Sex and the Citadel (28 page)

Meanwhile, the consequence of paltry information, haphazard contraception, and illegal abortion is clear to see at the House of Muslim Girls, a towering apartment building in one of Cairo’s more affluent suburbs. It’s a
dar al-aytam
(house of orphans), one of hundreds of such facilities in the capital. There are just over a hundred girls at the orphanage (boys go to a different facility). They stay until they’re eighteen, living four to a room and a dozen to a floor, sharing a kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. It’s a cheerful place—the younger children’s rooms are spotless, light, and airy, with brightly colored bedspreads and a menagerie of stuffed animals.

“Most of the kids here come because of an illegitimate relationship between a man and a woman. It happens because one of the two parties wants to get rid of the kid, who is evidence for what occurred,” said Mona Sayed Mohamed, director of the orphanage, who’s been working there for more than two decades. She’s a stately woman, dressed in attire as sober as her tone: a long black skirt suit and matching
isdal
, a headscarf that covers her upper body as well. The children at the orphanage are mainly foundlings (
laqiit
, in Arabic) left in the street, abandoned in hospitals, or dumped in front of mosques. From the police reports she receives when the children are dropped off, Mohamed is fairly certain that most of them are the offspring of unmarried mothers.
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There are so many of them now, she says, that the orphanage has stopped taking in new arrivals—there’s just no more room.

There are no official statistics on illegitimate births in Egypt, since having a child out of legally recognized wedlock is something most people go to great lengths to conceal. The very word in Egyptian Arabic for an illegitimate child—
ibn haram
or
ibn zina
(son of fornication)—gives you some idea why. As we’ve seen, sex outside of marriage is off-limits in Islam and the Christian churches of the Arab region; in many countries consensual premarital sex is also punishable by law, on paper if not in regular practice. According to recent World Values Surveys, an overwhelming 98 percent of the Egyptians questioned disapproved of women as single parents.
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Legal strictures aside, Egyptian society takes a very dim view of unmarried mothers, including those who have gone through one of the many forms of unofficial marriage, like
‘urfi;
research has shown that condemnation even leads some to condone the killing of women who conceive out of wedlock.
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As far as Mohamed is concerned, orphanages are a growth industry in Egypt. “When I see couples in streets without marriage, I immediately realize that the situation will get worse, and that’s why orphanages are increased.” In her opinion, it’s a combination of poor education, loose morals, and financial need that is pushing girls into relations before matrimony. Mohamed regards modern technology as an enabler to this decline and fall: “I see that any girl can do bad things. If I have a mobile in my room and Internet, I can do anything I want.”

The orphanage keeps a close eye on its charges: no mobiles or Internet, and TV viewing is strictly monitored for content. That’s not to say there isn’t fun: the kids can visit friends, they have parties in the orphanage, and people often come to take them out for the day—a form of fostering, or
kafala
, since adoption is forbidden in Islam.
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The orphanage gives them names, registers them for birth certificates, enrolls them in school, and tries to integrate them into regular society, for all the social baggage they’re carrying. “A lot of kids ask about their parents, and we tell them that they died in accidents,” Mohamed said. “But some kids do not believe us.”

I asked Mohamed if growing up in an orphanage, with the lingering suspicion of illegitimacy, hampers the girls’ chances in later life. Quite the contrary, she said, at least when it comes to marriage; plenty of men come to seek their hands. “These grooms are from poor families and come to get a wife from here because we are not asking for
mahr
[groom’s payment to the bride] and
shabka
[jewelry and gifts].” As for their mothers, though, she sees little hope of social integration: “The problem we have in the society is how to accept pregnant women without marriage. I know a girl in a university, and she had a baby from this relationship, and she didn’t want the kid because she didn’t want to remind her family of her mistake.”

GOING SOLO

It doesn’t have to be this way. Faiza, a young woman I met in Morocco, is living proof that things can be different for unmarried mothers. Our paths crossed in Casablanca, where I fetched up after almost two years on the road. I had been shuttling across the Arab region with a giant duffel full of books and papers picked up along the way, and had the aching shoulders to prove it. When I reached Morocco, I took myself off to a hammam, that apex of Orientalist fantasy, for a little relief. The idea of so much naked female flesh, bathed, buffed, and perfumed, has famously turned on generations of Western authors and artists. I, however, was more interested in finding an osteopath than an odalisque, unless she also happened to be a qualified masseuse. What I really needed was someone who could turn my lumpen muscles back into long, sinuous fibers, from the anatomical equivalent of
basbousa
, a dense semolina cake my grandmother used to make, into golden strands of
kunafa
, another of her syrupy specialties. I was in luck, and after an hour’s massage, restored to far better form.

A few weeks later, I returned to talk with Faiza, who was working on the till. She’s in her early twenties, and a real head-turner: feline green eyes in a pale, heart-shaped face, set against a tumble of coppery curls. Her rare beauty comes from her unusual origins; she’s
amazigh
, or Berber, one of Morocco’s indigenous population. Faiza is bubbly and talkative, no more so than when she’s describing her son: “We fell in love with the first contact.… You know, my baby, we speak with the eyes.” She told me about the delivery—sixteen hours of undiluted pain, she said. Then she added, “I am a virgin. I have two papers [medical certificates] to prove my virginity.”

Welcome to the modern Middle East, where, two millennia on, virgin births are still a fact of life. Faiza’s announcement was not just a piece of wishful thinking. She met the father of her son, a man twenty years her senior, while he was working for a water company connecting houses to the main in her small town in the
south. They were introduced through a mutual acquaintance: “I always thought of him as a friend. But one day he invited me [to where he was staying]; he said he was sick. [I said] I will go and see him, he’s alone there. I went, then he asked me to sleep with him. I said yes, but only [come] between my legs.”

A month later, Faiza missed her period, but thought little of it. Two more months and her mother—alarmed at her daughter’s dizziness, sleepiness, and headaches—sent her to a doctor in Agadir, 250 kilometers away. “The doctor told me I was pregnant. I didn’t believe it. I cried a lot; I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “It was the first time I was pregnant, so he thought I would want an abortion, because he saw me crying. But I was crying because I knew my situation.… I was still a virgin and I became pregnant. It was the biggest blow of my life.”

When she came home with the news, only her mother and sister were let in on the secret. Faiza managed to stay with her family for four months until her condition was impossible to conceal, at which point her mother gave her money to go to Casablanca to find the father of her child. She crept out early one morning, leaving the men of the family in the dark, literally and figuratively. “My father didn’t know; I was afraid he would hurt me. He could beat me, he could kill me … my brothers too [could do this],” she said.

Faiza failed to find the father of her child, but she did hear about a hospital that could put her in touch with INSAF (National Institution for Solidarity with Women in Distress), an NGO that helps unmarried mothers during pregnancy, delivery, and early motherhood. But getting to INSAF turned out to be an ordeal in itself. “The moment I got to the hospital, there was a man at security. He said, ‘I know the number for INSAF.’ He took my bag and I followed him [to a building around the corner from the hospital]. I wasn’t feeling right. I was a little scared, and at that moment he pushed me in a room and closed the door,” Faiza told me, in a surprisingly steady voice, given what followed. “For an hour, he tried to rape me.… He gave me nude photos of him; he gave me pictures—girls of Agadir who were having sex.
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All this to sleep with me. I was dumbstruck; I was afraid for my baby. He kissed me. I hit him, really I
hit him, so he hit my face. Never touch me, because I still have my virginity. He hit me with a belt.… He said, ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to stick you in a bin,’ ” she recalled. “The day I delivered, it was he who was in my head. I could never forget him—a fear that I had never had before.”

Fortunately, Faiza managed to escape with her prized virginity intact. From there it was relatively smooth sailing. She made contact with INSAF, which looked after her for the remainder of her otherwise uncomplicated pregnancy and delivery; a few months later she found a place at Solidarité Féminine, or SolFem, a Moroccan NGO whose mission is to knit unmarried mothers and their children together and weave them back into society.

SolFem has just around fifty women and their children under its wing at any one time, in a three-year program spread over three sites in Casablanca. For many of SolFem’s beneficiaries, this program begins behind whitewashed walls in an industrial quarter called Ain Sebaa. Outside is roaring traffic and lines of weather-beaten men looking for work; through the gate lies a lovely courtyard with palm trees and flower beds exploding with color. There’s a nursery on one side of this sanctuary, where a dozen or so toddlers are playing and infants lie dozing in cots; on the other is a kitchen, where young women are cooking up a storm, chopping mounds of vegetables and fanning small charcoal braziers on which are simmering earthenware tagines. By noon, the garden and dining room start filling up with young business types in shirtsleeves and ties and middle-aged women, their heads neatly covered in hijabs, with kids in tow. They’ve come for the food, and no wonder: my lamb and carrot stew, with a side dish of spicy eggplant, was delicious.

The Ain Sebaa facility is both a restaurant and a rehabilitation center. The idea behind it is to teach unmarried mothers a set of marketable skills they can use to build a new life. There is a lot of work to be done. The women who start here are the most fragile of SolFem’s beneficiaries. They are young, mainly in their early to late teens, and come from poor rural families. Many are illiterate and have been working as housemaids, or
bonnes
, farmed out to wealthier families as child labor. Their shy, almost wounded
demeanors come from a life of hard knocks, the hardest of which is their children’s sometimes violent conceptions—through sexual abuse, either in their own families or at the hands of their employers.
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The facility at Ain Sebaa is calm and quiet, a world away from the life most of these young mothers have known. While they live in groups of two or three with their kids in nearby apartments, organized by SolFem, they spend their days at the facility. Aside from vocational skills, they are taught how to read and write; there is also a social worker, psychologist, doctor, and lawyer on staff, as well as child care professionals to teach them how to look after their kids, which is no easy task. When I visited the nursery, my best efforts to entertain half a dozen curly-haired toddlers set off an explosion of crying. “Don’t worry,” one of the attendants reassured me. “The children are not good with strangers. The mothers, they are anxious, and they transmit this insecurity to the kids. We try to help them over this.”

After a year, mothers who are more at ease graduate with their children to another facility in the center of Casablanca that is a restaurant, patisserie, and a sewing workshop. A couple of years ago, the organization also opened the hammam where I met Faiza; it turns out beauticians and manicurists from a different sort of unmarried mother increasingly appearing at SolFem’s door: a student or graduate who, more often than not, has slept with the man she thought she would marry, only to find herself pregnant and deserted.

For all their efforts, SolFem, INSAF, and other NGOs are reaching only a fraction of the upward of twenty-five thousand single women a year who become mothers in Morocco.
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Those who don’t come under the protection of one of these organizations have a much harder time of things. Not only do they go without medical attention during their pregnancy, but this neglect can turn into bigger problems come delivery. Those under the umbrella of NGOs have an easier time in the hospital than women on their own, who are on the receiving end of staff contempt, even abuse.

The trouble keeps coming, especially for those unmarried mothers
toughing it out alone. Under Moroccan law, sex outside of marriage is punishable by imprisonment of up to one year, a point of considerable debate in recent years. But police tend to turn a blind eye to women who are in the care of one of the NGOs. INSAF, SolFem, and their counterparts are also indispensable when it comes to registering newborns with the state, as vital in Morocco as it is in Egypt. Legal reform means single mothers are now allowed to obtain birth certificates for their children.
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While the law has changed on paper, cutting through the Gordian knot of red tape can be an overwhelming task, one compounded by the obstructive attitude of civil servants who disapprove of unwed mothers, a situation so dire that it drove one single mother to self-immolation in the wake of the Arab uprisings.
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