Nine Parts of Desire (27 page)

The extremists were almost impossible to satisfy. Even segregated workplaces were at risk. Saudi Cable Company, the kingdom’s biggest industrial concern, had floated a proposal to build a factory where every job, from production line to senior management, would be filled by women. In a country with an acute labor shortage, I thought such a plan would be hailed for its initiative. But when I went to see the official in charge of the project, he begged me not to write about it. “We have already had too much attention,.” he said. He worried that the project would be scuttled if the fundamentalists started a campaign decrying it for luring women from their homes. However, he did introduce me to his wife, Basilah, who ran the magnificent Dar al Fikr girls’ school.

After showing me the school, Basilah invited me to her home for afternoon tea. The pale stone villa, with its floodlit pool, Persian carpets and elegant furnishings, made it clear that her job wasn’t a case of “financial necessity,” such as the
Saudi Gazette’s
religious editor would have approved. “I didn’t work when I first got married,” she said. “I would spend most of the day in bed, then when Fawaz would get home tired from a hard day’s work I’d be so bored I’d insist he take me out to the shopping mall. After a while we both decided the situation was crazy, that I should be doing something with my life that would make some kind of contribution.”

Basilah had invited a woman friend who helped her mother run a successful construction company to join us for tea. When her father died, she and her mother had expected his male relations to run the business and provide for her and her children. But they were lazy and incompetent, and it seemed that everything her father had worked for was going to be destroyed. “Finally my mother took over,” the woman explained. “She went to the Ministry of Construction with
the papers that needed official approval. No woman had been in there before. The officials ordered her out. She refused to go. She sat there, and sat there, until they were forced to deal with her. She turned out to be a very good manager, and she saved the business.”

As maids glided in and out with glasses of tea and a dazzling array of French cakes and pastries, conversation turned to how my husband felt about all the traveling I had to do for my job. I told Basilah that neither of us liked being apart so much but that, as a journalist himself, he understood the job’s demands. Then, bragging a little, I told her how he’d rearranged his own career to accommodate mine. “When my newspaper offered me the Middle East post,” I said, “he gave up his own job so I could accept it.” I had expected Basilah to be surprised; Tony and I were used to the automatic assumption in the Middle East that he was the one whose job had brought us there. But the look on Basilah’s face was beyond surprise. She looked utterly dismayed, as if I’d just admitted that my husband had committed mass murder. She fussed with her tea glass, cleared her throat and changed the subject.

It was hard to get information on women who worked in jobs outside the relatively safe spheres of girls’ education, women’s banking and medicine. When I asked the Ministry of Information for help, I was stonewalled. So I tried various other contacts. “Don’t even touch this subject unless what you plan to write is a hundred percent positive,” warned a Lebanese businessman in Jeddah. When I indicated that was unlikely, he refused to arrange any introductions. I’d heard of women in Jeddah and Riyadh who were the bosses of businesses as diverse as photography studios, clothing manufacture and computer training schools. I thought the Chamber of Commerce might be able to give me some leads. “No problem,” said a helpful official, “I’ll set you up some appointments.”

The next day he told me to be at the administrative office at Jeddah airport at 2
P.M.
I thought he’d found a woman executive for me to talk to there. But when I arrived I found I’d been scheduled for a mind-numbing “official tour” that had absolutely nothing to do with women. I was there for hours, being shown videos, walked
through computer rooms and deluged with official statistics—a 625% increase in passenger traffic between 1975 and 1988, an 870% rise in cargo traffic, a terminal the size of eighty football fields just for pilgrims making the Hajj, roofed with Teflon-coated fiberglass to deflect the heat. There was no polite way to cut the tour short. Developing countries always complain that reporters don’t write about their achievements; that we focus on colorful tribal traditions and neglect technological progress. Still, I was irritated with the Chamber of Commerce for wasting my time and the time of the airport officials.

As it happened, there was a part of the shining modern airport that had relevance to my story on the status of women in Saudi Arabia. But it wasn’t part of the tour. I didn’t see it until I was leaving the country, two weeks later. While I was waiting in the departure lounge I had to use the women’s toilet. I walked past the polished glass and gleaming chrome of the public areas and pushed on the blond wood door marked by a stylized drawing of a veiled head.

Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.

Saudi Arabia is the extreme. Why dwell on the extreme, when it would be just as easy to write about a Muslim country such as Turkey, led by a woman, where one in six judges is a woman, and one in every thirty private companies has a woman manager?

I think it important to look in detail at Saudi Arabia’s grim reality because this is the kind of sterile, segregated world that Hamas in Israel, most mujahedin factions in Afghanistan, many radicals in Egypt and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria are calling for, right now, for their countries and for the entire Islamic world. None of these groups is saying, “Let’s recreate Turkey, and separate church and state.” Instead, what they want is Saudi-style, theocratically enforced repression of women, cloaked in vapid clichés about a woman’s place being the paradise of her home.

In the vast majority of Muslim countries, barriers to women’s employment have fallen so far in the last fifty years that it seems it
would be impossible to reerect them, even if hard-line fundamentalist governments one day came to power. But under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.

In Egypt women are everywhere in the work force: in the fields, as they always have been, sowing and planting; and sitting on city sidewalks, selling their produce. But they are also in positions that would have been unthinkable in the first half of the century, when only the poorest and most wretched families subjected their women to the “indignity” of work outside the home. Egyptian women are doctors, filmmakers, politicians, economists, academics, engineers. Mostly they are public servants, cogs in the country’s bloated bureaucracy. Now, it is almost unthinkable that a young Egyptian woman won’t go to work, at least until she marries. Often she will find the man she will marry among her coworkers.

It was President Nasser who made way for women in the government, promising a job to any Egyptian who got a college degree. Now, many an educated, lower-middle-class woman finds work as a
muwazzaf,
a government employee, typing, filing or otherwise pushing paper six days a week, from about eight in the morning to two in the afternoon. The size of the bureaucracy means that most workers are underemployed, and most, men and women, pass the workday gossiping and sipping endless cups of sugary tea. While the pay is pitiful—less than $40 a month—the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget.

Most of the young, unmarried women I knew enjoyed the freedom of a salary and the challenge of even an undemanding workplace. But my married friends often saw things differently. Often, the job itself was a respite, wedged with great difficulty between hours of backbreaking household labor.

An afternoon I spent with a recently married woman went like this. After commuting for about an hour and a half on a bus so packed that three or four passengers hung out the door with just one foot each on the step, she elbowed her way off at a stop about half a mile from her apartment and stood in line for twenty minutes at a government food store, to get the lower-priced food available there. She
hauled the groceries home to a cold-water kitchen with no fridge, and immediately made tea for her husband, who’d arrived home from work and plopped on the sofa to chat with his father and a young nephew. Next she climbed the stairs to the pigeon coops she kept on the roof of the apartment building, fed yesterday’s leftover bread to the birds, then chose the two plumpest and wrung their necks on the spot.

She plucked the birds, gutted and cooked them, boiled cracked wheat and noodles for the stuffing, served the meal to the men, who seemed a bit grumpy to be kept waiting so late to eat; made and served more tea, scoured the cooking pans and plates, swept the ubiquitous Cairo dust from the floors and furniture, scrubbed everyone’s clothes by hand and left them in a bucket to hang out on the roof before she left for work the next morning; set some lentils to soak for the next day’s meal, finally sat down, with some sewing on her lap, at about 9
P.M.,
only to jump up ten minutes later to make another round of tea for some neighbors who’d popped in. There were only two unusual things about the woman’s situation; she didn’t have other women in the house—a sister-in-law or mother-in-law—to help her with the chores, and she didn’t yet have children to add to her responsibilities.

While women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To women run ragged by the routine of rushing home from work to have a large meal ready for a demanding family, the fundamentalists’ message of women’s place being in the home sometimes has some appeal.

Husbands, too, hear that message. Mostly raised by women who didn’t work outside the home, they are used to a household where their shirts are ironed, the floors swept, the food elaborately prepared and always ready. Now, a young man might meet his bride as a coworker in his office. Before their marriage, he enjoyed the chance to admire her beauty, share a joke and gossip with her. But once she is his wife, he resents the fact that other men in the office have the pleasure of her company. If she is not already veiled, he may begin pressuring her to wear hijab.

When home life with a working wife turns out to be less salubrious
than with the nonworking women of his youth, he doesn’t think of lending a hand with the chores, for he has never seen a man do such a thing. Instead, he curses the government for a ruined economy that makes his wife’s salary a necessity. And when he hears an imam or sheik preaching of a woman’s place, and promising better times under an Islamic regime, he eyes the pile of rumpled laundry, the dusty floor and the simple lunch his exhausted wife has slapped together, and wonders whether such a cause might not be worth supporting.

To see what happens if he takes the next step and joins the revolutionaries, it is necessary to look at Iran.

Even when a revolution succeeds, it doesn’t always achieve everything its extremists have envisioned. It is one thing to hold tenaciously, as Saudi Arabia does, to traditions that have existed unchanged for centuries. It is another thing altogether to reimpose such traditions after change has already reshaped a culture.

Since the 1920s, Iran’s Pahlavi rulers had tried to Westernize their nation, sometimes by force, scrapping thousands of years of traditional separation of men and women. By the time the Iranian revolutionaries threw out the shah in 1979, there were male hairstylists for women, male tailors fitting women’s gowns, male teachers in girls’ classrooms.

The extremists set out to end all that, telling male gynecologists that they should find another area of medicine, attempting to install curtains to divide university lecture halls into male and female sections, and banning male barbers from touching female heads.

Apart from the barbers, very little of it worked. What the extremists hadn’t realized was that, when it came to sex segregation, Khomeini wasn’t entirely with them. Khomeini, always a literalist, read the words of the Koran and the hadith and didn’t extrapolate from them. When he read that the prophet’s wives were to remain in their houses, he took that to mean the prophet’s wives, and only the prophet’s wives. Other Muslim women had roles to play outside their houses, and he encouraged them. From the beginning he encouraged
women to come into the streets to demonstrate and praised their role as revolutionaries, fighting in the streets side by side with the men.

To him, the rules were clear: unrelated men and women mustn’t be alone together; they mustn’t touch each other, except in medical situations; and women must wear hijab. Obviously, since hairdressers touched their clients and saw them out of hijab, there would be no more male staff in salons serving women. The same went for gym instructors whose students worked out in athletic gear, and reporters who covered women’s activities where hijab wasn’t worn.

But that didn’t mean that such activities should cease. What happened instead was a sudden flowering of job opportunities for women. The prohibition on men and women being alone created a demand for women driving instructors. In the media, the need for women to cover certain women’s sports and other segregated events opened jobs for producers, directors, reporters and sound recordists.

Since the hadith made it clear that the prophet had approved of women tending men’s war wounds, there was to be no segregation when it came to medicine. But since the new Islamic atmosphere made many women prefer to be seen by women doctors, there was an upsurge in demand for more women’s places in medical school. Nurse-midwives saw their status rise. While schools were quickly segregated to protect the impressionable young, the idea of curtaining off university classrooms was abandoned in most places. Since the universities were to be thoroughly Islamic, with admission requiring a reference from the would-be student’s local mosque, there was no need to physically separate these devout youngsters, who automatically separated themselves. In lectures, men sat on one side of the room, women on the other. Only the placement of the professor’s podium posed problems. In some lecture rooms, builders bolted it to the floor on the men’s side of the room, on the obsolete premise that professors were all male. That left the growing number of women professors standing on the women’s side for the sake of the new proprieties, but having nowhere to rest their notes.