Nine Parts of Desire (10 page)

Until this century, most Muslims married soon after puberty. Now, with the need for maturity in marriage widely recognized and the cost of weddings soaring, most young Muslims have to delay finding a spouse into their twenties and early thirties. Until she is married, a devout Muslim girl is expected to avoid even making eye contact with a strange boy. She will never so much as shake hands with a man, much less go out on a date or share a kiss.

In countries such as Egypt, where women had made their way into the work force, it was becoming more common for young people to meet prospective spouses before the family became involved. But in many countries marriages remain arrangements between strangers. In Saudi Arabia it wasn’t until 1981 that a committee of Islamic scholars finally ruled that young women could meet their intended spouses, unveiled, before the wedding. “Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning,” the committee found. But some Saudi women chose not to take advantage of even this small concession. Basilah al-Homoud, a thirty-eight-year-old school principal, had been twenty-one when her
father told her that she had received a marriage proposal. “He said, ‘Do you want to see him, do you want to sit with him?’ I said, ‘If you sit with him, it is enough for me.’ “ She glimpsed her husband, for the first time, from an upper window of her house as he arrived on the night of their wedding. “He was walking into the house with some of his relatives. My eyes went straight to him and I prayed that he was the one.” She believed she had been right to trust her father. “Who wants my happiness as much as he does? Who knows me better? Done this way, my marriage is not two persons only. It involves my whole family, and my husband’s whole family. And because the families are involved, I would think a thousand times before I say, ‘Can I have a divorce?’ “

But some young women weren’t so confident. “Marriage for us is a complete risk,” said Arezoo Moradian, an eighteen-year-old English-language student in Tehran. “A husband has so much power over you that you have to be mad to marry someone you don’t know perfectly. But under the system we have here, it’s impossible to get to know a boy perfectly. You can’t go out with him, you can’t spend time alone with him.”

And once you marry him, his word is law, as the religious commentator in the
Saudi Gazette
pointed out to a correspondent in the January 9, 1993, edition of the newspaper. “In today’s liberal world it is often assumed that the wife has absolute equal rights over her husband,” wrote Name Withheld of Jeddah. “I think it would be good if you could explain the correct conduct of a wife.”

Name Withheld was no doubt pleased with the explanation. “Leadership in the family is given to the husband,” the commentator wrote. “For a wife to demand complete and full equality with her husband will result in having two masters in the family and this does not exist in Islam.” Specifically, the commentator added, “To refuse to go with her husband when he calls her to bed is a grave mistake.” Furthermore, “Leaving the house excessively is a bad habit for a woman. She should also not leave the house if her husband objects to her doing so.”

If all this becomes too much, and she wishes to leave for good, obtaining a divorce can be fraught with difficulties for a woman.

Technically, Islam frowns on divorce. A hadith attributed to
Muhammad states that, of all lawful things, divorce is the most hated by God. The Koran gives an extensive and discouraging list of requirements to be fulfilled in ending a marriage, beginning with an instruction to bring arbitrators from the families of both bride and groom to attempt to patch up the rupture. In many countries Muslim authorities have expended much energy on debates over whether the arbitration is obligatory or merely recommended. “None came forward to ask why, if it is obligatory or recommended, whichever it may be, no practical steps are taken to comply with this clear commandment,” wrote an exasperated Muslim scholar, Muhammad Rashid Rida, who, until his death in 1935, spearheaded an intellectual response to the encroachment of Western values in Muslim countries. Both he and the influential Iranian commentator on women’s issues, Murtada Mutahhari, began a rereading of the Koran’s pronouncements on divorce that, if followed through, could lead to the adoption of laws much more equitable toward women.

But, for now, both the Shiites and followers of all four major schools of Sunni thought have enshrined a mode of divorce that only the most convoluted and misogynistic reading of the Koran can support. That is
talaq,
or divorce by a husband pronouncing the words “I divorce you” three times. No grounds are required of him and the wife has no say. For her part, a Muslim woman has no natural right to divorce, and in some Islamic countries no legal way to secure one. The Hanbali school, followed by the Saudis, gives a woman almost no way out of an unhappy marriage without her husband’s consent. Shiites and the Sunnis of the Hanafi school allow her to stipulate the right to divorce in her aqd, or marriage contract. Shiites, Hanafi and Maliki law all allow a woman’s petition on the grounds of her husband’s impotence, and Shiites and Malikis also allow petitions on the grounds of failure to provide support, incurable contagious disease or life-threatening abuse. Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce.

“I tell you, I hope I never fall in love,” the young Iranian, Arezoo, said, impatiently pushing back the fetching black ringlets that kept escaping her magneh. “You know why? Because when girls fall in love here they lose their judgment. Yes, sure, they can put all kinds
of conditions in the wedding contract, but who does it? It’s always ‘Ah, he loves me, he’ll never hurt me.’ I’ve watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life.”

For some women, of course, the risk paid off. The happiest couple I knew also happened to be two of the most strictly observant Muslims I’d ever met. Khadija was a young Kuwaiti Shiite whose marriage had been arranged for her. She had consented to the match without meeting her fiance, only stipulating that he should be someone who would agree to allow her to continue her studies. During the engagement the pair managed to meet, in secret, and found they liked each other enormously.

Khadija’s husband was an importer who did most of his business with Iran. When he traveled to Tehran, he always took Khadija and the children along. Their idea of a fun night out was to go to one of Tehran’s
husseinias
—Shiite study centers—to listen to a radical mullah lecturing on Islamic revolution. The two would, of course, sit separately—Khadija in her heavy black hijab always in the back with the other women, where their presence wouldn’t distract the men.

Sometimes I would go looking for Khadija in her hotel room, only to find her husband there, minding the children, while she spent the day at lectures at one of the Islamic women’s colleges. The hotel-room floor would always be completely covered in freshly laundered bedsheets, so that the toddlers, tumbling and playing on the floor, wouldn’t pick up any germs from a carpet that might have been walked on by foreigners who didn’t remove their shoes on entering a room.

When Khadija decided to do postgraduate work in London, her husband readily rearranged his business to accommodate her. The two of them never showed any physical affection in the presence of outsiders. But there was electricity in the looks they exchanged and warmth in the way they spoke to each other that made the intensity of their relationship quite obvious. When I asked Khadija why her marriage had worked out so well when so many other relationships looked empty, she smiled. “My husband is a good Muslim,” she said. “He knows what the Koran actually says about relations between men and women, and that is what he lives by. It’s as simple as that.”

Back in Egypt, my assistant, Sahar, had become engaged.

A few weeks after she began to wear hijab, she arrived for work bubbling with the news. She beamed as she showed me her fiance’s photograph. He was a newly qualified pediatrician and a second cousin. The picture showed a young face, grave and handsome, wearing the stubbly black beard of a devout Muslim.

Sahar had known him for years, seeing him often at family gatherings. But she hadn’t considered him a likely suitor. At university he had been active in Islamic groups, risking prison for his opinions at a time when the government was keeping fundamentalists on a tight leash. “I always knew he would only marry a veiled girl,” Sahar said. It was after he had seen her, veiled, at a family party, that he had told her parents he would like to propose.

Like many young Egyptian professionals, Sahar’s fiance hadn’t found a well-paying post in Egypt. Instead, he had agreed to take a job in Saudi Arabia and would have to work there for several months before he could support a bride. Before her betrothal, Sahar’s application to Harvard had been accepted; she could have used the delay to take the place in graduate school that she had been offered. Instead, she turned it down. It wouldn’t be appropriate, she explained, for a devout Muslim woman to live alone in an American city. Her new plan was to look into Islamic studies at one of Saudi Arabia’s segregated women’s schools.

Before her fiance left for Saudi Arabia, Sahar’s family threw a lavish engagement party. Sahar sat on a flower-decked throne and received the gifts of jewelry from her husband-to-be that would become part of her dowry. “My aunt wanted me to take off hijab for the party,” she said later. “She said, ‘You want to look lovely for your engagement.’ “ Sahar stuck to her guns and sat on her throne with her hair wrapped away in a white satin scarf.

But it soon seemed Sahar’s scarves wouldn’t be enough to satisfy her betrothed. Within weeks of arriving in Saudi Arabia’s austerely religious atmosphere, he was on the phone to Sahar, suggesting she lengthen her mid-calf dresses to floor length and put on socks to cover her sandaled toes. “I told him I’m not ready for that yet. I told
him I want to go slowly, to be sure of what I’m doing,” she said. ‘Tve seen other women who go straight into gloves and face veils, and a few months later find they can’t stand it. I don’t want to put something on that I’m going to want to take off.” As the months passed, I began to wonder whether her fiance was drifting into a fundamentalism too narrow to admit Sahar’s broad mind, no matter how correctly veiled.

Meanwhile, under her shapeless clothes, she started to gain weight. The elevator in our apartment building was so ancient it belonged in the Egyptian museum. It malfunctioned just about as often as it functioned. Sahar began to find the six flights of stairs an increasing trial. Sweating, she would sink into the chair by her desk and beg me to turn on the air conditioner, even on the mildest mornings. Because her coverings made her feel the heat, she no longer enjoyed walking with me when we’d go out reporting. She quickly became too out of shape to cover more than a block without gasping. She seemed to be growing old before my eyes.

Calls from Saudi Arabia invariably brought bad news. The medical center that had hired her fiance had no patients. He would have to wait and see if business improved before he could set a wedding date. When it didn’t, he began to search for a better job. But months had passed and he hadn’t found one.

There were other disappointments. Once, a few months before she adopted hijab, Sahar had brought a videotape of her best friend’s wedding to show me. It was a typical upper-crust Egyptian extravaganza, held at the Nile Hilton. Dancers pranced with candelabra on their heads, drummers and pipers provided the din. Everybody dressed to excess. Sahar told me she’d spent£60—a civil servant’s monthly salary—getting her hair done. She watched the tape with her lips parted and eyes shining. Her expression reminded me of my five-year-old niece when I read her a fairy story. I couldn’t believe that this serious, Harvard-bound woman admired this ostentatious display. But she did. “God willing, I’ll have a wedding just like that,” she said.

But it seemed that God, or at least her godly fiance, had other ideas. Their wedding, he decided, would be small and austere. “I suppose he is right,” Sahar said uncertainly. “At all those grand weddings,
nobody ever says anything good about the bride or her family. If it isn’t fancy enough, they criticize her stinginess. If it is very fancy, they criticize her for showing off.” Her fiance had even appropriated the task of buying the wedding dress. “The dresses are much finer in Saudi Arabia,” Sahar said hopefully. That may have been so, but I couldn’t help wondering what kind of gown a fundamentalist would choose for his bride.

None of my Egyptian friends seemed to have an easy time finding a mate. It became a race to see who would marry first: Sahar the fundamentalist, who had more or less arranged her own marriage, or my very unfundamentalist friend, who was having one arranged for her. She was named in Arabic for a beautiful flower, so I will call her Rose. She was unusual, even in the rarefied world of rich, Western-educated Cairenes. Like almost all unmarried Egyptians, she lived at home with her parents but, unlike almost all young women, she had a job that required her to travel abroad, alone.