Sex and the Citadel (29 page)

Having overcome these hurdles, Faiza faced yet another set of obstacles. Although she informed the father of his son’s birth, he at first refused to recognize the child, a common enough situation, even with the intervention of experts from SolFem. Reconciliation with her family, however, went more smoothly, much to Faiza’s relief: “A girl in this problem, she never forgets her parents. That’s the great curse. The father of the baby has taken off; a girl in this time, she thinks a lot about her family.” According to social workers at SolFem, family reintegration is one of the biggest changes in the situation of unmarried mothers over the past decade; where once there was blanket rejection by families, there is now growing rapprochement.

Faiza even took her son home for a visit. There was some initial awkwardness, particularly with her father, but he has not only come around, she says, but is even impressed with her new sense of purpose. “I found a lot had changed. [Before] I was not responsible; I didn’t know what responsibility was. I didn’t know what it was to be strong,” she told me. “You have a problem, but this problem gives you strength. I fell, and I fell, and I fell, but it taught me a lot of lessons.”

Although surveys show that many unmarried mothers feel they have been given the cold shoulder by society, Faiza is proud of her new obligations. “People respect me, and why, from the young to
the old? [Because] I look after my baby well: I dress him well, I take responsibility. That is why they respect me. They never say, ‘You are an unmarried mother.’ ” As far as Faiza is concerned, times are changing. “Now is not like before. Now they understand what is a single mother. It is a problem in Morocco, but really, people know if you want to live with your baby, you can.” This she attributes to the intervention of groups like SolFem and INSAF. “The associations are a point of contact with the people. Because through the newspapers, even the television, they speak directly with the people. Unwed mothers are not something bizarre in Morocco. They were always there, but it was a taboo. But now we are opening, we are talking.”

This new candor is in large part due to Aicha Ech-Chenna, a larger-than-life grandmother and founder of SolFem. A quarter of a century ago, when she started the organization, getting unmarried mothers to talk in public was a struggle, so ashamed were they of their condition. “Listen, you haven’t committed a crime, my girls,” is her message. “You are the victim of an error, you are the victim of a promise of marriage, or a rape—I don’t know what. If someone should tip the hat, it is society that dumped you at its feet, because you have the courage to keep your kids.”

Ech-Chenna’s passion for the plight of single mothers comes, in part, from her own background. Her mother was divorced and raised her daughter as a single parent. Ech-Chenna herself trained as a nurse and then became a social worker, where she met unwed mothers in desperate straits, handing off their children to orphanages. “I believe I am the first woman to talk about all these taboos on television, radio. I dropped the first bomb,” she told me. She started speaking out in the 1990s; today she’s a bona fide celebrity. King Muhammad VI is a fan, and high society has opened its doors, and wallets, to her cause. I met Ech-Chenna on her return from a tour of America, where she had won a million-dollar prize for “faith-based entrepreneurship.” Her phone was ringing off the hook, and we squeezed in our discussion between radio and TV interviews.

For all this success, the going has not been smooth. In 2004,
Morocco introduced significant reforms to its
Mudawwana
, the legal code governing personal status, that tempered a number of traditional male privileges. Among other changes, the reformed law requires men to secure the explicit permission of current wives before taking on any others (and allows existing wives to rule out this option altogether as a condition of their own marriage contract); it restricts the practice of wife repudiation and brings divorce under court jurisdiction; and states that male guardianship expires once a woman comes of age. These changes were bitterly opposed by the PJD, but with the backing of the king, the law passed, establishing a trend toward greater rights for women—on paper, at any rate. At the time, though, Ech-Chenna came under fierce attack from Islamists, who considered her support of such female-friendly reforms as the slippery slope to
zina
. But as with most things in her way, Ech-Chenna has a ready response for Islamic opponents: “I am the granddaughter of a religious scholar. He used to say to my aunt, ‘You must never say, “child of sin.” ’ Someone who does sin is an adult, sin of the spirit and the body, someone who does ill to another person. Me, as a practicing Muslim, I love God and I respect Him. Bringing moral judgments, that’s not up to me. Only God can judge.”

Ech-Chenna is old enough to remember how such matters used to be arranged, in Morocco as in Egypt: illegitimate children seamlessly absorbed into the extended family or quietly left on a neighbor’s doorstep to be taken in as a gift from God. “Our grandmothers, a long time ago, like all enclosed women, they developed an intelligence. Because they could not go out, they developed an internal intelligence to deal with their problems in a discreet way.” But all this changed with Morocco’s independence in 1956, what Ech-Chenna calls the “social explosion”: rapid urbanization, economic turmoil, breakdown of the family. Sex, once a natural part of life, got swept under the carpet. “No shame in [discussing any topic in] religion, they would say in Qur’an school. Even in the family, at least they would talk about menstruation—the mother, the aunt, or a female cousin,” Ech-Chenna recalls. “With the explosion, clients who come to the association don’t even know what sexuality is.
Even when they have their first period, they don’t know what is going on—things that were totally ordinary in our societies a long time ago.”

Ech-Chenna is convinced that the model she created in SolFem can work elsewhere in the region, including Egypt. Her advice is simple: start small, stay discreet, and steer clear of politics. Most important, though, is choosing the right leaders; in her opinion, ego is definitely not an asset: “It’s work that takes a lot of patience and self-abnegation. If you want to be a star, go sing [on a TV talent show]. Civil society is the only field where you shouldn’t be a star; if you become a star, if people recognize you, it should be because of the work you do.”

That work is far from over. While there may be a little more appreciation of the plight of single mothers in Morocco, that doesn’t mean widespread social acceptance. SolFem is careful to publicly present its beneficiaries as unwitting victims of sexual “accidents”; generally speaking, Moroccan society is, as yet, reluctant to recognize a woman’s right to sexual and reproductive autonomy—to have sex, and children, however she chooses.
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“We have not responded to all the problems of single mothers,” Ech-Chenna told me. “There are lots of abandoned children everywhere. If the society had completely evolved, there would be no abandoned children. It is the work of two or three generations, working transparently and humbly.” She compares the pace of social and legal change in Morocco since independence to water in the desert. “What the West did in two centuries, we did in fifty years. It’s like a really dry land that hasn’t benefited from human rights. If you pour a lot of water on it, what is going to happen? There will be floods; you have to give time for society to absorb the changes.”

Back in Egypt, Ech-Chenna’s words ring true in a time of transition. After the fast-track removal of Mubarak has come the much slower process of changing decades—centuries, really—of political culture. Social transformation, at the level of everyday life, is an even longer-term proposition. But I now hear a few voices in Egypt daring to imagine, after generations of disappointment and resignation, a country in which at least some on the margins—unmarried
mothers among them—might one day find a place on the inside. “With time, the shame will change. We are getting better every day, I am sure,” one unmarried mother in Cairo told me. “We are all becoming one world.… Otherwise, we will be extinct; we will not be there. The whole world is changing: North Africa is changing, even Saudi [Arabia] is changing.… You’re telling me we will stay the same?”

5
Sex for Sale

I am not a prostitute, and my husband isn’t giving me money, so where am I supposed to find the cash?

—My grandmother, on a woman’s limited options

When my father was a teenager in the late 1940s, he and his best friend used to take a tram across Cairo on Fridays to pray at Al-Azhar, the historic heart of learning in the Muslim world. Today, Al-Azhar’s great mosque, built like a fortress on the edge of Khan al-Khalili, Cairo’s famous souk, is besieged by modern life, hemmed in by roaring traffic. But in my father’s day, it dominated the landscape, both physically and spiritually; in an age before satellite preachers and online fatwas, Al-Azhar was the final word on Islam for Egyptians and much of the Muslim world beyond.

When prayers were over, my father and his friend were warned by the latter’s father, a mosque official, not to wander too far beyond its precincts, and especially not to the nearby neighborhood of al-Batniyya, whose skein of dark alleys was a famous tangle of vice. This included prostitution (
da’ara
in colloquial Egyptian;
bagha’
in classical Arabic). In al-Batniyya,
sharamiit
—which means “rags” in Egyptian Arabic, but is also slang for prostitutes—were ready to cater to their clients’ needs; this included easing the conscience in the case of Al-Azhar students known to frequent the area. “
Mallaktuka nafsi
,” the women would say, on starting proceedings with their more religious-minded customers. “I give you the right to own me.”
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This formula has a long tradition. For all Egypt’s current sexual hang-ups, the country’s history is not one of denying the flesh, and conversion to Islam, which began in the seventh century, did little
to change that. Islam, in its essence, acknowledges the power of sex—particularly women’s desire—so much so that it established rules and regulations to channel its force, albeit with male satisfaction foremost in mind. One of these institutions was concubinage, essentially, sexual slavery—a feature of pre-Islamic life retained by the new religious order.
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The Qur’an is clear on its acceptability. “The successful true believers are those who perform their prayers, avoid frivolous talk, render their alms and protect their genitals except with their wives and what their right hands possess [what they own], where there is no blame. Those who seek beyond those limits are the transgressors,” exhorts one of several verses on the subject. While polygyny is limited to four wives at any one time, concubinage is an open-ended proposition, hence the great harems of Arab history, a bottomless source of fascination for Western observers.

Institutionalized concubinage is long gone in Egypt; slavery was formally abolished in the late nineteenth century, and by the time my father was a boy in the 1930s, slave-owning families like ours had long since released their right-hand men and women. But even if the letter of the law changed in Egypt’s official statutes, the spirit of concubinage lived on in the working girls of al-Batniyya, who used an Islamic provision to get the job done, allowing themselves to be temporarily possessed by their clients—in more ways than one.

Today, certain forms of matrimony serve much the same purpose, lending religious respectability to what is nakedly commercial intercourse. A case-in-point is Samia, a soft-spoken woman in her early twenties. She comes from a town south of Cairo and had just spent a couple of weeks in the big city over the summer. “We stayed in Zamalek in a high-class area. I sat at home mostly; I didn’t go shopping or to the movies,” she told me. This might sound like a pretty dull family vacation, but Samia wasn’t on holiday, nor was she with her parents, although she did spend time with a man old enough to be her grandfather.

“He was around sixty or seventy years old. He came with the broker. I saw him and the next day he came and married me,” she said. “I knew that he was married in Saudi Arabia and has a wife. Every
day we would have breakfast together, and then practice [have sex]. I didn’t want to go outside with him because I didn’t want anyone to see me. I asked him some questions [about his life], but he never answered, and I didn’t really care because I just wanted to finish the relationship. After two weeks, I went back to my family.”

Tourists from the Gulf pour into Cairo to escape the summer heat and humidity of home. In recent years, Egypt has sold itself as a holiday destination for well-heeled Arab visitors, working wonders for the local economy. But some of that business is of a sexual nature. There is a well-established network of brokers and lawyers in Egypt procuring young women for these visitors, who enter into
zawaj misyaf
, a summer vacationer’s marriage, or a “deal marriage,” as locals call it. These unions, lasting from a few days to a couple of weeks, usually include a written contract and witnesses, which makes them
shar’i
, or Islamically sound. However, they remain unofficial because they are not registered with the government. Although the intent is to keep these unions temporary, the actual term is rarely written down, which means they sidestep the issue of
zawaj mut’a
, pleasure marriage permitted in Shi’i Islam but prohibited for Sunni Muslims. Aside from the veneer of religious propriety, these contracts also give couples some cover in the rare event that police ask questions of wealthy visitors. Commercial sex work is illegal in Egypt, with penalties of up to three years in prison and a fine of EGP 300 (USD 50) for “any person who habitually practices debauchery or prostitution,” as well as penalties for those who aid or abet the practice, though clients slip through this net.
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