Undercover Muslim

by Theo Padnos

  The Westerners who had married Yemeni women were the aristocrats among the students of knowledge. They lived away from the school, in the hurly-burly of Sana’a commerce and family life. Some of them had proper jobs teaching English. Some worked for travel agencies, and some worked in the businesses of their wives’ fathers. They all spoke excellent Arabic, quoted from the Koran in conversation, and dressed in robes with blue dress socks, sandals, and well-aged, oily turbans. They dressed as Yemeni tribesmen dressed, in other words, and spoke as if they had long ago discarded their Western heritage.

  My first friends at the Mahad Medina occupied a lower rank in the hierarchy: the level of the greenhorn, the recent arrival. Often, they couldn’t speak much Arabic. Occasionally, they were converts to Islam and had to be reminded about the most basic things: who was Khadija? (she was the Prophet’s first wife and the first convert to Islam). When did the Prophet’s early followers flee Mecca and why? (in AD 622, because they were oppressed in the land).

  Some of them had turned up in Yemen without enough money to rent a dorm room. Others were not planning to be in Sana’a long enough to make it worthwhile, so they slept in darkened nooks and corners of the office suite. They kept their belongings in an alcove under the back stairs of the mosque, next to the toilets and the women’s prayer room.

  At night, when these mosque sleepers were preparing themselves for bed, they pulled the hoods of their Adidas sweatshirts over their head, or they wrapped their Kashmiri shawls over their faces and rested their head in the crux of the Koran stands. Some just dropped on to the carpet wherever they happened to feel drowsy, covered their eyes with a scarf, and dozed. At eleven o’clock in the evening, when these travellers were crashed out in odd angles and attitudes, a collective snoring and sighing rose from the floor of the former office suite.

  Sometimes, when I was studying or chatting with acquaintances, a passed-out brother would stir on the carpet next to me, then sit up. He would unveil himself, and smile in the sleepy-headed way of someone napping in a youth hostel. ‘Salaam alaikum,’ he would say. ‘Yeah – I’m Abderrahman, from Australia. How’re you, mate?’ Or sometimes: ‘I’m originally Turkish but now I’m from Toronto. You?’

  Often in our mosque, when the day’s prayers had been prayed, and the fasts fasted, the brothers who were not sleeping spoke about what they really hoped for from Yemen. So often, their hopes were simple, and could be expressed in a word: wives.

  In Yemen, one is allowed to be married to four women at once. This is uncommon because it requires resources most don’t have but two wives are not uncommon, nor is polygamy looked down on as it is for instance in Syria and Egypt. To the outside world, wives are a sign of well-being, mastery of the world, prosperity and abundance. But our late-night conversations focused on what wives might mean for us, personally, in our private, as yet unlived lives.

  Since we were all bachelors, we really didn’t know much. Still, it wasn’t hard to guess.

  In the suqs in Yemen, one could ask the shopkeepers to display the labes dakhlia eros – the undergarments of the bride. These were often fantastic, unearthly creations: bras with flashing red lights over the nipples, or turning sunflowers, or strings of fake diamonds. There were exotic, sex-kitten suits made from red pleather strips and dangling glass jewels. There were panties with buzzers and massagers built into the crotches, which could be activated by remote control. There were edible panties and panties that weren’t anything more than silk strings, which the salesman removed from an envelope, dangled briefly in the air, then, overcome by confusion and shame, crumpled into his palm.

  Later on, when I discovered more about the Islamic marriage, I learned that wives sometimes danced for their husbands in these costumes. They themselves bought these bride undergarments – or their friends and family bought them for them.

  Sex was hardly the only reason Yemeni brides haunted our mosque. When the Yemeni men in our mosque spoke of the wives they would marry next, they conjured a picture that was both other-worldly and believable. The next bride would be a religious girl, one who didn’t come and go as she pleased but preferred staying in the house, preferred the Koran over TV, family over career, and Yemen over anywhere else on earth.

  In conversation, such women kept their eyes on the ground, never took food when it was offered to them, and spoke in tiny voices about their faith in God. They smiled with their eyes when they mentioned ‘our Prophet’, and whispered as they quoted the Koran.

  One might speak for an hour with such a woman without discovering any individuating characteristics. All young women in Yemen loved ‘our Prophet’; all of them said that they never lied, kept the fasts, and prayed, but not often in a mosque because, in Yemen, women did not pray in mosques. Of course they would marry, but they would not search out husbands; rather they would allow their father and Allah himself to give them a husband.

  A suitor in such a conversation would make eye contact only briefly. He would watch the bowed head of the girl for a while, and then watch the father nodding as she said the things young women are supposed to say. The father would be proud. The girl would be rigid with fear. For the suitor himself, the conversation would be like interviewing a blankness, a sheet of paper. This was something he could purchase. In Yemen, the cost was usually about $3,000.

  For Western students interested in marriage, Yemen was an auspicious place. Their passports and the reputation of Westerners as people of means gave them incomparable advantages in the marriage market. Furthermore, because the population of eligible young people was ballooning, marriages were happening at a rate never before known in Yemen.

  Every Thursday evening – the beginning of the weekend in Yemen – some street or alley near our mosque would be shut down, a tent erected, light bulbs strung over the alleyways, and loudspeakers latched to lamp posts and tent poles.

  Crowds of cousins and neighbours would gather. At around nine o’clock, a man with a microphone would stride through the crowd singing traditional songs. The men would chew qat in a tent. The women would ululate from the rooftops. The sexes would not meet, and the bridegroom and bride would not appear in public together. The bride would appear inside, in some closed-off room or salon, before her female friends and relatives. The groom would sit in a high backed wicker chair in the street, while his neighbours sang and danced at his feet. Some time in the evening, the bride would be ushered in a veil and cloak to his house, where the marriage would be consummated.

  Because of this boom in weddings, there were whole neighbourhoods in Sana’a in which nothing was sold but marriage regalia. The shop windows displayed the thrones, flowers, garlands, ceremonial swords, wedding dresses, sashes, ribbons and ouds. The shop clerks, all of whom were men, sat in folding chairs in front of their store windows beckoning to the passing women.

  Religious students who wanted to marry Yemeni women were meant to ask the imam of the mosque to introduce them to a woman in need of a husband. The imam would then contact a father in the mosque, and the father would bring the daughter to a room with a partition. The interested male party would then interview the prospective bride as her father and the imam listened. If the interview was going well, the partition – but not the veil – might be removed. Later in the engagement if things were still going well, the groom might ask to see the bride’s face.

  Some brothers in our mosque did go through this process but after the unveiling came another stumbling block: the bride price. Muhammad from Maryland badly wanted to marry and spoke every day about ‘rolling out my game’ – his personal flirtation strategy – but he didn’t want the flirtation to end in his having to pay a fee.

  One evening as the nappers were snoozing nearby on the prayer hall floor, I asked him if he was willing to pay the $3,000 a Yemeni bride might cost. ‘Hell, no!’ he said, laughing. ‘Hell, no! I don’t got that kinda money and if I did I wouldn’t spend it on a wife. I would not do that!’

  ‘This is the tradition here,’ I replied. ‘Why
not respect it?’

  ‘I just wouldn’t do it,’ he said, ‘and I know a lot of brothers from America who wouldn’t either. These Yemeni dads, they think they’re running a business. Now, they’re just plain greedy. They just want to see the green, you know? They have two daughters and they think they’re gonna get rich. In the Koran it says you give the father a consideration for his daughter. It does not say you give him $3,000 and enough qat to get high on for the next twenty years.’

  There were other brothers with different points of view: Bilal from Nantes had converted to Islam five years earlier. He had been a truck driver for DHL in Nantes but had to quit because an imam in Yemen, whom he had contacted on the internet, advised him that transporting wine, as he was obliged to do, was illegal in Islam. ‘Many of the Moroccans in France,’ he said, ‘they go back to Morocco to find brides. What should I do? Go back to Nantes?’

  No. He hoped to participate in the Yemeni bride purchasing system and he acknowledged that that would cost: the only problem was that his Arabic was poor, and he didn’t want to pay a lot for a lifetime’s worth of communication issues with his wife. He wondered if I had ever heard of a French-speaking observant, believing girl in Sana’a. ‘There is a French school here,’ I said. His eyes lit up, ‘but many of the students are the children of embassy employees and French government officials. They are not Muslim.’ He was disappointed. ‘I want someone who is secure in the religion,’ he said. ‘Someone who prostrates herself before God. I can surely find a woman like that in Yemen? If not here, where can I find her?’

  ‘Surely, you can,’ I agreed.

  In the months to come I learned how difficult these East–West marriages can be. I heard stories of Yemeni brides who fell out with their English husbands over what time the children should be put to bed, what the kids should eat, and at what age the girls should wear the hijab. In Yemen girls sometimes do not put on the hijab until the age of nine. Many Western Muslims felt that in order to exhibit respect for the Prophet’s traditions, and to protect the child from unwanted attention, it was best to put on the hijab at the age of six.

  There were other problems. Children don’t necessarily have bedtimes in Yemen but rather fall asleep when their parents fall asleep. I met an Englishman who was surprised to discover that his Yemeni wife and her entire family lived in a two-room apartment and fell asleep at the same time, usually in front of the television, usually at some hour past midnight.

  When he married the daughter, the Englishman, a convert, tried to bring some order to the situation by forbidding TV in his own house. But the bride liked to watch TV, particularly during the daytime, and anyway had grown up in a house in which everyone learned to fall asleep to the noise of the television. Now, without the TV, she had a hard time sleeping. She had a hard time putting her own children to sleep.

  There was also the issue of whom the children might speak with. The English father felt that the local children used foul language, thus corrupting the morals of his daughters. He preferred that the children play inside and got angry if he saw the kids outside, sitting in the dust with the neighbours’ kids.

  But the mother needed to clean the house and it was a local habit to send the children, even toddlers, into the lanes and alleys during daylight hours.

  Many of the arguments in this marriage apparently revolved around food and how it should be eaten. The father felt that Islam prohibited junk food. The mother liked Nestlé baby formula and creamy, European-style desserts. The father managed to tolerate some junk food over time but believed that Islam prohibited people from speaking while taking food. The mother felt that there was no such rule in Islam and wanted to watch TV during dinner. Thus did the marriage dissolve.

  Since most Yemeni brides abandoned school in order to be married, the husbands generally assumed responsibility for the remainder of their education. My friend Bilal from Nantes wanted to teach. Every day he memorised Koran, studied Arabic grammar, and discussed fiqh and sharia with friends in the mosque. An excess of learning bubbled in his head. On Fridays, he sat in the front row of worshippers and listened intently to the chutba or sermon. He was certainly accumulating a store of Islamic knowledge, and had the money to pay for a bride, but the French-speaking, observant one who did not cost too much and whose parents did not mind her marrying a foreigner refused to turn up. Bilal slept in a dorm room above the mosque for four weeks, then disappeared.

  Perhaps the women the students at the Mahad Medina knew best were the beggars who sat in the stairwell that led from the street up into the mosque. They lifted their hands to us as we filed into prayers and touched the sleeves of our robes as we filed out. No one spoke to them but we could guess, from the way the black Dacron fell across their hips, what their bodies might look like. My friend Muhammad from Maryland told me that the idea of marriage to one of them had occurred to him – surely the bride price would have been negligible – but he had problems with their practice of Islam. ‘They just sit around and wait for money,’ he used to say. ‘Without praying? What kind of a Muslim is that? They gotta pray and maybe then they’ll get husbands.’

  Sometimes, in the street, I bumped into a classmate from Canada or the UK or France who was followed not by one wife but by two. A trail of toddlers tottered along behind the two adult women. One hardly breathed a word to the fathers on those occasions because a conversation would require the father to stop in the middle of the pavement, shake hands and exchange greetings, thus causing a traffic jam. On those occasions the dads did not want to chat. They had brought their wives into the street with some specific purpose in view – a visit to a doctor’s office or to wait in line in the immigration office or the post office – but not so that their wives could loaf about in the street while people stared.

  Accordingly, whenever we saw a father with his family in tow we made silent eye contact only with him, and nodded and ceded the way. Nor did we ever ask the husbands about their wives. They didn’t volunteer any info and the bachelor students didn’t enquire.

  Once in my first weeks as a talib, I went to a French brother’s house for dinner. He had married a young woman from Sana’a. We never saw her, or heard her for that matter, but as he brought forth platter after platter of food from the kitchen, a sensation of pleasant domesticity filled the house. His dinner guests did not so much as mention the wife (we enquired after the health of his ‘family’) but the lightning speed with which the platters appeared in his hands, and the heaped piles of rice topped with parsley and orange slices seemed, to me anyway, very much like tokens of marital happiness. Ahmed, who had come to Yemen from Venisseux, outside Lyon, said that he got along splendidly with his in-laws. They were hoping and praying that he would find a job and were prepared to take the wife back to their own house if need be and would look after the son until such time as he had enough money to do it himself. But no one had any money in Yemen and most young men were unemployed. Ahmed had a little money from the mosque, enough to buy baby food and rice, and was thus not under pressure to find a job, as he might have been in Europe.

  I left his house that evening feeling that I had visited a happy and warm place. But a grammar class schoolmate of mine, Bilal from Bradford, painted a different picture of domestic life among the married students.

  If his wife left the house, he said, it would be only with his permission, and usually only under his supervision. ‘She wants it that way,’ he said. ‘She insists, not me.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she’s a good Muslim,’ he said. ‘It comes naturally to her.’

  Before coming to Yemen, he had divorced his English wife. Now he had a new English Muslim wife in Sana’a. In his house in Yemen, anything that reminded him of his previous life as an unbeliever was prohibited: there was no TV, there were no newspapers, and there were no images of animate beings.

  ‘She’s much happier than she ever was in England,’ he said, ‘I can tell you that, and she doesn’t talk back.’

 
In Sana’a, the bachelor students of knowledge only really had an opportunity to get to know a single family: it belonged to the imam of our mosque, Sheikh Moamr.

  He lived in an apartment just above the prayer hall. We saw his toddlers emerging from his front door in the mornings – son after son, barefoot, robed and joyous. They wrestled and pulled on one another’s hair in the mosque. They played with their father’s mosque microphone and brought books to his chair at the smallest sign from his right hand. In the mornings, as Moamr emerged from his apartment, he smiled. His beard glistened. In the evenings, when he stood in his doorway, we could smell dinner in the air behind him – cumin and lamb or rice and chicken or, during the holidays, beef. When he emerged into the hallway, it was obvious that he was coming from some sweeter, warmer region of our dorm building, a zone of indulgence and ease. In that place, there lived at least one and possibly several wives.

  If I had not seen Moamr’s children, I would never have imagined the existence of their mothers in one dorm. I would have guessed, on the evidence of his bare feet, his nightgown and his tranquil smile, that the sheikh lived in a monk’s cell. During the day, he was clearly a scholar-monk. He read and prayed in the mosque. But he had a complete and absorbing second life to go home to at night. To most of the students, I think, this seemed an interesting lifestyle and if there had been any way to inspect it more closely, I’m sure someone would have. But the sheikh did not ask the students to eat with him and no one that I knew ever set foot in his apartment.

  20

  I MET MY closest friend in Yemen, Said, a twenty-four-year-old former auto body repairman from Roubaix, in April. I had been a Muslim for about three months by then.

  By that time, Said’s patience with Yemen was gone. His five months in the country had given him more than enough opportunity to issue his final verdict on the lazy officials, the idlers in the streets, the qat-strewn hallways of the ministries, the decrepit taxis and their not always scrupulous drivers: it was a pays de clochards, a nation of hoboes. It refused to leave the twelfth century. It had been a mistake for him to come at all. He only liked one thing about it, which was the chance it gave him to wear proper Islamic clothing.