by Wafa Sultan
And so, she told me her story, one that has unfortunately become part of the social fabric of the place, a story also heard in other cultures of a woman who is used by a man; but one that, here, has a different Koranic twist to it. It’s a story that people have grown used to hearing and no longer, unfortunately, find a cause for concern… .
Halima has three children. She spent her childhood and early youth in the house of her father, who never accorded her a single day’s respect either as a woman or a human being. She escaped into marriage to a man named Omar while still an adolescent, seeking refuge from a bad situation in one that turned out to be even worse. After her marriage, Omar came home drunk every night and beat her. She became accustomed to these daily beatings, just as he was accustomed to drinking.
But Halima is no ordinary woman. She is a teacher, poised yet noticeably wary. Her tragedy came to a head when her drunken husband began to put pressure on her to arrange a bank loan for him on the strength of her salary to pay off his accumulated debts, to creditors whose patience was running out. Halima tried to find out whether or not what Omar said was true, in order to discover the names of his creditors and pay off the debt herself so that her husband would have no need of the loan—but without success.
Women, in Omar’s view, were supposed to carry out their husband’s orders without protest and had no right to interfere in a man’s affairs. He used to tell her from time to time, over the sound of his belt ripping into her body, “You damned woman, have you forgotten the words of God’s Prophet—may God bless him and grant him salvation: ‘If I had ordered anyone to bow down to anyone [other than God], I would have ordered a woman to bow down before her husband because of his rights over her.’ I haven’t ordered you to kneel down in front of me, but I am ordering you to take out a loan on the strength of your salary!” Halima secured the loan and Omar pocketed the money, leaving the house reassured that Halima had obeyed her Prophet and her husband, earning the approval of her Lord.
After Omar had taken Halima’s money, he was repeatedly and inexplicably absent from home and Halima became suspicious. One morning their neighbor, Salim, knocked at their door. “How are you, Halima? Listen, there’s something I want to tell you. Before Omar leaves home tomorrow morning, make sure he hasn’t got his passport in his pocket.” Then he turned on his heel and hurried away before Halima could ask why.
After beating Halima into exhaustion, Omar left the house that morning and did not return. Five months earlier, Omar had met a Moroccan dancer in a Damascus nightclub and had formed what he described as a “fraternal” relationship with her. When the dancer’s contract came to an end and she went back to her own country he kept in contact with her to “keep a brotherly eye on her and make sure she’s all right.” Once Omar got ahold of the loan money, he bought a ticket to Morocco leaving Halima and their children alone and in debt. Halima shared her income with the bank to pay the debt, but what remained was not enough to feed her children.
But the story didn’t stop there. Her entire salary evaporated when she discovered that the telephone bill amounted to 70,000 Syrian pounds (the average sum a Syrian earns in ten months), all of which had been spent on Omar’s telephone calls to Morocco to set his mind at rest as to the well-being of his “sister.” Halima could have left the bill unpaid, as she had no need of a phone and did not care if the telephone company cut her off. The drama, however, took another twist that favored another man in Halima’s life: The phone bill was registered in her father’s name. Instead of helping his daughter, Halima’s father made her promise to pay the bill before he would agree to have the line reinstalled in her home.
The only bright spot for Halima was when the Damascus telephone company took pity on her and agreed to take a share of her monthly salary as well, creating an even smaller amount of money with which she was to feed her children. Halima continues to work at her day job at the school to satisfy the creditors’ demands. When the school day is over, she runs from house to house giving private lessons to students so that she can perhaps manage to feed three hungry mouths. My heart bled for her as I saw her beautiful eyes fill with tears. I patted her shoulder, while a voice inside me murmured, “Don’t be sad, Halima. You’ve paid an exorbitant price, but you’ve pleased your God and his Prophet. That’s the way of the world, whose pleasures are fleeting. Patience, Halima, paradise is waiting!” I didn’t tell her. Nothing I could have told her. All that she wanted from me was to listen to her story.
Halima gave me a present. When I opened it I found inside two Syrian-made cotton shirts. I was delighted by her gift, a beautiful memento of my homeland and testimony to the tragedy of a woman I had met and before whose tears I had been helpless. It is my custom, when I receive a gift from someone dear to me, to inscribe the present with the giver’s name and the date on which it was presented, together with a sentence reminding me of the circumstances in which it was given. I folded one of the shirts and put it away for safekeeping with the inscription: HALIMA,SYRIA, 12 APRIL 2005, but I could find no sentence which summarized the situation better than Eleanor Roosevelt’s remark: “No one can put you down without your consent.”
Halima’s husband had humiliated and diminished her, but he had done it with her consent. Along with the arrogance and tyranny which her husband’s education nurtured in him as a Muslim male, there is another more powerful thing responsible for Halima’s tragedy: her acceptance of the slave role dictated to her by her husband’s Prophet. It is Halima who needs to be reeducated. Omar’s reeducation, if he ever leaves his Moroccan dancer to rejoin his wife, will follow as an inevitable consequence of a change in her. We cannot release Omar from his arrogance as long as he reads and believes the hadith: “A man has the right to expect his wife, if his nose runs with blood, mucus or pus, to lick it up with her tongue.” But we can give Halima back her power by amending her self-image for her. If that can happen, and if she can shed the role of slave, which has been handed down to her through the centuries, she will tell Omar to clean up his own filth instead of expecting her to lick it up for him.
A woman like Halima, however, cannot be persuaded to change her situation unless she has the opportunity to compare it with that of others. This is precisely what happens when a Muslim woman emigrates to a Western country where women’s rights are assured. In most cases she will try to change her situation as a result of what she observes in her new surroundings. However, Muslim women who have built Westernized lives for themselves in Western countries and enjoy the same rights as women in their adopted society are not always prepared to acknowledge what their new societies have done for them. On the contrary, they boast that the rights they now enjoy are no different from those which Islam granted them. Sometimes they go so far as to claim that the West uses women only for sex and places no value on her humanity. I have gotten into conversations with Muslim women now living in America who enjoy the same rights as American women do. Most of them insisted that their lives in America were no different from their lives in their homeland. This bizarre statement, which I was stunned by over and over again, always made me shake my head and wonder if, as they say, these women and I lived on different planets.
On my way from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, I got off at Trenton to change trains and sat in the station hall with the other passengers, waiting for the next train to arrive. To my right was a trolley piled with almonds and nuts, and beside it stood a broad-shouldered dark-skinned man of medium height whom I took at first glance for a Native American. He left his trolley, took two steps forward, and declaimed the call to prayer in Arabic: “God is great. God is great. The time of prayer has come. The time of prayer has come.”
I was pleased to hear someone speaking my native language, so I went over to have a word with him. Summoning my energies, I said, “Al-salamu ‘aleikum!” (“Peace be upon you!”)
He responded in astonishment, “Wa’ aleikumal -salam ! “ (“And on you be peace!”)
I asked him in English, “Do you speak
Arabic?”
He replied, “I read Arabic. It’s the language of my Koran.”
“And do you understand it?”
He replied evasively, “Yes … yes. Do you want to enter Islam ? “
“But I am a Muslim,” I told him.
His eyes blazed like live coals: “You are not a Muslim, and you don’t belong in Islam!”
His response shocked me, and I asked him, “Who are you to judge me?”
In a grinding voice he continued rudely, “Are you crazy? A Muslim woman covers her head, keeps to the house, and raises her children. She doesn’t go wandering around among men in the land of the unbelievers! Fear God, go home, and take care of your children!”
I looked him in the face and shouted at him, “Yes, I am crazy, because I expected something good from a religious fanatic. You fool! If your women had brought up your children properly, Pakistan would be the Switzerland of Islam and you wouldn’t have ended up on the West’s doorstep like beggars.” Then I left him, muttering to myself in Arabic, the language he couldn’t read, didn’t understand, and just repeated, parrotlike. I said, “It’s not your stupidity that upsets me. I feel sorry for America which allows fools like you to pollute it.”
I have no hopes for Muslims, men or women, who live in the West. They are, quite simply, hypocrites. They are trying to have the best of both worlds. They live and enjoy the carefree Western lifestyle to the full while at the same time pretending to their relatives back home that they devoutly observe the teachings of Islam and try to spread and apply them in the West.
In 2003, on my first visit to Syria since my emigration, I met a Syrian lady who was living in America and whose visit to Syria happened to coincide with mine. We met at a social gathering, and, before we had made each other’s acquaintance, I heard her telling a group of women, “A number of scholars and psychologists in the United States have found a way of treating mood disorders with recitation from the Holy Koran.” She was showered with questions from every side and began, without qualification, to describe to them what life in America was like; how people had lost their spirituality and were now ruled by their greed and their dependence on material things, how they were searching for a meaning in life, and had begun to find it in the teachings of Islam. Muslims of this kind present a danger not only in the United States, but also in their countries of origin.
People in Islamic countries are experiencing a terrible psychological struggle. They are dazzled by what they see and hear of the West and discontented with their situation in their homeland. However, at the same time, influenced by what they have heard from those who have already gone to live in Western countries, they are confused, and waver between their own culture, which has worn them out, and Western culture, which is condemned by those Muslims who live under its flag. When I joined in the discussion and asked her about her decision to live in American society and why she and her three children did not come back to live in her own “spiritual” society, she stared at me disapprovingly and indicated to me tersely that, though she wanted to return in the near future, the political and economic situation in her homeland prevented her from doing so at present.
I broke off the conversation at that point, convinced of the impossibility of reaching any logical conclusion with her. I have witnessed many scenes and heard many stories that embody this struggle, the most amusing of which I still remember from a number of years ago. President Gaddafi had expelled a group of young Palestinians from Libya in protest against the Oslo Accords between the Palestinian and Israeli governments. The Palestinians were gathered at the border between Libya and Egypt waiting for the United Nations to take pity on them and solve their problem. In the scene I remember, a group of Palestinians were protesting against Gaddafi’s decision by burning the American flag One of them brandished the burning flag. The logo on his T-shirt read CHICAGO BULLS.
Women in Muslim countries, isolated from the hypocrisy of their sisters who live in the West, can only observe what Western women have accomplished when they exercised their rights and freedoms and received the education that enlightened their minds. The woman in the Muslim country is forced to recognize that Western culture is the fruit of men and women working together equally and to acknowledge that societies which demean and oppress half their members will not be able to succeed on any level nor make any kind of progress at all. Releasing these women from their ignorance is the key to the doors that the teachings of Islam have closed firmly in their faces. Only when we have managed to open these doors will we have taken the first step toward stamping out Islamic terrorism.
When Muslim women realize the difference between decision and choice they will be able to respect their freedom rather than glorify their slavery. When we broach the subject of the head covering, which has kept Muslim women hidden from the entire world and has erected an iron barrier between men and women who live in the same society, these women protest that covering their heads is a decision they themselves have taken and that the rest of the world has to respect it. It may be their decision, but it is certainly not their choice. It is fear which binds women in Arab countries to these teachings.
The Prophet Muhammad told his cousin Ali in a hadith: “On the night the angel took me up into the heavens I passed by hell and saw women suffering all manner of tortures and wept at the sight, so great was their torment. I saw a woman hanging by her hair as her brain boiled, I saw a woman hanging by her breasts and I saw woman with the head of a pig and the body of an ass. I saw a woman in the form of a dog with fire going in through her mouth and emerging from her buttocks as angels beat her head with a stick of flame.” Could a Hollywood film director specializing in horror films filled with torture imagine a more terrifying scenario than this? How can a Muslim woman refuse to cover her head when she believes that God will hang her up by her breasts, send fire into her mouth, and bring it out through her backside? She can’t and she won’t be able to free herself from her head covering until she frees herself from her fear.
When we succeed in releasing that woman from the clutches of her ogre, she will be able to free herself from her fear and then she will take another look at the teachings which have deprived her of her humanity. That is one aspect of the issue. Another aspect is, if covering one’s head is a matter of personal decision on the part of Muslim women and the world has to respect this, the question arises: Does Islam respect the decision of women who do not cover their heads? Why can Muslim women walk around the streets of Los Angeles wearing a burka, which covers them from head to toe, while Western women visiting Saudi Arabia have to wear a burka when they go out in public?
Is a Muslim woman who refuses to cover her head treated with respect in Muslim society? Or does she pay a high price for her decision? When I visited Syria two years ago with my American friend Jessica, we sailed to a small island near the Syrian town of Tartus. Together with our guide, a man in his late twenties, we began to explore the island’s alleyways, which were crowded with local people and visitors. Jessica remarked: “More women seem to cover their heads here on this island than they do in other Syrian towns.”
I turned to the guide and asked him, “Do all the women here on the island cover their heads?”
He answered without hesitation, “Yes, apart from a few prostitutes.” His response was nothing more than the reflection of a reality which every woman living in a Muslim society tries to avoid facing. This is one of the most important motives for wearing a hijab. A woman would rather cover her head than be equated with a prostitute.
When I was a fourth-year medical student, at the bus stop one day near the hospital where I was doing my training, I saw two small boys aged about six and eight. Each boy had a small bird in his hand and was plucking out its feathers. The birds were cheeping with pain and struggling to escape. The sight upset me and I went over to the boys and said gently, “Boys, you mustn’t do that. Please stop it.” The elder boy fixed me with a piercing stare that seemed to penetrate every cell of my body and said
vehemently, “There’s nothing wrong with plucking a bird. What is wrong is that a woman like you should be walking around off the leash in mixed company without a head covering. Go and bury yourself at home!”
The war on terrorism has to start by protecting Muslim children from teachings that turn them into ogres. Let’s give this a bit of thought: The fact that an eight-year-old boy sees right and wrong in these terms is a problem that requires consideration. As far as that boy is concerned, a woman who walks down the street without a head covering is no more worthy of respect than a dog found wandering off the leash. This boy does not need to know anything about the woman, nor does the fact that she is an outstanding medical student concern him as he passes judgment on her and pronounces her a prostitute until she covers her head. The fact that this boy is utterly incapable of any sense of guilt about what he is doing to a small bird is another problem that should arouse our concern.
Muhammad Atta did not become a terrorist overnight. He did not come out of nowhere, nor was he born under a gooseberry bush. When he was eight years old he may well have plucked a little bird’s feathers with no sense of guilt and his assumptions regarding a woman without a hijab were no more rational than the small boy’s snap judgment of me. He was born into a society whose ethics, teachings, and culture he internalized. In his very early years he must have read the Koranic verse that says: “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides” (5:33). A boy who learns that God cuts off people’s hands and feet from opposite sides will not hesitate to pluck a live bird and will be capable, when he grows up, of hijacking a plane carrying “unbelievers” or attacking a tower full of those “unbelievers.” That boy will internalize his God and will one day himself become that God. Unfortunately, this indoctrination of the young is spreading.
