The Arab World
The modern Arab world stretches from the windswept Atlantic coasts of Morocco and Mauritania to the Zagros mountains of Iraq, taking in a score of countries, including Algeria, Libya and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman. Of course, its geopolitical boundaries have enlarged, contracted, and changed over millennia. Once, under the Umayadd caliphate of Cordovain in the tenth century, even Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain, was held up as one of the great Muslim civilisations.
To call the Arab world the powerhouse of human civilisation is no exaggeration: the Zagros mountains have been inhabited since the Lower Palaeolithic, its Sharidar Cave famously bears witness to some of the earliest Neanderthal ritual practices, while, elsewhere in the region, there’s evidence of the world’s earliest farming, stretching back as far as 9000 BC.
Arabic contributions to mathematics, science, and medicine, as well as literature and music, constituted an immeasurable quantum leap in human knowledge and understanding. In the West, our alphabet is Greek, but our numbers are Arabic, as is our algebra (‘al-jabr’). Even the algorithmic understanding that underpins the code behind this website finds its ancestry in the pages of the ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, called ‘Algoritmi’ amongst Latin-speaking scholars in Renaissance Europe. If you’ve recently kicked back to a piece of popular music with a guitar in it, you have the Mesopotamian ‘oud’-lute to thank; if you woke up to a coffee this morning, your gratitude should go to the early, cardamom-infused ‘qawha’ drink (qawha > kahve > koffie) popularised, centuries ago, in Damascus.
Despite its being so extensively and inextricably rooted in it, however, the English-speaking West continues to be sketchy about the Arab world; hesitant about its relevance in a more homely, Eurocentric history; and more than a little uncertain when it comes to its political, religious, and social practices. Remarkably, this lack of understanding coalesces around a single issue: the long-standing misapprehension of the Arab escort.
Arab Escorts and Arabian Nights
The trade routes known collectively as the ‘Silk Road’ had, of course, run through the Arab world ever since the rise of the Roman Empire and the territorial expansion of the Han dynasty in China, providing a rich seam of goods and ample opportunity for cross-cultural fertilisation. Nevertheless, the Arab world remained much of a mystery, so much so that there were even portions of Algeria that were still being mapped in the early 20th century. Understandably, for most people, the Arab world remained largely an exotic, imagined place; beautiful and seductive; wildly different to everything they knew, but also barbarous and frightening.
If this sounds like the stuff of a fairy tale, it might just as well have been. By the early nineteenth century, Tales from the Thousand and One Nights (widely known as the Arabian Nights) would be found in children’s nurseries, jostling alongside Charles Perrault’s contes des fées, Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen for attention. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and the swashbuckling adventures of Sinbad the Merchant seem to have fallen out of fashion, although the films they inspired continue to be much-loved; Aladdin endures through Disney.
So far, there are no Arab escorts to be seen. What early editions of the Arabian Nights offered, following Antoine Galland’s influential translation, was a rarefied setting: unfamiliar landscapes in the sun; palaces arising out of the melting desert heat, like the court of Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, filled with indescribable wealth, opulence, and luxury. The usual social conventions that Western readers held were entirely suspended and, in their place, a topsy-turvy morality with a logic of its own, where kings can be despots; thieves can be heroes; and scrappy street urchins get to marry beautiful princesses.
And what of the Arab escorts? Unbeknownst to readers, the Arab escort as a character had been carefully redacted to make Arabian Nights suitable for children and the conservative Victorian public at large. If adult readers lingered over impossibly beautiful ‘qanat’ or singing-girls, whose music and dance enraptured and caused the stars to shine more brightly, that was their concern, with no paper trail that could implicate the text. If curious boys and curiouser men fell in love with The Slave-Girl Tawaddaud, whose mastery of the arts and sciences saves her master’s life; if they ever felt a silent quiver in the loins when imagining the polyamorous, all-female ‘haramlik’ or ‘harem’ spaces that were often used as a site of jealousy and intrigue, again, that was entirely in their heads.
Yet, those latent, barely spoken fantasies did not arise out of nowhere. In 1885, following his translation of the Kama Sutra, Richard Burton’s unexpurgated and incendiary translation of the Arabian Nights exploded the carefully maintained charade entirely. Burton leaned into, rather than away from, the original’s polygamous practices, including Arab escorts. He made explicit references to novel and forbidden sex acts; uncovered cultures in which homosexuality and female pleasure were not only acknowledged but celebrated; and brought to light the near-mythical ‘Kabbazah’ women, Arab escorts who could contract and hold their pelvic muscles at will, to the excruciating delight of their lovers.
Circumventing the Obscene Publication Act (1857) by being available to subscribers only, Burton’s restored Arab escorts were still met with severe, high Victorian opprobrium. The resulting moral panic triggered fierce debate, most notably between Burton and Pall Mall Gazette editor William Morley, who accused him of importing Arab sexual degeneracy. The Edinburgh Review condemned them as ‘varied collection of abominations’ and ‘ocean of filth’; while the Pall Mall Gazette decried them as ‘pornography’ and asked: ‘Is there any reason why we should laboriously import the gigantic muck heaps of other races, placed them très curieux, and charge a high price for the privilege of wallowing in them? I think not.’
Arab Escorts: a colonial legacy
If the quotation from the Pall Mall Gazette sounds like smug superiority, that’s because it was. Burton’s Arab escort-filled Arabian Nights, intended to shake up complacent Victorian hypocrisy, instead became an establishment justification for cultural dominance.
The Arab world became a prurient world, barbarous and debauched. As Edward Said would later argue in his seminal Orientalism (1978), the Arab world would quickly become ‘essentialized’, that is to say, reduced to a heavily simplified, stereotype caricature, one that gave licence to the West to keep colonising it. The Arab world had become the Arab escort, and a grotesque, contorted vision of an Arab escort at that: clearly inferior because she seemed not only indifferent to being enslaved or otherwise subjugated, but ever-excited by the prospect of pleasuring her barbarous, often cruel master, regardless of how depraved his carnal tastes.
Edward Said is unashamedly high-brow and explores Gustave Flaubert’s numerous writings on Kuchuk Hanem, the famous Egyptian dancer and Arab escort. Flaubert’s ‘symbol’, writes Said, ‘of luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality […] why the Orient seems to still suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate […]’
Had Said cast a wider net than the European classics, he’d have found an engorged library of Arab escort and Arabian Nights-inspired films, with The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1954), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Arabian Nights (1974) and Osamu Tezuka’s A Thousand and One Nights (1969) quickly rising to the top of a litany of otherwise forgettable, blue-movie dross (Arabian Nights (1979); A Thousand and One Erotic Nights (1982)).
Almost overnight, it seemed, an entire civilisation, millennia in the making, that had informed and framed our own, would be further reduced from a boyhood fantasy to a greasy skin flick.
The Truth about Arab Escorts
The received truth about the Arab escort hides infinitely more complex truths about the Arab escort and, by extension, the Arab world at large. Far from being the scantily-clad, golden bikini party of nymphets that literature and film would have us believe in, the ‘harem’ may, after all, have been a locus of female power, run by and ruled by women; transgenerational spaces that would include daughters and mothers as well as the several wives that the Quran permits. Harems might be sites of refuge, security and sisterhood, rather than exploitative, submissive control and prurient fetish. And, rather than being easily excitable simpletons, the Arab escort ‘qanat’ might have been spirited, ambitious, and creative. Like Arib al-Ma’muniyya, who accumulated great wealth and moved in the highest spheres of courtly influence, widely celebrated in the Abbasid court during the reign of Caliph Al-Ma’mum, for her music and poetry, which left behind a rich legacy of 20,000 verses. Or, Wallada bent al-Mustakfi, princess of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba, who bluntly refused to wear a veil; held her own literary salon; and publicly conducted relationships with male poets, including Ibn Zaydun, who regarded her amongst their peers.
The Arab world may have collapsed into a bowdlerised Arab escort by colonial powers intent on subjugation. But the true values of the Arab escort, their beauty and their knowledge, their creativity and ambition, their deep-seated commitment to communality and sisterhood, live on, I think, in the true escort traditions of today.