Wives, odalisques, and ssighes

MOHAMMED ESSAD-BEY

Note.—During his visit to New York, last winter, Mohammed Essad-Bey was widely, and improperly, called Mr. Bey. (Bey is actually a Persian counterpart of the western tag, Esquire.) Otherwise, he was feted as the distinguished biographer of Mahomet, Czar Nicholas II, and Josef Stalin. In this article, Mohammed Essad unveils the mysteries of love and wedlock, as pursued in Persia, with cuff-note comparisons between Persian ways and ours. The article was translated by Paul Maerker Branden.

■ When I attended, for the first time, a series of divorce cases in the New York Supreme Court, I looked eagerly, being a Persian, for what I had been promised—a touch of my native Persian atmosphere. Of course it's really pretty silly to go round looking for bits of old Persia in New York, but I was simpler then than I am today. So far as the divorce cases went, I have the honor to report that I discovered only one instance of the authentic Persian touch: in every case the erring lady had been discovered, not merely in flagrante, but in pajamas as well. Pajamas—the good Persian pa-dshme, the "leg garment" of my native land!

Pleasant as it was to encounter this familiar garment in such intimate circumstances and in so far a country, it scarcely made the divorce proceedings any less alien to me. The American cadi, for example, after listening to an imposing array of witnesses, had paused impressively, and then announced "Decision reserved". "Reserved", indeed! I remembered the last time I had wandered through the bazaars of Teheran, Kermanshah, and Ispahan. Divorces in those places, like the poet's Chloe, are as common as the air. A venerable Mussulman, silent, inscrutable, squatting behind his low table, records the names of couples lined up before him, and looks and listens while man or woman, in the presence of a few bored spectators, loudly proclaims: "Si telak midehem"—I divorce you.

It's as simple as that. Nor are the reasons much more complicated. Too much sugar in the coffee, a word spoken too loud, a snore,—such are the grounds upon which a Persian husband may get rid of his wife. There are no hard feelings afterwards, no broken hearts, no lacerated nerves; nobody has spent any money, nobody is disillusioned. The pair go off and try their luck again.

Sometimes, of course—since Persian husbands pay a dowry for their wives—a man may reclaim the whole, or a part, of his purchase price. In fact, a well defined law provides for such emergencies, stipulating precisely to what extent the disappointed husband should be reimbursed: a snoring wife, for example, and rightly, keeps more of her dowry than a childless one. This is exactly the reverse of the American process; but then the American way has always seemed to me a very peculiar one. Why should a man, because a woman has tormented him for a period of years, be forced to support her for the rest of his life? Undoubtedly, we manage our divorces better in Persia.

But what about marriage? Is there any basis for comparison there? After thinking the matter over, I am convinced that Persian marriages are the happier and more logical; that the Persian harem is better regulated than the American harem; together with some other conclusions which, being somewhat too prejudiced perhaps, I shall not set down here.

Now the Koran and the Traditions, while permitting a man four wives, demand that he shall treat them each with complete impartiality. Erudite philosophers insist that this proviso was written into the Koran to serve as a prohibition, since no mortal could treat two people, let alone four wives, with complete impartiality. .But the Mohammedan religion, as was once said of the Catholic, "is inclined to take into consideration the natural weaknesses of mankind"; and I have never observed a Persian gentleman with four wives to be over-scrupulous in the matter of impartiality.

But what sort of life do these wives lead? The Occidental has sometimes been heard to say that a harem is nothing but a female chicken coop, guarded by sexless slaves— an assumption altogether untenable. Although it appears absurd and even despicable to the European, the harem-lyk—(the prohibited part of the house as contrasted to the salem-lyk, the public part of the house)—has persisted through centuries as the most important institution in Oriental life.

The last great Shah of Persia, Nasr-eddin, to take one example, was master of a harem of more than three hundred women. It must be evident that so large an establishment was expected to serve more than the amorous proclivities of the master, however agile he may have been. But the harem, as it happened, was not a place of entertainment at all; it was there to maintain the unity of his realm. As husband of so many women, the Shah was related to practically every clan, and in this way maintained close connections with every city in every province of his country. Throughout his realm, relatives of his helpmeets could be found, and these relatives, proud of being sisters and brothers or cousins and uncles of one or the other of these innumerable ladies, were naturally anxious to protect the unity of the realm. Besides, children of the Shah's many affiliations eventually were sent into those provinces from where their respective mothers hailed, to serve as governors or high officials. In this way, so many relatives of the ruling house were distributed throughout the country that, to all intents and purposes, they formed a special guard of loyalists. (I discovered a slight counterpart of this procedure in the American system of party patronage.)

■ As the marital relations of a Mohammedan ruler were always considered of utmost importance because of their political ramifications, the choice of the women and decisions involving their rank, or that of their offspring, were entrusted to the pudgy white hands of the Chief Eunuch. The indivisibility of the realm being a matter of great import, the hadith, or collection of traditions according to the Koran, provides that, aside from the various odalisques desired by a sovereign, he also may . have more than the four legal wives allotted to the ordinary Mohammedan. However, not even the Sultan of Turkey or the Shah-in-Shah of Persia was permitted more than seven, because the Prophet himself had no more than that number.

Not all the women of a ruler's harem are of equal station. Only his four, or, as the case may be, seven, full-ranking wives are addressed as "Your Majesty", regardless of whether they have presented the sovereign with an heir or not. Other members of the harem, considered odalisques, are promoted in rank after they have borne a child but, even then, they only rate the title of Um Walid—Mother of Child, though the child in question is always a legitimate prince oxprincess.

At this point I must permit myself to observe that the difference between the Persian and American harem is simply one of convenience and regularity. There is nothing to prevent an American man of substance from taking as many odalisques as fancy dictates; but these ladies aie flighty, irresponsible, refuse to live together, and, as soon as they reach the status of Um Walid, are apt to run him into a great deal of money.

As for the Persian harem in less exalted circles, it fulfills a very important sociological mission. Inasmuch as a man may have several wives, the chances of a girl remaining single are slight. Since every man must pay a price to prospective parents-in-law, which appears to he the reverse of the occidental custom, a girl who otherwise may not have good marital prospects will win a husband because her parents will let her go at a bargain price—an arrangement which assuredly makes for better public morals.

Continued on page 59

(Continued from page 16)

In the eyes of the law, all wives of a Mohammedan are on an equal footing; nevertheless, the first wife is the most important one in an Islamic ménage. Actually, this relationship works out so that the first wife—even if she be old and ugly—still rules the house, whereas the other wives, especially in poorer households, more or less play the part of servants. And so it often happens that the first wife, after reaching a certain age, will intimate to her husband that it would be advisable for him to marry again—being well aware that all the other wives her husband may bring into the house will make her own work easier. The inferior status of the newcomers in the menage is equalized by the fact that they hold their collective husband's loving attention which the older wives have had to surrender. With the one having the esteem and the other the love of the master, everybody is satisfied and peace prevails.

Europeans and Americans have invented an erroneous idea about the supposedly prison-like existence which is the unhappy lot of the Oriental woman. The general conception is that harem women lead thoroughly inactive lives within jealously guarded walls. Ever hiding their dark beauty behind veils, their only diversion, presumably, is the few hours of attention their husband may grant them at his pleasure.

Nothing could be more contrary to actual fact. Indeed, the Oriental woman has her freedom, although she uses it in a different manner from her European or American sister.

Many a modern harem can be found equipped with electric lighting, refrigerators, victrolas and radios; but that is as far as Western influence goes. Oriental cities, especially in Persia and North Africa, are still built on the beehive principle, with all the harems and houses connected by a labyrinth of by-ways. A woman may stroll from a harem at one end of a quarter to that at another, without ever stepping out into the street. The foreigner who only rarely meets a veiled Mohammedan woman on the streets has no conception of the active social life in the courtyards where the women gossip with faces uncovered and their veils wound around their heads.

The ubiquitous veil—black in Persia, white in Arabian countries—is by no means a Mohammedan invention and the Koran does not prescribe that it be worn. It is an imitation of a custom originated by Byzantine Christians. Only long after it had been accepted by the Mohammedans generally were religious reasons for it propounded. It was never very popular with the lower classes. Nevertheless, it has its advantages. Nobody—not even her own husband—would be able to recognize a woman through these veils, and what a blessing they are to a Mohammedan lady of philandering inclinations. If she has a rendezvous, she simply leaves word at the harem that she is going to visit a public bath—a procedure which, if properly followed, requires an entire day. Heavily veiled, the lady departs early in the morning and, as she passes the first corner, nobody in the world could distinguish her from any other woman. When she returns in the evening, one never knows what she has really visited— the baths or her paramour.

To be sure, officially, no wife may see another man besides her husband, except when visiting her closest relatives. However, the same rule holds good for the husband. Strolling along the streets, all he sees are heavily veiled figures so that there is no possibility of comparison for him. Consequently, Mohammedan marriages, as a ride, are happy. Since the first man the Mohammedan woman sees unhindered by a veil—with the naked eye, as it were—is her husband, she falls in love with him with the sacrificial passion innate in the Oriental woman.

Marriages, especially in Persia, very often provide a time limit which may vary from one day to ninety-nine years. If the marriage is not renewed at the end of a stated time, it is considered automatically dissolved. This is a procedure which has decidedly stabilizing influence on public morals. If, for example, a man from Shiraz has business in Tabriz which keeps him there for a few weeks or months, the first thing he does upon arriving in the new city, is to take a ssighe—a wife on time— for the duration of his sojourn. Such a temporary union does not injure the reputation of the woman at all. In better situated families, a year is generally considered as the minimum for a time marriage but in poorer homes, a shorter time will he agreeable to the father who is paid a certain sum by the husband pro tem.

There is no paternity problem to be faced by children horn of Mohammedan marriages, as the men are only too proud and happy to become fathers. Unlike the sad state of things in Occidental countries, it never happens that a father cannot be found for a child. On the contrary, men will vie for the right of paternity, and, even in distinctly doubtful cases, will claim the benefit of doubt for themselves. Sometimes the competition for paternity is so keen that experts will be called upon who, from the shape of the head, the color of the eyes, or by some other equally scientific means will decide the question. In the case of a divorce, children always go to the father.

No matter to what extent Occidental decadence may have invaded the Orient in recent years, there is no such thing as an economic problem in the rearing of children. By mutual, tacit agreement the problem is simply ignored. A father will share with his children the abundance of his riches or the privations of poverty.

And this, to return to divorce, is why divorce is so simple in the East. The fate of the children is never in question, and so there are no long drawn out court proceedings. Merely a few words spoken before a notary.