BURCKHARDT, the time-honored authority on things Arabian, writes: “The Bedouins are jealous of their women, but do not prevent them from laughing and talking with strangers. It seldom happens that a Bedouin strikes his wife; if he does so she calls loudly on her _wasy_ or protector who pacifies the husband and makes him listen to reason.... The wife and daughters perform all the domestic business. They grind the wheat in the handmill or pound it in the mortar; they prepare the breakfast and dinner; knead and bake the bread; make butter, fetch water, work at the loom, mend the tent-covering and are, it must be owned, indefatigable. While the husband or brother sits before the tent smoking his pipe.”
LADY ANN BLUNT, who travelled among the tribes of the Euphrates valley with her husband, speaks thus from a woman’s standpoint. “Of the Bedouin women a shorter description will be enough. As girls they are pretty in a wild picturesque way and almost always have cheerful, good-natured faces. They are hard-working and hard-worked, doing all the labor of the camp.... They live apart from the men but are in no way shut up or put under restraint. In the morning they all go out to gather wood for the day, and whenever we have met them so employed they have seemed in the highest possible spirits.... In mental qualities the women of the desert are far below the men, their range of ideas being extremely limited. Some few of them, however, get real influence over their husbands and even, through them, over their tribes. In more than one Sheikh’s tent it is in the woman’s half of it that the politics of the tribe are settled.”
SNOUCK HURGRONJE, the Dutch traveller who spent an entire year (1884-85) in Mecca thus characterizes the position of women in Arabian towns:[98]
“What avail to the young maiden the songs of eulogy which once in her life resound for her from the mouth of the singing-woman, but which introduce her into a companionship by which she, with her whole sex, is despised? Moslem literature, it is true, exhibits isolated glimpses of a worthier estimation of woman, but the later view, which comes more and more into prevalence, is the only one which finds its expression in the sacred traditions, which represent hell as full of women, and refuse to acknowledge in the woman, apart from rare exceptions, either reason or religion, in poems, which refer all the evil in the world to the woman as its root; in proverbs, which represent a careful education of girls as mere wastefulness. Ultimately, therefore, there is only conceded to the woman the fascinating charm with which Allah has endowed her, in order to afford the man, now and then in his earthly existence, the prelibation of the pleasures of Paradise, and to bear him children.”