Introduction:
To understand the depiction of the Arab Muslim woman in William Beckford’s Vathek and in its contemporary Oriental fictions, we need, at the beginning, to trace her development in the Western fiction long before the 18th century. This chapter examines the representations of Arab Muslim woman in Western literary texts , covering the period from the eleventh century to the seventeenth century ,and examines how these representations pave the way to her representation in the eighteenth century, and to what extent Vathek’s women can be recognized in them.
The significance of representing such a history is that it may open William Beckford’s narrative of the Arab Muslim woman to a new analysis and judgment. It may, as well, help in “allowing us to see them [Arab Muslim women] not as "culminations" of a natural truth, but "merely the current episodes in a series of subjugations" (Foucault 1977, 148)” (mohja), and to differentiate between them as represented in Western texts whose feet never touch earth, and the real –flesh and blood–ones whose “feet touch earth in Hamah or Rawalpindi or Rabat.”( MOHJA)
Arab Muslin Woman in Medieval Texts:
Arab Muslim woman resides a
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In order to achieve this purpose, “ecclesiastical discourse needed Crusade propaganda from1095 through the next century and a half.”(mohja)This propaganda presents Islam as oppressor and Muslims as “monsters”(Arab monsters).The Muslims’ image was based on and inspired by the oppressor “pagan Roman ruler”. In light of this, the church tried to show that the authority and wealth of the Arab Islamic world is the cause of its corruption, and assured the moral superiority of the Christian realm, as it is through poverty that virtuous can be achieved. Such a wealth was the cause of a hidden malevolence and jealousy: “the hatred of the unprivileged for the privileged" (Daniels 1975'
