyarin, Daniel “Justify My Love,” in Judaism Since Gender, ed. Peskowitz, Miriam and Levitt, Laura (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131-37.Google Scholar The quotes are from pages 131—32. Emphasis is in the original.

3. Karen Merguerian and I analyze these transformations and constitutive works of the episode in “Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story’?” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29 (1997): 485-508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. The term “Islamicate” was introduced by Marshall G. S. Hodgson. Whereas “Islamic,” he suggested, would be used to refer to ‘“of or pertaining to’ Islam in the proper, the religious, sense, … ‘Islamicate’ would refer not directly to the religion, Islam, itself, but to the social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.” Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis in original.

5. Dick Davis, correspondence with author, 9 November 1997.

6. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, Eve Sedgwick analyzes “erotic triangles” within English literary texts. Expanding on the work of René Girard, she argues that in the triangles with two males rivaling for one female, the homosocial bond between males is constructed through the “trafficking” female figure. My argument is deeply indebted to this work. I am here looking both at a triangle within a text, and at a phantasmic triangle constructed between a male reader, Yusuf (standing for a desired male), and the figure of Zulaykha. Several Sedgwickian triangles exist within the text of the Joseph story as well: between Yusuf, ˓Aziz of Egypt, and Zulaykha—is ˓Aziz angry at Zulaykha for betraying him or for coming between him and Yusuf?; between Yusuf, God, and Zulaykha; and perhaps even between Yusuf, his father, and Zulaykha. For a female reader, a different kind of Sedgwickian triangle becomes constructed between her, Zulaykha, and Yusuf: Through the heteroerotic rivalry for Yusuf that the story evokes, a homosocial bond between them becomes formed—similar to the homosocial bond constructed within the text of the story between Zulaykha and “women of the town.” I am grateful to Houman Sarshar for opening up these questions through numerous delightful conversations. As he observed, the Joseph story is clearly very rich in queer readings, which are beyond the scope of the present paper.

7. See in this connection de Lauretis, Teresa Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 103-57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 5, “Desire in Narrative.”

8. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn”t, 136-37.

9. Similar questions arise about women's folktales, narrated by women for women's entertainment and pleasure, in which women are reprehensible or stupid figures. Some of these stories are now being collected and transcribed into written form. See Qiṣṣah-ha-yi mashdī Galīn Khānum, collected by Elwell-Sutton, L. P. ed. Marzolph, Ulrich Amirhosseini-Nithammer, Azar and Vakilian, Sayyid Ahmad (Tehran: Nashr-i markaz, 1995).Google Scholar For a collection of similar Tunisian tales, see Hejaiej, Monia Behind Closed Doors: Women's Oral Narratives in Tunis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996).Google Scholar Many of these tales are wiles-of-women stories.

10. Brooks, Peter Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1984), 283.Google Scholar

11. See Muhammad Ja˓far Mahjub “Adabiyāt-i dāstānī-yi ˓āmyānah va ta˒īr-i ān bar adabiyāt-i dāstānī-yi kūdakān,” Kiyān 4, no. 21 (September/October 1994): 60-65.Google Scholar Sattari, Jalal Afsūn-i Shahrzād: pazhūhishī dar hazār afsān (Tehran: Tus, 1989).Google Scholar Mazdapur, Katayun Ravāyāt-i dīgar az dāstān-i Dalīlah-yi muḥtālah va makr-i zanān (Tehran: Rawshangaran: 1995).Google Scholar

12. In this paper, I propose to resist such reality-effect arguments not because there is never any truth in them, but because calls for reality referentiality in this strict sense, that is, a referentiality premised on transparency of representation, have often worked (and continue to work in the field of Persian literary studies) to block other reading possibilities. They work as brakes, as stop signs, as no-entry road blocks, delimiting where we are allowed to head interpretively, guiding us but to one straight path. The moment one raises other reading possibilities, the repeated question is invoked: “But don't you think there is some real truth in these stories? Are you denying that some women in fact used guile? Isn't it socially probable that where elderly men married young brides, many a son and a young bride/stepmother were in erotically charged situations?” One could of course deal with these challenges by simply answering “yes, but.” Already, however, the question has done its work; it has cautioned us against exploring other interpretive paths, to the interpretive “elsewhere” where work may unearth cultural sedimentations beyond the referential reality proclaimed. The cautionary questions work to slow, if not stop, the archaeological work, or at least cast doubt on their plausibility. It is for this reason that I have chosen to resist these calls in the present paper.

13. See Scott, Joan Wallach “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Pollock, Griselda Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 6.Google Scholar

15. Mulvey, Laura Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xiii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Bal, Mieke Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10.Google Scholar

17. I want to emphasize the nature of my endeavor: The interpretations that I offer of wiles of women stories in this essay, I do not claim as the sole meanings offered by these texts; nor do I claim them as a better, much less more scientific or authentic, interpretation than other readings of the same works. I offer them as a reading possibility that within the larger Islamicate cultural world may open up one layer of meaning sedimented in the works under discussion. For, literary texts are sedimentation of layers of meaning. So my venture into this literary genre is more akin to that of an archaeologist who uncovers one particular layer of artifacts and from that level of sedimentation speculates a possible world of social meaning. It is a work of speculation.

18. As previously noted in the case of the Joseph story, the narrative work of this female heterosexual desire is to produce homosexual desire between the male reader and the male object of desire. In some tales this narrative work is evident in explicit use of descriptive categories drawn from male homoeroticism, such as describing the male object of desire of the female protagonist as a youth with a hint of recently growing mustache (javan-i nawkhat), or even more explicitly as a beautiful young desired male (amrad-i bājamāl]. See, for instance, the fifth story in the Sandbādnāmah cycle in Muhammad ibn Ali Zahiri Samarqandi, Kitāb-i Sandbādnāmah, ed. Ja˓far Shi˓ar (Tehran: Khavar and Ibn Sina, 1954), 50.Google Scholar

19. Malti-Douglas, Fedwa “Shahrazad feminist,” in The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic literature and society, ed. Hovannisian, Richard G. Sabagh, George and Malti-Douglas, Fedwa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40-55.Google Scholar

20. Rich, Adrienne “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” reprinted in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Henry Barale, Michèle Aina and Halperin, David M. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227-54.Google Scholar Quote from page 236. For a feminist critical reading of the notion of female sexual insatiability in Islamicate cultures, see Sabbah, Fatna Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

21. Bouhdiba suggests the Jawdar story from The Thousand and One Nights as the cultural equivant for Arabo-Islamic culture of the Oedipus story. See Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab “The Child and the Mother in Arab-Muslim Society,” in Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies, ed. Carl Brown, L. and Itzkowitz, Norman (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1977), 126-141Google Scholar, and idem, Sexuality in Islam, tr. Sheridan, Alan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 225-30.Google Scholar Here I am suggesting that similar work is not done by any one story but by the whole genre of stories that are centered on the themes of woman's insatiable heterosexuality and guile, to which man is forever subjected and from which he perpetually needs to escape. As much as to the plot, I want to draw attention to the effect of repetition of plot in so many stories that circulate in a culture.

22. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, 145.

23. For European observations about kinship relations and child-rearing practices in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Iran, see Serena, Carla Hommes et Choses en Perse (Paris, 1883)Google Scholar, De Lorey, Eustache and Sladen, Douglas Queer Things About Persia (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907)Google Scholar, Hume-Griffith, M. E. Behind the Veil in Persian and Turkish Arabia (London: Seeley and Co., 1909)Google Scholar, Sykes, Ella C. Persia and Its People (London: Methuen & Co., 1910).Google Scholar For more recent surveys, see Friedl, Erika “Child Rearing in Modern Persia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Yarshater, Ehsan (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1992), 412—416Google Scholar, Friedl, Erika Children of Deh Koh: Young Life in an Iranian Village (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Warnock Fernea, Elizabeth ed., Children in the Muslim Middle East (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).Google Scholar

24. See Islami Nudushan, Muhammad Ali Rūz-hā (Tehran, 1984), vol. 1Google Scholar. Islami Nudushan, for instance, stopped going to the bath with his mother around the age of eight, while he continued to go to the women's section of the mosque for a number of years and shared a bed with his mother. He would also be allowed to attend the women's section of weddings and socialize with women in summer outings until he was almost fourteen.

25. For one fictive account, see Ja˓far Shahri Shakar-i talkh (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1968), 302-8.Google Scholar

26. Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, 168Google Scholar. The Tunisian/French movie “Halfaouine, Boy of the Terrace” (Ferid Boughedir, 1990)Google Scholar also powerfully depicts a young boy's conflicting desires of wanting to become “a man” and yet not wanting to leave the pleasure of going to the bath with his mother. See also Mahfouz's, Naguib Palace Walk, tr. Hutchins, William M. and Kenny, Olive E. (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 67-69Google Scholar, for the son's memory of expulsion from his mother's bed. I would like to thank Rachel Goldenberg for bringing this passage to my attention. See also Cooke, Miriam “Naguib Mahfouz, Men, and the Egyptian Underworld,” in Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, ed. Murphy, Peter F. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 96-120.Google Scholar For a discussion of some of these issues within a contemporary Egyptian context, see Hatem, Mervat “Toward the Study of the Psychodynamics of Mothering and Gender in Egyptian Families,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19, no. 3 (August 1987): 287-306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Bouhdiba, “The Child and the Mother.” For a discussion of some of these issues within the context of modern masculinities, see Kandiyoti, Deniz “The Paradoxes of Masculinity: Some Thoughts on Segregated Societies,” chapter 12 in Cornwall, Andrea and Lindisfarne, Nancy Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London: Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar

27. See “The Queen of the island of Waq-waq enthroned with her naked women courtiers,” (Isfahan, A.D. 1632)Google Scholar, reproduced in Robinson, B. W. Persian Paintings in the John Rylands Library (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1980), 302.Google Scholar For other scenes of imaginary naked female creatures, see ibid, 76, “Iskandar Sultan peeping at the sirens as they sport by a lake,” and female tree dwellers from Qazvini's ˓Ajā˒b al-Makhlūqāt, in Gray, Basil Persian Painting (Skira, 1961), 150Google Scholar; see also “Iskandar and the Sirens,” in Colnaghi's catalogue of Persian and Mughal Art, 108, plate 14xxi and “Ladies’ Bath” (˓Abd al-Razzaq, 1850) in the same catalogue, 163, plate 79. That the women's bath remains a site of “primal fantasy” is confirmed by the poetry that frames the Ladies’ Bath. The verses are addressed to “O you who have not seen beauty/ except for when you look into the mirror” and sing praise of the beloved as a cypress-stature body with “grass in the middle,” her hennaed hands and feet analogizing her to the sun. Though the poet and the painter would have seen the bath scene only as a son, he envisages it now as an adult man. Having gone to the hammām with his mother, he now reenters it in the realm of poetic and visual fantasy as a lover imagining his beloved there. In fact it seems that most Persian paintings of naked females depict groups of naked women, reminiscent of the women's bath, rather than individual women. See Hamdy, Nimat Allam “The Development of Nude Female Drawing in Persian Islamic Painting,” in Akten des VII. Internationalen Kongresses für Iranische Kunst und Archäologie, München, 7.-10. September 1976 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1979), 430-38.Google Scholar The one famous exception is Khusraw's sighting of Shirin, from Nizami's Khusraw wa Shīrīn, yet she is also bathing in this scene, often alone, but sometimes accompanied by her maids. The popularity of depiction of this scene perhaps speaks to the same desire: of peeping back in fantasy into the world of naked bathing female flesh. In other words, the voyeuristic vision that determined the original narrative of the verbal text also determines the popularity of the subject in painting. See Farzaneh Milani's essay in this issue.

28. See Mernissi, Fatima Women in Moslem Paradise (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986).Google Scholar One may even be tempted to see the male prerogative and desire to create a domestic space populated by numerous wives and concubines as an attempt to reenact in later years the memory of the all-female world to which the sole male patriarch has the exclusive right to enter.

29. Bouhdiba, “The Child and the Mother,” 131.Google Scholar

30. Bouhdiba, “The Child and the Mother,” 133.Google Scholar

31. On this issue, see Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Zanī būd, Zanī nabūd: bāzkhwānī-i Vujūb-i niqāb va Mafāsid-i sufūr,” in Nimeye Digar 14 (Spring 1991): 77-110. See also Milani, Farzaneh Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 24-26Google Scholar; Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, 37-39; and Mernissi, Fatima Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1975), 83.Google Scholar

32. See Mahmud, Sayyid ‘Alavi Tabrizi, al-Ḥijāb va'l-Islām (Mashhad: Firuzian, 1956)Google Scholar; Mutahhari, Murtaza Mas˒alah-yi ḥijāb (Qum: Sadra, n.d.), 164-66.Google Scholar In a related move these rules embrace the entirety of a woman's body as the potential site for inciting disorder and that upon which a man is forbidden to set eye. See in this connection Fatna Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious.

33. See also Farzaneh Milani's essay in this issue. One could argue that the popular belief that sighting the genitals of a woman may cause blindness is also a related fear of transgression of the rules of looking.

34. For boys as “transitional beings,” in yet another cultural context, see Herdt, Gilbert H. The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1987).Google Scholar

35. On the complicity between the son and the mother, both excluded from the world of men, and the value of this relationship to the mother—the son acting as “a precious antenna,” as messenger, as an agent of mother in the world of father—see Bouhdiba, “The Child and the Mother,” 132.

36. Bouhdiba, “The Child and the Mother, 130.Google Scholar

37. I am not discussing here the fact of rape and its consequences on development of the adolescents in this context. This is not to deny the reality of rape, or mark it “only” as a fear.

38. It is tempting to conclude that it is this fear of a lapse into the world of the mother that also informs the marking as effeminate of an adult man who refuses heterosexuality. In this sense, homophobia within the world of men can be considered as a fear of collective lapse. Thus the flight from women becomes productive of misogyny and homophobia simultaneously.

39. See Malti-Douglas, Woman's Body, Woman's Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

40. For “the heteronormativizing power of Oedipus,” see Boyarin, Daniel Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 211-12.Google Scholar

41. By focusing on the role of guiles-of-women stories in the production of Iranian masculinity, I do not mean to suggest that these stories are the only site, or even a privileged site, for that production. The production of Iranian masculinity takes place through many cultural domains and sites of performance, literary and otherwise, the study of which is not the purpose of my work. Kaveh Safa-Isfahani has been working on this topic for many years and I eagerly look forward to seeing his work. My focus is on the production of the beguiling woman as a cultural fiction, the work that this production performs, and what makes this cultural work possible.

42. See Malti-Douglas, Woman's Body, Woman's Word.

43. Clinton, Jerome W. “Madness and Cure in the Thousand and One Nights,” in Bottigheiner, Ruth B. ed., Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1986), 35-51.Google Scholar

44. See, in this connection, Malti-Douglas, “Shahrazad feminist.” See also Milani, Veils and Words, 178-80.

45. See Clinton, Jerome W. “Joseph, Yusuf, Siyavosh: Reflections on the Chaste Youth as Culture Hero,” in Edebiyāt 1. no. 1 (1987): 90-102.Google Scholar

46. On futuwat/futuwwa, see Cahen, Cl. and Taeschner, Fr. “Futuwwa,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1965), vol. 3, 961-69.Google Scholar

47. The expressions for these punishments continue to be used for marking transgressively shameful behavior, especially for women, in today's Persian: gīs-burīdah, a woman with cut-off hair; rū-siyāh, a person with a charred/shamed face; rusvā-yi kūy va khiyābān, someone whose dishonor is of street fame.

48. With this shift, the prohibition on women reading Sura Yusuf can take an additional meaning: it becomes not so much motivated by men's fear that the story would make women do what Zulaykha had done. Rather, it becomes expressive of men's fear of women peeking into the domain of their fantasies!

49. Writing about popular Persian tales, Mahjub explains that he first came to know of them by listening as a child to a neighbor of his, “an illiterate superstitious woman who liked these stories a great deal … knew them in all their detail, … and would narrate them at great length for her audience (composed of other idle and illiterate women of the neighborhood, not few in number).” Muhammad Ja˓far Mahjub, “Dāstānhā-yi ˓āmyānah-yi Fārsī,” Sukhan 10, no. 1 (March 1959): 64—68. The quote is from page 64. For some recently published compilations of women-narrated tales, see footnote 9 above. A fuller textual analysis of these types of tales—that often strike us as deeply misogynous on first reading—and psychoanalytically-informed interpretations that would unfold the various kinds of work they perform for female audiences is a project beyond the scope of the present paper.

50. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, 141.Google Scholar

51. As one Wall Street Journal reader had once pointed out. See Merguerian and Najmabadi, “Yusuf and Zulaykha,” for discussion of this letter.

52. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, 144.Google Scholar

53. Modleski, Tania Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1982), 14.Google Scholar

54. Despite the central importance of this event in a woman's life, the moment of her passage from virgin girlhood into wifely womanhood, there has been little research on it. Farzaneh Milani is currently working on representations of the wedding night (shab-i zufāf) in Persian literature.

55. In a modern context, Casey Williamson, reading through Foucault's concept of heterotopia, has argued that Parsipur constructs such a space in the Karaj garden for “women without men.” In this case, however, the construction of “the other space” is accomplished through the women each leaving their respective domestic spaces, venturing into public arenas of work, roads, and eventually another city, before they reconstitute their heterotopia within the closed walls of a garden, though with the crucial help of a male gardener. See Casey Rose Williamson, “Zamān, makān, fażā, va farhang dar Zanān bidūn-i mardān” (“Time, Place, Space, and Culture in Women Without Men”), 68-86 in Nimeye Digar 2, no. 4 (Spring 1998). For Foucault's observations, see Foucault, Michel “Of Other Spaces,” diacritics 16.1 (spring 1986): 22-27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56. For an alternative insightful reading of this episode, see Clinton, “Madness and Cure,” 39.

57. Phelps, Ethel Johnston “Scheherezade Retold,” in idem, The Maid of the North: Feminist Folk Tales from Around the World (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), 167-73.Google Scholar The quote is from page 173.

58. See in this connection Bouhdiba, “The Child and the Mother,” 137.