Essays on Harem

This paper will look at love, sex and gender within the backdrop of postmodernism, existentialism and orientalism in the novels The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Assia Djebar, Foam of the Daze by Boris Vian and The Lover by Marguerite Duras. In the novels love/ and sex are shown as something that a woman has no control over, something that destroys due to its intensity, and something that forever changes a person, respectively. While gender is seen as being something that disenfranchises women in a male dominant, unequal society and something that can destroy a man if ...

Mernissi, a Muslim woman who grew up in the Middle East in a traditional Muslim harem, with women and other children, compares the “Western harem” to be much worse than the restrictions of the Eastern harem. What she calls the Western harem, is the standard of beauty in the West that is so restrictive to women’s sense of self. The author compares the Western standard of beauty as a very oppressive problem for women, much more damaging than anything she has experienced in her native country. The argument from her perspective is that the Western version of men ...

As a self-taught photographer Samuel Bourne has given the world a view of India that is as prolific and beautiful. His photographs are an example of the true photography artistry and the photos remain a gem even in this time. The history of the mutiny in India against the British dominance is captured in a way of contrast between the old and the new. Bourne is centered at the period of disruption in the Indian lifestyle and portrays both the good and the racially charged emotions of the times. Bourne shot his photographs in the 1850 and 1860’s ...

Introduction

In their publication (Jean Louis & Frederic Hitzel) indicates that a vast pan-Islamic state of the Turks started its expansion in the small Turkish emirate location within the boundaries of the present republic of Turkey. It extended to North Africa, some part of Middle East and southeast Europe. It had also gained temporal authority over secluded overseas lands in the mode declarations paying of allegiance to the Sultan and Caliph. The publication further indicates that the empire was the pivot of interactions connecting the Eastern and the Western world for six centuries. This Ottoman Empire was an Islamic successor to ...