It was very hard to understand foreign people in premodern times. There was no social media, no wikipedia, no movies to watch, only very limited interactions for a very select few people. The Romans always struggled to properly understand barbarian tribes, for example, often grouping them together under one name which did not actually apply to all of them. The Arabs naturally had their own stereotypical views of Byzantine society. One very interesting aspect in this regard was how they saw the women of the medieval Roman society. Medieval Roman women were called rumiyya, the feminine linguistic form rumi which was their way of saying Roman. Professor Nadia Maria El Cheikh, the author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, will guide us as a source on this topic.
Lets just say it was…not such a positive perspective…but also sexually desirable…That may be contradictory, but that is what is present in the sources. The medieval Arab writers stereotyped Byzantine women as highly promiscuous and untrustworthy. They seem somewhat prized sexually, even. Nadia Maria El Cheikh wrote that: “Sa’id al Andalusi states that king of Rum(Roman Empire) is called the king of men because among a human beings, his subjects have the most beautiful faces, the most well-proportioned physiques, and the most vigorous constitutions. This characteristic, beauty, is associated with Byzantine women in particular.”
The women of Byzantium were described in some cases as being light-skinned and blonde with blue eyes and straight hair. This seems odd considering that is not the normal look of Mediterranean people. Perhaps the women that looked like this just stuck out more to Arab observers.
In the biography of Muhammad, a man named Jadd was asked if wanted to go fight the Romans and he said: “Will you allow me to stay behind so as not to be tempted, for everyone knows I am deeply attracted to women, and I am afraid that if I see the Byzantine women, I shall not be able to control myself.” This shows a bit of a fetishization of the Roman women, as if they were sirens luring virtuous men.
Some Arab writers simply insult them rather than objectifying the. Al-Jahiz wrote with disdain for Byzantine women he called: “the most shameless women in the world” noting that “the uncircumcised woman finds pleasure, which the circumcised woman does not.” I find this particularly interesting, as the Arabs strongly criticized the Byzantine use of eunuchs, castrated boys, in their court. Al-Jahiz wrote: “The Byzantines are the originators of this custom, which contradicts the spirit of kindness and mercy.” I agree the practice of castrating boys was immoral and wrong, but why is female genital mutilation ok? It seems the modification of young boys bodies is more touching to the heart of Al-Jahiz than procedures targeting female genitalia.
Byzantine women were criticized for going around without covering their faces and heads, which seems to have led to more assumptions by certain authors about their morality and chastity. Nadia Maria El Cheikh wrote about the account of Abd al-Jabbar: “(Byzantine) married women are usually chaste; it is the unmarried who are adulteresses, and they often start fornicating while still living in their parents home. He also mentions that Byzantine women are not veiled; even when married, and they pass the people in the market with heads and faces uncovered, showing all their beauty.”
El Cheikh elaborates further on Al-Jabbar’s claims: “There are he claims, many markets for prositutes, who posesses their own shops and sit in their doorways, uncovered and conspicuous. If one of them gives birth to a child, she can carry him to the patriarch, bishop, or priest and say “I am giving this child so that he may become a servant of Christ. Inevitably the response is that she is a “pure and blessed saint” Jabbar is basically belittling Roman family culture and Roman women in this text.
ACTUAL BYZANTINE EXPECTATIONS OF WOMEN:
The Arab writers “betray a strong inclination toward generalizations and stereotypes. In fact, in Byzantium, women were expected to be retiring, shy, modest, and devoted to their families and to religious observances. The upbringing of women took place in the gynaeceum, the part of the house for women, in virtual seclusion.”
“Outside of the gynaeceum women had little contact with men and wore a veil, whether married or not. Although Byzantine historical sources show that strict conventions did not stop illicit contact between the sexes, the behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in the Arabic sources.”
CONCLUSIONS:
Nadia Maria El Cheikh concludes that “the entire body of writing on Byzantine women seems to reflect fears of uncontrolled sexual activity. This threat was not unrealistic for although Islam officially tolerate marriage and concubinage alone, this did not prevent prostitution from prospering…the aforementioned accounts seem to be projections of the perceptions, feelings, attitudes, and judgment of Arab Muslim men. They give an image of Byzantine women that is implicitly connected to the way they relate to the Byzantines and their own self-definitions. Thus, there are no firsthand, credible, or dependable sources about Byzantine women in our sources. While they one quality that our sources never deny is the beauty of Byzantine women, the image that they create in describing these women is anything but beautiful.”
It all seems a device in order to “reject the moral and ethical system of the Byzantines as inferior, reinforcing their own adherence to what hey as a superior moral system”….even if much of what they thought about was not even true.
SOURCES:
Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs by Nadia Maria El Cheikh
shadowsofconstantinople.com 