Nine Parts of Desire (2 page)

Just after these incidents, God sent his prophet a message telling him to seclude his wives. Some of the wives had been battlefield nurses; others had preached the new faith in the mosque. Now they were expected to stay hidden behind a curtain in their rooms, going out only when shrouded from head to foot.

Gradually the rules meant to safeguard the prestige of the prophet’s wives came to be applied to other Muslim women. As the Islamic message spread out of Arabia and into neighboring lands, the idea of seclusion found an easy audience. Unlike the Arabians, Persians had long segregated women: in ancient Assyria, wives of the nobles veiled as a sign of status, while lower classes were obliged to go uncovered. A slave caught veiling herself could be punished by having molten pitch poured over her head. These customs easily drifted back to Islam’s Arabian heartland and endured there. In Saudi Arabia most women today still live curtained off from the world. A woman can’t check herself into a modern Saudi hotel because, like the prophet’s wives, she is supposed to be secluded in her home.

But a few miles away, across an invisible desert border, those rules have ceased to apply. In Saudi Arabia’s neighboring state, the United Arab Emirates, Muslim women soldiers, their hair tied back in Islamic veils, jump from helicopters and shoulder assault rifles. A little farther, across the Persian Gulf, the strict Muslims of Iran vote women into Parliament and send them abroad as diplomats. Pakistan was the first Islamic country to elect a woman prime minister; Turkey has had a female economist as its prime minister, while Bangladesh has had women both as prime minister and as leader of the opposition. Instead of adhering to the rules set down for the prophet’s wives, these women cite other role models from the history of early Islam. The soldiers look to Nusaybah, who helped save Muhammad’s life in battle, standing her ground at his side when the male soldiers fled. The politicians cite Fatima, Muhammad’s shy daughter, who spearheaded a political power struggle after the prophet’s death.

Islam did not have to mean oppression of women. So why were so many Muslim women oppressed?

I went to live among the women of Islam on a hot autumn night in 1987. I arrived as a Western reporter, living for each day’s news. It took me almost a year to understand that I had arrived at a time when the events of the seventh century had begun to matter much more to the people I lived with than anything they read in the morning paper.

It was a Muslim woman, Sahar, who gave me my first clue.

Sahar had been
The Wall Street Journal’s
bureau assistant in Cairo for two years when I arrived there as its Middle East correspondent. My first year in Egypt was set to the syncopated tattoo of her stilettos, clip-clipping their precarious way across Cairo’s broken pavements. She was twenty-five years old, six years my junior, but about a decade ahead of me in poise and sophistication. Her English was formal and precise, and so was her grooming. No matter what story we were covering—a building collapse in a teetering slum, sewage seep at the Pyramids—Sahar always dressed for a soiree. Her makeup was so thick it would have required an archaeological excavation to determine what she really looked like. Her hairdos needed scaffolding. As I shuffled beside her in my sneakers, I felt like a sparrow keeping company with a peacock.

Sahar’s father worked for an American car company in Cairo. She had spent a year in America as a high school exchange student and graduated top of her class at the American University in Cairo. She wanted to go to Harvard. Sahar was both reassuringly familiar and depressingly unexotic. I had imagined the Middle East differently. White-robed emirs. Almond-eyed Persians. Camels marking the horizon like squiggles of Arabic calligraphy. An Egyptian yuppie hadn’t been part of the picture.

At work, as well, it was hard to find the Middle East I’d imagined. I found myself stuck on the flypaper of Arab officialdom, sitting in the gilded salons of deputy assistant second secretaries to ministers of information, sipping tiny cups of cardamom-scented coffee and listening to lies. These men—urbane, foreign-educated—had no problems talking to a Western woman. But out on the streets, among the ordinary people I really wanted to meet, most men only spoke to women to whom they were related. To them, being approached by a lone woman reporter was either an occasion for embarrassment or an opportunity to test the widely held assumption that all Western women are whores. I hated the kind of reporting I was being forced to do: the head-of-state interviews, the windy think pieces on U.S. Middie East policy. I’d signed on as Middle East correspondent looking for risk and adventure. But it seemed the biggest danger I’d be facing was boring myself to death.

Tony, my husband, who had given up his newspaper job to come with me as a freelancer, wasn’t having that problem. A few weeks after our arrival, I looked over Sahara shoulder as she cut out my latest article—“Iraq-Syria Reconciliation Seems Tenuous”—and placed it in a folder alongside Tony’s—“Egypt’s Camel Corps Roams the Desert Tracking Smugglers.” Tony had talked his way onto a patrol with the last Egyptian camel corps. The army wouldn’t give approval for a woman to go. In the mine-strewn waters of the Persian Gulf, Tony crewed on a supply boat and came home with tales of turbaned Omani fishermen, Sindbad-style dhows and Persian carpet smugglers. I couldn’t join him: the shipping agent wouldn’t send a woman to sea.

For almost a year I fretted and kicked at the Middle East’s closed doors. Then, thanks to Sahar, I looked up and noticed the window that was open only to me.

Sahar and I worked side by side in a big bright room of my Nileside apartment. When I wasn’t traveling, we sat at desks just feet from each other. As I wrote my articles, Sahar translated items in the Arabic press, scheduled appointments or arranged my visas. After about a year of working alongside her, I felt we’d come to know each other well.

Then, one morning at the beginning of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, I opened the door and faced a stranger. The elaborate curls were gone, wrapped away in a severe blue scarf. The makeup was scrubbed off and her shapely dress had been replaced by a dowdy sack. Sahar had adopted the uniform of a Muslim fundamentalist. It was like watching a nature film run in reverse: she had crumpled her bright wings and folded herself into a dull cocoon.

It had been impossible to live for a year in the Middle East and not feel the rumbling of religious revival. All over the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, more women were covering their hair, more men growing beards and heading for the mosque. I’d assumed that the turn to Islam was the desperate choice of poor people searching for heavenly solace. But Sahar was neither desperate nor poor. She belonged somewhere near the stratosphere of Egypt’s meticulously tiered society.

On that Ramadan morning I stood at the door staring at her, stunned. Egyptian women had been the first in the Middle East to
throw off
the veil. In 1923, on their return from a women’s suffrage conference in Rome, the pioneer Arab feminists Huda Sharawi and Saiza Nabarawi threw away their coverings at the Cairo railway station, and many in the crowd of women who had come to greet them followed suit. Sahar’s mother, growing up under the influence of Sharawi and her supporters, had never veiled.

The Islamic dress—
hi jab
—that Sahar had opted to wear in Egypt’s tormenting heat signified her acceptance of a legal code that valued her testimony at half the worth of a man’s, an inheritance system that allotted her half the legacy of her brother, a future domestic life in which her husband could beat her if she disobeyed him, make her share his attentions with three more wives, divorce her at whim and get absolute custody of her children.

During those weeks of Ramadan, I spent hours talking to Sahar about her decision. In reply, Sahar mouthed the slogan of Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood: “Islam Is the Answer.” The question, certainly, was clear enough: how was her desperately poor country going to continue to feed, educate and employ a population that increased by a million every nine months? Flirtations with socialism and capitalism had failed to arrest Egypt’s economic decline. The Islamic movement wanted to abandon these recently imported ideologies and follow the system set down so long ago in the Koran. If God had taken the trouble to reveal a complete code of laws, ethics and social organization, Sahar argued, why not follow that code?

Sahar had joined a women’s study group at a local mosque and had been influenced by the young, veiled, woman instructor. “I would sit there and read in the holy Koran that women should be covered, and then walk out into the street with bare arms,” she said. “It just seemed to me that I was dressing that way because it was Western. Why imitate everything Western? Why not try something of our own?”

That “something” took many forms. Extremists rampaged down the Pyramids road, torching tourist clubs that served alcohol. In rural Egypt a sheik urged a ban on the sale of zucchini and eggplants, because stuffing the long, fleshy vegetables might give women lewd thoughts. In Cairo a writer mocking that pronouncement was gunned down and killed outside his office. Yet, when an earthquake convulsed the city, fundamentalists set up tent camps and soup kitchens, caring for the afflicted with a speed and compassion that had eluded the government.

As the weeks passed, Sahar drifted deeper into her new identity. I began to adjust my secular life to accommodate her, giving up coffee on Ramadan mornings in case the aroma made it harder for her to get through her fast; treading softly as she made her midday devotions on a prayer mat spread out in our living room. There were minefields everywhere. “What is a maraschino cherry?” she asked, suspiciously eying the contents list on a box of chocolates. “I can’t eat anything with alcohol inside.” Slowly, I became familiar with the rhythms and taboos of her new life. The evocative names of her festivals started to make their way onto our calendar: the Night of Power; the Feast of Sacrifice, the Hajj.

Sahar seemed comfortable with her new self. “I was up most of the night sewing,” she said one morning when she’d arrived for work bleary-eyed. Now that she had adopted hijab, she’d given away most of her bright dresses. But she hadn’t wanted to abandon the entire contents of her wardrobe. “Everything had something wrong with it—a slit in the back, a tight waistband—it’s really a lot of work to salvage a few outfits.”

Hijab, she said, gave her security on Cairo’s bustling streets. “You never hear about veiled girls being raped,” she said. In fact, it was unusual to hear about anyone being raped in Cairo, where violent crimes of all kinds were rare by the standards of Western cities. But bottom-fondling and suggestive comments were a hazard, especially in crowded quarters, especially for women in Western dress.

Sahar felt hijab also gave her access to an unusual women’s network. Prying permits and appointments out of government departments became easier if she sought out other veiled women among the bureaucrats working there. Wanting to see an Islamic sister succeed in her job, they’d give her requests a preferential push. At the same time, she felt easier dealing with men. “They have to deal with my mind, not my body,” she said.

Dress was only the beginning, she said. The West’s soaring crime rate, one-parent families and neglected elderly proved to Sahar the bankruptcy of our secular ways. At the root of it, to her, was Western feminism’s insistence on an equality of the sexes that she felt ignored women’s essential nature. “Islam doesn’t say women are inferior to men; it says they are different,” she argued, trying to explain the ban on women judges in some Islamic courts. “Women are more emotional than men, because God has designed them to care for children. So, in court, a woman might show mercy where logic demands harshness.”

Talking to Sahar gave me a feeling of deja vu. When I was fourteen years old, a convent girl in a Sydney Catholic school, the deputy head nun called us to assembly and read us the riot act. Some of us had been seen in the streets wearing our school sweaters without blazers over them. Sweaters, she said, were indecent, since boys would be able to make out the shape of our breasts. The school uniform included a blazer, and if any of us ventured out of the grounds in a sweater without a blazer over it, she would know what kind of girls we were. That same nun insisted we wear hats in church. Quoting St. Paul, she told us that woman, as the instrument of man’s downfall in Eden, wasn’t fit to appear bareheaded in the house of the Lord.

I thought the nun was a fossil. I stopped going to church as soon as I understood how Catholicism’s ban on birth control and divorce could ruin women’s lives. Sahar, a woman of my own generation, had made a choice exactly opposite to mine. Something was going on here, and I determined to try to understand it.

I started with Arabic, the language of the Koran. Only one in five Muslims is an Arab; yet Arabic is the language in which the world’s more than one billion Muslims—a fifth of the world’s population—talk to God.

The Arabic language is as tribal as the desert culture that created it. Each word trails a host of relatives with the same three-letter cluster of consonants as its root. Use almost any word in Arabic, and a host of uninvited meanings barge into the conversation. I learned that one of the words for woman,
hormah,
comes from the same root as the words for both “holy, sacrosanct,” and “sinful, forbidden.” The word for mother,
umm,
is the root of the words for “source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion.” In the beginning was the word, and the word, in Arabic, was magnificently ambiguous.