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

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The seclusion of women, especially among the nomads, can be traced to the warlike habits of the people. In times of war the enemy would first of all carry away the women, children, and cattle of the tribe with whom they were fighting. In order to protect the helpless they were kept in inner rooms. The richer and stronger the family, the more secluded were the women, and it became a mark of caste to be kept within the women’s quarters, or protected. Thus what first originated as a necessity became afterwards a matter of aristocracy, and the man who could keep his women strictly harim was looked upon as higher in the social scale than one who was compelled, from economic reasons or otherwise, to allow the females of his household to come and go freely in the world.

An Egyptian woman, from the time when she is seven or eight years old, never shows her face unveiled to any man except her father, her brother, or her husband. No chance is given the followers of the Arabian prophet to have the little flirtations that are so dear to the heart of many of her Western sisters. Mohammed says:—