Nine Parts of Desire (32 page)

I wondered if he was bored, being unable to go to the matches. “Not at all,” he said. “I have my hands full with all the problems my team is having acclimating to these regulations.” Some of the women had fallen foul of the Iranians because their big floral scarves kept slipping off. “It seems like the biggest fault here is if anybody sees your hair. But if God doesn’t like this, why did he give you eyes?” Others resented the rule against women going out alone to tour the
city between their events. The Iranian officials were taking a hyper-protective attitude toward their women guests, insisting that they travel only on official buses, and only with an official translator along. As someone who had wandered the streets of Tehran at all hours unmolested, I thought the rule silly, and likely to give the wrong impression. For a woman alone, Tehran was one of the safest cities in the world.

Murshida Mustakim thought the rule was pretty stupid, too. She had stunned one of the gun-toting male Revolutionary Guards who had tried to block her exit from the hotel. “I told him I was a retired superintendent of the Malaysian police force, and that I’d spent an entire career giving orders to boys like him,” she said. “Then I told him to get out of my way.” Murshida, a towering woman with the shoulders of a longshoreman, had come to Tehran as coach of the shooting team, who were all policewomen on the Malaysian force.

For her, trips to countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, which she’d visited as a pilgrim to Mecca, were like visits to the past. In her lifetime Malaysia had moved away from a doctrinaire approach to Islam. “When I was growing up, there was a lot of difficulty about girls being uncovered for sports,” she said. While Malaysians’ figure-hugging sarongs wouldn’t have passed muster as hijab in Tehran, conservative Malays believed that their ankle length provided an essential degree of Muslim modesty. Murshida had been a hurdle racer. “I used to unwrap my sarong just before the starter’s pistol, run the race in shorts, and then quickly retie the sarong at the finish line.” These days, she said, most Malaysian Muslims were relaxed about their faith and accepted women’s right to dress as they pleased and participate in society alongside men. But even her distant country hadn’t been entirely immune to the Islamic revival, and many young women had started wearing long veils that covered the head and upper body. In one state, Kelantan, local voters had recently ushered in a fundamentalist mini-state, complete with “morals patrols” to catch unmarried couples dating.

I sat beside Murshida on the bus to one of the Iranians’ official outings: a trip to the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Most of the excursions had followed a similar theme: a visit to the Museum of Reversion
and Admonition, a.k.a. the former shah’s palace; a tour of an exhibition entitled “The Dignity and Prestige of Women in the Islamic System.” Before the buses set off for the long drive to Khomeini’s gold-domed shrine on the southern edge of the city, chador-wearing Iranian officials boarded, carrying boxes of Kleenex. At first I had the bizarre thought that they were arming us against the onrush of emotion we would no doubt feel at the sight of Khomeini’s grave. But then I realized that what they were worried about was the lipstick that some of the non-Iranian athletes were wearing. Murshida politely took a proffered tissue and swiped at her glossy red lips. “Well,” she said, “there’d be one good thing about staying here: I could save a fortune on makeup.”

Not necessarily. At the final day of track events, makeup-less athletes and officials filed off the buses and past the guards at the stadium door. Inside, they shook off their hijab and raced for the women’s changing room to powder noses and apply mascara. Everyone wanted to look her best for the videotaped record of the games that a camerawoman was making for later screening at women’s gatherings all over Iran.

Padideh, the Iranian runner, sat by herself, nervously fingering worry beads as she waited for her shot at a medal in the 400 meters final. The night before, I’d commiserated with a Pakistani runner who had blown her heat and missed a chance at the final of her best event. It was a disaster for her, but by the next day she was already looking forward to another chance at the Asian Games, or the Pan-Pacifies, or one of half a dozen international contests she would attend in the following year or two.

For Padideh, everything rested on this one brief race. It would be four years before she had another chance at international competition. As she crouched at the starting line, her leggy, foallike figure looked frail alongside the muscular athletes from Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzistan and Azerbaijan. At the crack of the starter’s pistol, she sped away, her long, loping stride keeping pace with that of her meatier competitors.

But it was a brief illusion of parity. A third of the way through the race, she had already fallen behind, and the strain of her initial effort showed in her face. For Padideh, training had to fit in between
university classes, in the brief women’s hours allowed at her nearby stadium. She had never worked out with weights or been trained by a professional coach. She fell across the finish line more than three seconds behind the winner and almost two seconds shy of the third-place runner. Collapsing on the ground, she grasped at her chest and gulped for air between sobs of pain and disappointment.

It was impossible to say whether Padideh could have been a champion in a different time and place, in a system that cared less for modesty and more for methodical training. But her time in the 400 meters, though nowhere near good enough to beat the competition, had shaved a remarkable eight seconds from her previous personal best.

At the farewell dinner after the games’ closing ceremony, Padideh had regained her composure and spoke proudly of the bronze medal she’d helped win for the Iranian relay team. “Of course, I would have liked a medal of my own,” she said, “and now I’ll never get one.” I reminded her that Pakistan and Azerbaijan had both talked of hosting an Islamic Women’s Games in four years’ time. Perhaps she would win her medal then.

She shook her head and gave a swift, sad smile. “No,” she said, looking away. “Someone else maybe. For me, I think, it’s just too late.”

Chapter 12

A D
IFFERENT
D
RUMMER

“O true believers, turn unto God with a sincere repentance: peradventure your God will do away from you your evil deeds, and will admit you into gardens, through which rivers flow.”

THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF BANNING

S
oheir el-Babli, the doyen of the Cairo stage, seemed to have it all. One of the biggest box-office draws in a city that has always loved its performers, her starring role as “Attiya, the Terrorist Woman,” had been packing them in for a year at the 700-seat Misr Art Theater.

Then, suddenly, as the play was about to begin its second season in July 1993, she quit. She was, she said, renouncing show business for good and adopting the Islamic veil.

Soheir’s retirement was part of a wave of resignations by women artists that had begun with Cairo’s belly dancers back in the late 1980s. Soon, dozens of singers and actresses also were hanging up their spangles, wiping off their makeup, donning hijab and haranguing their former audiences about the evils of the artists’ world. By the spring of 1992 the unthinkable had happened: the musicals with dancing that had enlivened the nightly celebrations of Ramadan were banned as un-Islamic, depriving hundreds of artists of work.

But when Soheir resigned, the artists’ world fought back. The play’s producer-director had already reworked the script for the second season to include references to the recent wave of terrorist bombings by Islamic extremists. To replace Soheir, he chose his own
twenty-two-year-old daughter, a student at American University in Cairo, whose only theatrical experience had been student productions.

At the play’s reopening night, a who’s who of the Egyptian artistic world turned out to show their support. It was the beginning of a backlash: for the first time, artists had stood up together in criticism of religiously motivated retirements and fundamentalist pressure on entertainment. A joke began making the rounds of Cairo: Who are the second-best-paid women in Egypt? The belly dancers, of course, because the Saudi tourists throw hundred-dollar bills beneath their feet when they dance. Who are the best paid? The dancers who’ve retired for Allah, of course, because the Saudi sheiks throw thousand-dollar bills into their bank accounts when they stop dancing.

The sudden veil-takings all tended to follow the same pattern. A famous woman performer would appear on the popular television program of Sheik Mohamed Sharawi, Egypt’s equivalent of a televangelist. There she would denounce her former career as un-Islamic, take a veil from the aged sheik and put it on, with his blessing.

Cynical Egyptians believed the Saudis funded a special expense account for Sharawi to buy up women artists. “If it isn’t for the money, why do it on television? Why not do it in private, with Allah for their witness?” asked Nawal Saadawi, Egypt’s most outspoken feminist.

The newly veiled women certainly seemed to have plenty of cash. One of the first to veil, Shams al-Barudi, had spent a fortune buying the copyright to films in which she had appeared scantily dressed, including one particularly daring bathtub scene in which she’d appeared almost nude. She was determined, she said, that the films should never be shown again. She declined to comment on the source of the money she was using to buy the rights to her old films, but gossip in the Cairo movie business said it had been provided by a prominent clergyman.

Nawal Saadawi cynically pointed out that many of the women were past their prime as actresses or dancers anyway. “They know they’re soon going to have to retire, so why not go out in a blaze of publicity? You’ve heard the joke on the streets: people are saying that
these dancers were happy to make their fortune from sin in their youth. Now, in their old age, they want to share the pleasure of paradise with the poor.”

But Nawal’s own predicament provided another explanation for the rush to get behind the veil. As a psychiatrist and senior government health official in the 1960s, she had seen the physical and emotional effects of genital mutilation on Egyptian women. Her first book,
Women and Sex,
published in 1970, had been a condemnation of the distorted Islamic teaching she felt was responsible for ruining women’s lives. Despite losing her job and spending three months in prison, she continued to write about taboo subjects in more than thirty books. She described the childhood trauma of her own clito-ridectomy and how it had left her incapable of orgasm, wrote about the demand for prewedding hymen replacement in the surgical wards of Cairo, and exposed an epidemic of incest in Egyptian families.

In newspapers and public meetings she attacked powerful sheiks. On one of his television programs, Sheik Sharawi excoriated those who chose to lull themselves to sleep with Western classical music instead of the melodic drone of a Koran reading. A few days later extremist youths in Upper Egypt were arrested for storming a concert and breaking musical instruments. Nawal wrote a newspaper article asking why the government arrested the youths, and not Sharawi, whose ideas had inflamed them.

In the summer of 1992, Islamic Jihad put Nawal Saadawi on its death list, along with the writer Farag Foda. When Farag was shot dead outside his office, the Egyptian government that had often persecuted Nawal suddenly provided her with a round-the-clock military guard. Mindful that Sadat’s assassin had been part of an extremist Islamic cell within the Egyptian army, Nawal found the presence outside her door of army conscripts rather less than reassuring. “I’m more afraid of them than I am of anyone else,” she confided. In 1993 she went into exile, taking a post as a visiting professor at Duke University in America.

If authors were already targets, Nawal reasoned, it was only a matter of time before less political artists would come under direct attack. The dancers who renounced their profession often talked about the anxiety and fear that had been replaced by calm once they resigned
from the stage. One famous dancer, Halah al-Safi, talked of a dream she’d had of walking by a mosque and feeling dread because she wasn’t wearing the proper clothing. Suddenly, she said, a man in her dream took off his cloak and covered her. Nawal pointed out that it wasn’t necessary to be a psychiatrist to interpret the fear in Halah’s dream as a subconscious response to the pressure from religious extremists.

In 1993, Nawal’s prediction was proved correct. When Farida Seif el Nasr decided to return to show business after having announced her retirement, an unknown assailant attempted to murder her with a volley of gunshots.

At my office, Sahar gloated over each new story of an artist’s return to the veil. One morning she looked up from one of the local papers to read me an item about a famous dancer who had wanted to make the Hajj. The religious authorities had refused to give the woman the necessary papers unless she quit dancing. Sahar approved of their decision. “Why should she be able to go, spending money she earned sinning, and stand on the Plain of Arafat as though she’s a good Muslim?” Sahar said.

But I was sorry to see Egypt’s beautiful traditional dance being denigrated and threatened. I’d watched my first Egyptian dancer through a jet-lagged haze just after we arrived in Cairo, when a friend invited us to dinner at the Nile Hilton’s nightclub. Egyptians keep late hours, and I struggled through dinner to keep my face from falling into my plate of stuffed pigeon. But once the dancing started I forgot all about fatigue.

Souhair Zaki swirled onto the stage along a pathway of sound. The slow rise and fall of the flute undulated in waves through her body. For the first time, the atonal Arabic music made sense to me. I could
see
it, weaving through space in elaborate arabesques. And I could see something else: the beauty of a woman’s body that was neither young nor thin. Souhair Zaki was the most celebrated dancer in Cairo, but she hadn’t seen thirty in a while. Flesh clung heavily to her hips. Her abdomen bulged like a ripe pear. I had never seen traditional oriental dance before, but I recognized every movement.
What she was doing with her body was what a woman’s body
did
—the natural movements of sex and childbirth. The dance drew the eye to the hips and abdomen; the very center of the female body’s womanliness.