Читать книгу The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental Women онлайн

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The word harim is much misunderstood by the people of the Western world. The Arabic word harim simply means the women’s quarters. The selam-lik are the apartments in which the men of the household have their business offices, receive their friends, and pass their time, while the harim-lik are the apartments reserved for the female members and children of the family. The literal meaning is exclusiveness, seclusion, privacy. In its restricted sense it embodies the two meanings of the women of the household and their exclusive apartments. In the wider acceptance of the term we understand by harim an established social system deriving its sanction from a body of laws promulgated by the Arabian prophet Mohammed. When a woman is harim it means that she is secluded, and we hear the expression in regard to schoolgirls. “Yes, my daughters go to school,” a mother will say, “but they are kept harim.”

In Persia and Turkey the word zenana is used, and in India the common form of expression for the woman who is not seen by any male except those of her immediate family is, “She is purdah-nashim, or simply purdah.” The purdah is the screen that shuts her from the outside world, and the Oriental, whatever his race, whether in Egypt, Turkey, or India, whether he calls it the harim, purdah, or zenana, speaks of it in his literature and poetry as the “Sanctuary of Conjugal Happiness.”