SCHEHERAZADE GOES WEST

A savvy treatment of that ultimate piece of emotional baggage: sex.

“Why did the enlightened West, obsessed with democracy and human rights, discard Scheherazade’s brainy sensuality and political message in their versions of the tales?” wonders Mernissi (Dreams of Trespass, 1994, etc.). In the Middle East, after all, her cerebralness was the essence of her sexual attraction. The Eastern harem and the Western approach to sexuality may share needs of power and control, then they diverge radically: How in one cultural landscape sex is associated with obsequiousness and a decided lack of intellectual exchange, while in the other “the most efficient weapon with which to arouse a man is words” and the contest of self-determination. This sparks the author’s exploration into the psychic differences of men, East and West. Hers is a decidedly cerebral trip in itself, delving into the cosmic and spiritual dimensions of belly-dancing, the narratives of Persian miniatures, the paintings of Ingres, Kant’s notion of the sublime and the place of women, Poe’s assassination of Scheherazade, the feminism of Shirin in the Iranian Shahnameh, and (most ludicrous to Mernissi) the “bizarre separation between feelings and reasoning” that has come to typify Western sexuality (precluding “the harmonization of expectations and needs, which can only be accomplished when the two partners use their brains”). Many of the conclusions will sound familiar: “If intelligence is the monopoly of men, women who dare to play clever will be stripped of their femininity” and “Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look fourteen years old.”

Mernissi is as bracing and intelligent as Scheherazade—and her grasp of sexual politics, both East and West, is not just piquant but spot-on.