1. This paper was first presented at the Second Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies. A different version, titled “The Politics and Poetics of Sex-Segregation,” is forthcoming in Discourse on Gender/Gendered Discourse in the Middle East, ed. Boaz Shoshan. Through the years I have benefited from the comments and criticism of many friends and colleagues. Kaveh Safa, with his customary generosity of spirit, has been a major source of enlightenment. Afsaneh Najmabadi has offered invaluable suggestions on various permutations of this paper. I am also most grateful to Shahla Haeri, Debbie McDowell, Janet Beizer, Ann Lane, Barbara Nolan, Virginia Germino, Boaz Shoshan, Bella Depaulo, Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, and Abbas Milani for their many helpful comments.

2. Steingass, F Persian-English Dictionary. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).Google Scholar

3. Goldman, Shalom The Wiles of Women/The Wiles of Men (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 48.Google Scholar

4. ^˓Abd al-Rahman Jami “Yusuf wa Zulaykha,” [Yusuf and Zulaykha] in Masnaviye Haft Awrang, ed. Gilani, Mortaza Modaress (Teheran: Sa'di, 1958), 90.Google Scholar Ralph T.H. Griffith (London: Trubner & Co., 1882) and David Pendlebury (London: Octagon Press, 1980) have translated this beautiful tale into English. Auguste Bricteux (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1927) has translated it into French. For a brilliant and thorough analysis of different versions of this most popular tale see Merguerian, Gayane Karen and Najmabadi, Afsaneh “Zulaykha and Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story’?” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 29, no. 4 (November 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Firdawsi, The Legend of Seyavash, trans. Davis, Dick (England: Penguin Books 1992), 18.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 27.

7. See “Who is Jahika?” Mazdapour, Katayoun One Thousand and One Nights’ Delilah the Trickster, new revised edition, (Teheran: Rowshangaran, 1995).Google Scholar

8. In Sura 7:19 Satan whispers to both Adam and Eve, and in Sura 20:118 “Satan whispered to him saying, ‘Adam, shall I point thee to the Tree of Eternity, and a Kingdom that decays not?’” The Koran Interpreted, trans. Arberry, Arthur (New York: Collier, 1995).Google Scholar

9. The Koran Interpreted, 20:119.Google Scholar

10. Phillips, John A. Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 165.Google Scholar

11. In Beyond the Veil, Mernissi, Fatima writes: “The whole Muslim organization of social interactions and spatial configurations can be understood in terms of the woman's qaid power [“The power to deceive and defeat men, not by force, but by cunning and intrigue”]. The social order then appears as an attempt to subjugate her power and neutralize its disruptive effects” (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), 5.Google Scholar

12. Fallaci, Oranio Interview With History, trans. Shepley, John (Boston: Houghton, 1977), 272.Google Scholar

13. Shikubu, Murasaki et al, Tale of Genji (New York: Random House, 1983).Google Scholar

14. (Emile, V. 371)

15. Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, (New York: Norton, 1967), 218.Google Scholar

16. Maureen Dowd, “Libido Games,” New York Times, March 18, 1998, A27.

17. Aristotle, Works of Aristotle ed. Ross, vol. 4, ed. Smith, J.A. and Ross, W.D. (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1910), 9.1.608b.Google Scholar

18. Parsipour, Shahrnoush Sag va Zimistan Buland [The Dog and the Long Winter] (Teheran: Amir Kabir, 1976), 156.Google Scholar

19. Farrokhzad, Forugh Wall (Teheran: Amir Kabir, 1971), 70.Google Scholar

20. Yūsuf wa Zulaykha, 84.Google Scholar

21. The Legend of Seyavash, x.Google Scholar

22. Yusuf wa Zulaykha, 637.Google Scholar

23. Islami Nudushan, “Tragic Figures in Shahnameh,” Ettela'at, December 3, 1997, 6.

24. Nizami, Hakim Khusraw va Shīrīn [Khusraw and Shirin] (Tehran: Elmi, 1934), 280.Google Scholar

25. The Legend of Seyavash, 22.Google Scholar

26. Gurgani, Fakhr al-Din Vīs va Rārmīn, ((Teheran: Zar, 1960 reprint), 105.Google Scholar

27. Gurgani, Fakhr Ud-Din Vis and Ramin, Trans. Morrison, George (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 84.Google Scholar

28. Nannies appear frequently in contemporary women's writings. Taj-ol-Saltaneh, Simin Behbahani, Mahshid Amirshahi, Simin Daneshvar, among many others, have talked extensively about nannies. Their role, however, in this body of writings, is quite different from their function in classical romances. In modern literature, nannies are mainly upholders of the status quo. At times, they are negatively portrayed. For instance, even though Taj-ol-Saltaneh loved her nanny as a child, she came to believe that their close relationship blighted any chance for a close bond to develop between her mother and herself. Khāṭirāt-i Tāj al-Salṭanah [Taj-ol-Saltaneh's Memoir], ed. Ettehadiyeh, Mansureh and Sa'dvandiyan, Sirus. (Teheran: Nashr-i Tarikhi Iran, 1982), 115.Google Scholar Others have portrayed the nanny most lovingly. In an autobiographical sketch, Behbahani, Simin writes: “Perhaps I owe this good health to the milk of that village wet-nurse who had two white, soft, warm udders instead of breasts, and nurtured me abundantly from those fountains of sweetness.” Nīmeh-ye Dīgar, 2, no.1 (Autumn 1993): 169.Google Scholar

29. From antiquity to the Middle Ages, the figure of the nanny appears in many literary works in East and West. The Spanish alcahueta, the Indian sakhi, the Middle Eastern ^˓ajūz, (the crafty old woman in such popular tales as The Thousand And One Nights and The Forty Parrots), the European go-betweens not only create both thematic and narrative possibilities but also form a fascinating East/West link from the early 1300s on. Some of the most formative and vital characters in early western courtly literature depended on the nanny for the unraveling of the action. See Leyla Rouhi, “A comparative typology of the medieval go-between in light of Western-European, Near-Eastern, and Spanish cases.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1995.

30. Badr ol-Moluk Bamdad, in From Darkness Into Light: Women's Emancipation in Iran, talks about “brokeresses” and their role as “walking and talking newspapers.” “The semi-imprisoned women, who had to stay in the house from dawn to dusk and seldom went out of doors, inevitably needed contacts with the outside world. These needs were met by brokeresses… . It was thanks to the brokeresses that the harem women could keep themselves quite well informed about events in the city and circumstances of other families. All considered, these walking and talking newspapers were a boon to the prisoners behind the harem walls.” Trans, and ed. Bagley, F.R.C. (New York: Exposition-University Book, 1977), 13.Google Scholar

31. Nannies played important roles as patrons of art. As Annemarie Schimmel remarks “This brings us, perhaps indirectly, to the important role the wet-nurse played in Islamic history. Wet-nurses in imperial houses were frequently also distinguished patrons of the arts, and we need only think of the exquisite copy of the Quran, the so-called muṣḥaf al-hadina, that the nurse of the Zirid ruler in Tunisia contracted, or of the buildings in Lahore, Mandu, and other places founded by women in Muslim India. In Mandu, in fact, there is a very beautiful architectural compound dating back to the fifteenth century known as the “Resting Place of the Wet-Nurse's Little Sister.” My Soul Is a Woman (New York: Continuum, 1997), 93.Google Scholar

32. Hanaway, William L. “Formal Elements in the Persian Popular Romances,” Review of National Literature,. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 158.Google Scholar

33. The Ottoman Sultan issued a decree in November 1900 banning the importation and sale of certain kinds of photographs. He specifically mentioned the following kind of photographs: “bearing the names of God or Muhammad; pictures of the Kaaba or any other images relating to the holy city of Mecca; Muslim buildings and ceremonies; and portraits of women.” Graham-Brown, Sarah Images of Women (London: Quartet, 1988), 45.Google Scholar

34. This invisibility, idealized or prescribed for women, is not confined to cinema or classical Persian literature. Its remnant can be witnessed in modern literature. The cloak of secrecy that traditionally has veiled women's literary representation can perhaps best be detected in the conspicuous absence of references to the wives/mothers/daughters/sisters of contemporary literary men. Although numerous fictional women populate modern Persian literature, women are barely referred to in men's biographies, autobiographies, or even personal interviews. Although two of Iran's prominent women writers, Simin Daneshvar and Simin Behbahani, have dedicated whole books, respectively entitled Ghurūb-i Jalāl (Jalal's Sunset) (Tehran: Ravaq, 1981)Google Scholar and Ān Mard, Mard-i Hamrāham (That Man, my Male Companion) (Teheran: Zavar, 1990)Google Scholar to portraying and immortalizing their husbands, to this day not a single book of this kind has been written by an Iranian man. Whereas the overwhelming majority of women's autobiographies focus on men (husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons), in the first-person narratives of male authors, women, if present at all, are often marginalized.

35. The portrayal of women in post-revolutionary cinema best demonstrates the impact of prohibitions on women's representation. Although women have begun to play a major role as actresses and directors, in the first few years after the revolution, principles of modesty had substantially reduced their role and their presence on the screen. According to Hamid Naficy, in “Veiled Vision/Powerful Presences: Women in Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema,” the most significant effect of these guidelines was “self-censorship of film-makers or avoidance altogether of stories involving women in order to evade entanglement with censors.” (In the Eye of the Storm, ed. Afkhami, Mahnaz and Friedl, Erika [New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994], 146).Google Scholar The world of women was off-limits to spectators who “are considered to be unrelated (nāmaḥram) to the persons projected on the screen and thus must be treated as if they were present at the time of filming. This necessitates that women and men within the diegesis observe the rules of modesty and the codes of dress, gaze, and behavior not only in relationship to each other but also vis-à-vis the spectators. As unrelated spectators, film audiences cannot be privy to intimate moments between related males and females, such as exchange of amorous gazes and body contact (touching, hugging, or kissing). This forces the actors playing the parts of husband and wife, for example, in the privacy of their bedroom to behave as though they were not alone. It makes the private space public and renders modesty triumphant.” (145)

36. If men have had to follow a stringent code in representing women, women, until recently, were denied easy access to the power and privilege of publishing. The norms and values that regulated women's physical concealment applied equally to their literary representation and expression. Viewed as an act of unveiling, with the potential to enter the world of others, to establish communication, and to gain entrance into the public domain, publishing was for long construed as a masculine prerogative.

37. Many Iranian poets have recreated this legendary love story, “perhaps the most popular romance in the Islamic world. Versions appear in prose, song, and poetry in almost every language within the vast area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chinese border.” Chelkowski, Peter Mirror of the Invisible World: Tales from the Khamseh of Nizami (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1975), 66.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 153.

39. For a study of insanity as a masculine recourse, see Kaveh Safa, “Madness as Masculine Prerogative in Layla and Majnun,” unpublished paper, presented in “Shifting Boundaries,” at the University of Virginia, April 1995.

40. Layla and Majnūn, 81.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., 22.

42. For a translation of Farid al-Din ^˓Attar's Manṭiq al-Ṭayr, written around 1177, see The Conference of the Birds, trans. Darbandi, Afkham and Davis, Dick (London: Penguin Books, 1984).Google Scholar

43. As Julie Scott Meisami mentions, Vis, and Ramin, “has acquired international repute as the Persian analogue of the story of Tristan and Yseult. The love triangle is substantially the same (an aging king, his young bride, and her lover—here, the king's brother).” Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 86.Google Scholar

44. Dreams continue to function as pretext for love or union in the contemporary period as well. In Nine Parts of Desire, Brooks, Geraldine writes: “Ruhollah, an impoverished clerical student from the dusty village of Khomein, had been twenty-seven when he asked for the hand of fifteen-year-old Khadija Saqafi. Her father, a prominent ayatollah (the word, meaning “reflection of God,” is applied to the most learned of the Shiite clergy), didn't think much of the match. But Khadija felt differently. She had glimpsed her suitor when, wrapped in a chador, she brought him a glass of tea. She convinced her father to agree to the match after relating a dream in which the prophet proclaimed Ruhollah from Khomein as destined to become a great religious leader.” (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 15.Google Scholar

45. According to Gayane Karen Merguerian and Afsaneh Najmabadi, “The pervasive and multiple lives of the Yusuf and Zulaykha story in so many genres of Islamic literature (in the broadest meaning of that term) do not simply arise from its religious sanction and its Qur'anic power. On the contrary, the story draws its attraction in part from its ability to travel between genres, and, in its travels, moves from being a story of a prophet, to a story about the guile of women, to a love story, to a moral tale. Through its citation in the Qur'an; in the books of commentary, history, mythohistory, and ethics; in the mirror of princes; in love poetry; and in popular tales, it has come to saturate the cultural construction of gender in Islamic societies.” “Zulaykha And Yusuf: Whose ‘Best Story?” 487.

46. Abdulrahman Jami, Hakim Nuruddin Yusuf and Zulaykha, edited, abridged, and translated by Pendlebury, David (London: Octagon Press, 1980), 55.Google Scholar

47. Mirror of the Invisible World, 22.Google Scholar

48. “There is a traditional story told about the love between the prophet Muhammad and Zainab, the most beautiful of his wives. A story born from a single look. Zainab was married to Zaid, the adopted son of the Prophet. One day, the latter needed to speak with Zaid. And so he approached his tent. Zainab told him that Zaid was not there. She hid herself behind a tapestry, but a ‘gust of wind lifted the curtain’ and the young woman, scantily dressed, became visible to Muhammad, who retired, distraught. Zaid then sets Zainab free again. But Muhammad will have to wait until a Koranic verse intervenes, making the union with a former wife of an adopted son legitimate.” Djebar, Assia Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 153, n. 3,.Google Scholar

49. Vis and Ramin, 60.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., 83.

51. Yusuf, tricked into a meeting with Zulaykha, the woman who passionately loves him, implores her to let him go. “It distresses me,” he tells her, “to be alone with you and hidden from view; for you are a blazing fire, and I am a wisp of dry cotton.” Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā, 80.

52. Etymologically, in English too, seduction denotes “to lead astray.” The idealization of women's immobility seems not to be the monopoly of any one culture.

53. Ferdowsi, The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rustam, trans. Clinton, Jerome (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1987), 17.Google Scholar

54. Vahid Dastegerdi, an authority on Nizami, calls Khusraw and Shirin “the best historical tale of love and chastity,” Mirror of the Invisible World, 48.

55. Ibid., 31.

56. Manavī-yi Haft Awrang, 727.Google Scholar

57. Houris, literally, “girls with big, black eyes,” are promised to the male believers who enter paradise. See the Qur^˒an: 44:54; 52:20; 55:72; and 56:22.

58. It is interesting to note that both Vis and Zulaykha, two women full of love, lust, and rebellion in classical Persian literature, never consented to their weddings. True, Zulaykha wants to marry ^˓Aziz of Egypt. But from the beginning he is an unfortunate substitute for Yusuf. It is in search of the apparition in her dream that Zulaykha goes to Egypt and ends up marrying ^˓Aziz, by mistake and force of circumstances. Vis, too, marries King Mowbad because her mother promised her to him. As a matter of fact, the king first proposes to the mother, who did not want to marry him. Vis is her unfortunate substitute.

59. Vīs va Rāmīn, 111.Google Scholar

60. Vīs va Rāmīn, 83.Google Scholar

61. Ibid., 18.

62. Ibid., 106.

63. Ibid., 66.

64. Ibid., 153.

65. Ganjavi, Nizami Khusraw va Shīrīn, ed. Dastegerdi, Vahid (Tehran: ^˓Ilmi, 1934), 389.Google Scholar

66. The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rustam, 17.Google Scholar

67. Yūsufwa Zulaykhā, 38.Google Scholar

68. Firdawsi, The Shah Nameh of the Persian Poet Firdausi, trans.Atkinson, James Esq. (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1976), 56.Google Scholar

69. Vīs va Rāmīn, 70.Google Scholar

70. Mernissi, Fatima Beyond The Veil (New York: Schenkman, 1975), 83.Google Scholar

71. Ibid., 83.

72. Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab Sexuality in Islam, trans. Sheridan, Alan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 37.Google Scholar

73. Yūsuf va Zulaykha, 81.Google Scholar

74. Yūsuf va Zulaykha, 86.Google Scholar

75. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallysbra and White question Freud's conspicuous neglect of nannies and other female servants in the sexual development of his upper-class subjects. They suggest that nannies and maids, because they represent the forbidden “lowly” realms of the body and the lower classes, are dangerously seductive and are thus “contained,” almost dissolved, by being seen as a displacement of the mother. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar