Nine Parts of Desire (35 page)
This was not an isolated case; it simply happened to be the one I heard about. In a British study of family violence completed not long after Afaf’s death, the researchers found that women married to men of Muslim background were eight times more likely to be killed by their spouses than any other women in Britain. Yet British barristers, judges and juries continue to assess these crimes by a yardstick that’s completely inadequate to measure what is really going on.
Presented with statistics on violence toward women, or facing the furor over the Rushdie fatwa, progressive Muslims such as Ali Allawi, Rana Kabbani and others ask us to blame a wide range of villains: colonial history, the bitterness of immigrant experience, Bedouin tradition, pre-Islamic African culture. Yet when the Koran sanctions wife beating and the execution of apostates, it can’t be entirely exonerated for an epidemic of wife slayings and death sentences on authors.
In the end, what Rana Kabbani and Ali Allawi are proposing is as artificial an exercise as that proposed by the Marxists who used to argue that socialism in its pure form should not be maligned and rejected because of the deficiencies of “actually existing socialism.” At some point every religion, especially one that purports to encompass a complete way of life and system of government, has to be called to account for the kind of life it offers the people in the lands where it predominates.
It becomes insufficient to look at Islam on paper, or Islam in history, and dwell on the inarguable improvements it brought to women’s lives in the seventh century. Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith has proved such fertile ground for almost every antiwomen custom it encountered in its great march out of Arabia. When it found veils and seclusion in Persia, it absorbed them; when it found genital mutilations in Egypt, it absorbed them; when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women’s participation withered.
Yet there are exceptions. When the armies of Islam swept into India, Muslims were appalled by the practice of
sati,
in which widows, on a husband’s death, would burn themselves alive on his funeral pyre. In 1650 the traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote of Hindu widows, banned by their faith from remarriage and reduced by their husbands’ deaths to penury and contempt, choosing instead to end their lives through sati. “But it should be remarked,” he wrote, “that a woman cannot burn herself without having received permission from the governor of the place where she dwells, and those governors who are Musalmans [Muslims] hold this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror, and do not readily give permission.” For those women’s saved lives, at least, Islam can take the credit. But why did such a powerful and resilient faith not stand its ground more often in the face of “dreadful customs”?
Once I began working on this book, I looked everywhere for examples of women trying to reclaim Islam’s positive messages, trying to carry forward into the twentieth century the reformist zeal with which Muhammad had remade the lives of many women (other than his own wives and the Muslim army’s war captives) in the first Muslim community at Medina. It turned out to be a frustrating search. In most places the direction of the debate seemed to be exactly the reverse. Palestinian, Egyptian, Algerian and Afghani women were seeing a curtain come down on decades of women’s liberation as Islamic leaders in their countries turned to the most exclusionary and inequitable interpretations. For those women who struggled against the tide, the results were a discouraging trio of marginalization, harassment and exile.
In Morocco, Fatima Mernissi’s Koranic scholarship has made a formidable case for Islam as a religion of equality and human dignity, whose message has simply been buried over time by self-serving misogynists in positions of power. Yet her work is read in Western universities much more than it is in Moroccan mosques. No matter how precise her research into the hadith, the male-dominated Islamic establishment doesn’t seem willing to open its ears to the scholarship of a Muslim woman who doesn’t veil or otherwise flaunt her piety.
Perhaps that is why I found the brightest hope for positive change camouflaged among the black chadors of devout Iranian women. Even the most narrow-minded fundamentalists can’t criticize the Islamic credentials of women such as Khomeini’s daughter Zahra Mostafavi or Rafsanjani’s daughter Faezeh Hashemi. Their conspicuous adherence to religious rules gives them a high ground from which to make their case for women’s rights. So far, they have used that position sparingly, to get women a greater political voice, more equal job opportunities and the right to participate in sport. To be sure, these women will never tear down the walls of tradition. They will never make the arguments that
can
be made within Islamic reasoning against veiling or polygamy. But within those traditional walls they can make a much safer haven for women at risk of abuse and exploitation in the name of Islam.
To Western women, that mightn’t look like much. It is easy to see these grim figures in their heavy shrouds as symbols of what’s wrong rather than what’s right with women and Islam. But to Muslim women elsewhere in the strictest parts of the Islamic world, the Iranian woman riding to work on her motorbike, even with her billowing chador gripped firmly in her teeth, looks like a figure to envy.
“They are our Superwomen,” said Iman Fadlallah, the shy twenty-four-year-old wife of the Hezbollah sheik in southern Lebanon who had sat on his terrace and warned me about this book. Iman’s father, the most prominent Hezbollah cleric in Beirut, had abruptly ended her schooling when she was fourteen years old, choosing a husband for her whom she didn’t meet until the wedding. Now she stayed mainly in her house raising her children. In Iran, where she had lived with her husband while he continued his clerical studies, she had glimpsed a much wider world, even for the most devout of women. She spoke wistfully of Iranian women’s opportunities to study and work. “We have to struggle to be as strong as they are,” she said.
Everyone has her own way of remembering her travels. Some keep journals. Others take photographs. I go into the bedroom and open my closet. There are memories hanging there, semaphores from six years and twenty countries. There is the homespun scarf in red and black, still faintly scented with wood smoke from the cooking fire of the Kurdish woman who untied it from her own hair to wrap around mine. There is the long Palestinian dress Raed’s mother Rahme made for me so that I would feel comfortable sitting on the floor among them. I still have the Italian pin-striped “king suit,” a discreet little mend hiding the rip from the day I toured with Hussein in the Jordanian desert. I threw out my wedding shoes—the ones with the tide line of camel blood. And I keep meaning to give away the pair of black acrylic socks I had to buy in a hurry when the Islamic dress inspector at a Tehran bank objected to the inch of too sheer stocking peeking between the top of my shoes and the hem of my chador.
Limp on a hanger is the chador itself, the big black square of silk and synthetic that I used to despise. But that well-worn black rag, stained on the hem and torn on the shoulder, has become an old friend. Like a 1980s dress-for-success suit, it has been the camouflage that helped me do my job in a world where I wasn’t quite welcome.
When I look at that chador I no longer get the little shudder of fear or the gust of outrage that I used to feel when I saw the most extreme forms of Islamic dress. These days my feelings are much more complex. Chadors are linked in my mind to women I’ve felt close to, in spite of the abyss of belief that divided us.
When I lived among the women of Islam, I became part of a world that is still, in the last decade of the twentieth century, an intensely private one. In public, most women move like shadows, constrained physically by their hijab or mentally by codes of conduct that inhibit them. It is only behind the high walls and the closed doors that women are ever really free.
For me, entering that world touched emotions that had been a long time dormant. From the time I’d taken my first job, as a cub reporter on the sports desk of
The Sydney Morning Herald,
my career had pushed me into a man’s world. When I became a foreign correspondent, most of my colleagues were men. It wasn’t until I went to Cairo and started seeking out Muslim women that I realized I hadn’t made a close female friend since I left school.
I’d forgotten how much I liked to be with women. And yet there was always a sourness lurking at the edge of even the sweetest encounters. Squatting on the floor of a Kurdish friend’s kitchen, helping the women with their bread making, I realized what an agreeable thing it was to be completely surrounded by women, to have a task that was ours alone. As the women’s deft fingers flung balls of dough under my rolling pin and the fire roared beneath a baking sheet of blackened metal, I felt contentment in shared work well done.
But an hour into the labor, as my shoulders ached and scalding sweat dribbled down my back, I began to resent the boy toddler who kept ambling up to the steaming pile of fresh bread and breaking off tasty morsels in his fat little fists. His sister, not much older, was already part of our bread-making assembly line. Why should he learn so young that her role was to toil for his pleasure?
The nunlike clothes, pushed to the back of my closet, remind me of all those mixed feelings. Every time my hand brushes the smooth fabric of the chador, I think of Nahid Aghtaie, the Iranian medical student who gave up an easy life in London to go home and work at low-paying jobs to advance the goals of her revolution. I remember her, in Gum, drifting toward me over the marble-floored mosque to tell me that she’d prayed for me “to have nice children.” And then I think of her beautiful face—the small visible triangle between brow and lip—radiant on the morning of the murder of Rushdie’s Japanese translator in July 1991. “This,” she said triumphantly, “shows the power of Islam.” I told her that, to me, it no more showed the power of Islam than an Israeli soldier’s shooting of a Palestinian child showed the power of Judaism. Why not, I asked her, cite the “power of Islam” in the humanitarian work that Iran was doing for the flood of Iraqi refugees that was then pouring over its borders? “Because nobody notices when we do such things,” she said. “But every news report in the world will note this execution.”
Eventually I became worn out by such conversations. Friendships with women like Nahid were an emotional whipsaw: how was it possible to admire her for the courage of her convictions, when her convictions led to such hateful reasoning?
Just after that trip to Iran, tired from months of covering the war with Iraq and its aftermath, I went home to Australia for a brief vacation. My plane landed in Sydney just ahead of a flight from Jakarta. As I waited for my luggage, the doors to the arrival hall swished open on a crowd of Indonesian-Australians, waiting to greet their relatives. Almost all of the women were veiled. A swift, mean-spirited thought shot through my jet-lagged brain: “Oh, please. Not here too.”
I wasn’t raised to be a bigot. My parents considered religious intolerance a sin. My mother had seen too much of it in her childhood, among rural Irish Catholic immigrants. Her mother’s marriage to a non-Catholic had been an act of courage. Hers was a typically Australian story: within two generations she had kicked the dirt of the old country’s prejudices from her shoes and adopted Australia’s own “religion”—a passionately tolerant secularism. It happened to almost everybody. One of the most revealing statistics I ever learned about my country concerned the twelve members of the Board of Management of Sydney’s main synagogue. In 1890 those twelve men were among the city’s most observant Jews. Less than a hundred years later, none of the twelve had a single identifiably Jewish descendant. Mixed marriages and the siren song of secularism had claimed them all.
I wondered if that would happen to the new wave of Muslim immigrants. Would their children, too, learn to doubt the Koran’s doubt-free prescription for how to live? Would they see that Australia, where atheists routinely got elected prime minister, was a much fairer, gentler society than the religious regimes of places like Saudi Arabia and the Sudan? Or would they, as their numbers increased, seek to impose their values on my culture? During the Rushdie outcry, Australian Muslims had demonstrated, as was their right. But pictures of their toddlers holding placards saying “Rushdie Must Die” had sent a shudder through the society.
An Iranian-born friend who lives in London, a gentle, middle-aged woman who practices family medicine, says the only war she would willingly fight would be one to stop Islamic fundamentalism telling her how to live her life. She is a Zoroastrian, a member of the ancient Persian faith in which dark and light, good and evil are forever locked in a struggle for supremacy.
Should we also struggle to stop Islamic extremists telling others how to live their lives? As Westerners, we profess to believe that human rights are an immutable international currency, independent of cultural mores and political circumstances. At a Geneva conference on the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1993, Iran was among a handful of countries that argued otherwise. Cloaking their argument in fashionable dress such as cultural relativism, delegates from Iran and Cuba, China and Indonesia argued that the West had imposed its human rights ideology on nations whose very different religious and political histories gave them the right to choose their own. To me, their argument boiled down to this ghastly and untenable proposition: a human right is what the local despot says it is.
The concept of the universality of human rights prevailed at the conference, and the charter was not amended. And yet the charter has done little so far for the genitally mutilated, the forcibly secluded, the disenfranchised women of the world.