Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 203
woman is discovered the reader is led to suppose that a “union of souls”
takes place between the two. And that is the goal of life. [...] But it is
traceably a product of the teaching of the Christian Church regarding
marriage. Woman is an alluring but forbidden creature, by nature sinful,
except when a mystical union, typifying that of Christ and his Church,
has happened, thanks to priestly benediction.30Veiled Women is Pickthall’s masterpiece of becoming-woman. It depicts the
harem life in mid-nineteenth century Egypt no less skilfully and elaborately
than Lady Montagu. While Deleuze and Guattari turn to Proustian laws of love
as jealousy and homosexuality as the final outcome of all forms of idealised
love, and to the signs of Sodom and Gomorrah to deconstruct the Western
idealisation of love and marriage as a paradoxical cogito for two people, Pick-
thall turns to the harem life and polygamy which he does not believe to be the
Islamic ideal as he argues later that “Monogamic marriage remains, as it has
always been, the ideal of Islam [...] Polygamy is little practised in the Muslim
world today, but the permission remains there to witness to the truth that mar-
riage was made for man and woman, not man and woman for marriage.”31
It is a mistake to see Veiled Women as Muslim propaganda of conversion and
polygamy: it serves both as a symptomatology of Muslim decadence and mis-
conduct, and the deconstruction of the European idealisation of marriage and
love. The opening story of the novel, “the woman’s secret” is as follows:
[A]fter the flood, the men and women were in equal numbers and on
equal terms. What then? Why, naturally they began disputing which
should have the right to choose in marriage and, as the race increased,
enjoy more mates than one. The men gave judgment on their own behalf,
as usual; and when the women made polite objection, turned and beat
them. [...] The women sought recourse to Allah’s judgment; but – O ca-
lamity!- by ill advice they made the crow their messenger. The crow flew
off towards Heaven, carrying their dear petition in his claws, and from
that day to this he brings no answer.32Barakah, an English woman who marries the son of a Turco-Egyptian Pasha,
idealises her marriage at the beginning of the novel. But on a trip to France
30 Ibid., 154.
31 Ibid., 155, 157.
32 Marmaduke Pickthall, Veiled Women (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913), 6–7.