Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  As it turned out, infibulation hadn’t saved her from prostitution. Because of her beauty, Aset had been forced into servitude by the Ethiopian army, required to work as a domestic servant and sometime prostitute in a soldiers’ barracks. When the town fell to the Eritreans, the guerrillas offered Aset a chance to train for four months as a birth attendant, learning nutrition, hygiene, family planning and midwifery. Part of the course covered the dangers of genital mutilation, information that Aset now passes on to each of her patients.

  Aset’s job wasn’t easy: she had to talk her patients out of ancient practices such as placing heavy stones on the bodies of laboring women to hasten delivery, or firing off rifles next to their ears to “frighten” the baby out of the womb. Traditionally, infibulated women are restitched after each childbirth, an excruciating procedure that delays recovery and increases the risk of infection.

  “Now I know there’s no use to it, and as I was convinced I hope I’ll convince others. But it’s a difficult job,” Aset said. Sometimes women demanded the stitches because they feared their husbands’ rejection. Others just didn’t believe Aset’s assertion that the practice was damaging. If a woman insisted, Aset reinfibulated her, hoping at least that the clean instruments she used would do less damage than those of the traditional local midwife, who would almost certainly be called in if she refused.

  Because some Christians and animists also practice genital mutilation, many Muslims resent the way it is linked most closely with-their own faith. But one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.

  Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They drifted back to a few places on the Arabian Peninsula: in the Buraimi Oasis in the United Arab Emirates, it was traditional until a few years ago to remove about an eighth of an inch of the clitoris from all six-year-old girls. Asked the reasons for the practice, the Buraimi women couldn’t give any. Well versed in their religion, they knew that no such practice was advocated in the Koran, and they were aware that many neighboring tribes didn’t do it. But they knew that what they hoped for from the operation was to safeguard their daughters’ chastity, because upon that chastity depended the honor of the girls’ fathers and brothers.

  While some Muslims protest the linkage of mutilation with their faith, few religious figures speak out against the practice, and numerous Islamic texts still advocate it. In Australia, I once heard an educated and articulate young Muslim express gratitude for the removal of part of her own clitoris: “It reminds me that my marriage is about more important things than pleasure,” she said.

  In London in 1992, Donu Kogbara, a Sunday Times investigative reporter, had no trouble finding a doctor who agreed to remove her clitoris, even though the operation has been banned in Britain since the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act was passed in 1985. The reporter simply told the Harley Street doctor, Farouk Siddique, that her fiance was insisting she have the operation before their marriage.

  In most Muslim countries women are the custodians of their male relatives’ honor. If a wife commits adultery or a daughter has sex before marriage, or is even suspected of having done so, they dishonor their father, their brothers and sometimes the whole family that bears their name. To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job.

  Yet the lessening of women’s sexual pleasure directly contradicts the teachings of Muhammad.

  To Muslims, every word of the Koran is sacrosanct. “There is no doubt in this book,” the Koran says, and every Muslim believes that its 6,000 verses constitute the direct instruction of God. But there are debates about Islam’s second source of religious instruction: the massive body of hadith, or anecdotal traditions about the prophet’s life and sayings, compiled by the early Muslims in a formidable research effort in the two centuries following Muhammad’s death. Because Muslims feel that emulation of Muhammad is ideal, every detail of his habits, no matter how apparently trivial, has been preserved from the accounts of his survivors. The result is a collection of anecdotes, each with a genealogy that documents the source of the story and exactly how and through whom it was passed on. Each tradition gets a ranking: “true,” “good” or “weak.” Thus, Muslim scholars can make their own determination about whether the chain of transmission is reliable.

  From the study of hadith, various schools of Islamic thought have emerged, and within those schools, particular teachers have developed wide followings. Most agree on what is haram, or forbidden, such as eating pork and drinking alcohol, and also on what is wajib, or obligatory, such as the content and timing of the five daily prayers. A Muslim sins either by doing a forbidden act or by neglecting an obligatory one. In between, though, are makruh, or discouraged and unbecoming acts; and sunnat acts, which are desirable but not obligatory.

  To most Muslim men, growing a beard is sunnat—a desirable act that expresses humility and emulates the prophet. A man will be rewarded for doing it; he won’t be punished for neglecting to do it. In the Muslim communities that practice female genital mutilation, removing the clitoris is on a par with growing a beard—a sunnat act. Some Muslims believe Muhammad’s sunnah—tradition or “trodden path”—encouraged the removal of one third of a female child’s clitoris. The majority of Muslims say no such sunnah exists. The evidence supports the latter view, for there is an immense body of hadith in which Muhammad and his closest disciples extol women’s sexuality and their right to sexual pleasure.

  Many hadith reveal that Muhammad loathed the kind of sexual repression required by Christianity’s monastic traditions. One night, when a woman came to Muhammad’s house to complain that her husband, Othman, was too busy praying to have sex, Muhammad was so irritated that he didn’t even wait to put on his shoes. He went straight to Othman’s house, his shoes in his hand, and berated him: “O Othman! Allah didn’t send me for monasticism, rather he sent me with a simple and straight law. I fast, pray and also have intimate relations with my wife.” Compare that with St. Paul to the Corinthians: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman…. But if they cannot exercise self-control, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” Muslims see the West’s sexual revolution as an inevitable reaction to churches that tried to suppress and make shameful the God-given sexual urge.

  To Muhammad, sex within marriage was to be enjoyed by the husband and wife alike. He especially encouraged foreplay: “When any one of you has sex with his wife, then he should not go to them like birds; instead he should be slow and delaying,” he said. Once, discussing cruelty, he cited intercourse without foreplay as a form of cruelty to women.

  Nor does Islam set limits on the kind of sex married couples can enjoy. “Your wives are your tillage,” says the Koran. “Go in therefore unto your tillage in what manner soever ye will.” Most Islamic scholars interpret this to mean that all kinds of intercourse, including oral sex, are permissible. As for positions for intercourse, there are few taboos for enthusiastic lovers. It is makruh, or discouraged, to make love standing up, or with either the head or the rear end facing Mecca. The few unequivocal don’ts in Islamic marital life—don’t, for example, make love to your wife after she’s dead—reveal the religion’s willingness to contemplate the gamut of sexual possibilities.

  Islam is one of the few religions to include sex as one of the rewards of the afterlife—although only for male believers. One of the Koran’s many descriptions of paradise reads like a brochure for a heavenly whorehouse. In a fertile garden with fountains and shade, male believers will be entertained by gorgeous supernatural beings with “complexions like rubies and pearls,” whose eyes will be incapable o
f noticing another man, and “whom no man will have deflowered before them.”

  If Muslim women aren’t mentioned as partaking in this sexual afterlife, at least they are provided for on earth. In many Muslim countries, one of the few grounds on which a woman can initiate divorce under Islamic law is the failure of her husband to have sex with her at least once in four months. The reason: a sexually frustrated wife is more easily tempted to commit adultery, which leads to fitna, or the social chaos of civil war.

  “Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men,” said Ali, the husband of Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima and the founder of Shiite Islam. At my Catholic school, we were taught the reverse: girls, the less sexually active gender, had to guard their behavior because boys, driven crazy by lust, weren’t capable of guarding theirs. In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic tradition because they aren’t considered sexually active, and in the Muslim tradition because they are. It is this notion of women’s barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling. “You think we hide our women because we’re confused about sex,” a Saudi friend named Abdulaziz said to me one day. “On the contrary. We hide them because we’re not confused.”

  But it continued to confuse me. In Saudi Arabia, I got to know a couple who had fallen in love over the phone. He edited a magazine; she contributed a poem. He called her to discuss its publication, and the two of them were soon having long, intimate discussions on poetry and politics. They agreed to marry before they ever met.

  Like most Saudi homes, theirs had two entrances—one for men, one for women. I arrived at the high-walled villa one night for a party. White-robed men moved to the front door. Their wives, black-veiled and clutching colorfully dressed toddlers, made their way to an entrance at the side.

  Each door opened on a large, sofa-lined salon, the women’s decorated in floral pink cottons and plush carpet; the men’s a more austere and formal room. The two groups didn’t mingle. But there was one male guest the hosts particularly wanted me to meet: an academic who had been jailed for political views that pitted him against the Saudi monarchy. To talk with him, I had to break with convention and sit with the men. When I returned to the women’s salon, the man’s wife winked at me. “You just did me a great favor,” she said. “My husband loves to talk politics. And talking politics to a woman is sure to have made him aroused. Now I can’t wait to get him home. I know I’ll have great sex with him tonight.” I blushed. The woman laughed. “You Westerners are so shy about sex,” she said. “Here, we talk about it all the time.”

  Although Saudi women wanted large families, none of them would have understood the Catholic notion that sex was purely for procreation. The prophet Muhammad had children only in his first marriage, yet he enjoyed sexual relations with all his later wives, some of whom were beyond childbearing age. He also sanctioned coitus interruptus, the common birth control method of the day.

  The issue of contraception arose when Muslim soldiers began to win big victories. Women were part of the booty of war, and the Koran gave men sexual rights over their war-captive slaves. But Muhammad introduced new limits on these rights. First, the Koran encouraged Muslims to free their slaves “if you see any good in them”; a novel and highly unpopular idea in an economy that thrived on the slave trade. The Koran also enjoined Muslims not to force female slaves to have sex, if the women wanted to preserve their chastity.

  Contraception became important because any Muslim’s slave who bore her owner’s child could not be sold and was automatically freed on the man’s death. Her child, meanwhile, became the owner’s heir. For a soldier who didn’t want to lose the marketability of his captives, or see his estate dispersed among slave-born offspring, preventing pregnancy became essential to preserving wealth. Muhammad told a soldier to go ahead and practice withdrawal, for if God really wanted to create something, no human action could prevent it.

  Islamic jurisprudence tries to keep up with modern sexual dilemmas by applying ancient reasoning to contemporary circumstances. For instance, Islamic scholars have ruled that artificial insemination is permissible, but only with the sperm of a woman’s own husband. Citing the Koranic injunction that believers should “guard their private parts except from their spouses,” most Muslims rule out the use of donor sperm. But what if a couple, desperate for a child, transgresses this ruling and conceives a baby through insemination by donor sperm? Whose child is it, for purposes of Islamic custody or inheritance laws?

  When the Shiite jurist, Mohamed Jawad al-Mughniyah, was asked to rule on such a case, he referred to an ancient inheritance battle in which a woman had intercourse with her husband, then went straight to her slave girl and had lesbian relations. The semen of the woman’s husband supposedly flowed to the vagina of the slave, impregnating her.

  After explaining the punishment to be meted out to the two women for having illicit lesbian sex, the imams ruled that the slave’s child was the heir of the owner of the semen. Following that judgment, Sheik al-Mughniyah ruled that the child of donor-sperm insemination must always be considered to have been fathered by the sperm donor. It can’t be considered as related to, or an heir of, its mother’s husband.

  The more time I spent in Muslim countries, the more the paradox between sexual license and repression bewildered me. One hot summer day in Iran, I traveled to the religious center of Gum with Nahid Aghtaie, a medical student who had abandoned her studies in London to return and take part in her country’s Islamic revolution. A gold-domed mosque dominates Gum’s flat desert skyline, and its mirror-tiled interior houses the remains of a saintly Shiite woman, Fatima Massoumah (Fatima the Chaste One). Iranians generally don’t let non-Muslims enter important shrines but Nahid, saying the regulation came not from Islam but from narrow-mindedness, had insisted I ignore it.

  As Nahid washed for prayer, I wandered through the mosque’s vast forecourt, watching families setting out picnics in its blue-tiled enclaves. Eventually I became aware that a turbaned man was following me. He was a youth with a wispy beard, wearing the pale green gown and thin black cloak of an Iranian cleric in training. Gum is full of such young men. As I turned around, he took a step closer and whispered something urgent, in Farsi: “Honim sigheh mishi?” I was worried that he’d spotted me as a non-Muslim and was asking me to leave. I pulled my chador tighter across my face and walked briskly away from him with downcast eyes. Finding Nahid, I joined her in the press of bodies surging toward the women’s entrance. At the door we handed over our shoes and passed into the shrine’s shimmering interior.

  Inside, tongues of light from a chandelier danced off the glass mosaics and spilled over intricate enamel medallions set in carved marble. Nahid made her way through the crowd of women and wrapped her hands around the pillars of beaten silver that formed a tall cage around Fatima’s tomb. She stood between a toothless crone and a pregnant girl, offering prayers to this female saint who might sympathize with womanly problems.

  Months later, describing the beauty of the place to an Iranian friend, I mentioned how glad I was to have seen it, and how I’d very nearly been evicted by a mullah. My friend laughed. “I don’t think he doubted you were a Muslim. He was asking you to marry him.” What he had asked—“Does the lady want a temporary marriage with me?”—had been an invitation to an exclusively Shiite contract named sigheh, or muta. “You probably had your chador on the wrong way around,” my friend explained. “That’s one of the signals women use if they’re looking for sigheh.”

  Sigheh, agreed between a man and woman and sanctioned by a cleric, can last as little as a few minutes or as long as ninety-nine years. Usually the man pays the woman an agreed sum of money in exchange for a temporary marriage. The usual motive is sex, but some temporary marriages are agreed upon for other purposes. When sex is the motive, the transaction differs from prost
itution in that the couple have to go before a cleric to record their contract, and in Iran, any children born of the union are legitimate. Otherwise, sigheh is free of the responsibilities of marriage: the couple can make any agreements they like regarding how much time they will spend together, how much money will be involved and what services, sexual or nonsexual, each will provide.

  Shiites believe Muhammad approved of sigheh. Sunnis, the majority branch of Islam, don’t agree. Even in Shiite Iran, sigheh had fallen from favor until Rafsanjani encouraged it after the Iran-Iraq War which ended in 1988. In a 1990 sermon, he argued that the war had left a lot of young widows, many of them without hope of remarriage. Such women, he said, needed both material support and sexual satisfaction. At the same time, plenty of young men who couldn’t afford to set up house for a bride were postponing marriage. Sexual tension needed healthy release, he said, and since sigheh existed for that purpose within Islam, why not use it?

  His remarks sparked a heated debate among Iranian women, some of whom bitterly opposed the practice as exploitative. They argued that the state should provide for war widows adequately, so that they didn’t have to sell their bodies in sigheh. But others spoke out in its favor. Sigheh, they said, wasn’t just a matter of money. Widows and divorcees had sexual needs and a desire for male company, and the sigheh “husband” was a welcome male presence for the children in their homes. Iran’s satirical weekly magazine, Golagha, ran a cartoon lampooning the likely effects of Rafsanjani’s argument. It showed two desks for marriage licenses, one for sigheh and one for permanent wedlock. The clerk at the permanent desk had no customers; the queue for sigheh stretched out the door.