In the early 1940's in Morocco women and girls were segregated in the harem and a gatekeeper kept them from going out in the world without their father or an older brother accompanying them.

Life for the females was restricted to activities such as cooking, needlework and story telling and playacting these stories in the evenings when the women were alone in their compound. Because they were not free to determine their own fate, they used any ruse or plan to wheedle what they wanted out of the men whose word was law.

This is not unlike the early life in the colonies in this country when men made the rules and women were not allowed in meetings to set policy. The women would often sneak around outside the meeting house trying to hear what was said. Even up until August of 1920 women in this country could not vote in a national election.

It is not widely known that there were feminist writers in early Islam even before the feminist movement in this country. At first the writers could not live their feminist philosophy but could only write behind the walls of the harem but later there were women who dared to break conventional rules. One was Huda Sha 'raoui an aristocratic Egyptian beauty, born in 1879, who bewitched Egypt with ardent speeches and popular street marches.

There were two main kinds of harems-imperial harems, which first flourished with the territorial conquests and accumulation of wealth of the Muslim imperial dynasties. These harems were dismantled when the Western powers deposed Abdelhamid II.

After the imperial harems were gone the domestic harem, consisting of a man and his sons and their wives who lived in the same house, continued. What defines it as a harem is not polygamy, but the men's desire to seclude their wives and their wish to maintain an extended household rather than break into nuclear units.

Women around the world are separated either in harems or by traditional upbringing to be separate from men in their conscious or unconscious behavior and beliefs. This separation makes them unequal to the men who hold power and creates an enormous gap in understanding. It all starts when little girls are separated from little boys in the harem or in same sex classrooms around the world.

Polygamy still took place even after the imperial harems disappeared and the women worked to have polygamy banned. But the legislators, all men, said it was a religious law and could not be changed. In the summer of 1992, a Moroccan women's association that had collected one million signatures against polygamy and the outmoded rules of divorce became the target of the fundamentalist press which issued a religious decree calling for the women's execution as heretics.

Within the Islamic world there are many variations within regions. Where religious fundamentalism reigns, women have less power over their own lives-their comings and goings and their dress and the like. Even though we need to empathize with other cultures, we do not need to glorify another culture, nor dismiss it as unworthy.

I hope that this little window into the world of the women of Islam will whet your appetite to learn more. It is only through ignorance that we suffer the isms, including sexism, that divide us as humans.

Georgie Bright Kunkel is a freelance writer who can be reached at 206-935-8663 or

gnkunkel@comcast.net.