Nine Parts of Desire (22 page)

In Jordan the mood was somber and uncertain. When the king arrived back after his surgery, the crowd that thronged the road to the palace was the biggest in the country’s history. Their cries of
“Aish
Hussein
[Long Live Hussein]” had a desperate intensity. It was hard to imagine another country in the Middle East where the outpouring of support for a leader would be as spontaneous or as sincere.

There would be no more gossip. No one now, not even the extremists, would risk a whisper of criticism of the king, even indirectly through attacks on the queen. For however long her husband had left to live, Queen Noor seemed certain to be secure on her throne.

If there had been a marital rift, it wasn’t obvious when the couple came to the United States in 1994. After a checkup at the Mayo clinic at which the king got a clean bill of health, the couple were spotted in Washington, shopping for Harley-Davidson and BMW motorbikes. Together, they picked out three new bikes to be shipped back to Jordan, and took away about $2,000 in matching motorcycle clothes. The spending spree would help them reprise their courtship bike rides around the hills of Amman.

The king’s recovery from life-threatening illness also seemed to reinforce the risk-taker in him. Perhaps he sensed that time was short. In 1993, just after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their sudden and controversial peace accords in Washington, Hussein allowed Jordan’s scheduled elections to go ahead as planned. Foreign diplomats and most of his own government ministers had warned against it, fearing that a political campaign would become a front for agitation by Islamic extremists and hard-line Palestinians who didn’t want peace with Israel. Jordan, they said, would be destabilized.

Instead, the elections went off without a hitch. Behind the king’s resolve, I was sure I saw the queen’s quiet influence at work, and his world view gradually becoming identical with hers. Not long after the elections, in the winter of 1994, a satirical revue lampooning the pomposity of Arab leaders opened in Amman. Some of Jordan’s neighbors were not amused, and tried to have the revue shut down. The king stood up to the pressure and said the show must go on, including the skit that skewered his own sometimes ponderous rhetorical style.

Jordan was one of the first countries I’d visited when I moved to the Middle East in 1987. In six years I saw it transform itself from a
tense police state to the most promising cradle of political freedom in the region. The fundamentalists were still there, but so were the feminists. No group’s rights had been trampled for the sake of another’s. The struggle went on, but it went on in the open. And the weapons were words, not bombs or gunshots or mass arrests.

To me, it was clear that much of the credit for that transformation belonged to a woman.

Chapter 8

T
HE
G
ETTING OF
W
ISDOM

“Read, in the name of thy Lord, who hath created all things; who hath created man of congealed blood. Read, by thy most beneficent Lord, who taught use of the pen; who teaches man that which he knoweth not.”

THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF CONGEALED BLOOD

I
n Saudi Arabia the road north from Riyadh is a flawless strip of six-lane bitumen slicing through wind-sculpted sand dunes. Every few miles, through the shimmering heat haze, it is possible to glimpse the ruins of yellow mud lookout towers cut with rifle slits. They are eroding, like children’s sand castles.

My Saudi friend took a hand off the steering wheel, reached into the refrigerated glove compartment of his luxury four-wheel drive and tossed me a frosty can of soda. Then he threw one to the American in the back seat, a colleague he had enlisted for the day to play the role of my husband.

My Saudi friend, an urbane, Western-educated professional, wanted me to meet his uncle, an old man who lived out among the sand dunes near the hometown of Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, the preacher who had taught a form of Islam so severe it banned even whistling. The uncle was a true Wahhabi, strict and austere. It wasn’t certain he’d agree to speak to me—“he’s never spoken to a woman outside his family before,” my friend said, but he thought it would be worth a try so that I could understand the forces stacked against change for women in Saudi Arabia. The “husband” in the back seat
was essential. “My family is used to a lot of strange things from me, but showing up alone in my car with a foreign woman would be pushing their understanding a bit too far.”

The uncle, Mohamed al-Ghazi, lived in a flat-roofed house beside a grove of date palms. High orange sand dunes cradled his fragile little farm. When I opened the door of the air-conditioned jeep, a blast of hot air hit me like a gust from a crematorium. My eyeballs felt desiccated, like dried peas. T. E. Lawrence described the heat of these Arabian sands: “The sun came up like a drawn sword and struck us speechless.” And he wasn’t wearing a black abaya and opaque stockings at the time. I squinted enviously at my friend and his uncle embracing each other in their cool white robes and sandals. An irreverent thought occurred to me: if God really liked women, He would have revealed the Koran to an Inuit fur trader rather than an Arabian camel-caravan manager.

Calling to his wife, Mohamed al-Ghazi signaled me to follow her to the women’s quarters. My friend placed a hand on his uncle’s arm and explained that he wanted me to sit with them, in the men’s reception room, to talk about local history. I stood a small distance away, my abaya billowing in the hot wind, as a rapid-fire dialogue in Arabic ensued. Finally the uncle shrugged glumly and, without looking at me, beckoned me inside.

The men’s
majlis,
or reception room, stretched the length of the house. Mohamed al-Ghazi was an important man in his tiny village. Five times a day he led the prayers at the local mosque. As prayer leader, or imam, he was the villagers’ spiritual guide, and for performing that service he received a stipend from the government. Before oil wealth had allowed the government to afford such handouts, Mohamed had eked out a living from his dates, rising before dawn each morning to hand-water trees so few and precious that he had given each of them a name. He had been fifteen years old before he even had time to learn to read the Koran, so demanding was the toil required to wrest a subsistence living from the desert. Now, oil had brought electricity to power a water pump, and enough income to employ a foreign laborer. Every Friday, after community prayers, the imam slaughtered sheep and covered the floor of his majlis with platters
of lamb and rice. The men of the village joined him for lunch and a discussion of the issues of the day.

I asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. “They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course,” he said.

“But what if their husband is their problem?”

That possibility hadn’t crossed either man’s mind.

The Friday before our visit, Mohamed’s majlis had been abuzz with rumors about the women who, demonstrating for the right to drive, had dismissed their chauffeurs and taken to the wheels of their cars in downtown Riyadh. The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: “I hope I never see it in my lifetime,” he said.

But once, many years earlier, he had become a radical in his small rural community. He had petitioned the government to open a boys’ school in the village. Some of his neighbors were scandalized by the idea of secular education. Imams in neighboring towns sermonized against education, substituting the word filth, or
mingissa,
for the word for school,
madrassa.
To them, the only subject worthy of study was the Koran, and their boys were already learning that at the local mosques. Of what use were history, geography and foreign languages, they argued, when such studies brought knowledge of ungodly lands and peoples?

But Mohamed al-Ghazi knew that the prophet’s lieutenants had spoken foreign languages, and that they had used that knowledge to spread Islam. And what was the danger, he argued, in teaching the geography and history of Islamic lands? In the cities, the
ulema,
or religious regulators, had already fought these battles, making sure that the curriculum banned subjects such as music, which is considered too sensuous by Wahhabis, and art, which could lead to the creation of graven images. Mohamed al-Ghazi’s campaign eventually won the village its school. Two of the imam’s sons who studied there had gone on to university; the third had joined the military.

His daughters were another matter. To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home—to walk in the streets, even if
veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls—was wicked. His daughters learned what he felt they needed to know, which was to recite the Koran, in the seclusion of the women’s quarters of their house.

Today in Saudi Arabia, fathers like Mohamed al-Ghazi can still make such a choice for their daughters. Schooling for girls, although now widespread, has never been compulsory if their fathers disapprove. Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.

Saudi Arabia didn’t get its first girls’ school until 1956. Its opening was contrived by Iffat, the wife of King Faisal, and the only Saudi ruler’s wife ever referred to as queen. Iffat, who had been raised in Turkey, wanted to broaden education to include more science and more Western subjects, but she had to proceed cautiously even in opening such a school for her own sons. The girls’ school was an infinitely more delicate matter. When Dar al Hanan, the House of Affection, opened in Jeddah in 1956, it did so in the guise of an orphanage. Since the Koran repeatedly orders Muslims to care for orphan girls, such an institution was beyond reproach. It had been running a year before Iffat felt able to risk explaining the institution’s real intention.

In an article in a local paper titled “The Mother Can Be a School in Herself If You Prepare Her Well,” the objectives of Dar al Hanan were described as producing better mothers and homemakers through Islamically guided instruction.

Iffat, through Faisal, based her case for women’s education on a famous set of verses in the Koran that have become known as Umm Salamah’s verses. Umm Salamah, the beautiful widow whose marriage to the prophet had so upset Aisha, is said to have asked Muhammad one day why it was that, when God sent his revelations, the language in them was always addressed to men.

According to a hadith, Umm Salamah was in her room by the mosque, combing her hair, when she heard the prophet’s voice from the
minbar,
or pulpit. “I hastily did up my hair and ran to one of the apartments from where I could hear better. I pressed my ear to the wall, and here is what the prophet said:

“ ‘Lo! Men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere, and women who persevere, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard their modesty, and men who remember God much and women who remember—God has prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.’ ”

What the verses made clear was that the obligations of the faith fell without differentiation on men and women. To carry out those obligations, Iffat argued, women had to be educated and informed. By 1960 the ulema had been brought to grudging acceptance of this principle, and cautiously agreed to the spread of girls’ schools throughout the country. The provisos were that the schools would remain under the control of the ulema and that no father who objected would be obliged to send his daughters to them.

But for some Saudis that wasn’t enough. In the town of Burayda, not far from Minsaf, men rioted in protest at the opening of the first girls’ school in 1963. At around the same time as the United States was calling out its National Guard to enforce racial desegregation of schools in the American South, King Faisal had to call out the National Guard to keep the Burayda school open by force. For a year, the only pupil in the school was the headmistress’s daughter.

Many fathers continued to exercise their option of keeping daughters ignorant. By 1980, only 55% of Saudi girls were attending primary school, and only 23% were enrolled in secondary education. Only 38% of women were literate, compared with 62% of men.

Still, some girls managed to get the best education that money could buy. At Dar al Fikr, a private school for girls in Jeddah, the German-built campus is about as magnificent a school building as it’s possible to imagine. Inside the privacy of a towering white wall, glass doors swish open into a crisply air-conditioned foyer of polished stone. The layout is star-shaped, with classrooms radiating from large indoor recreation areas. High ceilings and huge panes of glass give an open, airy feeling to art studios, a gymnasium, science labs and a
computer center humming with Commodore and Macintosh desktops.

No class has more than twenty pupils. There is a day-care center, being used when I visited by the teachers’ infants, but available to the students in a country where early marriage and pregnancy are accepted and encouraged. In addition to an academic curriculum that stressed languages, girls could choose courses in cookery or dressmaking, karate or ballet, desktop publishing or motor mechanics. The motor mechanics course puzzled me, since Saudi women weren’t allowed to drive. “If her driver says there’s something the matter with the car, I want her to know if he’s telling the truth,” explained the headmistress, Basilah al-Homoud.