Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  Still, when about forty women gathered for the demonstration on a Monday afternoon in the main street of Nazareth, they found both supportive as well as hostile onlookers.

  “Some yelled ‘Whores’ and other insults,” said Tamam, “but several older women and even a few men joined us spontaneously.” Encouraged by their success, the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against “honor” killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls. “We found it was best to go to the villages in the hours when the men were likely to be at work,” says Tamam, “otherwise the husband would come to the door, take the flyer, look at it and tear it up before his wife even got a chance to see it.”

  In November another honor killing prompted a demonstration. This time the target was the Israeli police in the Israeli-Arab town of Ramie. The police had picked up a sixteen-year-old Arab runaway they’d found driving around in a stolen car with a married man. The girl begged the police not to involve her parents. “She explained that they’d kill her, but the police took no notice,” Tamam said. “They called the family and said, ‘We’ve got your daughter here. She’s very scared; you have to promise you won’t hurt her.’ Of course, the family said they wouldn’t, so the police gave her back to them.” Not long after, the girl was found murdered.

  Al Fanar’s activities began to attract the attention of the Israeli press. The women welcomed reporters, and then were dismayed by the articles that appeared. “We felt used for anti-Arab propaganda,” Tamam says. “It was ‘Look how the backward Arabs are killing their girls; look how the backward Muslims are attacking the women who fight it.’ The reporters would come and see me and say, ‘You’re not like an Arab.’ I’m sorry, I don’t want Jewish people defining what an Arab is and telling me I’m different.”

  The attention from the Jewish press only heightened the fundamentalist backlash. “As well as calling us whores, now they began calling us traitors,” says Tamam. Soon the women couldn’t go to the villages without being abused or, worse, ignored. “Even the women began to see us as something so foreign to their community that nothing we said could possibly be of any relevance to them. We thought we knew our culture, but really we only knew our own small circle of friends. Now, if you go to an Arab village and ask the people what they think of Al Fanar, they’ll laugh. We became a joke: the whores who thought they could change the way the world works.”

  The rejection led to arguments over tactics and approach within the group, and finally an acrimonious split. Two years after Al Fanar was founded, the group virtually ceased to function. “Society wasn’t ready,” says Tamam. “And we, also, weren’t ready.”

  But at least they had tried. And at least the midwives of newly independent Eritrea are trying to undo the damage done to women through perversions of Islamic teaching. Many Muslims are content to claim that honor killings and clitoridectomy are not Islam; that they are customs that come from the national cultures and have nothing to do with the faith. With this assertion, many mainstream Muslims wash their hands of the twin brutalities that shape the lives of perhaps a quarter of the women of Islam.

  It is understandable that progressive Muslims hate to see their faith associated with these practices. But what is less understandable is the way they turn their wrath on the commentators criticizing the practices, and not on the crimes themselves. An example is to be found in Rana Kabbani’s book, Letter to Christendom, which she published as an answer to the attacks on Islam that followed Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Rana Kabbani was born in Damascus but grew up abroad and now lives in London. Her complaint is worth quoting at length: “I am always pained by Western misconceptions about the lives of Muslim women,” she writes. “Western ignorance is often inseparable from a patronizing view that insists on seeing us as helpless victims, while hardly distinguishing between the very different cultures we come from. Recently, in London, I was visited by a novelist who had come to talk to me about a Muslim character she wanted to put into her next book. ‘How can a feminist like you defend Islam,’ she inquired, ‘when it advocates female circumcision?’ As chance would have it, that same day I read a piece by the historian Marina Warner in which she described Islam as a religion that practices clitoridectomy. Could these two writers not have taken the trouble to discover that this was an African practice which had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam?”

  Could Rana Kabbani not have taken the trouble to reflect that one in five Muslim girls lives in a community where some form of clitoridectomy is sanctioned and religiously justified by local Islamic leaders? Or to note the chapters on “Women and Circumcision” appearing in many new editions of Islamic texts, especially in Egypt?

  Until Islam’s articulate spokeswomen such as Rana Kabbani target their misguided coreligionists with the fervor they expend on outside critics, the grave mistake of conflating Islam with clitoridectomy and honor killings will continue. And much more importantly, so will the practices themselves, at the cost of so many Muslim women’s health and happiness.

  Chapter 3

  HERE COME THE BRIDES

  “And of his signs another is, that he hath created for you, out of yourselves, wives, that ye may cohabit with them; and hath put love and compassion between you.”

  THE KORAN

  THE CHAPTER OF THE GREEKS

  Rata-tata-tat-tat BOOM BOOM BOOM! Rata-tata-tat-tat BOOM BOOM BOOM!

  I pulled another pillow over my head, but it was no good. Lifting a corner of the pile of bedclothes, I opened one eye and peered at the hotel’s digital clock, winking greenly from the night table. It was 11:30 P.M. At least another hour, possibly two, before the noise would stop. I had to be up at 5 A.M. to catch a flight. But sleep was an impossible dream.

  I got up and walked to the window. The street below was a traffic jam of wedding parties. I counted at least three bridal limousines stacked up in a holding pattern behind the one that had just pulled in to the hotel entrance. A bride had just emerged from a car and was making her slow procession up the hotel steps, surrounded by a squad of drummers. She was, by my insomniac count, the ninth bride of the night.

  Rata-tata-tat-tat BOOM BOOM BOOM!

  I was in Baghdad, visiting Iraq in what turned out to be the brief interregnum between Gulf War I (the foreign, subtitled version between Iraq and Iran) and Gulf War II (the American-made international blockbuster). In Iraq, any time bombs stopped falling a wedding boom began. Saddam Hussein had decreed that Iraqis should marry and breed to repair the demographic damage done at the battle front. To achieve his goal, he banned contraceptives and offered large cash incentives for weddings and births.

  Since it didn’t seem likely that I’d be sleeping any time soon, I decided to go down to the foyer and get a better look at the festivities. Unmuffled by sixteen floors and five pillows, the drums, cymbals and horns were deafening. Souha, the young woman at the center of it all, looked like an accident victim, stunned and trembling. Dressed as elaborately as a princess, she paraded amid the musicians toward a banqueting room set up with groaning trestles of food and a throne made of pink gladiolus. Elsewhere, perhaps earlier that night or perhaps some days ago, the groom and the bride’s father had held hands under a piece of cloth provided by an Islamic clergyman. The father had said to the bridegroom: “I give to you my daughter, Souha, the adult virgin, in marriage according to the law of God and of his prophet.” The bridegroom answered: “I take your daughter, Souha, in marriage, the adult virgin, according to the law of God and of his prophet.” The father then asked, “Do you accept my daughter?”, to which the bridegroom answered, “I have accepted her.” The father said, “God bless you with her,” and the bridegroom replied, “I hope in God she may prove a blessing.” Then everyone in the room recited the brief and poetic first chapter of the Koran.

  The marriage is legal once the groom and the bride’s father sign the wedding contr
act, or aqd. Usually the contract’s main purpose is to document how much the groom pays the bride on marriage, and how much more he will have to pay her if he later decides to divorce her. An Islamic aqd is akin to a Western prenuptial agreement—an unromantic, hardheaded document that faces the fact that marriages fail. A well-written aqd can counter some of the inequalities in Islamic family law, setting out a woman’s right to work, to continue her education, and adding grounds for divorce to the very few allowed her under sharia law. Today, for example, many women add a clause known as the esma, giving her the right to a divorce if she asks for one. Others include a narrower stipulation, stating their right to divorce if the husband ever takes a second wife.

  I stood on tiptoe and watched over the shoulders of the ululating women as the groom made his way to join the bride at the front of the room. The bride, Souha, smiled wanly as he raised her veil and kissed her on the forehead. This must have been a progressive family: at most Islamic weddings, even that modest little show of affection wouldn’t have happened in public.

  Across the hall, one of the earlier parties was already breaking up. Spilling out of the banqueting room, the guests clapped and ululated as the bride and groom disappeared into the elevator and headed for one of the hotel’s luxury suites.

  When done by the book, the Islamic wedding night tensions should be eased by tender rituals. When the bride is finally delivered by her family to her new husband, the groom is supposed to greet her by removing her shoes and washing her feet. It is an inspired way to vault the hurdle of a stranger’s first touch. He is then supposed to pray and bless her, using the following words: “O Allah, bless me with her affection, love and her acceptance of me; and make me pleased with her, and bring us together in the best form of union and in absolute harmony; surely you like lawful things and dislike unlawful things.” After the bride prays, the groom places his hand on her forehead and asks God that any child from their union be guarded from Satan.

  It was hard to imagine this nervous, rumpled, exhausted-looking couple getting through all that. They were both under intense pressure. For the young man, the continuation of the marriage depended on his display of virility; if he failed to get an erection, his bride could repudiate him. The pressure on her was to prove her virginity. If she didn’t bleed, she could be handed back in disgrace to a family that might become enraged enough to kill her. For generations, women had resorted to filling their vaginas with blood-soaked sponges or splinters of glass to compensate for lost hymens. Only peasants in remote villages still paraded the bride’s stained garments for public inspection. But the issue of whether Souha was indeed “an adult virgin” still mattered, even in modern, urban families.

  “Almost all of them check out with a stolen sheet in their bag, you know,” said the hotel’s lobby manager, leaning exhausted against a pillar. “Their older relatives still insist on seeing it.” Almost a third of the hotel’s rooms were booked by newlyweds. ‘There’ll be a lot of you-know-what going on upstairs tonight,” he grinned.

  I wondered how it was going. Many of the couples were near strangers. Even in Baghdad, where men and women worked alongside one another, their personal lives remained highly segregated. During the war with Iran, when Iraqis were banned from foreign travel, I got used to being the only woman aboard flights in and out of the country. At the airport on my way home to Cairo, I would line up amid a planeful of Egyptian laborers for the Iraqis’ intense security inspection. Once a young inspector had peered into my toiletries bag and pulled out a box of tampons. He prodded the contents, then called his supervisor. The two men emptied the box onto the counter and whispered together. Finally, holding one cellophane-wrapped tampon up to the light, the young inspector barked accusingly: “For what is this?” When I tried to tell him, he looked baffled, then horrified. Although he would have read in the Koran that menstruation is “an illness,” I don’t think anyone had ever explained to him the exact nature of a woman’s monthly period.

  Until this century, most Muslims married soon after puberty. Now, with the need for maturity in marriage widely recognized and the cost of weddings soaring, most young Muslims have to delay finding a spouse into their twenties and early thirties. Until she is married, a devout Muslim girl is expected to avoid even making eye contact with a strange boy. She will never so much as shake hands with a man, much less go out on a date or share a kiss.

  In countries such as Egypt, where women had made their way into the work force, it was becoming more common for young people to meet prospective spouses before the family became involved. But in many countries marriages remain arrangements between strangers. In Saudi Arabia it wasn’t until 1981 that a committee of Islamic scholars finally ruled that young women could meet their intended spouses, unveiled, before the wedding. “Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning,” the committee found. But some Saudi women chose not to take advantage of even this small concession. Basilah al-Homoud, a thirty-eight-year-old school principal, had been twenty-one when her father told her that she had received a marriage proposal. “He said, ‘Do you want to see him, do you want to sit with him?’ I said, ‘If you sit with him, it is enough for me.’ “ She glimpsed her husband, for the first time, from an upper window of her house as he arrived on the night of their wedding. “He was walking into the house with some of his relatives. My eyes went straight to him and I prayed that he was the one.” She believed she had been right to trust her father. “Who wants my happiness as much as he does? Who knows me better? Done this way, my marriage is not two persons only. It involves my whole family, and my husband’s whole family. And because the families are involved, I would think a thousand times before I say, ‘Can I have a divorce?’ “

  But some young women weren’t so confident. “Marriage for us is a complete risk,” said Arezoo Moradian, an eighteen-year-old English-language student in Tehran. “A husband has so much power over you that you have to be mad to marry someone you don’t know perfectly. But under the system we have here, it’s impossible to get to know a boy perfectly. You can’t go out with him, you can’t spend time alone with him.”

  And once you marry him, his word is law, as the religious commentator in the Saudi Gazette pointed out to a correspondent in the January 9, 1993, edition of the newspaper. “In today’s liberal world it is often assumed that the wife has absolute equal rights over her husband,” wrote Name Withheld of Jeddah. “I think it would be good if you could explain the correct conduct of a wife.”

  Name Withheld was no doubt pleased with the explanation. “Leadership in the family is given to the husband,” the commentator wrote. “For a wife to demand complete and full equality with her husband will result in having two masters in the family and this does not exist in Islam.” Specifically, the commentator added, “To refuse to go with her husband when he calls her to bed is a grave mistake.” Furthermore, “Leaving the house excessively is a bad habit for a woman. She should also not leave the house if her husband objects to her doing so.”

  If all this becomes too much, and she wishes to leave for good, obtaining a divorce can be fraught with difficulties for a woman.

  Technically, Islam frowns on divorce. A hadith attributed to Muhammad states that, of all lawful things, divorce is the most hated by God. The Koran gives an extensive and discouraging list of requirements to be fulfilled in ending a marriage, beginning with an instruction to bring arbitrators from the families of both bride and groom to attempt to patch up the rupture. In many countries Muslim authorities have expended much energy on debates over whether the arbitration is obligatory or merely recommended. “None came forward to ask why, if it is obligatory or recommended, whichever it may be, no practical steps are taken to comply with this clear commandment,” wrote an exasperated Muslim scholar, Muhammad Rashid Rida, who, until his death in 1935, spearheaded an intellectual response to the encroachment of Western values in Muslim countries. Both he and the influential Iranian commentator
on women’s issues, Murtada Mutahhari, began a rereading of the Koran’s pronouncements on divorce that, if followed through, could lead to the adoption of laws much more equitable toward women.

  But, for now, both the Shiites and followers of all four major schools of Sunni thought have enshrined a mode of divorce that only the most convoluted and misogynistic reading of the Koran can support. That is talaq, or divorce by a husband pronouncing the words “I divorce you” three times. No grounds are required of him and the wife has no say. For her part, a Muslim woman has no natural right to divorce, and in some Islamic countries no legal way to secure one. The Hanbali school, followed by the Saudis, gives a woman almost no way out of an unhappy marriage without her husband’s consent. Shiites and the Sunnis of the Hanafi school allow her to stipulate the right to divorce in her aqd, or marriage contract. Shiites, Hanafi and Maliki law all allow a woman’s petition on the grounds of her husband’s impotence, and Shiites and Malikis also allow petitions on the grounds of failure to provide support, incurable contagious disease or life-threatening abuse. Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce.

  “I tell you, I hope I never fall in love,” the young Iranian, Arezoo, said, impatiently pushing back the fetching black ringlets that kept escaping her magneh. “You know why? Because when girls fall in love here they lose their judgment. Yes, sure, they can put all kinds of conditions in the wedding contract, but who does it? It’s always ‘Ah, he loves me, he’ll never hurt me.’ I’ve watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life.”