Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  When Jordanians went back to the polls in November 1993, more than sixty percent of the electorate voted, up from forty-one percent in 1989. The extra votes were enough to throw out almost half the fundamentalists and put Toujan into Parliament as Jordan’s first elected woman representative.

  The outcome rested in part on a nudge from King Hussein, who ordered subtle changes in voting rules to lessen the fundamentalists’ advantage in urban areas, where their following was strongest. In a speech just before lifting a ban on mass rallies, Hussein warned those who “climb the pulpits… to fear God in what they say.” The king’s deftness lay in containing fundamentalist influence without excluding it from the political process and driving it underground, as had happened in Algeria.

  But even without the electoral changes, Toujan’s support had swelled. Many Jordanians admired her courage throughout a campaign in which extremists once again declared it a religious duty “to shed her blood.” A competing candidate in Amman ran on a platform promising “to wrest women’s constitutional rights” away from them.

  “I did it by being myself, and it worked,” said Toujan, ecstatic about her victory. Other women candidates didn’t fare so well. Nadia Bouchnaq, a fifty-year-old with a record of three decades of social service, was stoned after leaving debates in which fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman’s voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia greeted her loss philosophically. “There will come a time when people will get used to having women in Parliament,” she said.

  Toujan certainly aimed to make it so, and not by treading softly. Her first goal as a legislator was a modest but telling reform of one of the many laws that belittle women. She sought to change an old travel regulation that required wives to seek their husbands’ permission before leaving the country. She also wanted to alter women’s passports that list them as ‘wife of,’ ‘widow of,’ or ‘divorcee of a husband or ex-husband, rather than giving them the dignity of their own names.

  It is still too early to know what Toujan will be able to accomplish in Parliament. But the extremists know she has already achieved something vastly significant just by being there, in place of one of those who tried every means to destroy her.

  In some Islamic countries, even the idea of women politicians remains a distant dream. In Kuwait it was women, during the seven-month Iraqi occupation, who faced Iraqi bullets, demonstrating for the return of the emir. Women kept the small resistance movement alive, smuggling weapons and food, hiding foreigners and fighters. But when the emir came back, he showed his appreciation by declining to let them vote in the 1992 parliamentary election.

  Before the invasion a medical student named Areej al-Khateeb did her political organizing from the car phone in her gold Mercedes sports car. The Iraqis stole the car, complete with its “I Love Democracy” bumper stickers. While Areej’s socialist parents didn’t care about Kuwait’s traditional view of women, Areej herself trod a careful path, tempering her own feminist views with a keen sense of how far she could go and still be listened to by a wide range of her fellow university students. To conform to Kuwaiti traditions of separating the sexes, she organized separate rooms for women at political gatherings, with audio hookups so they could listen to the debate.

  Across the border in Saudi Arabia, even the notion of a debate is anathema. Saudi Arabia has virtually no political culture. “We don’t need democracy, we have our own ‘desert democracy,’ “ explained Nabila al-Bassam, a Saudi woman who ran her own clothing and gift store in Dhahran. What she was referring to was an ancient desert tradition known as the majlis, weekly gatherings hosted by members of the ruling family, where any of their subjects were free to present petitions or air grievances. In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds’ opportunity to whisper in their prince’s ear.

  Nabila told me of a friend who had recently petitioned King Fahd’s wife to allow the legal import of hair-salon equipment. Technically, hairdressing salons were banned in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment frowned on anything that drew women from their houses. In fact, thriving salons owned by prominent Saudis and staffed by Filipina or Syrian beauticians did a roaring trade. “My friend is tired of having to run her business in secret,” Nabila said. But so far she had received no response to her petition. “Petitions do work,” said Nabila. “But in this society you have to do things on a friendly basis, like a family. You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right.” A rejected petitioner had no choice but to accept the al-Sauds’ decision. With no free press and no way to mobilize public opinion, the al-Sauds ruled as they liked.

  If there was one thing that Saudi women were prepared to criticize about their lot, it was the ban that prevented them from driving. During the Gulf War the sight of pony-tailed American ser-vicewomen driving trucks and Humvees on Saudi Arabian roads invigorated a long-simmering debate on the issue. The Americans weren’t the only women drivers the war had brought. Many Kuwaiti women, fleeing the Iraqi invasion, had arrived in Saudi Arabia unveiled, at the wheel of the family Mercedes.

  By October 1990, articles about Saudi women seeking the right to drive had begun appearing in the heavily censored press. Women quoted in these articles said they’d been alarmed to realize that they wouldn’t have been able to transport their children to safety as the Kuwaiti women had done. Some raised economic issues, calculating that twenty percent of average Saudi family income was spent on drivers, who had to be fed and housed as well as paid a salary. Saudi Arabia had 300,000 full-time private chauffeurs—a staggering number, but still far short of providing a driver for every Saudi woman who needed mobility. Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some proponents of allowing women to drive played the Islam card, pointing out how undesirable it was for a woman to be forced to have a strange man as part of her household, and to drive around alone with him.

  On a Tuesday afternoon in early November, forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, converged on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, they dismissed their drivers. About a quarter then slid into the drivers’ seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as passengers. They drove off in convoy down the busy thoroughfare. A few blocks later, the cane-wielding mutawain of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at intersections, ordering the women out of the drivers’ seats. Soon, regular police arrived, and the women asked them to see that they weren’t taken off to the mutawain headquarters. There was a scuffle between the mutawain, who yelled that the women had committed a religious crime, and the traffic police, who said the matter was their affair. In the end, the police drove the women’s cars to police headquarters with a mutawa in the passenger seat and the women in the back.

  The women who had taken part in the demonstration were all from what Saudis call “good families”—wealthy, prominent clans with close ties to the ruling al-Saud dynasty. All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers’ licenses they’d acquired overseas. Many of them were from the faculty of the women’s branch of Riyadh’s university, such as Fatin al-Zamil, a professor of medicine. Others were women of achievement such as Aisha al-Mana, who had a doctorate in sociology from the University of Colorado and headed a consortium of women-owned businesses from fashion to computer-training centers. Even though some of these women didn’t normally veil their faces, for the demonstration all wore the covering that leaves only eyes exposed.

  Before the demonstration, the women had sent a petition to the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who was thought to be a fairly progressive member of the ruling family. The petition begged King Fahd to open his “paternal heart” to what they termed their “humane demand” to drive. They argued that women of the prophet’s era had ridden camels, the
main mode of transportation of their day. The evidence, they wrote in their petition, was there in Islam, “such is the greatness of the teacher of humanity and the master of men in leaving lessons that are as clear as the sunlight to dispel the darkness of ignorance.”

  While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent religious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violations had occurred, since the women all had international drivers’ licenses recognized by Saudi law. The religious representatives found that no moral issues were at stake, since the women were veiled and the Koran says nothing that could be construed as forbidding an act such as driving. The women were released.

  In Jeddah and Dhahran, women gathered to plan parallel demonstrations, encouraged by what they saw as tacit support from the ruling family. But then came the backlash.

  Word of the demonstration spread quickly, despite a total blackout of coverage in the Saudi media. When the women who had taken part arrived for work the next day at the university, they expected to be greeted as heroines by their all-women students. Instead, some found their office doors daubed with graffiti, criticizing them as un-Islamic. Others found their classes boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets. Under a heading “Names of the Promoters of Vice and Lasciviousness,” the demonstration participants were listed, along with their phone numbers, and a designation of either “American secularist,” or “communist” after each name. “These Are the Roots of Calamity,” the leaflets shrieked. “Uproot them! Uproot them! Uproot them! Purify the Land of Monotheism.” Predictably, the women’s phones began ringing off the hook with abusive calls. If their husbands answered, they were told to divorce their whorish wives, or berated for being unable to control them.

  The royal family immediately caved in to the extremists’ pressures. Prince Salman’s committee’s findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their passports. The security police also arrested a prominent, well-connected Saudi man accused of leaking word of the protest to a British film crew. He was given a grueling interrogation, including a beating, and thrown in jail for several weeks.

  The ruling family could have stood by the women on Islamic grounds. What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.

  But a week after the demonstration Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstration as “a stupid act” and said some of the women involved were raised outside Saudi Arabia and “not brought up in an Islamic home.” He then read out a new fatwa, or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia’s leading sheik, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, stating that women driving contradicted “Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens.” If driving hadn’t been illegal before, it was now. Naif’s remarks got front-page coverage, the first mention of the driving demonstration that had appeared in the Saudi press.

  Although I had been in touch with some of the women drivers before the demonstration, none of them would take my calls afterward. They all had been warned that any contact with foreign media would lead to rearrest. All were sure that their phones were tapped and their homes watched. I did get a sad letter, signed simply “A proud Saudi woman” detailing the “witch hunt” under way. “Fanatics,” she wrote, “are forcing students to sign petitions denouncing the women.” They were “using this incident to demonstrate their strength and foment antiliberal, antigovernment and anti-American feelings.” Another woman sent me a simple message: “I did it because I want my granddaughters to be able to say I was there.”

  I also talked to a relative of one of the women who’d taken part. “I encouraged her,” he said sadly. “I thought the time was right. Now the cause has been set back ten years—buried under twenty tons of concrete. It’s so easy for people like me”—a diplomat’s son raised abroad and educated in America—“to be totally off base about this country and what it is ready to accept.”

  Chapter 11

  MUSLIM WOMEN’S GAMES

  “O true believers, forbid not the good things which God has allowed you, but transgress not, for God loveth not the transgressors.”

  THE KORAN

  THE CHAPTER OF THE TABLE

  As the torchbearer at the opening ceremony of the first Islamic Women’s Games entered the arena, ten thousand spectators burst into a deafening cheer. Her stride long and rhythmic, the athlete loped around the track as the torch flames licked the air above her hooded head.

  High in the stands, among the crowd, her father almost burst with pride. The torchbearer, eighteen-year-old Padideh Bolourizadeh, had been an Iranian track star since she was seven. But this was the first time her father had ever seen her run.

  He was able to watch because Padideh was wearing the world’s first track suit-hijab. The suit’s white hood concealed every wisp of hair, and a black, ankle-length tunic slid under a long jersey and flapped around the ankles of her sweatpants.

  At the center of the arena, all-women sports teams from ten Muslim countries lined up behind their national flags. Every now and then, among the contingents from Syria and Turkmenistan, it was possible to notice a surreptitious hand fiddling with an unfamiliar headscarf.

  The next day, when the contests began in earnest, the athletes stripped down to their more familiar Lycra shorts and skimpy singlets. At the basketball stadium, as the captain of the Iranian team sprinted down the court past the Azerbaijanis to slamdunk the ball, ecstatic women spectators packing the stands raised a roar that would have drowned out a Metrodome crowd at a Twins’ World Series game. Outside the stadium door, armed policemen paced the sidewalk, to make sure no men entered. Inside, high on the stadium wall, a larger-than-life-sized portrait of Khomeini gazed down on the sweaty, shorts-clad women athletes. In art, if not in life, his craggy countenance gave just the merest hint of a smile.

  I had heard about the first Islamic Women’s Games in early February 1993, when Mary Glen Haig, a British representative of the International Olympic Committee, phoned me at home in London to get advice about what a Western woman should pack for a trip to Tehran. The International Olympic Committee, she said, had been invited to observe the games and she—a former Olympic fencing champion—was to be the observer.

  A few days later, having wangled an invitation of my own, I went looking for her among the contestants and spectators at the track and field stadium, to see what she was making of the events so far. Someone pointed me to an official table, where a black-hooded woman sat alongside a sporty, svelte figure with bobbed blond hair, a denim jacket over a Liberty-print shirt, blue jeans and Asics athletic shoes. I’d explained on the phone that it wasn’t necessary to wear hijab at all-women gatherings, but I was surprised that she’d dressed so casually. I wandered over and introduced myself. The blonde smiled and held out her hand. “Faezeh Hashemi,” she said. “Vice-president of the Iranian Olympic Committee. This,” she said, indicating the woman in the black hood, “is our British guest from the International Committee.”

  Faezeh Hashemi was President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s thirty-year-old daughter and the brains behind the first Islamic Women’s Games. Women’s sports had practically disappeared after the Islamic revolution, when the mullahs put an abrupt end to the mixed training and competition that had taken place under the shah. The idea of girls, in revealing athletic gear, training alongside boys had turned many religious Iranians against sports, especially for women.

  “There is no fun in Islam.” Khomeini had told his flock in a radio sermon in 1979. During his lifetime the city of Tehran reflected his opinion. A combination of an economically ruinous war with Iraq and the eagle eyes of Islamic zealots turned the city into a gray place of sandbagged buildings and circumspect citizens. All the old prerevo-luti
onary night spots were gone. Even the Hiltons and the Kentucky Fried Chicken joints were changed utterly. Terrible hybrids had been born, such as the former Intercontinental Hotel on the former Los Angeles Boulevard, which had become the Flower of Martyrdom Hotel on Hijab Street, where mold bloomed in the bathrooms and a sign saying “Down With U.S.A.” loomed in the lobby.

  And yet even Khomeini hadn’t been entirely oblivious to the need for bodily fitness. His own daily routine included a walk—round and round the courtyard of his house.

  The wealthy, landowning Rafsanjani clan had taken a much more freewheeling approach to exercise, even having a little unmul-lah-like fun. In the privacy of their own family compound, Raf-sanjani’s two daughters and three sons swam, bicycled, played table tennis and volley ball. Before the duties of the presidency took up all his time, Rafsanjani himself often joined his kids in the pool or at table tennis.

  After the 1979 revolution most of Iran’s sports facilities had simply been handed over to men. The government set up an important-sounding “Directorate of Women’s Sports Affairs” in 1980, but it remained nothing but a name until 1985, when an odd alliance of Iranian women began a patient campaign to get women’s sports back on the agenda. Some of the activists were Iran’s former women athletes—a few of them Olympic-class competitors—who had been forced out of sportswear and into hijab. Athletes who hadn’t gone into exile eventually adopted an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” philosophy, and reached out to women’s groups within the religious establishment for help. It was Faezeh Hashemi, who could speak the language of the radical mullahs, who proved their best ally. Faezeh had many assets, including her father’s backing. As a master’s degree student in management at the University of Tehran, she knew a lot about manipulating organizations.

  Like most religious women who wanted to get something done, she built the foundations of her case on the prophet’s hadith. Muhammad is on the record as recommending that Muslims have “strong bodies.” He also said: “You shall excel in all respects if you are the believers.” Faezeh argued that sports should be part of the search for excellence, and that these recommendations applied equally to women and men. Women, as the lynchpins of the Islamic family, needed the physical and mental benefits that sports could provide. Fine, the conservatives responded; let them follow a program of exercise in the privacy of their homes. Faezeh responded that women and girls shouldn’t be robbed of the social benefits of teamwork and competition.