Nine Parts of Desire Read online

  At first, I’d naively assumed that hijab would at least free women from the tyranny of the beauty industry. But at the Iranian Women’s Conference, locked up day and night with a hotelful of Muslim radicals, I soon learned I’d been mistaken.

  I’d asked Hamideh to arrange a meeting for me with the women of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The group’s strongholds were the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs—no-go areas for Western journalists since the kidnapping of the Associated Press bureau chief, Terry Anderson. I wanted to ask about Anderson, who was spending his days chained to a radiator in a lightless Beirut basement. To meet the women said to be married to his captors seemed like the best chance I’d ever have to get information for his desperate family.

  In the end, I learned nothing about his plight, but meeting the women was instructive in other ways. They invited me to join them that evening for tea in their suite, provided that I promised not to name them in any articles I wrote. When the door opened to my knock, I thought I had the wrong room. The woman in front of me had frosted blond hair streaming to her waist. She wore a silk negligee with a deep plunge neckline. On the bed behind her, another woman lay languidly in a bust-hugging, slit-sided scarlet satin nightgown. Through the filmy fabrics, it was obvious that their bodies were completely hairless, like Barbie dolls. It was, they explained, sunnat, or Islamically recommended, for married women to remove all body hair every twenty days. The traditional depilatory was a paste of sugar and lemon that tugged the hairs out by the roots. Muslim men, they said, also should remove their body hair. For men, the recommended time between depilation is forty days.

  It took a few minutes to recognize the bleached blonde as the same woman who had wailed the emotional eulogy at the Khomeini house. When I mentioned my surprise at the way she looked, she laughed. “This is how we are at home,” she said, striking a seductive pose. “Islam encourages us to be beautiful for our husbands.” I suddenly understood why Khadija, Khomeini’s widow, had hennaed her hair to carrot-orange, and why an inch of gray had grown in since she stopped doing it on her husband’s death.

  Her daughter Zahra somehow didn’t seem like the carrot-curl type, or the plunge-neck negligee type, for that matter. Under her chador, she wore matronly twin sets and tweedy skirts—donnish clothes for a donnish woman who taught philosophy at the University of Tehran.

  It took me three years and many meetings before she relaxed enough to allow me to see her in anything but her chador. Even in a room full of women, she rarely let the chador fall from a clenched-fist grip that kept it pulled down past her brows and up over her lips. The style led to confusing graphics in the Women’s Society literature. The Society liked to promote its prominent women—its members of Parliament, artists and authors. But in photographs everyone came out looking exactly the same: a little white triangle, apex down, inside a big black triangle, apex up.

  Once, during the Tehran conference, Zahra momentarily let go of her chador, revealing some lip and chin. Someone’s flash bulb popped. Consternation. Could whoever had taken the picture please hand over the film? The Women’s Society would develop it, excise the offending picture and send back the rest of the shots on the roll, along with an appropriate picture of Mrs. Mostafavi. All eyes in the room turned to me. As a journalist, I was the prime suspect. Flapping my chador to prove there was nothing up my sleeve, I explained that I didn’t have a camera with me. A sheepish Khatima Ma confessed to being the culprit. As she handed over the film, she looked a little crestfallen at the Hong Kong Muslim Herald’s lost scoop.

  Zahra Mostafavi was a heavy-set woman, pallid and jowly, with the same fierce profile and intense expression as her father. Austere wire half-spectacles perched on her nose and an elaborate diamond-encrusted gold ring flashed on her hand. As head of the Women’s Society, she was the most politically active of Khomeini’s three surviving daughters. Sedigheh, a widow, lived quietly with her seven children. Farideh, a theology scholar, was married to a rug merchant in Gum.

  Zahra’s position as a philosophy professor was quite an achievement for a woman who had never been to school. Like many religious Iranians before the revolution, Khomeini refused to send any of his children to what he felt was the corrupt state-run education system. Zahra was educated at home by handpicked men of religion. Every day, at her request, her father tutored her himself for half an hour. Zahra found herself drawn toward metaphysics and to Western philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant.

  Khomeini, she said, was an easygoing parent most of the time, but unyielding on Islamic issues. “If I wanted to play at a house, and he knew there was a boy there, he would say, ‘Don’t go there, play at home,’” she recalled. “You couldn’t say, ‘Come on, Dad, let me go,’ because what he said was based on Islam, not on his own opinion.”

  Once she finished her studies, Khomeini began to scrutinize potential husbands. Zahra turned down three suitors he suggested before accepting the fourth. “My father would come to me and say, ‘I’ve chosen one, I think he’s not bad, he has this and that characteristic, but it’s up to you.’” All were men she had met through the family. “It wasn’t as if they were strangers. I knew what they were all like; I waited for the one that I knew would suit me.” She chose an academic, who now heads an educational think tank. As a married woman, she stayed behind when the shah ordered her father into exile. But she would visit him each year, returning with revolutionary tracts and tapes hidden in her clothes. Back in Tehran, she would go out at night to distribute them. “I’d take my son and have him scramble up trees and drop copies over people’s fences,” she recalled.

  Her own daughter, coming of age after the Islamic revolution, didn’t face the kinds of restrictions that had kept Zahra mostly at home. Once the revolutionaries gained control and purged institutions such as schools, universities, banks and businesses, Khomeini had no objection to the participation of women (correctly veiled) in politics and the economy. So his granddaughter went to law school, married a cardiac surgeon, and wound up living in London while her husband completed his training.

  In the winter of 1993, when Khadija needed specialist medical care, Zahra didn’t hesitate to bring her to London. I had moved from Cairo to London by then, and was surprised to get a call inviting me to lunch with her at the Iranian consulate. It was the week of the fourth anniversary of her father’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie, and to mark British displeasure the foreign secretary had met with Rushdie. The Iranians, miffed, had immediately raised the visa fee for British travelers to Iran to a staggering £504.

  But Zahra waved all that off with a flick of her plump wrist. She had never been an easy person to chat with: every conversation I’d ever had with her started with the words “Bismillah al rahman al rahim [In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful]”—always a disincentive to small talk. As well, the combination of growing up in a preacher’s home and working as a university lecturer had left her with a tendency to monologue. Once she got going it was hard to interject a question, much less hold anything that resembled a conversation.

  But over lunch in London she seemed much more relaxed. Encouraging me to take more rice, more chicken, more kebab, and piling her own plate with healthy portions, she talked merrily about the pleasures of London: the trees, the wide avenues, the polite people. I knew that Khomeini, when he went into exile in France, had averted his eyes on the drive from the airport to his residence, so as not to be contaminated by a Western environment. At his house outside Paris he’d had the pedestal toilet removed and a humbler, oriental-style squat version installed. Zahra smiled when I asked if the un-Islamic atmosphere of London bothered her. “I have no problems here,” she said. The only slight unpleasantness had occurred when an Iranian exile who recognized her in the street had shouted an abusive remark about her father. “Of course, I don’t like anyone to insult my father, but he was always ready to forgive anything aimed at him personally. It was attacks on Islam that he couldn’t forgive.”

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bsp; In her chador, Zahra stood out on the streets of London. Many devout Iranian women didn’t wear their chadors in the West for that reason. One of the main objectives of hijab is to make a woman less eye-catching. In London, a chador drew many more stares than a scarf and coat would have. But for Zahra the chador was like a second skin that couldn’t be discarded.

  One reason she had invited me to the consulate was to show off the women diplomats working there. One handled international law, another studied the status of women in Britain. Their presence was something of a triumph for the Women’s Society, which had pushed to have women assigned abroad.

  These women were an entirely different group from the modern, middle-and upper-class minority who had thrived under the shah’s liberalizations, many of whom were destroyed by the revolution. One, Esfand Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman in the Iranian cabinet, had been wrapped in a sack and machine-gunned for the crimes of “corruption on earth, expansion of prostitution and warring against God.” What she had done was direct schoolgirls not to veil and order textbooks revised to present a more modern vision of women. Hundreds of women had been imprisoned for refusing to follow revolutionary dictates; thousands fled into exile.

  But others, from poor, conservative, rural families, emerged for the first time from behind the high walls of the andarun—the women’s quarters of traditional homes where the vast majority of Iranian women used to live their entire lives. Khomeini encouraged these women to come into the streets, where they had never been welcome, to demonstrate for the revolution. He even stated that they didn’t need their male guardian’s permission to leave the house for such a purpose. His views on the matter weren’t, he said, his views at all, but the literal laws of Islam. If Muhammad’s sunnah was that women could marry at nine, then of course they could marry at nine. If it said they couldn’t be judges, then of course they’d be banned from the bench. But if it said they could do other things—run a business, as the prophet Muhammad’s first wife had done, or tend the sick, or even ride into battle, as women of the prophet’s era had—then of course Iranian women must be permitted to do the same. Suddenly, because the imam had spoken, conservative fathers, husbands and brothers had to listen. To women who would have spent their lives in seclusion, wearing a head covering was a small price to pay in return for the new freedoms.

  Still, it intrigued me that, while public pressure and state laws could be brought to bear to force women into hijab, no one seemed to pay much attention to Islam’s dress code for men. The Koran urged men, as well as women, to be modest. Muhammad’s sunnah was unambiguous on the matter: as women must cover all but hands and face, men were obliged to cover the area of the body from navel to knee. The covering had to be opaque and loose-fitting enough to conceal the bulge of male genitals.

  But all over the Islamic world men flouted that code. Crotch-hugging jeans were the fashion among the youths of the Gulf. Soccer players—national heroes—competed in thigh-high shorts. Top-rating televised wrestling matches featured sweaty men in jockstraps. At the Caspian Sea, where Iranian women had to swim in chadors, no one insisted that the men wear swimsuits covering their navels.

  The hypocrisy was especially evident at Iranian soccer matches, where chador-wearing women couldn’t take their sons to see a game because the male players weren’t Islamically dressed. Meanwhile, the same matches were televised nightly on state TV that called itself the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic. Whenever I asked Iranians about this, they would simply laugh or shrug. “Women are supposed to leave the room if their husbands want to watch football,” one friend said. “Even this government knows there’s a limit. You can ask a country to make many sacrifices, but expecting men to give up watching football would be pushing things too far.”

  The answer, of course, went much deeper. In Muslim societies men’s bodies just weren’t seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women’s. Getting to the truth about hijab was a bit like wearing it: a matter of layers to be stripped away, a piece at a time. In the end, under all the concealing devices—the chador, jalabiya or abaya, the magneh, roosarie or shayla—was the body. And under all the talk about hijab freeing women from commercial or sexual exploitation, all the discussion of hijab’s potency as a political and revolutionary symbol of selfhood, was the body: the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.

  Chapter 2

  WHOM NO MAN SHALL HAVE

  DEFLOWERED BEFORE THEM

  “The whore, and the whoremonger, shall ye scourge with an hundred stripes. And let not compassion towards them prevent you from executing the judgement of God.”

  THE KORAN

  THE CHAPTER OF THE LIGHT

  The operating theater was a whitewashed cavern gouged out of an African hillside. In its bleaching light, the patient’s flesh looked like a slab of putty. Reaching wrist-deep into an abdominal incision, the surgeon grasped the woman’s slippery, glistening uterus as if it were the enemy.

  The patient, at forty, was an old woman by the harsh reckoning of this Ethiopian province. She was a survivor of famine, war and the routine violence waged against women by the country’s ancient customs. At the age of eight, she had been held down while her clitoris was scraped away with an unclean knife and the raw flesh sealed with inch-long acacia thorns. On her wedding night, her husband had to use his dagger to slice his way into the jagged cicatrix that had become her genitals. That pain had been the prelude to recurring agonies as she delivered four children through a birth canal choking on its own scar tissue. Here, one in five births ends in the mother’s death.

  That risk, at least, would soon be over. Wrapping her gloved fingers around the woman’s diseased uterus, the surgeon hacked with unexpected force at the last shreds of tissue holding it in place, bracing her foot against the operating table as she tugged the organ free. The smell in the small, rock-walled room was a pungent medley of ether, disinfectant and freshly butchered meat.

  Wielding clamps the wrong shape for pelvic surgery and aged, bent suturing needles, the doctor paused from time to time to wring blood from the swabs packing the patient’s abdomen. “We have a shortage of gauze.” she explained.

  Abrehet Gebrekidan was used to shortages of almost everything, except patients. In 1977 she left her job at Syracuse Medical Center in New York to join a ragtag secessionist movement waging Africa’s longest war. As an obstetrician and gynecologist, she knew her skills would be needed in the mountain hideouts from which her people, the Eritreans, fought Ethiopian annexation from 1962 until the central government fell in 1991.

  When I met her, late in 1989, Dr. Abrehet worked in a hospital whose “wards”—thatched shelters with saline drips hanging from tree branches—rambled for almost three miles through a steep-walled mountain valley. Much of her work had nothing to do with the war. Instead, it involved saving women from the worst consequences of genital mutilation. In Eritrea, girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn’t bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes the baby’s trapped head led to fatal hemorrhage or ruptured the bladder, causing seepage of urine that made the woman smell like a latrine and poisoned her later fetuses.

  With antiquated equipment, each procedure took much longer than it should. The hysterectomy, a job of about an hour and a half at Syracuse Medical Center, dragged on into the night. From first incision to final, awkward suture took Dr. Abrehet almost five hours. Outside, the next case, a thirteen-year-old, waited patiently for the operation that would reconstruct her vaginal wall. The girl, a Muslim nomad, had been
married at ten. Her husband’s rough intercourse had been too much for her immature body, tearing the tissue that divides the vagina from the rectum. The girl had run away from her husband and joined the Eritrean guerrillas. They had enrolled her, for the first time, in school, and brought her to Dr. Abrehet.

  Above her green surgical mask, Dr. Abrehet’s sweaty brow bore a crudely tattooed cross. Eritrea, an England-sized wedge of land along Ethiopia’s coast, has three and a half million people divided almost equally between highland-dwelling Christians and coastal-lowland Muslims. Dr. Abrehet drew her patients from both communities. The practice of mutilating women’s genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The Eritreans’ guerrilla movement was among the few African organizations trying to wipe it out. The campaign was part of a wider agenda of promoting women’s rights that included reforming land distribution to give women a share and pressing for women’s representation in politics.

  “We can’t force them, we can only teach them,” said Amina Nurhussein, one of six women elected to the Eritreans’ seventy-one-member policy-making body. Infibulation had begun to decline in the highland areas, where the predominantly Christian population saw the custom as a cultural duty rather than a religious command. But in the Muslim lowlands the issue remained extremely sensitive. As a Muslim herself, Amina understood the obstacles. “The women have been told it’s written in the Koran that they must do these things,” she said. She could tell them it wasn’t but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik.

  Educating the women so that they could read the Koran for themselves was the keystone in the Eritreans’ patient campaign against genital mutilation. A year before I met her, Aset Ibrahim would have told anybody who asked that clitoridectomy and infibulation were essential to a woman’s beauty and well-being. “My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute,” said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old. “I even learned to believe that it looked nicer that way. We grow up reciting the saying, ‘A house isn’t beautiful without a door.’ “