Guests of the Sheik

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea went 'behind the veil' when she and her anthropologist husband spent 2 years (1956-58) living in an Iraqi village. The real pay-off of the book she wrote about the experience comes — at least for me — on the last few pages:

"I suppose I was flattered, for I had apparently shown, by my restrained conduct in El Nahra, that all Western women were not, per se, wanton, but I had done this by generally observing Hamid's own customs towards women. How many years would it have taken, I wondered to convince Sheik Hamid that I was a respectable woman if I had not worn the abayah in El Nahra, if I had sat with the men in the mudhif, ridden horseback in blue jeans and wandered through the suq and village as I pleased?

"How many years would it take, I wondered, before the two worlds began to understand each other's attitudes towards women? For the West, too, had a blind spot in this area. I could tell my friends in America again and again that the veiling and seclusion of Eastern women did not mean necessarily that they were forced against their will to live lives of submission and near-serfdom. I could tell Haji again and again that the low-cut gowns and brandished freedom of Western women did not necessarily mean that these women were promiscuous and cared nothing for home and family. Neither would have understood, for each group, in its turn, was bound by custom and background to misinterpret appearance in its own way.

"... We [she and her husband] talked until very late that night. The dinner party had dramatized, a little more effectively than we might have wished, the difference between the sheik's world and ours. It had also made us realize that our presence in El Nahra had done little to resolve those differences. We admitted to each other that we had both somewhat irrational and idealistic notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had not basically changed anyone's attitude, except perhaps our own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have hoped for, and perhaps it was enough."
-p.312-13, 314 in Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village. Anchor: 1965/1989.