Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Read, in the name of thy Lord, who hath created all things; who hath created man of congealed blood. Read, by thy most beneficent Lord, who taught use of the pen; who teaches man that which he knoweth not.”

  THE KORAN

  THE CHAPTER OF CONGEALED BLOOD

  In Saudi Arabia the road north from Riyadh is a flawless strip of six-lane bitumen slicing through wind-sculpted sand dunes. Every few miles, through the shimmering heat haze, it is possible to glimpse the ruins of yellow mud lookout towers cut with rifle slits. They are eroding, like children’s sand castles.

  My Saudi friend took a hand off the steering wheel, reached into the refrigerated glove compartment of his luxury four-wheel drive and tossed me a frosty can of soda. Then he threw one to the American in the back seat, a colleague he had enlisted for the day to play the role of my husband.

  My Saudi friend, an urbane, Western-educated professional, wanted me to meet his uncle, an old man who lived out among the sand dunes near the hometown of Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, the preacher who had taught a form of Islam so severe it banned even whistling. The uncle was a true Wahhabi, strict and austere. It wasn’t certain he’d agree to speak to me—“he’s never spoken to a woman outside his family before,” my friend said, but he thought it would be worth a try so that I could understand the forces stacked against change for women in Saudi Arabia. The “husband” in the back seat was essential. “My family is used to a lot of strange things from me, but showing up alone in my car with a foreign woman would be pushing their understanding a bit too far.”

  The uncle, Mohamed al-Ghazi, lived in a flat-roofed house beside a grove of date palms. High orange sand dunes cradled his fragile little farm. When I opened the door of the air-conditioned jeep, a blast of hot air hit me like a gust from a crematorium. My eyeballs felt desiccated, like dried peas. T. E. Lawrence described the heat of these Arabian sands: “The sun came up like a drawn sword and struck us speechless.” And he wasn’t wearing a black abaya and opaque stockings at the time. I squinted enviously at my friend and his uncle embracing each other in their cool white robes and sandals. An irreverent thought occurred to me: if God really liked women, He would have revealed the Koran to an Inuit fur trader rather than an Arabian camel-caravan manager.

  Calling to his wife, Mohamed al-Ghazi signaled me to follow her to the women’s quarters. My friend placed a hand on his uncle’s arm and explained that he wanted me to sit with them, in the men’s reception room, to talk about local history. I stood a small distance away, my abaya billowing in the hot wind, as a rapid-fire dialogue in Arabic ensued. Finally the uncle shrugged glumly and, without looking at me, beckoned me inside.

  The men’s majlis, or reception room, stretched the length of the house. Mohamed al-Ghazi was an important man in his tiny village. Five times a day he led the prayers at the local mosque. As prayer leader, or imam, he was the villagers’ spiritual guide, and for performing that service he received a stipend from the government. Before oil wealth had allowed the government to afford such handouts, Mohamed had eked out a living from his dates, rising before dawn each morning to hand-water trees so few and precious that he had given each of them a name. He had been fifteen years old before he even had time to learn to read the Koran, so demanding was the toil required to wrest a subsistence living from the desert. Now, oil had brought electricity to power a water pump, and enough income to employ a foreign laborer. Every Friday, after community prayers, the imam slaughtered sheep and covered the floor of his majlis with platters of lamb and rice. The men of the village joined him for lunch and a discussion of the issues of the day.

  I asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. “They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course,” he said.

  “But what if their husband is their problem?”

  That possibility hadn’t crossed either man’s mind.

  The Friday before our visit, Mohamed’s majlis had been abuzz with rumors about the women who, demonstrating for the right to drive, had dismissed their chauffeurs and taken to the wheels of their cars in downtown Riyadh. The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: “I hope I never see it in my lifetime,” he said.

  But once, many years earlier, he had become a radical in his small rural community. He had petitioned the government to open a boys’ school in the village. Some of his neighbors were scandalized by the idea of secular education. Imams in neighboring towns sermonized against education, substituting the word filth, or mingissa, for the word for school, madrassa. To them, the only subject worthy of study was the Koran, and their boys were already learning that at the local mosques. Of what use were history, geography and foreign languages, they argued, when such studies brought knowledge of ungodly lands and peoples?

  But Mohamed al-Ghazi knew that the prophet’s lieutenants had spoken foreign languages, and that they had used that knowledge to spread Islam. And what was the danger, he argued, in teaching the geography and history of Islamic lands? In the cities, the ulema, or religious regulators, had already fought these battles, making sure that the curriculum banned subjects such as music, which is considered too sensuous by Wahhabis, and art, which could lead to the creation of graven images. Mohamed al-Ghazi’s campaign eventually won the village its school. Two of the imam’s sons who studied there had gone on to university; the third had joined the military.

  His daughters were another matter. To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home—to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls—was wicked. His daughters learned what he felt they needed to know, which was to recite the Koran, in the seclusion of the women’s quarters of their house.

  Today in Saudi Arabia, fathers like Mohamed al-Ghazi can still make such a choice for their daughters. Schooling for girls, although now widespread, has never been compulsory if their fathers disapprove. Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.

  Saudi Arabia didn’t get its first girls’ school until 1956. Its opening was contrived by Iffat, the wife of King Faisal, and the only Saudi ruler’s wife ever referred to as queen. Iffat, who had been raised in Turkey, wanted to broaden education to include more science and more Western subjects, but she had to proceed cautiously even in opening such a school for her own sons. The girls’ school was an infinitely more delicate matter. When Dar al Hanan, the House of Affection, opened in Jeddah in 1956, it did so in the guise of an orphanage. Since the Koran repeatedly orders Muslims to care for orphan girls, such an institution was beyond reproach. It had been running a year before Iffat felt able to risk explaining the institution’s real intention.

  In an article in a local paper titled “The Mother Can Be a School in Herself If You Prepare Her Well,” the objectives of Dar al Hanan were described as producing better mothers and homemakers through Islamically guided instruction.

  Iffat, through Faisal, based her case for women’s education on a famous set of verses in the Koran that have become known as Umm Salamah’s verses. Umm Salamah, the beautiful widow whose marriage to the prophet had so upset Aisha, is said to have asked Muhammad one day why it was that, when God sent his revelations, the language in them was always addressed to men.

  According to a hadith, Umm Salamah was in her room by the mosque, combing her hair, when she heard the prophet’s voice from the minbar, or pulpit. “I hastily did up my hair and ran to one of the apartments from where I could hear better. I pressed my ear to the wall, and here is what the prophet said:

  “ ‘Lo! Men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere, and women who persever
e, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard their modesty, and men who remember God much and women who remember—God has prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.’ ”

  What the verses made clear was that the obligations of the faith fell without differentiation on men and women. To carry out those obligations, Iffat argued, women had to be educated and informed. By 1960 the ulema had been brought to grudging acceptance of this principle, and cautiously agreed to the spread of girls’ schools throughout the country. The provisos were that the schools would remain under the control of the ulema and that no father who objected would be obliged to send his daughters to them.

  But for some Saudis that wasn’t enough. In the town of Burayda, not far from Minsaf, men rioted in protest at the opening of the first girls’ school in 1963. At around the same time as the United States was calling out its National Guard to enforce racial desegregation of schools in the American South, King Faisal had to call out the National Guard to keep the Burayda school open by force. For a year, the only pupil in the school was the headmistress’s daughter.

  Many fathers continued to exercise their option of keeping daughters ignorant. By 1980, only 55% of Saudi girls were attending primary school, and only 23% were enrolled in secondary education. Only 38% of women were literate, compared with 62% of men.

  Still, some girls managed to get the best education that money could buy. At Dar al Fikr, a private school for girls in Jeddah, the German-built campus is about as magnificent a school building as it’s possible to imagine. Inside the privacy of a towering white wall, glass doors swish open into a crisply air-conditioned foyer of polished stone. The layout is star-shaped, with classrooms radiating from large indoor recreation areas. High ceilings and huge panes of glass give an open, airy feeling to art studios, a gymnasium, science labs and a computer center humming with Commodore and Macintosh desktops.

  No class has more than twenty pupils. There is a day-care center, being used when I visited by the teachers’ infants, but available to the students in a country where early marriage and pregnancy are accepted and encouraged. In addition to an academic curriculum that stressed languages, girls could choose courses in cookery or dressmaking, karate or ballet, desktop publishing or motor mechanics. The motor mechanics course puzzled me, since Saudi women weren’t allowed to drive. “If her driver says there’s something the matter with the car, I want her to know if he’s telling the truth,” explained the headmistress, Basilah al-Homoud.

  The pupils had the well-tended look of the very rich. They were tall, with lustrous hair swept back in thick braids. The headmistress, a svelte, silk-clad thirty-eight-year-old, had the unlined skin of a teenager and the taut body of an aerobics addict. “The gym is the most important room in my house,” she said. Twenty years earlier, her older sister had wanted to study dentistry, impossible then for women in Saudi Arabia. Basilah’s father had moved the whole family to Syria so her sister could study at Damascus University. She came home as the first Saudi dentist and opened a clinic to treat both men and women. But she soon found that some Saudi men used to strict segregation couldn’t cope with having a strange woman touch them, even with a dentist’s drill. Tired of propositions and misunderstandings, she separated her clinic into men’s and women’s sections and hired male dentists to treat the men.

  Basilah, too, preferred professional segregation. Dar al Fikr had a neighboring school for boys and a male board of directors. When Basilah had to have a meeting with the board, or with her boys’ school counterpart, she used closed-circuit TV. “I might need a colleague’s support, but I don’t need to be sitting in a room with him,” she said. “If the men could come in here and be with us, they would end up dominating and telling us how to run things. I prefer to run my own show.”

  Basilah also used closed-circuit TV at the university, where she was studying for her MBA. Women were first admitted to university in Saudi Arabia in 1962, and all women’s colleges remain strictly segregated. Lecture rooms come equipped with closed-circuit TVs and telephones, so women students can listen to a male professor and question him by phone, without having to contaminate themselves by being seen by him. When the first dozen women graduated from university in 1973, they were devastated to find that their names hadn’t been printed on the commencement program. The old tradition, that it dishonors women to mention them, was depriving them of recognition they believed they’d earned. The women and their families protested, so a separate program was printed and a segregated graduation ceremony was held for the students’ female relatives. Two thousand women attended. Their celebratory ululations raised the roof.

  But while the opening of women’s universities widened access to higher learning for women, it also made the educational experience much shallower. Before 1962, many progressive Saudi families had sent their daughters abroad for education. They had returned to the kingdom not only with a degree but with experience of the outside world, whether in the West or in more progressive Arab countries such as Egypt, Lebanon or Syria, where they’d breathed the air of desegregation and even caught a breath of secular culture. Now a whole generation of Saudi women have completed their education entirely within the country. While thousands of Saudi men benefit from higher education abroad at government expense, women haven’t been granted such scholarships since 1980. The government’s position is that women’s educational opportunities have improved within the kingdom to the point where a woman’s needs can all be met within its borders. The definition of her educational needs, as set out in a Ministry of Higher Education policy paper, are “to bring her up in a sound Islamic way so that she can fulfill her role in life as a successful housewife, ideal wife and good mother, and to prepare her for other activities that suit her nature such as teaching, nursing and medicine.”

  The result is a cadre of older Saudi women professors who are vastly more liberal than the younger women students they now are teaching. When some of these women professors took part in the driving demonstration, it was their women students who turned on them first. One student barged into one professor’s office and started pulling at the professor’s hair and abusing her for demonstrating. Young women objecting to the drivers led an angry protest from the campus mosque. Among the calls of the zealots following the demonstration was for the women’s university to be permanently closed.

  Lack of opportunity for education abroad means that Saudi women are trapped in the confines of an education system that still lags men’s. Subjects such as geology and petroleum engineering—tickets to influential jobs in Saudi Arabia’s oil economy—remain closed to women. Three of Saudi Arabia’s seven universities—Imam Mohamed bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, the University of Petroleum and Minerals and the Islamic University in Medina—don’t accept women. Few women’s colleges have their own libraries, and libraries shared with men’s schools are either entirely off limits to women or open to them only one day per week. Most of the time women can’t browse for books but have to specify the titles they want and have them brought out to them.

  But women and men sit the same degree examinations. Professors quietly acknowledge the women’s scores routinely outstrip the men’s. “It’s no surprise,” said one woman professor. “Look at their lives. The boys have their cars, they can spend the evenings cruising the streets with their friends, sitting in cafés, buying black-market alcohol and drinking all night. What do the girls have? Four walls and their books. For them, education is everything.”

  When Saudi women did go abroad to be educated in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the places they often selected was the American University of Beirut. In 1866 a Vermont missionary named Daniel Bliss laid the foundation stone for the men’s college that was to become AUB, declaring that the school was for “all conditions and classes of men without regard to color, nationality, race or religion. A man white, black, or yellow, Christian
, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution… and go out believing in one God, in many gods, or in no God.”

  The AUB opened a Women’s School of Nursing at the university as early as 1905 and accepted its first woman student to the general campus in 1921. She arrived fully veiled and accompanied by her husband. By the mid-sixties, the last all-male bastion, engineering, had fallen to coeducation.

  For a while, the transplant of American liberalism seemed to work. Leila Sharaf, a Lebanese Druse, witnessed the birth of dozens of political and philosophical movements on the campus in the 1950s, and fostered the rise of Arab nationalism. “There were so many clubs,” she says. “The Arab Cultural Club, the Loss of Palestine Club, the Baathists.” Women sat with men in the coffee shops fringing the campus, arguing passionately into the night. Leila Sharaf met her future husband, a Jordanian Muslim, at one of the clubs and returned with him to Jordan, where she eventually became minister of information in the Jordanian government and a close adviser to Queen Noor.

  But by the middle of the 1960s the return to Islamic fundamentalism began to emerge as an ideology in competition with Arab nationalism. The university’s liberalism, and its American name, began to make it a target of extremists.

  The heart of the liberal program at AUB has always been a cultural studies course that takes students from the Epic of Gilgamesh through Homer and Virgil to Locke, Descartes and Hobbes. In 1966 the imams of some Beirut mosques got hold of a required text from the course that quoted the medieval Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, saying that the Islamic faith’s swift expansion didn’t indicate the religion’s inherent truth. Police burst onto the campus to arrest the heretical author. “I told them Mr. Aquinas wasn’t available at the moment,” recalls Tarif Khalidi, a medieval historian who helped develop the cultural studies program. He found himself hauled off to be interrogated instead. It was one of his students, Hanan Ashrawi, who raised the alarm and brought the president of the university and the Lebanese interior minister to have him set free.