The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental WomenCooper, Elizabeth
Religion
The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental Women
Cooper, Elizabeth
East Asia -- Social life and customs; Women -- East Asia
These Moslem women display a fortitude and courage that is almost
fanatical in times of persecution. Thousands in Persia have given their
lives for their faith in Baha Ullah, the leader of a sect of reformed
Mohammedans. They have been dragged from the harims to the public
market-places, where they have been subjected to unheard of indignities
before having the privilege of dying for their faith. They have also
been compelled to sit in rows facing the public execution grounds while
their husbands and sons were beheaded before their eyes, but even the
torture and death of those they loved did not cause them to waver from
what they believed to be right. The story of one woman exemplifies the
fanatical courage that will dominate such a shut-in woman, when in some
dim, tragic hour she has been compelled to give her contribution in the
life she loved to her religious cause. In Tabriz one day a crowd of
women were seated facing the executioner’s block, and amongst them a
delicate, dainty woman who had been protected all her life within the
harim of one of the prominent men of Tabriz, but whose death had left
his women helpless to bear the brunt of his enemy’s wrath. Chance had
made this enemy the city Governor, and he remembered that the family of
the man he hated even in death were followers of Baha Ullah. On this
morning in June the mother was brought to see the death of her
fourteen-year-old son, her only child. When the executioner had done his
work, the head was tossed into her lap, and she was told “Take back your
son.” She stood up, and holding the loved head in her hands, held it
towards the sky, as if to give it as an offering to the God who seemed
to have deserted her in her hour of need, looked long into the closing
eyes, then threw it to the official’s feet, saying, “I do not take back
what I give my God!” and turning quickly, took her place among the
sorrow-maddened women.
Her cousin, who told me the story and who was a witness to the scene,
said to me: “It is impossible for a Western woman to understand a Moslem
woman. Perhaps because of our exclusion and the lack of means of
self-expression, we have over-developed our inner emotional natures,
which at times of sorrow burst forth like a hidden flame. We not only
gave our lives in those dread days of Tabriz, but what is worse, we gave
the lives of those we loved—and still lived on.”
The women of Egypt have as yet had no reason to rise up _en masse_ and
show what they may do in times of national distress. It is unusual for
the women of any Mohammedan land to usurp the prerogatives of men. They
are fundamentally intensely feminine, the home their only domain.
Sa’adi, the Persian poet, said:—
No happiness comes to the house of him whose hen hath crowed like a
cock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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