by Wafa Sultan
When my feet touched the ground at the airport in Los Angeles, it was not just my family I was concerned for. I also worried about the people I left behind in my village. In Los Angeles, my first job was pumping gas at a gas station. On the very same day I started that job, I wrote my first article that dared to question and disagree with the shrieking mullahs and began to claw my way along two paths. The first was the path my family and I were traveling as we tried to earn enough to live and better ourselves. The other path I found myself on alone wound its way through the hills in my mind as I looked for a way to confront the ogre and free my family from his tyranny. What a difference there was between the two paths. The first was governed by law and morality and, however diffcult, appeared possible. The other was ruled by the laws of the jungle, which can harm you, even in a civilized place like the United States.
Courage alone made me push forward along the mountain path with the same energy I devoted to making my way in a society that respected me, no matter what my weaknesses were. As a woman, the knowledge I now had access to because I was living in America satisfied my ravenous hunger to learn and released me from many of my fears and weaknesses. I was surrounded on all sides by books as I worked to better myself and my family. Books, so frequently denied to women in my culture, were the things that saved me. Once you arm yourself with books, you become ever more powerful—a bulldozer—and completing the journey, no matter how long and how difficult, never seems impossible.
After seventeen years in America, I’ve achieved the position I wanted in my new country. I’ve also become acquainted with a different God than the one I knew in my village. I can still see the woman who greeted me at the Los Angeles airport. So many years ago I set foot on American soil and this young woman, with a smile that still warms my heart, said, “Welcome to America!” No one had ever welcomed me anywhere before. The ogre, the old God I knew, had not only deprived me of my right to hear these words; he had also succeeded in convincing me that I was not worthy of possessing that right. America gave me back my right to live in a society that welcomed me, and showed me, for the first time, that I deserved that right.
I emerged from the Los Angeles airport that day with a new understanding that perhaps others have always known, but which I just understood because of the kindness of a woman I’d never met before: People in every society worship their own image. Is the kind woman who welcomed me to Los Angeles not the God she worships? How much I wanted to exchange my ogre for her welcoming God at that very minute! I understood then that the God suits the person just as the lock suits the key. If a society has a defect, both lock and key have to be repaired. Fixing one or the other alone will not do. In my village, as in the America where I now live, the person is the God she worships. She regards that God as her ideal. She strives both consciously and unconsciously to draw closer to her ideal until she becomes one with it.
The woman at the Los Angeles airport gave me hope that people can change. Before a human being can change, however, the God he worships must be remolded. When I think of the waste of human life we see around us, I am disgusted. I am horrified by the waste of life that is the young Muslim who blows himself up in the midst of a crowd of schoolchildren. He kills twenty-eight people and himself because he is entirely deluded by the lie, forced on him by his God, that the deaths of these children will buy him entry to paradise and his houris. Isn’t that young man striving to identify with that ogre, that God who hates, squatting on the hilltop in that melancholy village? Does he not hope to control and influence others through fear? If we want to transform others like the unfortunate young Muslim suicide bomber into reasonable human beings and preserve our world, we first have to help them see their ogre clearly and show them how to exchange their God who hates for one who loves.
2.
The Women of Islam
PEOPLE HAVE OFTEN asked me what turning point brought about the dramatic change which altered the course of my life. I believe my life really began in the third grade when I learned to read. From that point on, I developed an insatiable appetite for every book that came my way. By the time I got to the fourth grade, I was getting lost in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Gone with the Wind, and the mysteries by Agatha Christie. My teachers, family, and family friends were generous in their attention and treated me as if I was a gifted child because of my precocious reading habits.
Even then, I loved to talk and talk and talk. I believe that the first thing that encouraged me to develop my talent for writing and public speaking was a comment made by my Arabic literature teacher. One day, in one of my exercise books he wrote, “I like your common sense and discernment. You have talent which you must nurture by reading until it matures. The road is a long one, but the fruit of the cactus emerges in all its sweetness from among the prickly spines.” So, I was to be, with his encouragement, “the fruit of the cactus,” the gift of a prickly plant, and his lines encouraged me to begin writing. The way my family spoke about me provided the rest of the push I needed toward learning. When I heard my father talking about me, as he sat with his friends in the evenings, he sounded is if he were speaking of someone possessed of an unusually high degree of intelligence. I was embarrassed to hear him speak of me in that way. His lavish praise placed a great burden of responsibility on me and, from that moment on, I never wanted to disappoint him.
My maternal grandmother was my ideal and played a major role in my life. My most precious memory of her is the stories she would regale us with when we were little and gathered around her every evening. She showed me the worth of a woman, as well as how one could be trod under the heels of one’s husband in the Muslim world. She was a strong woman, and, had she been allowed the opportunities I enjoyed, she would have been the Arabic Margaret Thatcher. She was also a sad woman who could be harsh, but for a long time, I never knew the secret that lay behind the profound sadness in her eyes. By the time she was in her early twenties she already had three sons and two daughters. A smallpox epidemic swept through her village and carried off a large number of its inhabitants. It stopped at her door and took away her three sons, leaving only her daughters. My grandfather awoke in the night to find himself enveloped not in sadness, but in shame. He had become a “father of daughters,” and, of course, my grandmother was held responsible for his disgrace, as she had borne him those daughters.
My grandfather was the local mukhtar—the head of the village—and his position did not permit him to remain without sons. Since he held my grandmother responsible for his disgrace, within a week of the death of her sons, my grand-father forced my grandmother to approach one of the village’s best-known families and ask for their beautiful daughter’s hand in marriage … for him. By her own accounts, my grandmother made a very good job of describing to the new bride my grandfather’s virtues as a man of distinction and she returned home with the family’s consent.
It was the custom for the bride to ride to the bridegroom’s home on a horse led by a member of her family. She would be met by a woman from the bridegroom’s family who would welcome the bridal procession by dancing before it with a bowl of incense on her head. The bride would reward the woman by throwing a few coins into the bowl. My grandfather, without a thought for my grandmother’s feelings, insisted that she carry the bowl and perform the dance before the bridal procession. He forced the woman who bore five of his children to denigrate herself before others in the village for the simple and selfish reason than that he didn’t want the few coins his new bride would toss into the bowl to go to anyone outside the family.
My grandmother swallowed her pride and hid her sadness away to perform the dance. At the end of the wedding ceremony she felt that, although she might have lost her husband, she had at least gained a golden Ottoman pound. Her happiness about even that small triumph was short-lived. At dawn that first day, she awoke to the sound of a gentle knocking at the door of her room. When she spied my grandfather through a crack in the door she was thunderstruck. In a low voice he whispered in
her ear, “My bride is still asleep, and I’m here to borrow the golden pound. I promise I’ll give it back to you when we bring in the harvest at the end of the season.”
My grandmother gave him the coin and went back to bed empty-handed, deprived of everything except her sadness. After the wedding, my grandmother was reduced to the status of a servant in her own home. She served my grandfather, his wife, and the ten boys that wife would bear for him. My grandmother accepted this humiliation, swallowed the insult, and worked from dawn till dusk in the house and the fields, all for the sake of her daughters. Some fifty years later my grandfather died without having given my grandmother back her pound. My grandmother died about fifteen years after that, still insisting—as a loyal Muslim wife must—that her husband had been a man of distinction, just as she had when he forced her to solicit a young woman to become his new bride.
A Muslim woman does not usually have the right to choose anything about her life; but in the rare circumstance that she does, that woman does not hesitate for a moment in choosing what suits her, even if she has to pay a price for that choice. When my mother married, my grandmother decided to escape the hell of life with my grandfather and moved in with her brother and his family. Although her life with her brother was little better, she felt that by leaving home she had taken a stand against her husband. After my mother’s marriage, she began to fuss over the children like a broody hen. My father’s five children from his first wife lived with us. I was the fourth of my mother’s eight offspring. When I came into the world I had to compete for a foothold in a house that swarmed with children. Several years after my mother’s marriage, my father asked my grandmother to come and live with us so that she could help my mother with the housework and the children. In the Arab world it is not usual for a woman to live in her son-in-law’s home and my grandmother agreed to my father’s request so as to make a point with her brother just as she had with my grandfather: She could make a choice. Life in our house was different for my grandmother. My father treated my grandmother with respect and seized every opportunity to praise her hard work and her role in raising the children. In his house, my grandmother breathed the fresh air of freedom and showered us with love and tenderness.
My mother was different. She did not share my grandmother’s ability to cast off the effects of her past, and was always a sad, angry, and stubborn woman. My father was dazzled by her youthful beauty as a child is dazzled by a toy. He was about twenty-five years older than she was. She was younger than his eldest daughter. He treated her well, but even this could not bring a smile to my mother’s face. The age difference between them was too great and their betrothal had not been her choice.
My father was a businessman who was respected and well known in the town where we lived. He was a grain merchant who sold the product of crops grown in eastern Syria to buyers in the coastal area. He provided us with a standard of living that many families in our region could not even dream of at the time. His day began at four o’clock in the morning when he would get up and make the morning coffee. Within a few moments the scent of Turkish coffee would pervade every corner of the house. Still half asleep, I would see him approach my mother’s bed and whisper quietly in her ear, “Coffee’s ready, dearest.” But she would thrust him away with a shove and he would go back to his chair on the veranda overlooking the sea, and, on most occasions, drink his coffee alone.
One of my happiest memories of him is of his return from a long journey at his usual dawn hour, when he would run to his family and wake us all up shouting, “Come on out, and bring bags with you!” We would run outside, pushing and shoving, and then race to the grain truck that stood blocking the street in front of our house. The driver would help us carry in the bags full of sweets, fruit, and vegetables. In the melon and watermelon season, we would compete to see who could carry the most.
My father spent very little time at home. He would leave in the morning before sunrise and come home after dark. In his absence my grandmother reigned supreme. Our town suffered from a shortage of schools. To solve this problem, each school had two shifts of pupils. On Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, the girls went to school from seven in the morning until noon, while the boys started their school day at half past twelve and studied until five o’clock in the evening. This arrangement was reversed on the remaining three school days, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, when the boys started school in the mornings, while the girls studied in the afternoons. On the days I went to school in the afternoon I would accompany my grandmother to the local market in the early morning to buy the day’s necessities.
My grandmother’s village, where she lived until the day she left her brother’s house for my father’s, is about seven miles away from the town where we lived. For twenty years after the day she left it, she never set foot there again. I remember the first time she went back after those twenty years, to attend the funeral of one of her sisters. My grandmother clearly loved the village she grew up in, but she had an astonishing capacity for concealing her feelings. Occasionally, I would get a glimpse of these emotions when I accompanied her on her morning excursions to the market in our own town.
Near the market there was a bus station and taxi rank where people gathered to wait for transport to the surrounding villages. In one of the corners stood a kiosk that sold falafel sandwiches, plates of hummus, and fava beans. It was owned by a relative of my grandmother’s who came from the same village as she did. My grandmother loved falafel and she would make straight for the kiosk every morning. Then she would begin to chat with her relative Muhammad the falafel seller and embark upon a long conversation with him, in the course of which he would inform her of every incident, large and small, which had occurred in her village. The time my grandmother spent in these conversations with Muhammad gave me some of my most precious moments.
That rubbish bin behind Muhammad’s kiosk was the first school I graduated from. Muhammad would wrap the falafel sandwiches in pages torn from magazines, books, and newspapers that he bought for a trifling sum from people who had finished reading them. Behind the kiosk was the bottom half of a large barrel that was used for rubbish, and Muhammad’s customers would throw their sandwich wrappings into it when they had finished eating.
While my grandmother was busy talking, I would sneak up to the barrel and climb onto the stone wall that ran alongside it. Then I would bend over, inclining my skinny body until I could reach inside and pick out the pages. I would scrape the remains of the sesame paste and falafel off them, smooth them flat, then fold them carefully and hide them in my pockets and underneath my jacket to read later. I would continue retrieving those pages that were precious to me until I heard my grandmother’s voice shouting, “Where have you got to, you little monkey? Playing in the rubbish? What a dirty little girl!” Then she would give me the rest of her sandwich and I would devour it inspired by the thought of the damp papers filling my pockets. Those visits to Muhammad’s falafel stand gave me my first access to the contents of the free Lebanese press and, consequently, the European and French newspapers it replicated. At the end of the 1960s when I was growing up, the Arabic newspaper market was dominated by the free Lebanese press. This was especially true of Syria. The freedom I saw being exercised in that press system inspired me. The newspaper pages I retrieved from Muhammad’s rubbish bin represented a freedom of thought and expression largely unknown in the Arabic world and they made me bold, made me look for the truth in all things.
On Fridays, our day off, I would spend most of the day copying the pages I had found into a special exercise book that I kept after I had thrown the dirty bits of paper into the waste-basket. Not a week passed without my discovering pages from one newspaper or another. The Reader’s Digest, in its Arabic-language version Al-Mukhtar, was the only object of my search that did not find its way into Muhammad’s barrel. Unfortunately, its small pages could not be wrapped around the sandwiches. As a result, buying Reader’s Digest mercilessly devoured two weeks’ pocket money every m
onth, but I didn’t mind. What I found there was more than worth the drain on my allowance.
Through the Reader’s Digest I learned about the United States, the country of Uncle Sam. Up to that point, I imagined the United States as existing on a planet quite different from the one I inhabited. In its pages I first encountered the Statue of Liberty and, in the early years of my life, tried to assume her personality. I imagined that if I were that woman, the very first thing I would do would be to put a smile on my mother’s face and write a ferocious letter to my grandfather, finally telling him off for the despicable way in which he treated my grandmother. I won’t deny, though, that my initial reaction toward this statue was a feeling of envy. Why could she carry a torch in one hand and a book in the other and stand haughtily in public view without fear or embarrassment, and I couldn’t? My whole life, both then and now, has been an attempt to answer that question.
I saw this statue of a woman who was my rival and whose enthusiasm for books I imagined matched my own for the first time from the window of a Pan American plane which bore me through the skies over New York as I arrived from Frankfurt on December 25, 1988. My heart leapt for joy at the sight of her and my envy evaporated at once, to be replaced, I don’t know from where, by a sense of security and triumph. I had a six-hour wait at New York airport before I could board the plane to Los Angeles where my husband would be waiting for me. On the flight from New York to Los Angeles I wrote a letter to my grandfather, by then already in his grave, in which I vented my anger toward him; by the time my feet touched the ground of Los Angeles I felt that my load had been lightened, even though I was unable to put a smile on my grandmother’s face.
