Englishmen in Arabia: Encounters with Middle Eastern Women

Abstract

The mystery, the romance, and the impenetrability of Arabia is a Western conception that has been intriguingly promulgated by English travelers such Burton, the Blunts, Doughty, and Palgrave in the nineteenth century and Lawrence, Bell, Dickson, Philby, and Thesiger in the twentieth. In common with a number of other literary forms, English travel literature has participated in creating an imagery of women reflective of both individual dispositions and prevalent societal attitudes. While the tenacity of the literary image it concerns Arabian-and often by extension other Arab and Middle Eastern women-might charitably be excused by the dearth of contemporary, more objective research, misconceptions of purdah (the seclusion of women and attendant veiling), polygyny, and other cultural institutions continue to muddle Western understanding of the nature of Middle Eastern society and the status of women in it. In this essay, I outline the major components of this stereotype of a sector of womankind, concentrating on three major English authors on Arabia: Richard Burton and Charles Doughty of the nineteenth century and Harold Dickson of the twentieth. While dissimilar in temperament, motivation, and style of writing, all three had encounters with Arabian women. Moreover, like many of the English travelogues on the Middle East, their accounts are as revealing of the writers ... of the countryside through which they travelled.' Thus, we are treated in these works not only to observations on Arabian women but also to usually oblique, but sometimes more overt, individual interpretations of English assumptions about women generally.