A NOTE ON SPELLING
Since there is no standard method of transliteration from Arabic to English, I have followed my own whim, which is to select, wherever possible, the simplest spelling of a word or name that conveys an approximation of its sound in Arabic. The exceptions are names of authors who publish in English translation, in which case I have followed their spelling preference, and for the name of the prophet Muhammad, which I have rendered in the spelling preferred by most Islamic sources.
To Gloria, who convinced her daughters
that they could do anything.
And to Tony, of course.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
1 THE HOLY VEIL
2 WHOM NO MAN SHALL HAVE DEFLOWERED BEFORE THEM
3 HERE COME THE BRIDES
4 THE PROPHET’S WOMEN
5 CONVERTS
6 JIHAD IS FOR WOMEN, TOO
7 A QUEEN
8 THE GETTING OF WISDOM
9 RISKY BUSINESS
10 POLITICS, WITH AND WITHOUT A VOTE
11 MUSLIM WOMEN’S GAMES
12 A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
CONCLUSION: BEWARE OF THE DOGMA
GLOSSARY
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Lee Lescaze, for his calm voice on the end of so many crackly phone lines; Paul Steiger, for tolerating a leave that lasted too long; Karen House, for having confidence that I could cover the Middle East long before I had; Mary Ellen Barker, John Fitzgerald and Elinor Lander Horwitz for their comments on the manuscript; Melissa Biggs for painstaking fact-checking; Michael Lewis for neighborly advice and inspiration; Deborah Amos, Christiane Amanpour, Nora Boustany, Jacki Lyden and Milton Viorst for good company in war zones; and David Chalfant, agent and champion, without whom this book would not be.
Finally, I would like to thank the many Muslim women who, across so many obstacles, made me welcome in their world.
“Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”
—Ali ibn Abu Taleb, husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and founder of the Shiite sect of Islam
PROLOGUE
“Say, I fly for refuge unto the Lord of the daybreak, that he may deliver me from the mischief of those things which he hath created.”
THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE DAYBREAK
The hotel receptionist held my reservation card in his hand. “Mr. Geraldine Brooks,” he read. “But you are a woman.”
Yes, I agreed, that was so.
“I’m sorry, but our reservation clerk has made a mistake.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Just add an s and make it ‘Mrs’.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. I can’t give you a room. It’s against the law for women.”
I glanced around the hotel’s gleaming lobby. “What about them?” I said, nodding my head in the direction of two black-cloaked Saudis heading for the elevator.
“They are here with their husband,” the receptionist explained. “In Saudi Arabia a lady does not travel alone. There is no reason for it. Unless she is a prostitute.”
There was a time—a year, two years earlier—when I would have lost my temper. Now I just sighed and walked away from the desk. It was after 11 P.M. I knew no one in the city of Dhahran. I could take a taxi back to the airport and wait out the night on one of its plastic chairs. But at the hotel entrance there were no taxis. The plush sofas of the empty hotel lobby looked inviting enough. I made myself comfortable behind a potted plant and pulled my black chador out of my bag to use as a blanket. I was closing my eyes when the receptionist coughed behind me.
“You cannot stay here.”
I quietly pointed out that I had nowhere else to go.
“Then,” he said, “I have to call the police.”
The Dhahran police station had the same hard benches and harsh lights as police stations everywhere. The only difference was that the plain-clothes detectives wore long white thobes. Whenever I’d been in police stations before, it had been to report on crime. This was my first visit as a criminal.
Behind a desk across the room a young police lieutenant shuffled my identity documents. I had press credentials from Australia, Britain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, the United States and Yemen. I had passes to Arab summit meetings and presidential palaces. I even had a plastic press badge issued by Saudi Arabia’s own Information Ministry. The lieutenant peered at them all. First he lined them up vertically, then horizontally. Then he stacked them in a neat pile, as if to evaluate them by height.
Finally he looked up, letting his gaze rest on a patch of wall just above my head. Like most very strict Muslims, he didn’t want to risk polluting himself by gazing at a strange woman. When he spoke, he addressed me in the third person. “I think the lady hasn’t been in Saudi Arabia very long. She doesn’t know our customs.” He resumed his tedious perusal of my documents. Plucking one of my passes from the pile, he dangled it between his thumb and forefinger. “This one,” he said with a tiny triumphant smile, “expired yesterday.”
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning the lieutenant handed back my documents, adding a permit allowing me to spend the next few hours in a hotel. Back at the front desk, the receptionist summoned a bellman, a Filipino, to show me to my room. It was on a completely empty floor. An armed guard hovered by the elevator.
“They must think I’m dangerous,” I muttered. The bellman didn’t smile.
“They think all women are dangerous,” he replied, dropping my bag just inside the door and retreating under the guard’s watchful gaze.
I lay on the bed, staring at the decal glued to the mirror, showing Muslims the direction that they should face to pray. Nearly every hotel room I had stayed in during the past three years had had a similar arrow—stuck on the night table, pinned to a curtain, fixed to the ceiling. It was just a few minutes before dawn. I walked to the window and waited. As a pale disc of light crept up over a hazy blue horizon, the stillness shattered, as it did every dawn, and had done for the last thirteen hundred years.
“Come to prayer!” wailed the muezzins of the city’s hundreds of mosques. “It is better to pray than sleep!” As the sun edged its way westward, a billion Muslims would do as the citizens of Dhahran were doing at that moment: rise from their beds and bow toward the town of Mecca, about seven hundred miles west of my hotel room.
The reason for my sleepless night lay in that desert town. I couldn’t check myself into a Saudi hotel room in the 1990s because thirteen hundred years earlier a Meccan named Muhammad had trouble with his wives.
Islam’s prophet loved women. He married his first wife when he was twenty-five years old. Illiterate, orphaned and poor, he hardly expected to receive a proposal from his boss, Khadija, a rich Meccan businesswoman at least ten years his senior who hired him as a manager for her international trading company. While it wasn’t typical for women to propose to men in Meccan culture, Khadija was among those with the clout to do so. She gave him money, status and four daughters—his only children to survive infancy. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, King Hussein of Jordan and the thousands of sheiks and mullahs who today wear the black turban that signifies descent from the prophet all trace their lineage to one of those daughters.
It was to Khadija that Muhammad crawled, trembling, the first time he heard the voice of the angel Gabriel pronouncing the word of God. Despairing for his sanity, Muhammad found himself repeating the first words of the Koran—which means simply “recitation.” Then he made his way to his wife on his hands and knees and flung himself across her lap. “Cover me! Cover me!” he cried, begging her to shield h
im from the angel. Khadija reassured him that he was sane, encouraged him to trust his vision and became the first convert to the new religion, whose name, Islam, means “the submission.”
The message of Islam arrived in seventh-century Arabia where female infants, of limited value in a harsh herding and raiding culture, were exposed on the sands to die. In Mecca’s slave market, soldiers sold the women captives they’d won as spoils of war. But a few women, like Khadija, had the money and influence to choose their own husbands and shape their own lives.
For twenty-four years Khadija was Muhammad’s only wife. It wasn’t until she died, nine years after that first vision, that Muhammad began receiving revelations from God on the status of women. So Khadija, the first Muslim woman, was never required to veil or seclude herself, and never lived to hear the word of God proclaim that “Men are in charge of women, because God has made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property [to support them].” Such a revelation would have come strangely from Muhammad’s lips had Khadija still been alive and paying his bills.
Six years after her death, and after a battle between the Muslims and the ruling tribe of Mecca that had left about sixty-five Muslim women widowed, Muhammad had the revelation that endorsed the taking of up to four wives: “Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice [to so many] then one [only].” Needing to make alliances through marriage with defeated enemies, he had a further revelation exempting himself from the four-wife limit. Every time he took a new wife, a room for her was added to his apartments near Islam’s first mosque. Gradually the rooms increased until they housed eight or nine women.
Soon there was jealousy, intrigue and scandal. Relatives of lesser wives conspired to discredit the prophet’s favorites. Enemies of the new religion harassed the prophet’s wives. Any small incident was an occasion for gossip. One wife brushed the hand of a male dinner guest as she handed him a plate of food; another drew a rude comment as she made her way at night to an outdoor latrine; a third caused all kinds of controversy because her first husband had been Muhammad’s adopted son Zaid.
Just after these incidents, God sent his prophet a message telling him to seclude his wives. Some of the wives had been battlefield nurses; others had preached the new faith in the mosque. Now they were expected to stay hidden behind a curtain in their rooms, going out only when shrouded from head to foot.
Gradually the rules meant to safeguard the prestige of the prophet’s wives came to be applied to other Muslim women. As the Islamic message spread out of Arabia and into neighboring lands, the idea of seclusion found an easy audience. Unlike the Arabians, Persians had long segregated women: in ancient Assyria, wives of the nobles veiled as a sign of status, while lower classes were obliged to go uncovered. A slave caught veiling herself could be punished by having molten pitch poured over her head. These customs easily drifted back to Islam’s Arabian heartland and endured there. In Saudi Arabia most women today still live curtained off from the world. A woman can’t check herself into a modern Saudi hotel because, like the prophet’s wives, she is supposed to be secluded in her home.
But a few miles away, across an invisible desert border, those rules have ceased to apply. In Saudi Arabia’s neighboring state, the United Arab Emirates, Muslim women soldiers, their hair tied back in Islamic veils, jump from helicopters and shoulder assault rifles. A little farther, across the Persian Gulf, the strict Muslims of Iran vote women into Parliament and send them abroad as diplomats. Pakistan was the first Islamic country to elect a woman prime minister; Turkey has had a female economist as its prime minister, while Bangladesh has had women both as prime minister and as leader of the opposition. Instead of adhering to the rules set down for the prophet’s wives, these women cite other role models from the history of early Islam. The soldiers look to Nusaybah, who helped save Muhammad’s life in battle, standing her ground at his side when the male soldiers fled. The politicians cite Fatima, Muhammad’s shy daughter, who spearheaded a political power struggle after the prophet’s death.
Islam did not have to mean oppression of women. So why were so many Muslim women oppressed?
I went to live among the women of Islam on a hot autumn night in 1987. I arrived as a Western reporter, living for each day’s news. It took me almost a year to understand that I had arrived at a time when the events of the seventh century had begun to matter much more to the people I lived with than anything they read in the morning paper.
It was a Muslim woman, Sahar, who gave me my first clue.
Sahar had been The Wall Street Journal’s bureau assistant in Cairo for two years when I arrived there as its Middle East correspondent. My first year in Egypt was set to the syncopated tattoo of her stilettos, clip-clipping their precarious way across Cairo’s broken pavements. She was twenty-five years old, six years my junior, but about a decade ahead of me in poise and sophistication. Her English was formal and precise, and so was her grooming. No matter what story we were covering—a building collapse in a teetering slum, sewage seep at the Pyramids—Sahar always dressed for a soiree. Her makeup was so thick it would have required an archaeological excavation to determine what she really looked like. Her hairdos needed scaffolding. As I shuffled beside her in my sneakers, I felt like a sparrow keeping company with a peacock.
Sahar’s father worked for an American car company in Cairo. She had spent a year in America as a high school exchange student and graduated top of her class at the American University in Cairo. She wanted to go to Harvard. Sahar was both reassuringly familiar and depressingly unexotic. I had imagined the Middle East differently. White-robed emirs. Almond-eyed Persians. Camels marking the horizon like squiggles of Arabic calligraphy. An Egyptian yuppie hadn’t been part of the picture.
At work, as well, it was hard to find the Middle East I’d imagined. I found myself stuck on the flypaper of Arab officialdom, sitting in the gilded salons of deputy assistant second secretaries to ministers of information, sipping tiny cups of cardamom-scented coffee and listening to lies. These men—urbane, foreign-educated—had no problems talking to a Western woman. But out on the streets, among the ordinary people I really wanted to meet, most men only spoke to women to whom they were related. To them, being approached by a lone woman reporter was either an occasion for embarrassment or an opportunity to test the widely held assumption that all Western women are whores. I hated the kind of reporting I was being forced to do: the head-of-state interviews, the windy think pieces on U.S. Middie East policy. I’d signed on as Middle East correspondent looking for risk and adventure. But it seemed the biggest danger I’d be facing was boring myself to death.
Tony, my husband, who had given up his newspaper job to come with me as a freelancer, wasn’t having that problem. A few weeks after our arrival, I looked over Sahara shoulder as she cut out my latest article—“Iraq-Syria Reconciliation Seems Tenuous”—and placed it in a folder alongside Tony’s—“Egypt’s Camel Corps Roams the Desert Tracking Smugglers.” Tony had talked his way onto a patrol with the last Egyptian camel corps. The army wouldn’t give approval for a woman to go. In the mine-strewn waters of the Persian Gulf, Tony crewed on a supply boat and came home with tales of turbaned Omani fishermen, Sindbad-style dhows and Persian carpet smugglers. I couldn’t join him: the shipping agent wouldn’t send a woman to sea.
For almost a year I fretted and kicked at the Middle East’s closed doors. Then, thanks to Sahar, I looked up and noticed the window that was open only to me.
Sahar and I worked side by side in a big bright room of my Nileside apartment. When I wasn’t traveling, we sat at desks just feet from each other. As I wrote my articles, Sahar translated items in the Arabic press, scheduled appointments or arranged my visas. After about a year of working alongside her, I felt we’d come to know each other well.
Then, one morning at the beginning of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, I opened the door and faced a stra
nger. The elaborate curls were gone, wrapped away in a severe blue scarf. The makeup was scrubbed off and her shapely dress had been replaced by a dowdy sack. Sahar had adopted the uniform of a Muslim fundamentalist. It was like watching a nature film run in reverse: she had crumpled her bright wings and folded herself into a dull cocoon.
It had been impossible to live for a year in the Middle East and not feel the rumbling of religious revival. All over the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, more women were covering their hair, more men growing beards and heading for the mosque. I’d assumed that the turn to Islam was the desperate choice of poor people searching for heavenly solace. But Sahar was neither desperate nor poor. She belonged somewhere near the stratosphere of Egypt’s meticulously tiered society.
On that Ramadan morning I stood at the door staring at her, stunned. Egyptian women had been the first in the Middle East to throw off the veil. In 1923, on their return from a women’s suffrage conference in Rome, the pioneer Arab feminists Huda Sharawi and Saiza Nabarawi threw away their coverings at the Cairo railway station, and many in the crowd of women who had come to greet them followed suit. Sahar’s mother, growing up under the influence of Sharawi and her supporters, had never veiled.
The Islamic dress—hi jab—that Sahar had opted to wear in Egypt’s tormenting heat signified her acceptance of a legal code that valued her testimony at half the worth of a man’s, an inheritance system that allotted her half the legacy of her brother, a future domestic life in which her husband could beat her if she disobeyed him, make her share his attentions with three more wives, divorce her at whim and get absolute custody of her children.
During those weeks of Ramadan, I spent hours talking to Sahar about her decision. In reply, Sahar mouthed the slogan of Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood: “Islam Is the Answer.” The question, certainly, was clear enough: how was her desperately poor country going to continue to feed, educate and employ a population that increased by a million every nine months? Flirtations with socialism and capitalism had failed to arrest Egypt’s economic decline. The Islamic movement wanted to abandon these recently imported ideologies and follow the system set down so long ago in the Koran. If God had taken the trouble to reveal a complete code of laws, ethics and social organization, Sahar argued, why not follow that code?
Nine Parts of Desire Page 1
