Forbidden Love (6 page)

“No! I don’t want that! Michael, can you hang on a minute? I should go check on Dalia. You two should talk before we have to hang up. Hold on.” I put the receiver on the front counter. Mohammed would be here

soon. I walked over to Dalia, who’d been listening to my end of the conversation, and physically dragged her to the phone. \020”What’s wrong with you, Dalia? First you can’t wait to talk

to him and now he’s on the phone you won’t even pick it up! He sounds really nice and he’s dying to talk to you. He’s just as nervous as you are.” I picked up the receiver, covering the mouthpiece with my hand, and snapped a loud stage whisper, “Now take this call!”

“All right, all right, just give me a minute,” she said.

“You’ve had at least half an hour to get ready enough!”

At last she took the phone, and I left the room so she could have some privacy. I went into the break room and made a fresh pot of coffee, and only minutes later Mohammed burst in and plopped himself down on the couch, waiting for us to serve him. Dalia hung up swiftly when she saw him, but we’d have no chance to sit and go over our conversations with Michael. We could hardly bear it.

“I told the guys I’d meet them at seven tonight, and I need to pick up Khaldoun before that,” he announced, insisting we cancel our seven o’clock appointment to speed his getaway.

“With our regular customers during the week and wedding parties at the weekends for the next three weeks, when else will we fit her in?”

But it was futile. This was Thursday and Mohammed knew we’d cancel our seven o’clock appointment to accommodate his silly plans. Thursday night is men’s night out in Amman. On Friday, the Muslim day of worship, everything is closed.

“Norma, get me some coffee.” Never any ‘please’ from this idiot. I fumed that I had to kowtow to him, but I’d at least try to seize the moment to further our secret plans before he left.

“Since we’ve been so busy, well, Dalia and I have been thinking that it might be wise to hire a girl, a student or something, to help out a bit. You don’t think your father would have a problem with that, do you? I’ve discussed it with my father and he doesn’t. We just need a shampoo girl, or

someone to help with the clean-up a few hours a day,” I said. \020”I don’t see a problem. I’ll ask him tomorrow and see what he says. Anything else?”

“Actually, yes. If your father agrees, you should know that we already have a candidate in mind. She’s a nice girl, a student, about twenty-one. She can juggle her schedule to accommodate ours. If you let me know tomorrow, then I’ll give her a call.”

“OK, I’ll talk to my father tonight.” He swallowed his last sip of coffee and left.

Dalia and I stayed in the break room, but we needed to focus on Jehan, not Michael.

“Why did you tell Mohammed we wanted to hire a shampoo girl?” she asked, a bit shocked.

“I’m just setting the stage for Jehan’s arrival. She’s his sister, by the way,” I said, not knowing if Michael had told her.

Her shoulders slumped with relief and a smile spread across her face. “I thought she must be. Are you sure she can spend that much time here?”

“According to Michael, she’ll rearrange her schedule to help the two of you.” There were now four of us in on The Plan. We must start thinking creatively, and with an espionage agent’s attention to detail. We were terrified of being caught, and must miss nothing. First, we must free ourselves more from Mohammed.

“It looks as if Mohammed has got himself out of his rut. Let’s pray that he’ll go back to his regular routine and we’ll have our break room to ourselves again. I’ve been going nuts since he started hanging out here every day. We should convince him to take up an activity,” I suggested. “That would keep him out of our hair even longer.”

“I don’t think there’s anything else he could possibly do on

that dumb truck of his. How about a class or something?” she suggested.

Yes. But what? Then it came to me weightlifting! \020”We could persuade him to take up body-building,” I said, ‘then tell him how wonderful he’s looking, what a noticeable difference it’s making. Oh, I can see it now. He’d live at the gym-if we could convince him to go there.” We both thought feverishly. “Let’s buy him a membership. Give it to him as a gift. And tell him we did it because he’s been feeling so down lately, and wanted to help,” I said, completing the plot.

“You’re a genius!”

But would it work?

We got on with the day’s appointments, not daring to ponder on how typical and pathetic an example this was of what our lives forced us to do-serving the whims of this kid like slaves while plotting to manipulate him so that we could have our tiny taste of freedom and excitement.

“What do you think they do all night on Thursdays?” I asked as seven o’clock approached.

“Well, Selma says they go to secret places where they see women dance and do other things.”

“But no woman is allowed out that late.”

“Not Arab women, foreigners!”

“I don’t believe it. You know how Selma is, she hears one little thing and turns it into headline news. I think they just sit around and play backgammon or cards and smoke their argil as and talk.”

“I overheard the twins once, when they were getting ready to go out, say they were going to miss some show called Baywatch that some club picks up on its TV. It’s an Israeli show or something. Maybe they just watch foreign shows all night.”

Mohammed’s pickup roared up the street and came to an abrupt stop outside the salon. He leaned on the horn until Dalia ran out to see what was wrong. An instant later she returned with instructions to close up immediately and get in the car, Mohammed was already late. We left everything as it was and ran out to the pickup. Mohammed was impatient and irritable. He yelled at us to hurry and close the doors

and then sped off, almost hitting another driver. \020Every Thursday, most of the men in both our families, like most of the men in Amman, rushed home from work and got ready to go out. Many went to one of several sleazy bars downtown that are tucked away in the maze of alleys around the Cliff and Venetia Hotels. Amman’s only other bars or discos are inside the larger hotels such as the Marriott or the Hyatt, which younger night dwellers go to.

At night Amman transforms into a strange world. When I was around four or five, my father would take me to the city centre at night. I had to wait in the car while he ran to pick up sahlab (a traditional milk drink served warm with nuts and cinnamon) for me. I remember that the streets were full of men, both young and old. Some were seated at outdoor cafes, smoking water pipes and drinking mint tea. Older men gathered in large groups on the street corners, dressed in the traditional long dish-da shay The men of our generation prefer the “American style’, jeans and a dress shirt, or the “English style’, where they replace the jeans with trousers.

Even in their dress, men have varied options open to them, unlike women. They can make their own decisions, choose their own careers, decide whether or not to marry (though they marry when asked to by their fathers), select their own hobbies and activities, and decide whether to remain at home or move out. Men in a Muslim society are free to

do as they wish within the guidelines laid out by their religion.

It’s different, of course, for Muslim women. If you saw Dalia in the street and were Jordanian, you’d instantly know that she is subject to Muslim laws. Her graceful body is sheathed in the long, loose folds of a shar’ia, and her hair is hidden by a veil. Dalia has worn the shar’ia since she was ten, which for women is the beginning of adult life. This is at least as old as Mohammed himself. Islam’s founder was married to an even younger child, six-year-old Aisha, and consummated the marriage sexually when she was nine. Aisha was only one of Mohammed’s many child brides.

Dalia and I became friends at an age when she was not yet required to follow all of these regulations and customs, and we already loved each other as sisters before we reached the age when the rules could have influenced our feelings towards one another and divided us. Her family allowed her to continue to associate with me, most likely because we both lacked sisters and because they never thought it would develop into such a close friendship. When she turned ten, together we found ways to tiptoe around the rules and, temporarily at least, escape some of the restrictions. But as a Christian I was bound by my own set of rules, many of which were the same as hers.

By our early teens, Dalia and I had learned how to navigate this treacherous religious landscape, even if we hated it. So far we had survived. But, with Michael on the scene, look how we were now being forced to behave. How could we be proud of such petty and demeaning behaviour? How could two intelligent, middle-class women show such slavish obedience to a shallow younger brother? How could we rely on subterfuge and manipulation to get what we wanted, and let a gossipy neighbourhood beauty salon define the boundaries of lives that could have ranged much further?

How could we risk our lives for simply a romance?

It is only now, looking back six years from the beginning of our dangerous adventure-years of experiencing freedom, travelling across oceans, continents and cultures that I can see that our actions would be incomprehensible to women of any liberated culture. As incomprehensible as the violent acts against non-Muslims, non-Arabs, that, since 11 September, have made the Western world suddenly hungry to understand this alien place. They read scholars, watch TV pundits. How much more they would learn if they had lived for a day in our shoes, in Amman, in our neighbourhood, in our salon. Then they would understand the forces that wrote Jordan’s history, and our personal histories. They would begin to glimpse the laws that dictate the shape of every moment of every day of the ordinary lives of people like Dalia and me, and our families.

And don’t be deluded by Mohammed’s freedom to wear blue jeans and go to a bar. Both sexes are bound by the thousands of rules that carpet Jordan and the Middle East with a dense tapestry of overlapping and interwoven layers of Muslim, Arab, Christian, and Jewish codes and traditions, all of it dominated by the pervasive power of the Koran, Islam’s holy book and manifesto. The difference, of course, is that if men break any of these rules, they are to be forgiven. Women’s limitations are harder to list simply because the list is continually being expanded and edited by both male lawmakers and the men in a woman’s own family. And if a woman breaks any of the rules she’s required to follow, she is not granted the luxury of forgiveness. She must be punished.

\020CHAPTER SEVEN

Violence is embodied in our laws, and in our history. It applies to warriors in battle, to perceived enemies of Islam, to Muslims who try to escape the faith, and, above all, it applies to women. Listen to these words from Islam’s holy book, the Koran. This passage is the basis of the honour killing the legal murder-of women:

Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). Good women are obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them and scourge them.

in the Arabic text, the last portion of this verse, ‘scourge

them’, is often translated to mean ‘kill them’. Arab men believe

that this verse orders them to ‘kill’ any female relative who is

not obedient, or who shows any sign of rebellious behaviour. This act is called and honour killing, or a crime of honour, because the men believe that they must kill the offending woman in order to protect their family’s ‘honourable’ name and reputation. This kind of killing rarely makes the papers. It is kept out of the civil justice system. It happens routinely, even

today.

Since most Arabic countries have been under Islamic law since AD 644, honour killing is no longer considered just an Islamic practice. It has been incorporated into Arab culture and is practised by both Christians and Muslims, embracing both Dalia and me (for my blood is Arab). And in Arab culture, an entire family’s reputation is tied to the reputations of its female

members.

It is this codified obsession with honour that drove Dalia’s brother Mohammed to guard and watch us like a jailer. It is what would permit him, or any of our brothers or fathers, to, literally, drive a dagger into our hearts if we betrayed whatever I they perceived as honour.

We can lay the violence that has been part of the Islamic’ culture for nearly fourteen hundred years at the feet of another 1 Mohammed. From the time Mohammed’s followers took Mecca by force, the story of Islam has been filled with wars and bloody battles. I’ve never found it surprising that a religion founded by vicious warriors, and scarred by centuries of bloodshed, contains such endorsements of violence, and then wraps it in the dignity of ‘honour’ and of law without a qualm.

\020It is safe to say, I believe, that Islam is a totalitarian regime operating under the guise of a religion. The Koran is its manifesto, claimed by Islam to provide guidance for all that is needed for a person’s spiritual and physical well-being It tells Muslims when and how to have sex and when and how to

refrain from it, what to possess and what to give away, when to sleep and when to wake, when to speak up and when to remain silent, what and how to eat, to dress, and how to seek knowledge. It shows Muslims how to deal with the world around them; outlines the responsibilities of a person to himself, to his parents, siblings, offspring, spouses, neighbours, society, and nation; details what habits to cultivate and what to avoid. In short, Islam contains laws and restrictions covering every aspect of life, controlling you from birth to death. And, if born Muslim, there is no escape. It is against Muslim law to convert from Islam to any other religion; such a conversion is punishable by death.

There are six basic daily rules that neither men nor women can escape. One is the ritual they must follow prior to performing their prayers washing their hands, arms, feet, head, and neck, then facing Mecca. The other five are known as the “Five Pillars of Islam’. Sala is the obligation of prayer, which should be performed five or six times a day. Haj, which is considered the pinnacle of a devout Muslim’s life, is the pilgrimage to the holy sites in and around Mecca, usually performed in the last month of the Muslim year, Zuul-Hijja. Zakat, or giving alms to the poor, is a form of tax that should be paid in various ways through the years and is a vital part of Islamic social teaching.