Your loving daughter, Budur She posted this off, and after that stopped thinking of Turi. The letter was helpful in making her feel less guilty. And after a while she realized, as the weeks went on, and she did clerical work, and cleaning, and cooking, and other help of that kind in the zawiyya, and made the arrangements to start studies at the institute connected to the madressa, that she was not going to get a letter back from her father. And Mother was illiterate; and her cousins no doubt forbidden to write, and perhaps angry at her for abandoning them; and her brother would not be sent after her, nor would he want to be; nor would she be arrested by the police and sent off in a sealed train to Turi. That happened to no one. There were literally thousands of women both escaping from home, and relieving those left behind from the burden of caring for them. What in Turi had looked like an eternal system of law and custom that the whole world abided by, was in reality nothing more than the antiquated habits of one moribund segment of a single society, mountain bound and conservative, furiously inventing pan Islamic 'traditions' even at the moment they were all disappearing, like morning mist or (more appropriately) battlefield smoke. She would never go back, it was that simple! And no one was going to make her. No one even wanted to make her; that too was a bit of a shock. Sometimes it did not feel so much that she had escaped as that she had been abandoned.
There was this fundamental fact, however, which struck her every day when she left the zawiyya: she was no longer living in a harem. She could go where she chose, when she chose. This alone was enough to make her feel giddy and strange – free, solitary – almost too happy, to the point of disorientation, or even a kind of panic: once right in the midst of this euphoria she saw from behind a man emerging from the railway station and thought for a second it was her father, and was glad, relieved; but it wasn't him; and all the rest of that day her hands shook with anger, shame, fear, longing.
Later it happened again. It happened several times, and she came to regard the experience as a kind of ghost glimpsed in the mirror, her past life haunting her: her father, her uncles, her brother, her male cousins, always in actuality the faces of various strangers, just alike enough to give her a start, make her heart jump with fear, though she loved them all. She would have been so happy to think they were proud of her, that they cared enough to come after her. But if it meant returning to the harem, she never wanted to see them again. She would never again submit to rules from anyone. Even ordinary sane rules now gave her a quick surge of anger, an instantaneous and complete NO that would fill her like a shriek in the nerves. Islam in its literal meaning meant submission: but NO! She had lost that ability. A traffic policewoman, warning her not to cross the busy harbour road outside the crosswalks: Budur cursed her. The house rules in her zawiyya: her teeth would clench. Don't leave dirty plates in the sink, help wash the sheets every Thursday; NO.
But all that anger was trivial compared to the fact of her freedom. She woke in the morning, understood where she was, leapt out of bed full of amazed energy. An hour's vigorous work in the zawiyya had her groomed and fed, and some of the communal work done, bathrooms cleaned, dishes, all the chores that had to be done over and over again, all the chores that at home had been performed by the servants but how much finer it was to do such work for an hour than to have other human beings sacrificing their whole lives to it! How clear it was that this was a model for all human labour and relations!
Those things done, she was off into the fresh ocean air, like a cold salty wet drug, sometimes with a shopping list, sometimes only with her bag of books and writing materials. Wherever she was going she would go by the harbour, to see the ocean outside the jetty, and the wind whipping the flags; and one fine morning she stood at the end of the jetty with nowhere to go, and nothing to do; and no one in the world knew where she was at that moment, except for her. My God, the feel of that! The harbour crowded with ships, the brown water running out to sea on the ebb tide, the sky a pale wash of clean azure, and all of a sudden she bloomed, there were oceans of clouds in ber chest, she wept for joy. Ah, Nsara! Nsssarrrrra!
But first on her list of things to do, on many mornings, was to visit the White Crescent Disabled Soldiers' Home, a vast converted army barracks a long way up the river park. This was one of those duties Idelba had pointed her towards, and Budur found it both harrowing and uplifting – like going to the mosque on Friday was supposed to be and never really had been. The larger part of this barracks and hospital was taken up by a few thousand blind soldiers, rendered sightless by gas on the eastern front. In the mornings they sat in silence, in beds or chairs or wheelchairs as the case might be, as someone read to them, usually a woman: daily newspapers on their thin inky sheets, or various texts, or in some cases the Quran and the hadith, though these were less popular. Many of the men had been wounded as well as blinded, and could not walk or move; they sat there with half a face, or without legs, aware, it seemed, of how they must appear, and staring in the direction of the readers with a hungry ashamed look, as if they would kill and eat her if they could, from unrealizable love or bitter resentment, or both all mixed together. Such naked expressions Budur had never seen in her life, and she often kept her own gaze fixed on whatever text she was reading, as though, if she were to glance up at them they would know it and recoil, or hiss with disapprobation. Her periph eral vision revealed to her an audience out of a nightmare, as if one of the rooms of hell had extruded from the underworld to reveal its inhabitants, waiting to be processed, as they had waited and been processed in life. Despite her attempts not to look, every time she read to them Budur saw more than one of them weeping, no matter what it was she read, even the weather reports from Firanja or Africa or the New World. The weather actually was one of their favourite readings.
Among the other readers there were very plain women who nevertheless had beautiful voices, low and clear, musical, women who sang their whole lives without knowing it (and knowing would have ruined the effect); when they read many in their audience sat forward in their beds and wheelchairs, rapt, in love with a woman to whom they never would have given a second glance could they have seen her. And Budur saw that some of the men leaned forward in the same way for her, though in her own ears her voice was unpleasantly high and scratchy. But it had its fans. Sometimes she read them the stories of Scheherazade, addressing them as if they were angry King Shahryar and she the wily storyteller, staying alive one more night; and one day, emerging from that antechamber of hell into the soaked sunlight of cloudy noon, she almost staggered at the realization of how completely the old story had been turned on its head, Scheherazade free to walk away, while the Shahryars were imprisoned for ever in their own wrecked bodies.
THREE
That duty accomplished, she walked through the bazaar to the classes she was taking, in subjects suggested by Aunt Idelba. The madressa institute's classes were folded in to the Buddhist monastery and hospital, and Budur paid a fee, with money borrowed from Idelba, to take three classes: beginning statistics (which began with simple arithmetic, in fact), accounting and the history of Islam.
This last course was taught by a woman named Kirana Fawwaz, a short dark Algerine with an intense voice hoarsened by cigarettes. She looked about forty or forty five. In the first meeting she informed them she had served in the war hospitals and then, near the end of the Nakba (or the Catastrophe, as the war was often referred to) in the Maghribi women's brigades. She was nothing like the soldiers in the White Crescent home, however; she had come out of the Nakba with the air of one victorious, and declared in the first meeting that they would in fact have won the war, if they had not been betrayed both at home and abroad.
'Betrayed by what?' she asked in her harsh crow's voice, seeing the question on all their faces. 'I will tell you: by the clerics. By our men more generally. And by Islam itself.'
Her audience stared at her. Some lowered their heads uneasily, as if expecting Kirana to be arrested on the spot, if not struck down by lightning. Surely at the least she w
ould be run down later that day by an unexpected tram. And there were several men in the class as well, one right next to Budur, in fact, wearing a patch over one eye. But none of them said anything, and the class went on as if one could say such things and get away with it.
'Islam is the last of the old desert monotheisms,' Kirana told them. 'It is belated in that sense, an anomaly. It followed and built on the earlier pastoral monotheisms of the Middle West, which predated Mohammed by several centuries at least: Christianity, the Essenes, the Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Mithraists and so on. They were all strongly patriarchal, replacing earlier matriarchal polytheisms, created by the first agricultural civilizations, in which gods resided in every domesticated plant, and women were acknowledged to be crucial to the production of food and new life.
'Islam was therefore a latecomer, and as such, a corrective to the earlier monotheisms. It had the chance to be the best monotheism, and in many ways it was. But because it began in an Arabia that had been shattered by the wars of the Roman empire and the Christian states, it had to deal first with a condition of almost pure anarchy, a tribal war of all against all, in which women were at the mercy of any warring party. From those depths no new religion could leap very high.
'Mohammed thus arrived as a prophet who was both trying to do good, and trying not to be overwhelmed by war, and by his experiencing of divine voices babbling some of the time, as the Quran will attest.'
This remark drew gasps, and several women stood and walked out. All the men in the room, however, remained as if transfixed.
'Spoken to by God or speaking whatever came into his head, it did not matter; the end result was good, at first. A tremendous increase in law, in justice, in women's rights, and in a general sense of order and human purpose in history. Indeed, it was precisely this sense of justice and divine purpose which gave Islam its unique power in the first few centuries AH, when it swept the world despite the fact that it gave no new material advantage – one of the only clear cut demonstrations of the power of the idea alone, in all of history.
'But then came the caliphs, the sultans, the divisions, the wars, the clerics and their hadith. The hadith overgrew the Quran itself, they seized on every scrap of misogyny scattered in Mohammed's basically feminist work, and stitched them into the shroud in which they wrapped the Quran, as being too radical to enact. Generations of patriarchal clerics built up a mass of hadith that has no Quranic authority whatsoever, thus rebuilding an unjust tyranny, using frequently falsified authorities of personal transmission from male master to male student, as if a lie passed down through three or ten generations of men somehow metamorphoses into a truth. But it is not so.
'And so Islam, like Christianity and Judaism before it, stagnated and degenerated. Because its expansion was so great, it was harder to see this failure and collapse; indeed, it took up until the Nakba itself to make it clear. But this perversion of Islam lost us the war. It was women's rights, and nothing else, that gave China and Travancore and Yingzhou the victory. It was the absence of women's rights in Islam that turned half the population into non productive illiterate cattle, and lost us the war. The tremendous intellectual and mechanical progress that had been initiated by Islamic scientists was picked up and carried to much greater heights by the Buddhist monks of Travancore and the Japanese diaspora, and this revolution in mechanical capacity was quickly developed by China and the New World free states; by everyone, in fact, except for Dar al Islam. Even our reliance on camels did not come to an end until midway through the Long War. Without any road wider than two camels, with every city built as a kasbah or a medina, as tightly packed as a bazaar, nothing could be done in the way of modernization. Only the war's destruction of the city cores allowed us to rebuild in a modern way, and only our desperate attempt to defend ourselves brought any industrial progress to speak of. But by then it was a case of too little and too late.'
At this point the room was quite a bit emptier than it had been when Kirana Fawwaz began; and two girls had exclaimed as they stormed out that they were going to report these blasphemies to the clerics and the police. But Kirana Fawwaz only paused to light a cigarette and wave them out of the room, before continuing.
'Now,' she went on, calmly, inexorably, remorselessly, 'in the aftermath of the Nakba, everything has to be reconsidered, everything. Islam has to be examined root and branch and leaf, in the effort to make it well, if that is possible; in the effort to make our civilization capable of survival. But despite this obvious necessity, the regressives prattle their broken old hadith like magic charms to conjure jinns, and in states like Afghanistan or Sudan, or even in corners of Firanja itself, in the Alpine Emirates and Skandistan, for instance, the hezbollah rule, and women are forced into chador and hijab and harem, and the men in power in these states try to pretend that it is the year 300 in Baghdad or Damascus, and that Haroun al Rashid will come walking in the door to make everything right. They might as well pretend to be Christian and hope the cathedrals will spring back to life and Jesus come flying down from heaven.'
FOUR
As Kirana spoke, Budur saw in her mind the blind men in the hospital; the walled residential streets of Turi; her father's face as he was reading to her mother, the sight of the ocean; a white tomb in the jungle; indeed everything in her life, and many things she had never thought of before. Her mouth hung open, she was stunned, frightened but also elated, by every single shocking word of it: it confirmed everything she had suspected in her ignorant balked furious girlhood, trapped in her father's house. She had spent her whole life thinking that something was seriously wrong With herself, or with the world, or both. Now reality seemed to have opened up under ber like a trapdoor, as all her suspicions were confirmed in glorious style. She held onto her scat, even, and stared at the woman lecturing them, hypnotized as if by some great hawk circling overhead, hypnotized not just by her angry analysis of all that had gone wrong, but by the image she evoked thereby of History itself, the huge long string of events that had led to this moment, here and now in this rainlashed western harbour city; hypnotized by the oracle of time itself, rasping on in her urgent smoky crow's voice. So much had happened already, nahdas and nakbas, time after time; what could be said after all that? One had to have courage even to try to talk about it.
But very clearly this Kirana Fawwaz did not lack for courage. Now she stopped, and looked around at the half emptied room. 'Well,' she said cheerfully, acknowledging with a brief sardonic smile Budur's round eyed look, somewhat like that of the astonished fish in the boxes at the market. 'It seems we have driven out everyone who can be driven out. Left are the brave of heart to venture into this dark country, our past.'
The brave of heart or the weak of limb, Budur thought, glancing around. An old one armed soldier looked on imperturbably. The oneeyed man still sat next to her. Several women of various ages sat looking around uneasily, shifting in their seats. A few looked to Budur like women of the street, and one of these was grinning. Not what Budur had imagined when Idelba had talked about the Nsarene Madressa and Institutes of Higher Learning; the flotsam of Dar al Islam, in fact, the sorry survivors of the Nakba, the swans in winter; women who had lost their husbands, fiances, fathers, brothers, women who been orphaned and never since had the chance to meet a single man; and the warwounded themselves, including a blinded veteran like the ones Budur read to, led to the class by his sister, and then the one armed one, and the eyepatch next to her; also a Hodenosaunee mother and daughter, supremely confident and dignified, relaxed, interested, but with nothing at stake; also a longshoreman with a bad back, who seemed to be there mainly to get out of the rain for six hours a week. These were the ones that remained, lost souls of the city, looking for something indoors to occupy them, they were not sure what. But perhaps, for the moment at least, it would do to stay here and listen to Kirana Fawwaz's harsh lecture.
'What I want to do,' she said then, 'is to cut through all the stories, through the million stories we have constructed to def
end ourselves from the reality of the Nakba, to reach explanation. To the meaning of what has happened, do you understand? This is an introduction to history, like Khaldun's, only spoken among us, in conversation. I will be suggesting various projects for further research as we go along. Now let's go and get a drink.'
She led them out into the dusk of the long northern evening, to a cafe behind the docks, where they found acquaintances from other parts of her life, already there eating late meals or smoking cigarettes or puffing on communal narghiles, and drinking little cups of thick coffee. They sat and talked through the long twilight, then far into the night, the docks out of the windows empty and calm, the lights from across the harbour squiggling on black water. The man with the eyepatch was a friend of Kirana's, it turned out; his name was Hasan, and he introduced himself to Budur and invited her to sit on the wall bench next to him and his group of acquaintances, including singers and actors from the institute, and the city's theatres. 'My fellow student here, I venture to say,' he said to the others, 'was quite taken by our professor's opening remarks.'
Budur nodded shyly and they cackled at her. She inquired about ordering a cup of coffee.
The talk around the dirty marble tabletops ranged widely, as was true in all such places, even back in Turi. The news in the newspapers. Interpretations of the war. Gossip about the city officials. Talk about plays and the cinema. Kirana sometimes rested and listened, sometimes talked on as if she were still in her class.
'Iran is the wine of history, they are always getting crushed.'
'Some vintages are better than others so for them all great civilizations must finally be crushed.'
'This is merely al Katalan again. It is too simple.'
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 56
