A God Who Hates (4 page)

During the period between my father’s death and the day I graduated from high school, I was comparatively free. I was allowed to go to the cinema and see most of the Egyptian movies that then dominated the Arabic film industry, and permitted to read most books, magazines, and newspapers. I can remember numerous occasions, when, for one reason or another, I had a run-in with one of my brothers, who would then rain down blows upon me. My shrieks—like those of the Bedouin—were usually my only means of defense, as my high-pitched voice was much more powerful than my small body.

My grandmother would quickly stick her fingers in her ears to shut out the noise, saying, “May God quiet her voice! It goes right through you. You shameless girl! So your brother gave you a slap in the face—what’s the problem? He’s just disciplining you. Has the Kaaba
^*
collapsed?”

“Has the Kaaba collapsed?” That question still echoes in my head. Time after time, though I worshipped her, I wanted to shout in my grandmother’s face: “Shut up, you stupid woman! You may have let my grandfather beat you, but I am not going to let anyone hit me. A man hitting me is a much more serious matter than the collapse of the Kaaba!” My deep love and respect for her, along with our traditions which forbid us to defy those older than ourselves, held me back.

Because I passed my school graduation exams with distinction, I was eligible for medical school. I had no ambitions of becoming a doctor and never dreamed of practicing medicine. I dreamed of studying Arabic literature so as to one day be able to write flawless Arabic, but I excelled at mathematics, biology, physics, and other scientific subjects. Giving up on medicine, then, would have disappointed my family. Out of respect for my brother’s pride in my achievements, I gave in and agreed without protest to go to medical school as he wanted me to.

I moved from Baniyas to Aleppo, so that I could attend Aleppo University. Life in Aleppo, the second largest city in Syria after its capital Damascus, was noisy and very different from life in Baniyas, which was a small quiet town slumbering on the shores of the Mediterranean. In Aleppo I found myself all alone in a society quite unlike the one in which I had been born and raised. Baniyas’s proximity to the sea had made it accessible to European tourism and kept it comparatively free of the constraints of Islamic law, which shackled the lives of the inhabitants of Aleppo.

In Aleppo I was the guest of a local Muslim family. My brother had met Ahmad, the husband, through his work, and they had become friends. Ahmad insisted that I live with them during the term as I was considered too young to live on my own and my brother agreed. Ahmad’s wife, a young woman in her mid-twenties, welcomed me as a heaven-sent distraction from her cares, as she had never before met a fellow Muslim woman who did not cover her head and whose family allowed her to live on her own in a strange town far from home. The couple had two small children, but I got as much attention from the friend and his wife as they did.

Staying with them showed me a way of life I had never known before. Islamic teachings reigned supreme over everything that went on in the house. I quickly realized how lucky my grandmother had been, even in her terrible marriage to my grandfather, when I compared it with the life this young woman led and the relationship she had with her husband, a short, bald, coarse-featured man with skinny limbs and a pendulous belly. She was a very beautiful woman, with green eyes, fair pinkish skin, and long blond hair.

I once asked her, “Why did you choose him?”

She laughed and said, “Choose him? Me? Where are you from—Switzerland?”

And, indeed, she did regard me as a woman from another planet. Her name was Huda, and when she was sixteen years old a woman came knocking on her family’s door looking for a girl of marriageable age. As soon as the woman laid eyes on Huda she was struck by her beauty and immediately asked her mother for her hand in marriage as a bride for her son. After meeting the man’s family, Huda’s father seized this opportunity to marry his daughter off to this wealthy man, even though the prospective groom was fourteen years older than she was.

It was not until her wedding night that she saw the bridegroom for the first time. When he came into her room she began to shudder. The wedding guests were all waiting outside the door for proof of her virginity. The bridegroom fell upon her like an animal and emerged from the room a few minutes later bearing a piece of cloth stained with her blood. The female members of the family shouted for joy and danced.

She confessed to me more than once that she did not love her husband, and that she was, in fact, very much afraid of him—but she had no other options. She never left the house unless he escorted her. They lived in a traditional quarter where everyone remained behind closed doors. I never saw a single open window in the entire neighborhood the whole time I stayed with them.

He would pick a quarrel with her on the slightest pretext, or for no reason at all. She would take very good care not to utter a single word when he was angry. Anything she said would be used against her. Often I would come out of my room and find myself confronting him as I defended her. When we argued he would quote from the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet in order to justify his behavior and assert his right to mistreat his wife. But I forced him to respect me, and he was afraid of my sharp tongue. He was also terrible at holding his own in an argument and, when confronted with me and the way I steam-roll others (yes, I know I do … ), he would smooth things over by saying, half jokingly, half seriously, “You’ll end up in hell, because you don’t follow the teachings of Islam.”

The oldest of their two children was five years old and his brother was a year younger, yet the husband used both boys to spy on his wife. The older boy clearly understood the type of relationship his parents had and manipulated them both. From my room I would often hear his mother shouting, “Wafa, I need your help—come here and be my witness,” and I would find the elder boy threatening his mother and telling her that, if she didn’t do what he wanted, he would tell his father that she had spoken to a man on the phone, opened the door to someone, or left the house.

I lived with them for one whole school year. In my second year, unable to stand being a witness to the household sadness any longer, I moved into university accommodation and stayed there until I graduated from medical school. I stayed in touch with Huda and her family, however, because I felt sorry for her, and visited her at least twice a week. During those years I was able to observe firsthand the crime against humanity—against both men and women—that was being perpetrated in Ahmad and Huda’s home, which to a great extent was representative of how people in Aleppo lived. The teachings of Islam have destroyed the men and women there, and rendered them incapable of the smallest measure of humane behavior.

Ahmad, with his violent and cruel behavior toward his wife, fell into the same category as my grandfather. I hated him. I began to question things I had always seen as certainties. The worldview I had developed growing up in Baniyas began to be eroded as doubts about Islam and its teachings grew stronger. The time I spent in Aleppo, and my experiences with Ahmad’s family in particular, heralded a new stage in my life that formed most of my subsequent convictions and attitudes regarding Islam.

^*
Kaaba:
a Muslim shrine in Mecca toward which Muslims turn to pray.

IN THE SUMMER
of 1977 I met a gynecologist through Ahmad. When this doctor learned that I was a fourth-year medical student he asked if I would like to work with him for a few hours a day in his clinic in a crowded, traditional suburb. I welcomed the suggestion and started work at once. In his clinic I came face to face with all those things that had been hidden behind the closed doors and windows of Ahmad’s home and neighborhood. My work at this clinic was confined, in most cases, to diagnosing pregnancies and confirming the virgin status of young girls. Most of the girls were unmarried and came with their mothers or grandmothers who wanted to reassure themselves that their daughter or granddaughter was a virgin, and some also came to find out if they were pregnant. It was the doctor’s task to abort the children of the girls who were pregnant and patch up those who had lost their virginity.

The patients and their escorts entered the office concealed under their cloaks so that only their hands showed. None wished to risk being recognized. In the examination room, where the woman and her daughter or granddaughter talked to the doctor, the story was always the same: “Doctor, my daughter had a serious fall and bled when she was a child, and we’re here now to make sure she’s still a virgin, because she’s about to get married.”

When the doctor explained, after examining the young girl, that she hadn’t just lost her virginity but was also pregnant, the two women would weep and beg the doctor to help solve their problem.

In most cases, after a number of questions, the young woman would confess that for many years, since childhood, she had been sexually abused by her father, her brother, an uncle, or another male relative. Frequently, the girl had only just begun to menstruate and had become pregnant not long after her first period. One would think that a doctor’s attitude to young women in distress such as this would have been one of care and sympathy. No relationship between a man and a woman in that sick society could be anything but oppressive and exploitative, not even the relationship between a male doctor and his female patients. The doctor frequently took advantage of the sensitivity of the situation and demanded fantastic sums as payment. The two women would come back the next day with the money, which they might have obtained by selling some of their jewelry. Watching this whole seedy drama play out, I was just as sickened by the doctor’s attitude as I was by the abuse—sexual and otherwise—these women were suffering at the hands of their male relatives.

Outside the gynecologist’s office, things were no better for women and I found myself experiencing some of this abuse firsthand. The university was situated outside the town, and the journey from the campus to the town center was one of the most difficult treks a female student had to make, at least twice a week, in order to buy our weekly supplies.

This journey, which took about an hour by bus, was a cruel one. The bus route passed through many neighborhoods and only ten minutes after leaving the campus the vehicle would already be packed with passengers crammed in like sardines. Most of the women on the bus, who never made up more than a quarter of the total number of passengers, were students, and their movements resembled those of mice attempting to flee from a malicious cat. No sooner did a man get the opportunity to press up against a woman than his penis would poke into her back like an iron bar. Shrieked complaints could be heard, but the sad fact of the matter was that the residents of the town regarded the female students as prostitutes, plain and simple.

Once out of the bus and on to the street, it was not much better. The contempt displayed toward us was nonstop. It was nerve-racking and exhausting to be in any public place any day of the week, if you were a woman. Friday, though, was the most difficult day and we avoided going out in public at all. The buses and streets were full of men on their way to the mosques. Any one of them who had the good fortune to be able to press up against a young woman, even if only for a few moments, had enough time to ejaculate in his pants so that he could arrive at the mosque to stand before his god in a more gratified frame of mind.

On Fridays I would usually have lunch with Ahmad and Huda and their family and spend the rest of the day with them indoors. Often I would get into vehement arguments with them over the backwardness of the local population. Huda would usually remain quiet while Ahmad made his way from one Koranic verse to the next and quoted one saying of the Prophet after another in order to demonstrate the truth of his beliefs, while impugning the morals of every woman who lived, like me, far from her family. I refused to back down, however, and from that time on I learned to defend myself stubbornly and determinedly. It was also the time that I discovered how impudent and easily defeated the men of my society were.

Together with Ahmad and his family I attended a number of weddings in the town. Rather than being happy affairs, they provided me with another opportunity to explore more deeply this society, which appeared to be sick to the very marrow of its bones. At weddings people would split up into two groups, with the women in one room and the men in another. Each group celebrated in its own way. Women wore the most striking clothes and remarkable finery to these weddings. Their clothing, however, was not the only thing that was shocking. Normally staid, the women became voracious. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Women would go up to one another and touch each other in an unnatural manner, such as pinching a bottom or a breast, or putting a hand between thighs. None of them appeared surprised by this behavior, nor did anyone protest against it. Toward the end of the wedding celebration an announcement would be made that the bridegroom was on his way to the women’s hall to collect his bride. As soon as they heard this, the women would quickly pick up their wraps and would transform themselves within minutes into objects resembling rubbish bins arrayed along a highway, each indistinguishable from the next. They went from being as beautiful as Scheherazade to as ugly as what can only be called a human garbage can in a matter of minutes, trained by a sick society to cover a body they were told would lead men astray.

Only a trip to Damascus gave me hope for the men of Islam. In my second year, on Good Friday, my roommate Siham invited me to go on a trip to Damascus with her and a group of students from the agricultural union. I insisted on staying with my youngest half-sister, who lived in the capital and was married to a high-ranking officer in the Syrian army. We arrived at night, and the trip’s organizer suggested sending one of the young men to escort us and ensure that we arrived safely at my sister’s home. My sister, her husband, and their children were waiting for my roommate and me at the supper table. When my brother-in-law opened the door he welcomed us and insisted that our escort come in and share our evening meal.