Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Good night.”

  At the university the next morning, we made our way to a class in the religion faculty, where women students were due to hear a lecture on Islamic regimes. “You’ll find it very lively,” Asya said. “Lots of questions and argument.”

  But when we arrived, the lecture room was deserted. A veiled student told Asya that the women had decided to protest the previous day’s announcement of a resumption in peace talks with Israel, and had gone to a sit-in outside the home of Dr. Haider Abdul Shafi, the head of the Palestinian peace negotiators. The only class under way was a math tutorial.

  Asya and I braved the men’s campus in search of the university spokesman. The corridors were full of bearded students, all conscientiously averting their eyes as we swished past them in our jalabiyas. Ahmad Saati, the spokesman, was a short, fleshy man who, like most of the faculty, had done his time in an Israeli prison, suspected of being an activist for Hamas. He apologized for not offering a handshake. “We have a saying: Tt’s better to stab yourself in the hand than to touch a woman’s hand.’ “

  “But doesn’t intention matter?” asked Asya. “I thought it was all right to shake hands if you have a good intention.” Ahmad, himself a graduate of the Islam Institute of Higher Studies in Egypt, corrected her politely. “Your intention might be okay. But what about mine? How can you know the other person’s intention?”

  When I asked about coeducation, Ahmad almost exploded with excitement. “Coeducation is prevented in Islam! We know the disastrous results of coeducation. We have names, we have numbers.” Zina, or out-of-wedlock sex, had taken place at Birzeit, a coed Palestinian university on the West Bank, he said. “This is disastrous, especially for young girls.”

  It could be disastrous, I agreed, since fathers and brothers still killed their teenaged girls if they suspected them of having sex. “We are not for these extrajudicial killings,” he said. “Islam is not for them. Islam demands proof. Not just a witness: four witnesses. Not just a confession: a credible confession.”

  Then why didn’t learned Islamic scholars, such as the university faculty, speak out more vehemently against these killings, instead of turning a blind eye? Why weren’t the scholars speaking out against clitoridectomy, which had made its way to Gaza while the Strip was under Egyptian rule?

  “It is a sensitive subject. Some people say it makes women calmer. But of course Islam is against it. Every part of the body that is created has a function. It’s like tonsils: only if it is threatening health should you remove it; if it is not threatening, leave it be. Perhaps the women preachers are preaching against it. Of course, we don’t have such operations here. In Egypt, but not here.”

  “Among the older women …” Asya began, but Ahmad interrupted. “Not here. Never among Palestinians.” Asya was silent. The night before, she had told me that her mother’s clitoris had been removed.

  “This is an Eastern society,” he continued. “There are many things to do with women in Eastern societies that are not correct according to Islam. But it takes time to change them. First we must get an Islamic state. All the disasters in the world are from not adopting Islam. When Islam is adopted, all will be right.”

  When Ahmad excused himself for a moment to speak with a colleague, Asya told me she wanted to visit the lavatory on the women’s campus. “I can go here, but I don’t feel comfortable.”

  When Ahmad returned and found me by myself, he recoiled from the doorway. “Where is Asya? It’s forbidden to me to sit with you alone.” We were hardly alone. The door to the office stood wide open, onto a passageway teeming with students.

  “Even with the door open?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, I am sorry. You must bring Asya,” he said, backing away down the corridor as if I had the plague. When Asya returned, we continued oussr discussion, turning to the role of women in politics. Ahmad was explaining that, while women can’t lead a Muslim community, they have a duty to comment and protest to the leader if they feel he’s astray.

  “It’s exactly the same as the role of women during family prayers,” he said. “A woman can’t lead her husband—or any man—at prayer, but if he makes a mistake—say he leaves something out—she must let him know by clapping her hands.”

  “Can’t she just say the right words?”

  “No, because her voice is alluring. She mustn’t raise it.”

  Asya broke in. “Surely, if it is her family, she can raise her voice to say ‘Subhan Allah.’”

  “No, no,” he said. “She can’t raise it at all. She may only clap. Women must be very careful of their voices. If someone comes to my house and asks for me, my wife may say, ‘Yes, wait,’ or ‘He’s not here.’ Very briefly, very formally. She must not speak in a delicate tone. This is from the Koran. Things begun with a few words will continue to other things.”

  I left Gaza that night and drove, the next day, out through the stony hills and olive groves of the West Bank, to meet with some women professors from a very different Palestinian university, Birzeit.

  These women were less than a generation removed from Asya—women in their late thirties and early forties who could have been her older sisters. But something had happened in the years that separated her education from theirs, and the gulf, widening between them, seemed almost unbridgeable. Yet the women professors at Birzeit, while acknowledging the problem, seemed to me to be in deep denial about its extent.‘The trouble is, these people don’t understand their own culture,” said Islah Gad, sipping fresh orange juice after a day’s teaching. We sat in the sunroom of her house, a huge, Ottoman-style stone building with a portico and domed ceilings. Islah’s eyes drifted to the garden, where carefully tended fruit trees blossomed in the red soil. She was watching a small tortoise make its uncertain way through the furrows of plowed earth. She had noticed the creature on the roadway as she drove back from the university and had rescued it from being splattered under the wheels of a car.

  Islah had grown up in Egypt and met her husband, a prominent Palestinian activist, at university there. She had returned with him to El Bireh, the West Bank village where his father was mayor until the Israelis deported him as a PLO activist. “Israelis did a lot to uproot traditional Palestinian culture here, but not as much as the Islamic movements are doing,” she said. She ticked off the problems on her long, elegant fingers. First, there was the issue Hamas had made of traditional Palestinian dress—the beautiful long black or maroon caftans that Palestinian women had always worn, elaborately embroidered in cross-stitch in the front and at the hem, twinned with a delicate white scarf wrapped around the hair. “This is Islamic dress—but not to them. According to them, the colors in the embroidery are haram. Where in the Koran does it say so? A thousand Palestinian women are earning their bread making those dresses. But they don’t think of that. They accuse leftists of having imported ideas. But all of their ideas are imported. At the Birzeit book fair this year I counted a hundred books on women and Islam—all from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”

  At Birzeit, the Palestinians’ most liberal and secular college, Islamic movements such as Hamas and Jihad had made less headway than at any other school, but still their influence was being felt. “They are like mushrooms,” said Lily Feidy, one of Islah’s colleagues. “They grow up in certain conditions, and then when the conditions change, they die out. Right now, their resurgence is a sign of pessimism. Because people are desperate, they are resorting to the supernatural.”

  Lily Feidy, who taught linguistics at Birzeit, had never set foot on the campus of the Gaza Islamic University. “I can’t go there because I won’t put on the veil. And anyway, I’m not interested in sitting and arguing with them. What was true fourteen hundred years ago is not true now. I’m sorry, but we’re not living in the desert anymore; we’re not living in tents.”

  Islah Gad, for her part, welcomed the chance to argue her case. “It’s easy to break their logic,” she said. “At a debate we had on coeducatio
n, the Hamas boys were saying coeducation is haram—that we must close the coed schools. I said to them, ‘Wait: in all our villages, the schools are coed. The villagers can’t afford to build two schools. So what will happen in your scenario? All the girls will have to stay away from school. Is that what you want?’ They of course said, ‘No, no—we didn’t think about the expense of new schools.’ So I said to them, ‘Go, read your own reality. Forget these prefab ideas from Saudi Arabia.’ “

  Both Islah and Lily seemed to be unwilling to accept that the rising Islamic tide could pose a threat to their own cherished liberal views. To me, their analysis seemed wishful. I heard it a lot from the educated women of their generation—women like Jordan’s Leila Sharaf, who had grown up in the heady days of the Arab nationalist movement, when the charismatic figures were all secular leftists who urged women’s emancipation. For these women, Hamas’s view of women was laughable. And since they couldn’t hear the appeal of such views themselves, they were deaf to the appeal they held for their students.

  Islamic movements were on the ascendant in almost every university in the Middle East. And the faculties in which they were most heavily represented were the bastions of the most gifted—the medical schools, the engineering departments. The students who were hearing the Islamic call included the students with the most options, not just the desperate cases: the Sahars and the Asyas, with the scholarships to Harvard and London. They were the elites of the next decade: the people who would shape their nations’ futures.

  A decade or two earlier, these same gifted intellectuals would have been Arab nationalists, but that idea had failed to deliver anything but military defeats and crumbling economies. To an outsider, it was hard to imagine this new “big idea” doing any better. But the return to roots and the rejection of outside influence is always an attractive notion; I had felt its pull myself as an Australian adolescent, living in the shadow of United States influence and watching my country march lockstep into the quagmire of Vietnam. For intelligent young Muslims facing futures limited by the failures of so many imported ideologies, Islam’s lure was its very homegrownness. Sahar had said it from the beginning: “Why not try something of our own?”

  What worried me most was that the Islam taking hold in so many of the universities wasn’t their own; not the tolerant tradition of Egypt nor the progressive practices of Palestinians, but rather the warped interpretation promoted by the wealth of the Saudis. I hated to think of a generation squandering its talent in the service of that repressive creed.

  When my Saudi friend took me into the sand dunes north of Riyadh to meet his uncle, I’d assumed that the older man was a relic of a passing era, whose values would erode as surely as the old sand-castle fortresses we’d passed along the highway.

  My friend seemed to have traveled such a vast distance in the span of half a lifetime. Born under a palm tree on his uncle’s farm, he’d been carried home to his father’s house by camelback. Twenty-five years later he crossed the Atlantic by Concorde. Educated at the best colleges in the United States, dividing his professional life between London, Washington and Riyadh, he had an iconoclastic intellect that reveled in exposing cant and upending orthodoxy.

  It seemed clear to me that he was the future: his uncle, with the sad story of the sequestered, school-deprived daughters, was the past. It took me awhile to realize that it wasn’t as clear as I thought.

  My friend was more comfortable critiquing the oddities of OPEC or lamenting the dominance of the Levantine voice in Arabic literature than he was in discussing his personal life. Once, when I pestered him, he described in a slightly self-deprecating way how he’d returned from his liberated life in the West to marry a Saudi bride he “managed to see” just once before their wedding. He never took her with him on his business trips and never offered to introduce me to her when I was in Saudi Arabia. He had daughters, who clearly delighted him, although he never spoke of them unless I asked after them.

  How, I asked him one night over dinner in London, was he planning to educate them? He looked down into his plate of pasta and played with his fork. “I will raise them as Saudi women. I won’t make the mistake some people make, of bringing them up half here and half there, so that they don’t know who they are,” he said.

  “But what if one of them is a gifted physicist or mathematician?” I asked. “What if she needs to go abroad to study?” I thought he would say, “Well, in that case, of course, she’ll study at Harvard, or Princeton, or Cambridge.” But he didn’t say that at all.

  Instead, he sighed. It was a long, deep sigh that reminded me of his uncle when I’d asked him about women driving.

  “That,” he said, “would be a problem. And I would have to solve it when it happened.” It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn’t nearly as great as I’d assumed.

  Like most Westerners, I always imagined the future as an inevitably brighter place, where a kind of moral geology will have eroded the cruel edges of past and present wrongs. But in Gaza and Saudi Arabia, what I saw gave me a different view.

  From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.

  Chapter 9

  RISKY BUSINESS

  “I suffer not the work of any worker, male or female, to be lost.”

  THE KORAN

  THE FAMILY OF IMRAN

  At the office of the Arab News in Jeddah, a reporter named Faiza Ambah had a cartoon tacked to the bulletin board over her desk. “Behold the turtle,” said the caption under a whimsical drawing of the creature. “He makes progress only when he sticks out his neck.” Every now and then Faiza would uncoil from a hunched position over her keyboard and tug pensively at the black chiffon scarf tied around her face.

  Faiza was sticking her own neck out. By Saudi standards, her articles were daring. In the aftermath of the Kuwait invasion, she probed the new mood of Saudi women and the delicate question of press censorship. But the most daring thing she did was to come to work at all. Even cloaked and veiled, she ran a risk every day she came to the newspaper’s unsegregated office, where men worked in cubicles alongside her. “When the editor hired me, I think the idea was that I’d work at home: do my reporting by phone and file my copy electronically,” she said. “But a reporter can’t work like that. You have to see what’s going on in the world.”

  At the end of the day, when she’d filed her article, she would adjust her scarf and abaya and head for the carpark. There, because Saudi law banned her from driving, her Yemeni chauffeur waited to take her home. The first time I met Faiza, she berated me for an article I’d written about the difficulties faced by Saudi women. She was proud of her achievements and those of her friends, who worked as doctors or ran their own companies. She felt I hadn’t paid enough attention to the Saudi women who were working and making a difference in the society.

  What women like Faiza and her friends were doing was simply reclaiming the ground lost in the centuries since the death of the prophet. Every Saudi knew that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, had run an international trading company. Sawda, his second wife, had been famous for her leatherwork, which she sold to help support the household. Fatima, the prophet’s daughter, had labored at spinning until her hands bled, alternating days at work and at study. When she worked, she gave her slave girl time off to study, insisting that everyone had a right to learn.

  Faiza was the most visible of the handful of working Saudi women because her name appeared so often in the newspaper. There were a few other Saudi women journalists, but Faiza was the only one I knew who risked working in her newspaper’s office. The risk was that the mutawain—religious police from the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—would one day burst into the office and discover her breaking the rules on segregation. The mutawain are the loose cannons of the Saudi justice system; fanatical volunteers who patrol the streets and shopping malls yelling at people. Women with uncovered faces are one target; men dawdling over closing their sho
ps at prayer time are another. Some mutawain wielded long canes with which to whip offenders. The government didn’t encourage the mutawain’s excesses, but it didn’t rein them in, either. The Saudi ruling family was terrified of a fundamentalist upsurge that would sweep it from power in the way the Iranians had disposed of the shah. So it bought off the mutawain with fleets of fancy cars to use in its patrols, and with a hands-off policy toward its activities. As a result, the mutawain were fearless, even abusing an al-Saud princess when they caught her walking with a maid who wasn’t wearing a face veil.

  Perhaps the most humiliating thing about the mutawain was that, apart from abusing women in the streets, they didn’t deign to deal with them directly regarding so-called “offenses.” If a woman transgressed a rule of dress or segregation, the mutawain would take the matter up with her husband, father or brother—the “responsible male” deemed to be in charge of her—in the manner of a school principal dealing with a recalcitrant child. Women of all ages are in-fantilized by the Saudi system. A woman, no matter how old, has to be able to show a signed permission from her husband, son or grandson before she is free to travel, even inside her own country.

  Once, Faiza left her permission behind in Cairo. Her husband was traveling out of the country and was unreachable. She was due to travel herself, but without her permit, she was trapped in Jeddah. “I was tearing my hair out,” she said. Her father couldn’t help her because, once a woman marries, only her husband’s word counts with the Saudi authorities. In the end, she had to wait for a cousin to travel to Cairo and collect the document. Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.