Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  For some women, of course, the risk paid off. The happiest couple I knew also happened to be two of the most strictly observant Muslims I’d ever met. Khadija was a young Kuwaiti Shiite whose marriage had been arranged for her. She had consented to the match without meeting her fiance, only stipulating that he should be someone who would agree to allow her to continue her studies. During the engagement the pair managed to meet, in secret, and found they liked each other enormously.

  Khadija’s husband was an importer who did most of his business with Iran. When he traveled to Tehran, he always took Khadija and the children along. Their idea of a fun night out was to go to one of Tehran’s husseinias—Shiite study centers—to listen to a radical mullah lecturing on Islamic revolution. The two would, of course, sit separately—Khadija in her heavy black hijab always in the back with the other women, where their presence wouldn’t distract the men.

  Sometimes I would go looking for Khadija in her hotel room, only to find her husband there, minding the children, while she spent the day at lectures at one of the Islamic women’s colleges. The hotel-room floor would always be completely covered in freshly laundered bedsheets, so that the toddlers, tumbling and playing on the floor, wouldn’t pick up any germs from a carpet that might have been walked on by foreigners who didn’t remove their shoes on entering a room.

  When Khadija decided to do postgraduate work in London, her husband readily rearranged his business to accommodate her. The two of them never showed any physical affection in the presence of outsiders. But there was electricity in the looks they exchanged and warmth in the way they spoke to each other that made the intensity of their relationship quite obvious. When I asked Khadija why her marriage had worked out so well when so many other relationships looked empty, she smiled. “My husband is a good Muslim,” she said. “He knows what the Koran actually says about relations between men and women, and that is what he lives by. It’s as simple as that.”

  Back in Egypt, my assistant, Sahar, had become engaged.

  A few weeks after she began to wear hijab, she arrived for work bubbling with the news. She beamed as she showed me her fiance’s photograph. He was a newly qualified pediatrician and a second cousin. The picture showed a young face, grave and handsome, wearing the stubbly black beard of a devout Muslim.

  Sahar had known him for years, seeing him often at family gatherings. But she hadn’t considered him a likely suitor. At university he had been active in Islamic groups, risking prison for his opinions at a time when the government was keeping fundamentalists on a tight leash. “I always knew he would only marry a veiled girl,” Sahar said. It was after he had seen her, veiled, at a family party, that he had told her parents he would like to propose.

  Like many young Egyptian professionals, Sahar’s fiance hadn’t found a well-paying post in Egypt. Instead, he had agreed to take a job in Saudi Arabia and would have to work there for several months before he could support a bride. Before her betrothal, Sahar’s application to Harvard had been accepted; she could have used the delay to take the place in graduate school that she had been offered. Instead, she turned it down. It wouldn’t be appropriate, she explained, for a devout Muslim woman to live alone in an American city. Her new plan was to look into Islamic studies at one of Saudi Arabia’s segregated women’s schools.

  Before her fiance left for Saudi Arabia, Sahar’s family threw a lavish engagement party. Sahar sat on a flower-decked throne and received the gifts of jewelry from her husband-to-be that would become part of her dowry. “My aunt wanted me to take off hijab for the party,” she said later. “She said, ‘You want to look lovely for your engagement.’ “ Sahar stuck to her guns and sat on her throne with her hair wrapped away in a white satin scarf.

  But it soon seemed Sahar’s scarves wouldn’t be enough to satisfy her betrothed. Within weeks of arriving in Saudi Arabia’s austerely religious atmosphere, he was on the phone to Sahar, suggesting she lengthen her mid-calf dresses to floor length and put on socks to cover her sandaled toes. “I told him I’m not ready for that yet. I told him I want to go slowly, to be sure of what I’m doing,” she said. ‘Tve seen other women who go straight into gloves and face veils, and a few months later find they can’t stand it. I don’t want to put something on that I’m going to want to take off.” As the months passed, I began to wonder whether her fiance was drifting into a fundamentalism too narrow to admit Sahar’s broad mind, no matter how correctly veiled.

  Meanwhile, under her shapeless clothes, she started to gain weight. The elevator in our apartment building was so ancient it belonged in the Egyptian museum. It malfunctioned just about as often as it functioned. Sahar began to find the six flights of stairs an increasing trial. Sweating, she would sink into the chair by her desk and beg me to turn on the air conditioner, even on the mildest mornings. Because her coverings made her feel the heat, she no longer enjoyed walking with me when we’d go out reporting. She quickly became too out of shape to cover more than a block without gasping. She seemed to be growing old before my eyes.

  Calls from Saudi Arabia invariably brought bad news. The medical center that had hired her fiance had no patients. He would have to wait and see if business improved before he could set a wedding date. When it didn’t, he began to search for a better job. But months had passed and he hadn’t found one.

  There were other disappointments. Once, a few months before she adopted hijab, Sahar had brought a videotape of her best friend’s wedding to show me. It was a typical upper-crust Egyptian extravaganza, held at the Nile Hilton. Dancers pranced with candelabra on their heads, drummers and pipers provided the din. Everybody dressed to excess. Sahar told me she’d spent£60—a civil servant’s monthly salary—getting her hair done. She watched the tape with her lips parted and eyes shining. Her expression reminded me of my five-year-old niece when I read her a fairy story. I couldn’t believe that this serious, Harvard-bound woman admired this ostentatious display. But she did. “God willing, I’ll have a wedding just like that,” she said.

  But it seemed that God, or at least her godly fiance, had other ideas. Their wedding, he decided, would be small and austere. “I suppose he is right,” Sahar said uncertainly. “At all those grand weddings, nobody ever says anything good about the bride or her family. If it isn’t fancy enough, they criticize her stinginess. If it is very fancy, they criticize her for showing off.” Her fiance had even appropriated the task of buying the wedding dress. “The dresses are much finer in Saudi Arabia,” Sahar said hopefully. That may have been so, but I couldn’t help wondering what kind of gown a fundamentalist would choose for his bride.

  None of my Egyptian friends seemed to have an easy time finding a mate. It became a race to see who would marry first: Sahar the fundamentalist, who had more or less arranged her own marriage, or my very unfundamentalist friend, who was having one arranged for her. She was named in Arabic for a beautiful flower, so I will call her Rose. She was unusual, even in the rarefied world of rich, Western-educated Cairenes. Like almost all unmarried Egyptians, she lived at home with her parents but, unlike almost all young women, she had a job that required her to travel abroad, alone.

  On one of these trips she’d fallen in love with a Paris-based American and was, when I met her, in the midst of a passionate affair. He had offered to marry her, but she had refused. Although the Sunni branch of Islam allows men to marry other monotheists such as Christians or Jews, it doesn’t offer the same liberty to women. Because Islam is passed through the paternal line, children of non-Muslim fathers are lost to the faith. Rose’s lover came from a Christian fundamentalist family and argued that his conversion would kill his mother. For her part, Rose believed that marrying a Christian would cause a complete rupture with her family. “I would be living in sin,” she explained. “And anyway, I want to marry a Muslim. I want my sons to be called Omar and Abdullah. I want to go to the sheik and have a wedding party with dancers and drums. I don’t want to slink off to some French bureaucrat for a sly little civil
ceremony.”

  The religious impasse finally ended the affair. As well as a broken heart, Rose had the gnawing anxiety of an Egyptian woman who was over thirty and edging toward irreversible spinsterhood. “I went to my father and said, ‘All right. I give in. You’ve always wanted to arrange a marriage for me, so let’s see what you can do. Bring ‘em on.’ “

  Affluent, intelligent and beautiful, with the huge deerlike eyes extolled by Arabian poets, Rose had it all. Using their large network of extended family and business contacts, her parents soon compiled a long list of prospective suitors, and Rose worked her way through it as briskly as a pilot completing a preflight check. Her first meeting was with a young doctor, who came to her house with his father and sat down with Rose and most of her family for tea. “I asked him where he’d traveled and he said Alexandria and Ismailia. Alexandria and Ismailia! How can anyone get to the age of thirty-two and never have gone outside Egypt? His family’s rich; he could have gone anywhere. I could never be happy with someone so unadventurous.”

  After that she vetoed meetings at home. “In the first five minutes I could tell it was pointless, but I was stuck there, being polite, wasting a whole afternoon.” She insisted on meeting future prospects at their offices. “Usually they don’t get past the first half hour,” she reported after a few dismal encounters.

  The wealthy young son of a merchant family survived his first interview and seemed promising. Rose even went on a three-week, closely chaperoned holiday to Los Angeles with the family. “I fell in love—with America,” she reported on her return. But not with her suitor. “I had to want to do everything when he wanted,” she said. “It was a disaster if I didn’t like the film he was watching. And he didn’t like the fact that I didn’t drink. He said when he came home at the end of the day he’d like to share a beer. I said, ‘I’ll have a Coke and you have a beer; we’ll still be sharing the moment.’ He said, ‘Yes, but we won’t be sharing the beer.’ It was too ridiculous.”

  At the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, one would-be spouse, a young diplomat, was preparing for his first posting abroad. “He would have been perfect,” Rose sighed wistfully after her brief appointment. “He was witty, cosmopolitan. But he had dirty fingernails.”

  “Rose,” I said, incredulous, “are you telling me you’ve ruled him out because he had dirty fingernails? For goodness’ sake! You can always clean his fingernails.” She raised her head and gazed at me sadly with her huge dark eyes. “Geraldine, you don’t understand. You married for love. What’s a dirty fingernail on someone you love? But if you are going to marry somebody you don’t love, everything, everything, has to be perfect.”

  I wondered if my Palestinian friend Rehab had expected perfection from her arranged marriage. If so, I could only guess at the depth of her disappointment.

  Rehab lived on a hilltop west of Jerusalem, in an ancient stone village that seemed pinned to the earth by the spindly minaret of its mosque. To get there, it was necessary to drive past the cranes and bulldozers of half a dozen new Jewish settlements. The closest, a kibbutz, was just across the valley, its modern vegetable trellises lacing through the Arabs’ ancient orchards like fingers locked in an arm wrestle.

  Every time I arrived in the village I looked for Rehab and Mohamed. Rehab was a diminutive, feisty young women who worked as a hairdresser, going from house to house beautifying the village women for weddings and feast days. She kept track of every shred of women’s news in town. Her husband Mohamed was an ebullient shopkeeper, strongly built, with muscular forearms, a tangle of thick dark curls and laughing brown eyes. He loved attempting jokes in his colorful, fractured English. I’d often been at their home, a couple of times with Tony along. We shared meals, played with their four-year-old daughter, admired the new coops they’d built for the “Palestine Liberation Chickens” that would free them from dependence on Israeli produce.

  Tony and I loved hanging out with Palestinians. They were humorous, outspoken people who seemed to lack Egyptians’ class consciousness and Gulf Arabs’ reserve. What struck us most was the easy interaction of men and women. Women were in the demonstrations against Israeli occupation, in the hospitals treating the wounded, and at home, around the table, arguing politics with the foreigners as loudly as the men. Mohamed and Rehab’s house always seemed full of friends of both sexes, and Tony and I were both equally welcomed.

  One beautiful late summer day I arrived in the village alone, and met Mohamed at his shop in the tiny main street. He seemed distracted and upset. He had been impatient since my last visit, he said, because he wanted to ask me something important.

  He needed a second wife. He couldn’t mention his plans to anyone in the village because his neighbors, like most Palestinians these days, considered polygamy backward. Besides, if Rehab heard about his intention she’d go into a frenzy. Did I know any foreign woman who would secretly marry him? Could he get a visa to go abroad and find someone?

  No, I said, stunned by his questions. I didn’t know anyone, and visas were difficult to arrange without relatives abroad. Mohamed seemed angered by my answers. “You think I am a poor man? I am not!” he exclaimed, jumping up and dragging me by the arm behind the counter of his shop. Pulling down several boxes of goods, he reached back into the darkness and came out with his fists full of gold. I recognized the jewelry: gaudy bangles and necklaces made by the Indian goldsmiths of the Gulf States especially for bridal dowries. All of it was pure, solid, 22 or 24 carat, because that is what Arab buyers insist on. “I will give it all to her. It’s just that I must have a son. My wife, after our daughter, they had to cut her up so she can’t have another child. I am nothing in this village without a son.” His voice cracked. “Please, you have to help me. Will you find someone for me?”

  “May your womb shrivel up” is one of the worst Arabic curses it’s possible to utter. Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he’d told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.

  I remembered then that I’d never heard Rehab’s kunya—her mother designation. Arab women don’t take their husbands’ names on marrying, but both men and women do take the name of their first-born sons. They are known to their friends ever afterward as “Umm Fans” or “Abu Aziz”—“Mother of Faris” or “Father of Aziz.” Rehab, now infertile, would never have a kunya. Mohamed could get one if a new wife gave him a son.

  It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn’t wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad is thought to have had three or four sons, two or three by Khadija and one by an Egyptian concubine named Mary. None survived infancy. Instead, the prophet raised four daughters, one of whom, Fatima, he extolled as a perfect human being. “Fatima,” he said, “is part of me. Whoever hurts her hurts me, and whoever hurts me has hurt God.” Fatima was the only one of his children to outlive him.

  The Koran, meanwhile, has a mixed message about female infants. It orders an end to female infanticide. One of its most beautiful and poetic chapters contains a poignant reference to the practice, then so widespread in Arabia: “When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought.”

  But elsewhere, in a discussion of the idol-worshipers in Mecca, the Koran mocks the Meccans’ worship of three goddesses known as “the daughters of Allah.” Why, it asks, would God have daughters, when even puny human males can
have the more desirable sons?

  As Mohamed thrust his fistfuls of gold under my nose, he seemed on the verge of tears. To calm him I muttered something about finding out about visas. His spirits lifted immediately. “Good,” he said, smiling broadly. “Now I have something else to show you!”

  He’d built a special hideaway at the top of the shop, from which he could spy on Israeli troop patrols. Grateful to get back to what I thought was the solid ground of reporting, I climbed the ladder to his secret nook and humored his insistence that I lie down on the thin mattress by the spyhole to examine the clear view of the street. When he lay down beside me to point out a Palestinian flag in the power lines, I jumped up immediately and climbed back down into the shop.

  He had one more piece of news for my article, he said. The Israelis had imposed water restrictions, but the village had circumvented them by uncovering some ancient Roman-era cisterns on the village outskirts. He wanted to show them to me. We got into his rusty truck and rattled out of the village.

  The cisterns were well hidden, at the base of a row of crumbling, abandoned olive terraces. As I scrambled down the rocky ground, Mohamed reached out to help me. His hand landed firmly on my buttock. It’s a mistake, I thought. He didn’t put it there on purpose. Without saying anything, I tried to prise his fingers loose. But he pushed my hand away, tightening his grip into a crude and unambiguous grope. Then, grabbing my arms, he pinned me in a sudden embrace that was more like a wrestler’s hold. His bulk bearing down on me sent me stumbling against the wall of old stone. As he rubbed himself against me, I could barely breathe under his weight. I couldn’t get my breath to scream, and there was nobody near this place to hear me. Wrenching one arm free, I started pummeling him, but he seemed oblivious. He reached for the edge of my shirt, trying to tug it up over my abdomen. His other hand pulled at the waistband of my trousers. “You should see what they did to my wife—here—right here, they cut her up—it is so ugly I can’t look at it. I don’t want to make love to such a body.”