...For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, European leisure travelers made endless romantic speculations about the “secrets of the harems,” writes Judy Mabor in Veiled Half-Truths. They filled their fantasies with erotic scenes of dark-eyed women, but kept their distance; even as they fantasized, they pitied the poor, backwards Arab women, Mabor writes. In later years, however, Westerners began to feel guilty about these one-sided Orientalist fantasies. In Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate, Hideous Kinky, and Sheltering Sky, the Western woman sleeps with an Arab man. The experience turns the tables on the usual fantasy. Now it’s the...