204 Kökoğlu
with her husband and three other Egyptian couples her idealisation is totally
dismantled. All four women are ill-treated. The men leave their wives at the
hotel, and go out themselves to enjoy nightly entertainment probably with
French prostitutes. And each man, including her own husband, asks Barakah
“to confide him the secret how to win the love of Frankish ladies”,33 but Yusuf,
her husband, does not forget to add “‘It is not for myself I ask, ... but Hâfiz,
Izz-ud-dîn, and Saïd die to know. Where are these balls at which distinguished
women fling aside all shame?’”34
Next, Barakah idealises her only son in an Oedipal retreat. In worshipping
him, she never realises that the spoilt child grows into an asocial tyrant. When
at a young age he is killed in the war by a recruit he had been training abu-
sively, it is the end of everything for Barakah. She is finally resolved to return
to England and back to Christianity. When she secretly asks the help of the
British Consul in Egypt, she is refused since her case is regarded as a harem
quarrel. Barakah, completely disillusioned and devoid of soul, finds a new ide-
alisation, the harem life itself: “She had found the keynote of harîm existence –
resignation; not merely passive, but exultant as an act of worship”.35 Barakah
is hypnotised into fatalistic resignation through her personal incapability to
dissolve her marriage. Bernard Shaw points to this state of “beglamoring the
human imagination with a hypnotic suggestion of wholly unnatural feelings” 36
especially in the case of indissoluble or sacramental marriages in Christianity.
For Shaw, in fact, there is nothing unnatural in Muslim polygamy and it is even
preferable to unlimited “Free Love”: “In the British Empire we have unlimited
Kulin polygamy, Muslim polygamy limited to four wives”.37 Shaw argues that,
if there were an excessive surplus of women population, limited polygamy
“would be absolutely necessary”.38 He also argues in terms of monopoly and
supply and demand that no one, especially no women, would object to po-
lygamy, but only men who are “comparatively weedy weakling[s], left mateless
by polygyny”.39 Finally, in contrast with Barakah’s disillusioned resignation,
Shaw claims, when polygamy is customary, women become “its most ardent
supporters”.40
33 Ibid, 140.
34 Ibid, 146.
35 Ibid, 314.
36 G. Bernard Shaw, Getting Married (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 55.
37 Ibid., 7.
38 Ibid., 35.
39 Ibid., 36.
40 Ibid.