A God Who Hates (10 page)

Never, as long as I live will I forget my first meeting with my brother after he had met Morad. It was, without doubt, the most difficult moment of my life. He asked me what I knew about Morad and if I in all conscience and understanding wanted to marry him. He tried to explain to me that, though he would raise no objections under any circumstances, he wanted me to be judicious in my decision and not to be in any hurry, as I was still young and had another year of studies ahead of me before I graduated. I summoned all my strength and told my brother of my admiration for this young man, explaining that I had met him at university and had come to realize through our meetings that he would be a suitable life partner for me.

My brother gave my decision his blessing and telephoned Morad to congratulate him. I borrowed some money from my sister, who was a year older than me, had already graduated from university, and now had a good job. I used the money to buy two rings for Morad and myself, but asked him to keep quiet about this and not to let anyone know that my sister had paid for them. Morad returned to our house with the sheikh and the two rings, which he pretended to have bought himself. The engagement ceremony was conducted quietly, in accordance with Muslim teaching, which, though it supports public celebration of marriage, insists upon discreet engagements for one reason: If the couple changes their minds, the girl might miss her chance to marry someone else since most men would rather not marry a girl who has already been engaged to another suitor.

We got engaged in August and decided to get married that same month. My brother was not very happy with our decision, which he considered rash. People firmly believed that it was unlucky to get married in the two months and ten days between the end of Ramadan and the Feast of the Sacrifice. My brother took advantage of this and suggested postponing the marriage, hoping that I would change my mind in the intervening period, but I insisted on getting married immediately after the Feast of the Sacrifice. We rented a small furnished apartment near the hospital I had moved to in Lattakia. On October 10, at a small party for friends and family, we said our good-byes and left Baniyas for a new life.

My husband exchanged his job at Aleppo University for one at the University of Lattakia, where he earned enough to pay our rent and buy a few basic necessities. I supplemented this with occasional help from my family. Immediately after our marriage, I discovered I was pregnant and thought that I would lose my mind. We both now faced a new problem that depended on our capacity to assume parental responsibilities. I decided to have an abortion, but my mother intervened at once and declared that such a thing would be done only over her dead body and I had no choice but to go ahead with the pregnancy. Syrian society allows its members no privacy, and decisions cannot be taken in isolation; the opinions of both family and society have to be taken into consideration.

In any case, my marriage provided me with a partial release from family and social pressures. In Islam, a husband owns his wife just as he does the furnishings of his home. My mother was well aware of this, and in order to assert her authority, she took advantage of the fact that we needed financial help from the family, and she triumphed. I am glad that she did, as our son, Mazen, was the result of that pregnancy. I gave birth to Mazen on the first day of the Muslim festival that marks the end of the monthlong Ramadan fast, on August 1, 1981. Fate decreed that my brother should come to visit me that same day, only to be told that I was in the hospital, where the doctors had decided to perform a cesarean as I was having a very difficult birth.

On the way from the operating theater to my room, while I was still under the influence of the anesthetic, he came over to where I was lying and planted a kiss on my forehead, saying jokingly, “Don’t be upset that you’ve had to have an operation. You’ve got a son, and he’s as handsome as his maternal uncle.”

I did not get a chance to talk to him before he left the hospital, as he had to catch the bus from Lattakia back to Baniyas before the bus station closed. After he left the hospital that day, I never saw him again. It is one of fate’s ironies to give with one hand and take away with the other. Fate gave me Mazen and took Muhammad from me in the space of a single day. My brother died from a heart attack ten minutes after he got home. He was forty-four years old.

Muhammad’s death shocked and saddened me, but at the same time released me to a certain extent from my familial and social obligations. He was the only person I had loved and respected, and for his sake I had felt obliged to submit to many social conventions in order to preserve our relationship. After his death there was no one else whose opinion I cared about. Even after my marriage I felt I had to do everything I could to please my brother, even if he did not directly tell me to do so. I knew what he wanted and what he did not, and did my best to please him. After my marriage and his death I became relatively free of obligations. I set no great store by the opinion of my other brothers, especially as I was now married, and, in the eyes of Islam, the exclusive property of my husband.

I had now spent five years away from my family and close to Morad. This had allowed me to begin to think for myself, and my personality was now formed to a certain extent. After our marriage, my domestic life with Morad was very different from our life outside the home. Together, protected from the influence of our surroundings, we tried to construct a belief system different from that of most other people, and we kept ourselves to ourselves.

I was an avid reader, fascinated by anything that could tell me about life in the West, beyond the confines of the ideological prison we lived in. My sister had a friend who worked at the public library. Through her I was able to borrow a number of books, and for long time I was in the habit of photocopying articles. A neighbor of ours, who was originally from Lebanon, would smuggle in many of the books I wanted when he returned from his frequent visits to his homeland. In exchange, I provided free medical treatment for him and his family.

On one occasion he brought me two books by a Saudi writer and thinker named Abdullah al-Qasimi whose life had been declared forfeit in Saudi Arabia. He fled to the West, and no one knows what has become of him since. Two of his books, “The World Is Not a Mind” and “This Universe—What Is Its Conscience?,” gave me an intellectual shock when I read them. Their contents turned my whole life upside down. My husband and I began to hold daily discussions on various aspects of Al-Qasimi’s thought, every detail of which we had begun to adopt. We did not dare tell anyone what we were reading lest we should be accused of apostasy. My husband was more receptive to what he read than I was. Like most Muslims today, I tried to interpret everything on the basis of a belief that I was frightened to see contradicted: I believed that people’s interpretation of Islam, rather than Islam itself, was responsible for the shortcomings of our Muslim countries. My husband did not agree with me on this point, but this difference of opinion between us was not so serious as to affect the warm friendship that bound us, and each of us continued to respect the other’s opinions.

My husband had felt from the outset that my belief that it was Muslims rather than Islam that was at fault would perhaps help to protect us from the potentially serious consequences of living in a society that did not permit its individual members to take the smallest step toward examining any of its taboos, and so he did not object to my thinking as I did. When we got into discussions with people at social events I would assume the role of faithful sentinel, keeping a close watch over everything Morad said, and intervening and reinterpreting his remarks in a more acceptable manner whenever it looked as if he might be straying into dangerous territory. Because I was very careful never to come close to crossing the line myself, Morad felt secure because he knew I was there to protect him whenever he felt the need to get things off his chest. His childhood and the circumstances of his life seemed to make it easer for him to believe that the fault lay in Islam itself, and that Muslims were victims of their belief system.

During the first five years of my marriage I moved gradually to a different stage in my thinking in which I allowed myself to ask questions about the truth of our Muslim beliefs and culture, and started looking for answers. We passed around books in secret, as if they were opium. Al-Qasimi denied the existence of God and attacked Islam, analyzing it in such as way as to make the most closed mind stop and really think. He was an original and creative writer with an excellent command of Arabic. His style was enjoyable to read and easy to understand, and it led his readers almost imperceptibly to the point where they could not help but agree with him, at least privately. The fact that he was from Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, gave him another kind of authenticity. His books were not readily available, but we found a way to get copies and share them. I remember a young woman in her early twenties at the hospital where I worked once confessed to me secretly that she read Al-Qasimi’s works, and asked if she could borrow one of them from me. I wrapped the book in one of my dresses to conceal it and, as I gave it to her, made a great show of telling her she could wear the dress to her sister’s wedding on condition she return it afterward.

The Egyptian doctor Nawal el-Saadawi also played an important role in my intellectual reprogramming Although her books were not as strictly forbidden as Al-Qasimi’s, her ideas were anathema to most sections of society. She became my mentor, and her books gave me a glimmer of hope for a future that nothing else in our society indicated would be any better than the present. After I had finished reading her book
The Female Is the Source,
I felt as if I had been revived from a drug-induced coma. In a society that believes the Prophet Muhammad’s dictum that a man’s prayer is nullified if a dog or a woman passes close beside him, it is not easy for a writer to say that the female is the source.

Dr. El-Saadawi lived in the same society as I did—a society that does not just believe that women are dirty, but considers anyone who does not believe this an infidel, and calls for him to be killed. In a society such as that it was not easy for Dr. El-Saadawi to prove her contention, nor was it easy for women like me to adopt her ideas. Dr. El-Saadawi is still an ideal figure and an example as far as I am concerned, and I acknowledge that she played a major role in making me the person I am today.

In 1984 my husband was a member of a Syrian delegation that was sent to Britain to study teaching methods. At the time he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Agriculture at Syria’s Tishreen University. His trip was another turning point in our lives, as he was now able to observe in practice in the West the things we had learned from books. He was astonished by British society, just as a prisoner born behind bars is astonished the first time he experiences life on the other side of them.

He sent me a secret message telling me: “Take Mazen and go to the British Embassy then just leave everything and get out! Life here’s different but I c an’t go into details.” Naturally, I refused to do anything of the kind. I knew that he was in England at the expense of the Syrian government, that his visa would run out as soon as the allotted time was up, and that he had no skills to help him build a new life. He remained in Britain for three months, then came back home at my request. His experiences in Britain continued to preoccupy him, however, and he talked about them from the day he came home until the moment he left for the United States four years later.

His three-month stay in Britain confirmed his deep-rooted conviction that we in our Muslim societies were slaves to a doctrine that neither respected people nor valued their ideas. For some reason I continued to disagree with him about this, and insisted that the problem lay with Islam’s followers, not in Islam itself. When I look back now and try to understand my insistence on this point, I can find no convincing reason for me to cling to this point of view other than the survival instinct, which made me adopt this attitude to protect our safety and our lives.

Without our being aware of it, our new beliefs began to affect the way we lived. We no longer practiced any form of religious observance and avoided visiting my family during the month of fasting. Moreover, our attitudes affected the way we treated each other. Most of our acquaintances accused me of being a domineering woman and my husband of being weak. When a man treats his wife with respect and listens to her opinions, he is thought weak and she is considered bossy. Whenever my mother came to stay with us she would express indignation at the way I treated my husband if, for example, I asked him to bring me a glass of water while we were sitting at the dinner table. She was accustomed to a tradition in which a woman waited upon her husband, and in which it was unseemly for her to ask him to do anything for her. I would argue with my mother, and she would usually leave the house swearing never to visit us again.

My two brothers were no less critical of the way my husband and I behaved and, half jokingly, half seriously, would refer to my husband as my slave. My husband treated their jokes with magnanimity and insisted that I was a woman who deserved to be treated well. Our “odd” beliefs—as others considered them—set us apart, and we were sometimes accused of being Marxists, as people believed that anyone who deviated from Islam had to be a godless communist.

I graduated from medical school in 1981, three months after Mazen was born, and was immediately given a job as a doctor in a mountain village far from the center of the country and sixty kilometers away from the nearest first-aid center. My husband and I moved to the village called “Kinsebba” and rented a house from the local sheikh, Muhammad. He looked after the mosque, called people to prayer at the appointed times, and lived in a little room behind our house.

The sheikh’s wife and seven children lived far away in another town where some of them were at university, and came to visit him only for a short period over the summer holidays, as they were not on good terms with him. We became very friendly with the sheikh, largely because he was a cheerful man with a sense of humor, and we would spend long hours together in half-serious, half-humorous discussion of Islam and its teachings. He often repeated to us his dictum: “Believe me, if they stopped paying mosque sheikhs’ salaries, there wouldn’t be a single mosque left open in all Syria!” I remember one stormy winter’s day when the village was struck by lightning and the sheikh discovered the following morning that the minaret and its equipment had been damaged. He came back to us smiling, saying jokingly, “I thank God for having given me a holiday until the mosque gets repaired.”