Forbidden Love (8 page)

Another set of laws governs a woman’s duties as a wife and mother. It is hara am for a married woman to go out of the house without her husband’s permission. She must also submit herself to her husband’s sexual desires and should not prevent him from having intercourse with her without a justifiable excuse. As long as she does not fail in her duties, her husband is required to feed, clothe, and house her. However, “If the wife does not fulfill her matrimonial duties towards her husband, she will not be entitled to the food, clothes or housing, even if she continues to live with him.”

These laws place women in a no-win situation. Most Muslim women cannot work and so do not have their own income. Therefore, in order for a woman to get the things she needs to survive food, clothing, medicines-she has to obey all of her husband’s requests and demands or else he doesn’t have to feed her. In reality, these laws mean that if a woman wishes to live, she must

obey.

And so in this stifling climate of laws, a modest beauty salon

in Amman became the stage for an epic struggle between the almost blinding force of Islam and a fragile hara am forbidden love.

Jehan joined the conspiracy on the twenty-third day of the sixth month, known as June or AKA by Arabic or Islamic calendars. That was the day she began coming to the salon. She had completed her term of classes at Jordan University and was now on summer break.

By June, Jordan begins to feel like an airless furnace with temperatures starting at 86 degrees Fahrenheit and steadily climbing until they have reached well into the high nineties. Jordan is an arid country, with an annual rainfall somewhere below two hundred millimetres. The many wild flowers that blanket the fields in the valley Wadi as-Seer, near Amman, begin to shrivel in the gruelling heat for lack of water. All along streets and highways vendors sell roasted houmous -green chick peas roasted in an open flame while still in their soft shells and attached to the stem.

By June, the wedding season is in full swing. This year, as for the past five years, Dalia and I were run off our feet, and refused most of our regular appointments to focus on wedding

parties, for a salon hairstyle on the wedding day is a ritual for all the women in a bridal party. Arab wedding ceremonies are very colourful and noisy affairs. The celebrating begins the night before, when all the men drive or march down the streets in a convoy, singing and dancing, while the women, dressed in their best clothes, go to the bride’s home for a night of their own singing and dancing.

That evening the women are allowed to remove their veils, since no men are present. It is one of the only times in a woman’s life when she feels comfort, ease, and freedom.

On the morning of the wedding day, the men again gather and begin their noisy procession to the bride’s home to escort her to the mosque or, if the couple are Christian, church. This is where the similarities between Christian and Muslim weddings end. At a Muslim wedding, men and women are separated during the wedding reception. The groom is allowed to join the women long enough to dance with his bride once, after which he must return to the room designated for men. At Christian receptions, men and women celebrate together.

On her wedding day, the bride-to-be chooses a salon to go to with all the women in her bridal party, including the flower girl. They have their hair styled and their make-up applied. Most often, wedding parties would come to our salon, but sometimes we were asked to go to the bride’s home. As a result, our schedule was often very hectic. The bridal party usually consisted of at least ten women and we had to style all of them in a three-to four-hour period. Our calendar was booked for the next three months so, since we truly needed Jehan’s help, her arrival at the salon didn’t raise any suspicions. Phase one of our communication network was now successfully in place.

Through Jehan, Dalia and Michael were able to exchange

letters and have short conversations on the phone. Dalia and Michael’s letters slowly progressed from one-page “I just met you and don’t want to reveal too much of me yet’ notes to ten-page “I’m pouring my heart and soul out on paper’ missives discussing their opinions, beliefs, likes, dislikes. I believed that if this friendship lasted, they would soon know more about each other than most Jordanian couples who had spent their lives together.

Jehan quickly became a good friend and the three of us discovered that we had a lot in common. It turned out that Jehan wasn’t as quiet as I’d originally thought. She chattered on and on, hopping from one subject to another without taking time to draw a breath. Dalia and I loved her. It was wonderful to meet another woman who shared our beliefs, hopes and opinions about women’s positions and rights. But it would still be months before Mohammed trusted Jehan enough to leave the three of us unaccompanied outside the salon. It would be weeks before Dalia could see Michael again. For now, though, she survived on the letters and sporadic calls.

To implement phase two of our plot we had to find a way to get Mohammed interested in joining a gym so that he would be out of the salon more often. This was not easy; we had to be very careful or Mohammed would suspect that we were up to something and we spent several weeks working to arouse his interest. Our concentrated efforts kept our minds a little off our fear of being caught, but it was always there.

First, Jehan asked Michael to buy magazines and books about exercise and weight training. We left them lying around the salon in places we knew Mohammed would see them. Once we saw him reading the magazines and books, Dalia and I started talking, in Mohammed’s presence, about the exercises we’d supposedly begun doing and mentioned that they

increased our strength and energy. After a week, he began asking us questions. We knew we had him hooked. We gently urged him to try some of them himself. Oh, if only we had access to weights and weightlifting machines, how much better our results would be, we said, nudging him towards joining a health club. The place we had in mind was Sports City, which was minutes from both our homes and the salon.

We phoned the Club to discuss a gift membership for our brother, and, with Jehan’s help, arranged to have Michael drop off the money for fees and pick up Mohammed’s card later that evening.

The next morning we wrapped up all of our workout books and magazines, along with Mohammed’s new Sports City membership card, and presented him with his gift when he arrived that afternoon. He was thrilled.

Our plan appeared to have worked perfectly. Mohammed loved his new pastime, and managed to make many new friends at the gym; he was out of our hair from morning until siesta. He was

happy to drop us off at the salon or a bride’s home, and leave. Dalia was thrilled to be in touch with Michael. And we’d found a great friend in Jehan.

We savoured our first small taste of success at manipulating and deluding men the only route, for millennia, to any kind of power for Arab women. It gave us a little confidence, subdued the fear a bit. But it was bittersweet; had we lived in a freer world, it would not have been our strategy of choice.

Eventually, of course, Jehan was going to have to return to university and wouldn’t be able to spend much time at the salon. We’d miss her she had become like a sister to us. Without her here to cover Dalia’s calls to Michael, and deliver long letters to him, we needed a new way for them to communicate. We agreed that Dalia would only write to him on

the days Jehan came in and could courier the letters swiftly home. With classes and her duties at home, Jehan would be here much less often, but Dalia and I were sure that we would find a way to persuade

Mohammed to take us to see her. \020We knew that all this scheming was dangerous, but we never discussed it. It was as if we would give life to the risks if we spoke them aloud. So they remained thoughts and fears that we managed to suppress while we hatched our plot.

We became fixated on Fridays, the holy day, when everything in Amman is closed-stores, the salon. Looking out desperately for a way to escape our daily prison so that Dalia and Michael could have moments together, Fridays became our target, our only possible window of opportunity. Dalia and I had always spent Friday evening together, at her home or mine. But that had to change; Dalia would explode if she didn’t see Michael soon.

Our first idea was to open the salon on Friday afternoons, making that our excuse to be out of the house, but both fathers opposed the idea. We refocused our energy on Friday evenings. Where could we get Mohammed or any of our brothers to drop us off and collect us later without betraying the plan?

The problem with Friday evening was going to be football. Football is Jordan’s most popular sport; most of the males in the nation are ardent fans and watch the games religiously every Friday night. As soon as the season began, Mohammed stopped

weight training so that he wouldn’t miss a game. The chances of getting him to drive us anywhere on Friday evenings during the football season, which lasted from late September to March, were slim to non-existent. We searched for another plan.

It was a Thursday night. I could smell the majalabiyya baking from my room aromatic biscuits made with rice flour, sugar, milk and rose water and topped with an almond or pine nut. Dalia and I were plotting, plotting. For years we’d been allowed to have a sihra on Thursday evenings a night when our parents did not impose our usual curfew, and we were allowed to stay up late. We alternated between Dalia’s home and mine. While the biscuits baked, we’d made tea and locked ourselves in, playing music while we talked through the urgent issues.

Days earlier, we’d had a breakthrough. We’d been trying to find an activity that would require us to be out of the house every Friday afternoon. But what activity? We’d researched for days, and decided that computer classes were our best hope. Now we were racking our brains for ways to get our fathers to agree.

“I don’t know if my father will go for something like this,” I said.

“Your father would at least consider it, but there’s no way my father is going to agree.”

“Maybe one of your brothers might convince him that it’s important, and that one of my brothers will be watching us. He’ll listen to one of his sons. I also think we should approach both fathers at the same time, and make each one believe that the other has already agreed.

That’s the only way they’ll go for it.” \020”I don’t know, Norma. All they have to do is call each other and they’ll find out we’ve been lying.”

“But what are the chances they’ll actually do that? I mean, if we can persuade your brother Suhal to talk to your father, then your father will think that Suhal has already made sure that my father approves of the idea.”

For hours, we talked back and forth, on and on. Finally, Dalia said, discouraged, “Maybe it would be better if you just took the class by yourself

“That won’t solve the problem. You want to be able to see Michael and Jehan too, don’t you?”

“Of course I do.”

We decided we’d call some schools on Monday to find out when their classes met. Then talk to Suhal. If we could lure him to the salon on his way home…

“Do you really think we can pull this off?” Dalia asked.

“We convinced them that we needed a computer for the salon, so we should be able to convince them that we need computer classes. We already have the computer, and they keep telling us that we wasted our money on it because we hardly use it.”

It was the only solution we could come up with.

“I hope it works.” Dalia was clearly worried.

“It will, you’ll see. Now let’s go eat some mahalabiyya before my

brothers gobble it all.” \020On Monday morning Dalia picked me up for work as usual. September in Amman is a strange mix of winter and summer. The early morning is cold, with occasional bursts of cool winds, the remnants of the freezing desert nights. During the day, the temperatures once again feel as if they are reaching their summer highs. It’s as if the transition from summer to winter sneaks in during the night, and the only evidence of its lurking presence is the one or two degree drop in afternoon

temperatures. The cool winds are not strong enough to fight the heat of the summer sun until at least the end of October, leaving September full of sumptuous summer days.

We bought two newspapers on our way to work that day, through which we searched for advertisements for computer classes and made a list of all the possibilities. We started by listing the ones nearest Abdoun, where Michael and Jehan lived.

Our first hair appointment was not until ten-thirty. That gave us enough time to call these places before we began work. We hurried into the break room. I locked the door and switched off the salon lights so we wouldn’t be interrupted.

“Do we have enough money saved up to pay for this out of the business account?” I asked. Dalia was our business and personal bookkeeper; she’d always had a better head for numbers than I had.

“When I made the deposit last week, we had 7,253 dinars in the bank. That should be plenty,” she assured me.

I felt urgency to get going on the calls.

“Relax, ya butbouta, we still have time. Enjoy your coffee and smoke a cigarette, it’ll calm you down a little,” she said and tossed a cigarette my way. Butbouta literally means duck, but used as slang it implies that someone is acting hyper in a cute way. Which I was. But we had never planned such a complex violation of the rules, with such risks.

“I’m just excited, aren’t you? It’s a perfect plan. They’ll never guess what we’re really up to, and you’ll be able to see Michael. We’ll even learn a little about computers in the process,” I said.

“I don’t want to get too excited yet; I’ll only be disappointed if it doesn’t work,” said Dalia, always the more practical of the two of us. Not that she wasn’t given to crazy ideas and fantasies, she was just more methodical in implementing them

and hid her emotions better than I did. She was my anchor and kept me grounded. I was the only one who ever noticed any slight change in her during critical times, but then again I was the only one who knew all