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Biblical Proximity and Women: the Image of Arabs in Victorian Works of Religious Nature

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Biblical Proximity and Women: the Image of Arabs in Victorian Works of Religious Nature Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Pp. 5-17 Biblical Proximity and Women: The Image of Arabs in Victorian Works of Religious Nature May A. Witwit University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom Abstract The pro-suffrage campaign to elevate the Oriental female did not give emphasis to Arab women; however, they were vividly presented in religious literature and romances of a religious nature. The inferior position and the victimisation of Arab women, attributed to Islam, delivered a political and a religious message that helped steer the Victorian reader‟s opinion towards a desired effect. The paper will focus on the image of the Arab woman in some of these publications to highlight that the use of the biblical element of the Middle East was employed to reinforce Christianity and combat Ottomans. The image of the victimised Arab woman also prepared the public for a future military involvement in the Middle East. The paper suggests that the Victorian depiction of the Arab female may well be the precursor of present-day use of Islam-phobic slogans that trigger sorrow easily transformed into anger at the men, culture and the religion that victimise women. Keywords: Arabs in British Nineteenth Century periodicals, Arab proximity to Bible, Arab Women, Revival of mediaeval polemic, Victorian perception of Arabs Arab World English Journal www.awej.org 5 ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Biblical Proximity and Women: The Image of Arabs Witwit Introduction To regard Arabs with wonder has long been the proper function of all European writers, and for some thousands of years yet the untameable rover of the desert will in all probability be an interminable source of astonishment. (Stigand, 1872, p. 39) William Stigand‟s remarks published in Belgravia in July 1872 capture the curiosity which characterised Victorian interest in Arab ways and practices. Articles, from as early as the late eighteenth century, and throughout the nineteenth century, focused on Arab life, customs, proximity of their life style to stories in the Bible, and the treatment and position of their women. Those early accounts, whether fiction or impressions, regardless of their reliability, have largely contributed to stereotyping Arabs in general and Arab women in particular: as Michael Wolff rightly notes, “An attitude, an opinion, an idea did not exist until it had registered itself in the press” (Codell, 2010, p. 17). The idea for this paper began with my surprise at the large number of Victorian works on Arabs returned from the British Periodicals Online‟s search engine for the keywords “Arab” and “Arab women”. I found them hugely varied and spread over a long period of time. I was intrigued by works that highlighted the biblical element of the Arab region and Arab proximity to Scripture. My major concern here is to investigate the presentation of Arab life and Arab women in Victorian literature of religious context to assess their possible impact on the reading public. Through the textual analysis of two English romances and two articles that focus on the biblical element of the Middle East, the impact of Islam on culture and on Arab women, I argue that common themes suggest the existence of a common factor or factors; thus works of this nature contributed to delivering a religious or a political message or both. Religiously, they reinforced belief in the authenticity of the Bible and evoked Christian prejudice to liberate the Holy Land and defend the Cross (Warburton, 1845, p. 242) from the “Paynim” hand of “Mohammedans” This religious-political goal gradually generated anger against the Turks and sanctioned the later invasion of the Arab region. To further clarify my argument, I have also chosen a book by Reverend H. H. Jessup, The Women of the Arabs, 1874, and a review of the same book to highlight not only the observations but also the recommendations to handle the issue of Arab women. The presentation of Arab women, of other religions, suffering under Muslim rule, further consolidated the negative image of Arabs and evoked sorrow for Muslim and non-Muslim females in Arab countries. This in turn convinced the Victorian reader of the need to shoulder the burden of rescuing the helpless women by dispatching civilising missions and sanctioning future military intervention in the region. Checking the dates of many articles showed that the main output of religious literature highlighting Arabs were published from the 1830s to the 1870s, which also coincides with rising religious doubt evoked by the works of eminent philosophers, like Charles Lyell‟s Principles of Geology (1830-33), David Friedrich Strauss‟s Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined),1 long before Darwin‟s On the Origin of Species (1859). These books challenged the credibility of the biblical stories on the basis of the time-scale of creation given in Genesis (Jay, 1986), creating strong controversy over the credibility of the Bible among the intellectual classes and threatened reaching those of the slightly lower social level. Records show that by 1849 religious books and sermons formed a third of Macmillan‟s list Arab World English Journal www.awej.org 6 ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Biblical Proximity and Women: The Image of Arabs Witwit (in Scott, 1973, pp. 213-223) of publications and continued to rise. Similarly, 213 out of 516 magazines were estimated to have been of a religious nature (Scott, 1973) and had become increasingly available to a larger readership with the reduction of stamp duty and the successive repeals of advertisement duty. The period also coincides with several Ottoman massacres against Christians in Syria, Lebanon and Crete, and the Russian–Turkish war in 1877, all of which were covered by the European press. Western misconceptions over the treatment of women under Islam were emphasised and later echoed during the British occupation of Arab countries, and horror stories about Muslim misogyny were reiterated by Western patriarchs to justify imperialism, excuse sex discrimination against British women and oppose the rising calls for their enfranchisement. Lord Cromer, British colonial administrator in Egypt 1883-1907 and ardent anti-suffrage figure, believed the veil demonstrated Egyptians‟ moral and cultural inferiority in the treatment of women and demanded they be “persuaded or forced” to become “civilised” by disposing of the women‟s veil. In 1924, Gertrude Bell, British Oriental Secretary in Iraq, described her work with women as British efforts for the “advancing of Moslem women” (Bell, 1924). This paper proposes that the presumed plight of the Arab Muslim woman continues to be an “effectual” argument for sanctioning military intervention. The British View of Arabs The first cultural and political contact between the British and the Arabs took place when the Arabs were under Ottoman occupation (Nasir, 1979, p. 18). Apart from official envoys and ambassadors‟ reports on the region, trade companies using the Middle East route for their trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also allowed communication with Arabs (Al-Rawi, 2008), but the expansion of the Ottoman Empire influenced the prevalence of the negative image of Arabs as they were seen as identical with the Turks (Hollenbach, 1972). This is largely due to their participation in the Ottoman wars and in several massacres against Christians. The power of the Turks over Christians generated hostility which sought to revive and consolidate Christian mediaeval theory accusing Mohammad of engineering a religion, theft from Christianity and Judaism and supported by false revelations, designed to meet his various political needs and personal desires. The survival of this ideology is clearly illustrated in Thomas Carlyle‟s description of Islam as “bastard Christianity” (1840). Very little was added to the theoretic polemic before the nineteenth century (Al-Rawi, 2008, p. 6) and the most noticeable change then was the replacement of mediaeval polemic by exotic entertainment (Al-Rawi, 2008, p. 9). The Gothic revival and Romantic Nationalism, manifested in the national feelings of primacy and superiority participated in reviving considerable European and British interest in the Middle Ages (Chapman, 1986). Religion was estheticized and writers felt free to draw on Biblical themes with freedom and with very little reverence. Religion, a dominant factor in England, along with the development of values and moralities, criticised the corruption of the mediaeval Church thus generating nostalgia for the conventional Christianity of the East. The second contact with Arabs came through fiction about the “inscrutable Orient,” the mysterious “phoenix of Arabia,” “stories of assassins” and “evil spirits of the desert” (Nasir, 1979, p. 18). Open British political interest in what is now known as the Arab Middle East was not clearly defined until the purchase of almost half the shares of the Arab World English Journal www.awej.org 7 ISSN: 2229-9327 Arab World English Journal (AWEJ) Special Issue on Literature No.3 October, 2015 Biblical Proximity and Women: The Image of Arabs Witwit Suez Canal in 1875, followed by Britain‟s competition with France and the dual control over Egypt in November 1879 (Cleveland, 1986, p. 92). The increasing number of travellers in the Middle East generated wider interest in Arab literature. Edward William Lane‟s translation of the Arabian Nights, published in monthly parts in the years 1838 to 1840 became an immediate success amongst the British. The fact that the Nights offered “very little of the sectarian peculiarities of religion” (“Popularity of the Arabian Nights,” 1834, p. 264) explains its renown. The Nights “uniformly acknowledge” the “care of beneficent Providence,” (“Popularity of the Arabian Nights,” 1834, p. 264) but do not give emphasis to Islam.
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