Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood

by Fatima Mernissi

  Cousin Zin and the other young men always walked to the Friday gatherings at the mosque on foot, while the older men followed just a few meters behind, sometimes on foot, and sometimes riding their mules. Samir and I loved it when Uncle and Father took their mules because then we could be part of the party too. We each would sit on our father's mule, in front of the saddle. Father hesitated about taking me to the mosque with him the first time, but I screamed so loudly that Uncle told him that there was nothing wrong with taking a little girl to the mosque. The Hadith reported that the Prophet, Allah's Prayer and Peace Upon Him, had conducted prayers in the mosque with a female child playing in front of him.

  The only concession to tradition that the young men made in their Friday dress was that instead of keeping their heads uncovered, they wore the triangular felt cap that had become popular among the Egyptian nationalists. These felt caps could bring on trouble in times of agitation, when the French police got hysterical, because the cap fad had first swept our Medina after Allal al-Fassi, an often-imprisoned and exiled Fez-born hero who opposed the French presence in North Africa, appeared wearing one at the Qaraouiyine Mosque. Later, when our King Mohammed V wore the felt cap, elegantly sloping back from his serene forehead, at an official meeting with the French Resident General in Rabat, foreign analysts of Arab affairs concluded that nothing good, as far as their interests were concerned, could be expected from him anymore. Any king who discarded his traditional turban in favor of a subversive felt hat could no longer be trusted.

  In any case, tradition and modernity existed harmoniously side by side, both in the young men's dress and in our house during; the men's news sessions. First, everyone would listen to the radio news in both Arabic and French. Then Father would turn off the radio, and the group would listen to the young men reading and commenting on the written press. Tea would be served, and Samir and I were expected to listen without too much interruption. However, I would often press my head against Father's shoulder and whisper, "Who are the Allemane (Germans)? Where did they come from, and why are they beating up the French? Where are they hiding, if the Spaniards are in the North and the French in the South?" Father always promised to explain it all to me later when we were by ourselves in our salon. And he did explain it many times, but I never got over my confusion, and neither did Samir, in spite of our all efforts to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

  11.

  WORLD WAR II:

  VIEW FROM THE COURTYARD

  THE ALLEMANE (GERMANS) were Christians, that was for sure. They lived in the North like all the others, in what we call Blad Teldj, or the Snowland. Allah did not favor the Christians: their climate was harsh and cold, and that made them moody and, when the sun did not show up for months, nasty. To warm themselves up, they had to drink wine and other strong beverages, and then they got aggressive and started looking for trouble. They did drink tea sometimes though, just like everyone else, but even their tea was bitter and scalding and not at all like ours, which was always perfumed with mint or even absinthe or myrtle. Cousin Zin, who had visited England, said that the tea up there was so bitter, they mixed. it with milk. So Samir and I poured some milk in our mint tea once, just to give it a try, and it was ugh! awful! No wonder the Christians were always miserable and looking for fights.

  Anyway, it seemed that the Allemane, the Germans, had been preparing a huge and secret army for a long time. No one knew about it, and then one day, they invaded France. They colonized Paris, the French capital, and started giving people orders, just as the French were doing to us in Fez. We were lucky though, because at least the French did not like our Medina, the city of our ancestors, and had built the Ville Nouvelle for themselves. I asked Samir what would have happened if the French had liked the Medina, and he said that they would have thrown us right out, and taken our houses.

  The mysterious Allemane were not only after the French, however; they had also declared war on the Jews. The Allemane forced the Jews to wear something yellow whenever they stepped out into the streets, just as the Muslim men asked the women to wear a veil, so they could be spotted immediately. Why the Allemane were after Jews, no one in the courtyard was ever really able to say. Samir and I kept asking questions, running around from one embroidery team to another on quiet afternoons, but all we got was speculation. "It could be the same thing as with women here," said Mother. "No one really knows why men force us to wear veils. Something to do with the difference maybe. Fear of the difference makes people behave in very strange ways. The Allemane must feel safer when they are by themselves, just like the men in the Medina who get nervous whenever women appear. If the Jews insist on their difference, that could unsettle the Allemane. Crazy world."

  In Fez, the Jews had their own district, called the Mellah. It took exactly half an hour to get there from our house, and the Jews looked just like everyone else, dressing in long robes similar to our djellabas. They wore hats instead of turbans, that's all. They minded their own business and kept to their Mellah, making beautiful jewelry and pickling their vegetables in a most delicious way. Mother had tried to pickle zucchini, small cucumbers, and tiny eggplants the Mellah way, but she had never succeeded. "They must say some magic words," she concluded.

  Like us, the Jews had their own prayers, loved their God, and taught His book to their children. They had built a syna gogue for Him, which was like our mosque, and we shared the same prophets, with the exception of our beloved Mohammed, Allah's Prayer and Peace Upon Him. (I never went too far in listing the prophets, because it got complicated and I was afraid of making a mistake. My teacher Lalla Tam said that making mistakes in religious matters could send a person to hell. It was called tash f or blasphemy, and as I already had decided that I was going to paradise, I tried to stay away from mistakes.) One thing was for sure, the Jews had always lived with Arabs, since the beginning of time, and the Prophet Mohammed had liked them when he first started preaching Islam. But then they did something nasty, and he decided, that if the two religions were to co-exist in the same city, they would have to live in separate quarters. Jews were well organized and had a strong sense of community, much stronger than ours. In the Mellah, the poor were always taken care of and all the children went to highly disciplined Alliance Israelite schools.

  What I could not understand was, what were the Jews doing in the country of the Allemane? How did they get there, into Snowland? I thought that Jews, like Arabs, preferred warm climates and steered away from snow. They had lived in the city of Medina, in the middle of the Arabian Desert, during the Prophet's time, fourteen centuries ago, right? And before that, they had lived in Egypt, not that far from Mecca, and in Syria. At any rate, the Jews had always hung around with the Arabs.I During the Arab conquest of Spain, when the Arab Omayyad Dynasty of Damascus turned Andalusia into a shady garden, and built palaces in Cordoba and Seville, the Jews went right alongside. Lalla Tam had told us all about that, although she had talked so much about it that I had gotten confused, and thought it was mentioned in the Koran, our holy book.

  For you see, most of the time, Lalla Tam did not bother to explain what the verses of the Koran meant. Instead, we copied them down into our luha, or tablet, on Thursdays, and learned them by heart on Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. Each one of us would sit on our cushion, hold our luha on our lap, and read out loud, chanting back and forth until the words sank into our heads. Then on Wednesdays, Lalla Tam would make us recite what we had learned. You had to put your luha on your lap, face down, and recite the verses from memory. If you did not make any mistakes, Lalla Tam would smile. But she rarely smiled when it was my turn. "Fatima Mernissi," she would say, her whip hovering above my head, "you will not go far in life, if words keep going in one ear and out the other." After recitation day, Thursday and Friday practically felt like holidays, although we did have to clean off the luha and write the new verses. But during all this time, Lalla Tam did not explain the verses. She said that it would be useless to do so. "Just learn by hear
t what you have written on your luha," she would say. "No one will ask you your opinion."

  Still, she went on and on about our conquest of Spain, and when I got confused and believed it to be part of the holy book, she screamed that I was speaking utter blasphemy and summoned Father. It took him a long time to clear things up. He said that it was essential for a young lady who wanted to dazzle the Muslim world to know a few key dates, and then all the rest would fall nicely into place. Then he told me that the revelation of the Koran ended with the death of the Prophet, in the year ii of the Hejira (Mohammed's exodus from Mecca), which is the year 632 in the Christian calendar. I asked Father to please simplify things for me by sticking to the Muslim calendar for the time being, because the Christian one was so confusing, but he said that a smart lady born on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea needed to be able to navigate two or three calendars at least. "Switching calendars will become automatic if you start early enough," he said. He did agree to skip mention of the Jewish calendar, though, because it was so much older than everyone else's, it made me dizzy just imagining how far back in time it went.

  Anyway, to get back to the point, the Arabs conquered Spain almost one century after the Prophet's death, in the year 91 of the Hejira. Therefore, the conquest is not mentioned anywhere in the holy book. "So, why does Lalla Tam keep talking about it?" I asked. Father said that that was probably because her family had come from Spain. Her last name was Sabata, a derivation of Zapata, and her father still had the key to their house in Seville. "She is just homesick," Father said. "Queen Isabella massacred most of her family."

  He went on to explain that the Jews and the Arabs had lived in Andalusia for seven hundred years, from the second to the eighth centuries of the Hejira (A.D. eighth to fifteenth centuries). Both peoples had gone to Spain when the Omayyad Dynasty had conquered the Christians and established an empire with Cordoba as its capital. Or was Granada the capital? Or was it Seville? Lalla Tam never mentioned one city without mentioning the others, so maybe the people had a choice among the three capitals, although normally, you were not allowed more than one. But nothing was normal about Spain, which the Omayyad re-named Al-Andalous.

  The Omayyad caliphs were a merry hunch who had a lot of fun building a fabulous palace, the Alhambra, and tower, the Giralda. Then, wanting to show off to the rest of the world how enormous their empire was, they built an identical tower in Marrakech, and named it the Koutoubiya. As far as they were concerned, there was no frontier between Europe and Africa. "Everyone is fond of mixing the two continents up," said Father. "Otherwise, why are the French camping right outside our door at this very moment?"

  So the Arabs and the Jews lounged around up there in Andalusia for seven hundred years, enjoying themselves as they recited poetry and looked up at the stars from the middle of their lovely jasmine and orange gardens, which they watered through an innovative and complicated irrigation system. We forgot all about them down here in Fez until one day, the city woke up to see hundreds of them streaming down into Morocco, screaming with fright, their house keys in their hand. A ferocious Christian queen named Isabella the Catholic had emerged from the snow and was after them. She had given them one hell of a beating and said, "Either you pray like us, or we'll throw you into the sea." But in fact, she never gave them time to answer, and her soldiers pushed everyone into the Mediterranean. Muslims and Jews together swam to Tangier and Ceuta (unless they were among the lucky ones who found boats) and then ran to Fez to hide. That had happened five hundred years ago, and that was why we had a huge Andalusian community right in the heart of the Medina, near the Qaraouiyine Mosque, and the big Mellah, or Jewish quarter, a few hundred meters away.

  But that still does not explain how the Jews ended up in the land of the Allemane, does it? Samir and I talked about this and decided that maybe, when Isabella the Catholic started screaming, some of the Jews walked the wrong way, heading north instead of south, and found themselves in the heart of Snowland. Then, since the Allemane were Christians, like Isabella the Catholic, they chased the Jews away because they did not pray alike. But Aunt Habiba said that this explanation did not sound right, because the Allemane were also fighting the French., who were Christians too and worshipped the same God. So that put an end to that theory. Religion could not explain the war going on in Christendom.

  I was about to suggest to Samir that we let the mysterious Jewish question sit until the following year, when we would be much older and wiser, when Cousin Malika came up with a sensible but terrifying explanation. The war had to do with hair color! The blond-haired tribes were fighting the brownhaired people! Crazy! The Allemane, in this case, were the blonds, tall and pale, while the French were the brunettes, smaller and darker. The poor Jews, who had simply gone the wrong way when Isabella chased everyone from Spain, were trapped between the two. They just happened to be in the war zone, and they just happened to have brown hair. They were not part of any camp!

  So, the mighty Allemane were after anyone with dark hair and dark eyes. Samir and I were terrified. We checked what Malika had said with Cousin Zin, and he said that she was absolutely right. Hi-Hitler - that was the name of the king of the Allemane - hated dark hair and dark eyes and was throwing bombs from planes wherever a dark-haired population was spotted. Jumping into the water would not do any good either, because he would send submarines to fish you out. Looking up at his older brother, Samir put his hands over his sleek jet-black hair, as if to hide it, and said, "But do you think that once the Allemane have knocked out the French and the Jews, they'll push south and come down to Fez?" Zin's answer was vague; he said that the newspapers did not mention anything about the Allemane's long-term plans.

  That night, Samir begged his mother to promise to put henna in his hair, in order to redden it, the next time we went to the hammam (public baths), and I ran around with one of my mother's scarves securely tied around my head, until she noticed it and forced me to take it off. "Don't you ever cover your head!" Mother shouted. "Do you understand me? Never! I am fighting against the veil, and you are putting one on?! That is this nonsense?" I explained to her about the Jews and the Allemane, the bombs and the submarines, but she was not impressed. "Even if Hi-Hitler, the Almighty King of the Allemane, is after you," she said, "you ought to face him with your hair uncovered. Covering your head and hiding will not help. Hiding does not solve a woman's problems. It just identifies her as an easy victim. Your Grandmother and I have suffered enough of this head-covering business. We know it does not work. I want my daughters to stand up with their heads erect, and walk on Allah's planet with their eyes on the stars." With that, she snatched off the scarf, and left me totally defenseless, facing an invisible army that was running after people with dark hair.

  12.

  ASMAHAN, THE SINGING

  PRINCESS

  SOMETIMES, IN THE late afternoons, as soon as the men left the house, the women would jump to the radio, unlock it with their illegal key, and start a frantic search for music and love songs. Chama was the technician, since she could spell out the foreign letters inscribed in gold on the impressive radio face. Or so it seemed. The men manipulated the dials with smooth precise gestures, dicipher- ing those mysterious signs, but although Chama had taught herself the French alphabet, she could not decode what SW (short wave), MW (medium wave), and LW (long wave) meant. She begged her brothers Zin and Jawad to tell her what the letters stood for, and when they refused, threatened to swallow the French dictionary whole. They told her that even if she did, she would still face the same problem, because those letters represented English words. She then gave up on the scientific approach, and developed an extraordinary fiddling technique, manipulating many dials at the same time, and pitilessly choking off all news stations, nationalist sermons, and military songs in search of a melody. Once the melody was caught, there was even more fiddling to be done - tuning that big radio to a distinct, static-free signal took forever.

  But when Chama finally succeeded, and a warm a
nd tender masculine voice, such as that of Abdelwahab the Egyptian crooning "Ahibi `itchi 1-hurriya" (I love the free, unshackled life) filled the air, the entire courtyard would start moaning and purring with delight. Even better was when Chama's magic fingers captured the ravishing voice of Princess Asmahan of Lebanon, whispering on the air waves, "Ahwa! Ana, aria, aria, ahwa!" (I am in love! I, I, I am in love!). Then, the women would be in pure ecstasy. They would toss their slippers away and dance barefooted in procession around the fountain, with one hand holding up their caftans, and the other hugging an imaginary male partner.

  Unfortunately, however, Asmahan's melodies were hard to come by. Much more frequently, we heard the nationalistic anthems sung by Oum Kelthoum, an Egyptian diva who could warble for hours about the Arabs' grand past and the need for us to regain our glory by standing up to the colonial invaders.

  Such a difference between Oum Kelthoum, a poor girl with a golden voice who was discovered in an obscure Egyptian village, and made her way to stardom through discipline and hard work, and the aristocratic Asmahan, who never had to exert any effort at all to attract fame! Oum Kelthoum projected the image of an unusually determined, self-assured Arab woman who had a purpose in life, and knew what she was doing, while Asmahan made our hearts sink with self-doubt and bewilderment. Solid and well-endowed (in the Boujeloud Cinema films, Oum Kelthoum always appeared in long, flowing robes which hid her motherly bosom), Oum Kelthoum thought about all the right and noble things - the Arabs' plight and their pain in a humiliating present - and gave voice to our nationalist yearnings for independence. Still, the women did not love her the way they loved Asmahan.