Nine Parts of Desire (Korean Edition)

by Geraldine Brooks

  For the Kurdish Parliament, the difficulties would come with demands for change in things that the Koran doesn’t present as optional, such as the division of an estate to give sons double the share of daughters.

  The Koran sets out the formula for inheritance as an instruction which all believers must follow. In seventh-century Arabia the Koran’s formula was a giant leap forward for women, who up until then had usually been considered as chattels to be inherited, rather than as heirs and property owners in their own right. Most European women had to wait another twelve centuries to catch up to the rights the Koran granted Muslim women. In England it wasn’t until 1870 that the Married Women’s Property Acts finally abolished the rule that put all a woman’s wealth under her husband’s control on marriage.

  Today, Muslim authorities defend the unequal division of inheritance by pointing out that the Koran requires men to support their wives and children, whereas women are allowed to keep their wealth entirely for their own use. In practice, of course, it rarely works that way. Hero headed the Kurdish chapter of Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women’s hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.

  I went to visit Hero in January 1993, as Parliament got ready to debate the women’s platform. Her office was a small room in a large house that had once belonged to one of Saddam Hussein’s top officials. Hero had stripped the room of furniture and tried to recreate the mood of a traditional Kurdish mountain dwelling. Kurdish kilims and cushions covered the floor. Climbing plants wound their way up the walls and over the rafters. Near the ceiling, a squirrel darted in and out of a small knitted pouch that dangled from a beam.

  To Hero, legislation was only a beginning. “I don’t believe some habits and ways of thinking can be changed by making a new set of rules,” she said. “It needs time, publicity, education; first to make people understand it, then, gradually, to get them to accept it.”

  At that time, members of a committee formed by the women parliamentarians were traveling Kurdistan, trying to raise support for the law reforms. They visited women in towns and remote villages, carrying a petition in favor of reform. In August 1992, the petition carried 3,000 names. A year later, 30,000 had signed.

  In principle, the support of ten parliamentarians is all that is required for a proposed law reform to be put to a vote by legislators. By September 1993, thirty-five MPs had signed the proposals. But still the reforms languished. Timid MPs said it was necessary to wait for what they called the “right” time to present them.

  It wasn’t clear when that “right” time might be. And by the summer of 1994, it seemed it might not come at all. By then, the Kurdish parliament had collapsed amid bitter fighting between the two main Kurdish parties. It seemed unlikely that any meaningful change would come from there.

  Even if it had, legislative reform of sharia-based law has rarely been a lasting success. Tunisia in 1956 replaced its Koranic law with a unified code for Muslims, Christians and Jews that banned polygamy and repudiation, and gave women equal pay and equal rights in divorce. But the law was so far ahead of public attitudes that it never succeeded in creating deep change. To walk the streets in Tunis today is to be transported to a planet where women barely exist. Apart from a few foreign tourists, women aren’t seen in public places.

  In Iran the shah’s laws banning polygamy and child marriage were overturned after the revolution. In Egypt, the birthplace of the modern Arab feminist movement, legal reform had a mixed history. In 1919 veiled women marched through the streets of Cairo to protest British colonial rule. In 1956, with British rule banished, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser granted women the vote. But until 1979 restrictive personal status laws prohibited a woman leaving her husband’s house without his permission or a court order.

  In his novel, Palace Walk, Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz writes movingly of Amina, who leaves her house just once in twenty-five years of marriage to visit a nearby mosque. When her husband learns she has defied him and gone out, he orders her from the house: “His command fell on her head like a fatal blow. She was dumbfounded and did not utter a word. She could not move… she had entertained many kinds of fears: that he might pour out his anger on her and deafen her with his shouts and curses. She had not even ruled out physical violence, but the idea of being evicted had never troubled her. She had lived with him for twenty-five years and could not imagine that anything could separate them or pluck her from this house of which she had become an inseparable part.”

  Perhaps even worse than the threat of banishment, though, was the law of Bait el Taa, or House of Obedience. This law empowered a husband to compel an estranged or runaway wife to return home and have sex with him, no matter how great her hatred or aversion. If necessary, the police could be called to drag a woman back to her husband’s house. Other laws meant Egyptian women could be divorced without even knowing it. Polygamous husbands weren’t legally required to tell their wives about one another. Some found out only on the death of the husband, when a “new” family showed up to claim a share of the estate.

  Gradually, Egyptian women worked their way into politics. In 1962, Hakmet Abu Zeid became the first woman in the cabinet, in the post of social affairs minister. But it wasn’t until 1978, backed by the president’s wife, Jehan Sadat, that her successor, Aisha Rateb, began a sustained campaign for reform of the personal status laws. They were mild reforms, calling for a husband to inform a wife of divorce, or of his intention to take another wife. If he married another, the first wife had the right to divorce him within twelve months. The reforms also gave divorced women custody of children at least until age ten for boys and twelve for girls, extendable, by court order, to fifteen and marriage. There was to be fairer alimony; the right of a wife with children to retain the family home; and the right of appeal to a court against a husband’s enforcement of Bait el Taa.

  But despite their mildness, the reforms immediately provoked cries of “Islam’s Laws not Jehan’s Laws.” Radical sheiks branded Jehan Sadat and Aisha Rateb atheists and enemies of the family. Rioting broke out at Al Azhar, the ancient Islamic university. “One, two, three, four!” screamed the male students. “We want one, two, three, four wives!” In fact, the laws hadn’t challenged the right to polygamy or unilateral divorce. They hadn’t even mentioned clito-ridectomy.

  In 1979, Anwar Sadat enacted the laws by presidential decree, during a parliamentary recess. He also set up new quotas aimed at raising the number of women in government. But opponents continued the battle in court. In 1985 they succeeded in having “Jehan’s Laws” struck down. Now the fight has widened, with fundamentalists seeking to overthrow Egypt’s government in favor of what they say is a pure Islamic system. And that system is at odds with all forms of government that currently exist, including Western democracy.

  In its ideal form, the Islamic state isn’t a nation in any modern sense of the word. It has no borders. It would be a political and religious union of all Muslims, modeled on the community Muhammad set up in Medina. There would be no political parties, just a single, unified Islamic ummah, or community. At its head would be a caliph, literally, successor, who would follow in the footsteps of the prophet Muhammad as the Muslims’ leading political and religious authority.

  The caliph must be a man, for part of his duty is leading community prayers, and a woman isn’t allowed to lead men at prayer lest the sound of her voice arouse carnal rather than spiritual thoughts. The caliph should be chosen by the distinguished members of the community and ideally would be someone who serves reluctantly rather than one who puts himself forward for election.

  Under the caliph are legislative and judicial branches of government: a majlis as shura, which resembles a parliament in some ways, although its role is more advisory than legislative; a council of experts who serve as the caliph’s close advisers; and the qadis, or judges, who according to most sources also must be men, since women are considered t
oo emotional to sit in judgment.

  The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The hadith fills many gaps. A third source of legislation, on matters not touched on in either Koran or hadith, are practices decided upon by the unanimous agreement of the Islamic community, for Muhammad is believed to have stated that “my community will not agree upon an error.”

  While Muslims may vote for their representatives in an ideal Islamic state, the system can’t be a democracy in the sense of tolerating competing ideologies, for no earthly ideology—even if supported by the will of the majority—can ever be allowed to overrule the divine laws of the Koran. When the Algerian government called off elections that looked likely to bring an Islamic government to power in 1992, it did so on the basis that the Islamicists, once democratically elected, would then dismantle Algerian democratic institutions. Members of the main Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front, even joked that their slogan was: “One man, one vote. Once.”

  How women would participate in an ideal Islamic state is a matter of debate. While they can’t be caliph or qadi, the history of the community at Medina shows women taking part in key decisions and being present at discussions of policy. Women often argued with Muhammad and the caliphs who followed him, and sometimes their opinions proved decisive.

  Yet at the Islamic University of Gaza women students get a decidedly dimmer view of their likely role in a future Islamic state. “Politics needs a certain mental ability,” explained Ahmad Saati, the university’s spokesman. “Very few women have this kind of mind.” I found his answer odd, seeing that the most prominent Palestinian political figure at that moment was Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman at peace talks in Washington.

  “Ask Ashrawi’s husband. Ask her children,” Ahmad Saati responded. “If she is a good wife, and a good mother, and a good sister—if she is perfectly fulfilling all those roles, and then has some ability to participate beyond that, fine, she is welcome in politics. But if her husband and children are suffering from her absence or her preoccupation with politics, then this is not Islam.” It was widely known that Hanan’s husband cared for their two daughters in her absence, was comfortable in the kitchen and proud of his wife’s work. Ahmad Saati neither understood nor approved of any of this. “How,” he asked contemptuously, “can I build homes for others when my own home is falling down?”

  In Iran, which has tried to model many of its political institutions on those of the original Islamic community, women’s political participation has been encouraged since the demonstrations that brought the revolution. There are women in the Parliament, and some women have risen to as high rank as deputy ministers.

  After its revolution, Iran nodded once in the direction of democracy by holding a referendum asking the question: Islamic Republic, yes or no? An overwhelming “yes” opened the way for a ban on political parties and a prohibition on anyone standing for office who didn’t support the goals of the Islamic revolution. In Iran everyone over the age of sixteen has the vote. Since voting is considered a religious duty, turnout is high. But the choice of candidates is strictly limited to those acceptable to the theocracy.

  Marziyeh Dabbagh, one of four women elected to Iran’s first postrevolutionary Parliament, is typical of politicians likely to succeed in the Iranian system. With a hunched asymmetry caused by severe beatings, she looks much older than her fifty-three years. Her wrists bear a bracelet of scars from cigarette burns, inflicted in the jails of the shah’s secret police. Before the revolution Marziyeh used her father’s book business as a front for arms smuggling and bomb making. When the police tracked her down and tried to torture information from her, they forced electrodes into her vagina, causing an infection so severe, she says, that “the Savak chief wouldn’t come into my cell for the smell.” In a final effort to extract a confession, the police tortured her twelve-year-old daughter. But even that failed. “When I heard my daughter screaming,” she said, “I recited the Koran.”

  Marziyeh would probably have died in the Savak prison if a woman relative hadn’t agreed to take her place while Marziyeh crept out disguised in the woman’s chador. When she recovered her health, she went back to smuggling arms and training commandos from bases in Lebanon. During Khomeini’s Paris exile, she became chief of his household security. She told me she’d never quite forgiven the press for making her miss Khomeini’s historic flight home in 1979. The day before, a French reporter had tried to get a scoop by climbing into the ayatollah’s house over a back wall. “I tackled him, and sprained my ankle,” she confided. When she did get home, she found her military skills in heavy demand. For six months she commanded a Revolutionary Guards corps in her hometown of Hamdan. The men, she said, had no problems taking orders from a woman: “I knew how to shoot, and they didn’t.”

  After her election to Parliament, she became one of Khomeini’s two envoys to Mikhail Gorbachev when Iran restored relations with the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev extended his hand in greeting, she remembers a moment of alarm. Muslim women aren’t allowed to touch unrelated men, but she didn’t want to insult the Soviet leader at such a sensitive diplomatic moment. She solved the problem by sticking out her hand wrapped in her chador.

  In Parliament, Marziyeh generally voted with the hard-liners on matters of foreign policy and economic reform. But she always supported initiatives for women, such as easing access to pensions, improving benefits for single mothers and ending discrimination in the distribution of foreign-study scholarships.

  It seemed ironic that women like Marziyeh could get elected in hard-line Iran, while women in much more moderate Islamic countries often got nowhere. In Jordan women got the vote in 1973. Unfortunately, since Parliament was suspended in 1967, they didn’t get a chance to exercise it until King Hussein finally called elections in 1989. Toujan Faisal, a forty-one-year-old TV presenter, thought she had a good chance of winning a seat. A year earlier, Toujan had been made moderator of a new chat show called “Women’s Issues,” which dealt each week with a particular topic of special concern to women. It had quickly become the most controversial TV show in Jordan’s history. One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a God-given right.

  For Muslim feminists, few issues are more sensitive. “Good women are the obedient,” says the Koran. “As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.” Muslim feminists argue that “scourge” is only one of the possible translations for the word used in the Koran, dharaba. They say the word can also be translated as “strike with a feather.” In the context of the Koran, which elsewhere urges gentle treatment of women, they argue, it is illogical to accept that the word is being used in its severest definition. The passage, they say, is meant to be read as a series of steps: first, admonish them; if that fails, withdraw sex; as a last resort, hit them lightly. No Muslim emulating Muhammad would ever go as far as the third step. While the prophet is known to have deprived his wives of sex as a punishment, there is no evidence that he ever raised a hand against them. One hadith records Muhammad telling his followers: “Some of your wives came to me complaining that their husbands have been beating them. I swear by Allah those are not the best among you.” Toujan delved deep into the hadith to make her case for an end to domestic violence. But a literal reading of the Koran clearly sanctions beatings, and the men who attacked her were quick to brand her a heretic.

  When the television station canceled her program after nearly a year of threats, Toujan decided to run for election. Part of her platform was reform of family law to give women more rights. Fundamentalists answered her candidacy by bringing charges against her in religious court, accusing her of apostasy. While the Koran pres
cribes death to apostates, Jordan doesn’t sanction such executions. Still, if convicted, Toujan faced dissolution of her marriage and loss of custody of her children. Unsatisfied by that, her accusers also called for the lifting of penalties on any Muslim who chose to assassinate her. At her court appearances, Toujan had to be protected by the police from hordes of yelling zealots.

  “I started getting calls in the middle of the night, women as well as men screaming at me,” she said. “They promised I would die.” Toujan was forced to campaign surrounded by volunteer bodyguards. Her husband, a gynecologist, had to close his clinic because of the intense harassment. In the election, Toujan finished third out of six candidates. Her seat was one of only two where electoral officers found evidence of serious irregularities, possibly fraud. No woman candidate won a seat in Parliament. The Islamicists ended up as the dominant faction, with twenty seats going to the Islamic Brotherhood and another dozen to independent Muslim hard-liners.

  Immediately the Islamic bloc began campaigning for segregated schools, a ban on alcohol and an end to interest payments. In Parliament they introduced debates over issues as trivial as outlawing male hairdressers for women. When some were appointed ministers, the ministries they controlled became difficult places for women workers. Some were pressured to cover their hair; others, especially married women, were urged to resign to open jobs for unemployed men.

  Soon Toujan had a steady stream of women turning up at the door of her small flat. “Most of them came to say how sorry they were that they hadn’t taken the election more seriously,” she said. Jordan’s moderates, the wealthy and well educated, had been cynical about the election and hadn’t believed that Jordan’s king actually intended to give the Parliament real power. They’d used election day as a holiday, heading for the beach at Aqaba or on a shopping trip to Damascus, and hadn’t bothered to vote. “All of them say they’ll vote next time,” said Toujan. “I just hope that by then it isn’t too late.”