Everyday life in the harem

By Babs Rule

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 085634141X
• ISBN13: 9780856341410
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Blond & Briggs
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Memoir - Everything Old Is New Again

The phrase "everything old is new again," is not meant to apply to the institution of the Harem, I hope. Instead, I am applying it to the sense I got when reading this 1983 account of EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE HAREM, by Babs Rule, that what was then billed as an account, an example of personal reporting diguised by the fiction of letters to various people "back home," would today be called a memoir. As memoir, it is the story of the invitation to Babs Rule, an American businesswoman, to visit a Saudi Arabian harem, the home of her daughter and grandson. It was, as she portrays it, a kind invitation to a grandmother isolated from her one-year-old grandson by culture, religion, and most of all sheer distance. She spent three months in the harem, which as the meaning of the term develops in Rule's book, is where the sons under ten years old, the daughters, and the wives of Saudi royalty and wealthy traditionalists spend their days and nights. Rule's daughter has married a Saudi prince she met in the United States, and traveled with him to live in Saudi Arabia, where their son was born. Rule describes here the expected opulence and unanticipated tedium in the everyday life of the harem. What to me makes it a memoir, although the time covered is less than four months, is the development of understanding and insight by Rule, and the drama of her escape from the harem. The remaining suspense is what will become of her daughter and grandson in the institution of the harem, in Saudi, or in the United States. While Rule's book is almost 25 years old, many of her insights into the cultural differences between the conservative Islamic monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the industrialized commercialized liberationist USA are worth pondering today. And it makes a neat memoir, and a fast and suspenseful book to read.