Nine Parts of Desire Read online

  Mostly, it is poorer women who consent to sigheh. A lawyer friend told me about her cleaner, whose husband had died young and left her to support two children. “For a long time, she was a very bitter person,” my friend said. “She would come to my house and see me enjoying my life with my husband and daughter, while her life was nothing but work.” Then the cleaner contracted a temporary marriage. “Her personality changed overnight. It wasn’t just the money. Suddenly, she had a man to spend time with, to take her out. In our culture, a man and a woman can’t just go out on a date and enjoy each other’s company, but with sigheh they can.”

  Some Shiites also use sigheh to create a relationship that will allow a woman to appear unveiled in front of a man before whom it would otherwise be forbidden—for instance, a distant relative sharing the same house. These sigheh contracts are written to specify that no sexual relations are involved. In the West, some Shiite families are using sigheh as a way to make it possible for young couples to get to know each other well before marriage. A sigheh contract that bans sexual relations can allow a boy and girl to date each other for the duration of their engagement, without defying religion or tradition.

  Sigheh also provides an answer to the kinds of infertility problems that Westerners are now trying to solve with legal contracts for surrogate motherhood. In the Sunni branch of Islam, if a woman is infertile her husband usually divorces her or brings home a second wife. In Iran, a sigheh contract can be drawn up signifying that the object of the temporary marriage is a child that the husband and his permanent wife will raise.

  Sigheh is also the only way a Shiite man can marry a non-Muslim woman. Unlike the Sunnis, who allow Muslim men to marry other monotheists, Shiites demand conversion from all non-Muslim women, as well as non-Muslim men, before a permanent marriage is valid.

  Rafsanjani’s revival of sigheh came as a boon to nonreligious Iranians whose private lives had been disrupted by revolutionary intrusions. Unmarried lovers, for instance, couldn’t go away together for a weekend—hotels wouldn’t give them a double room without a marriage license, and Revolutionary Guards might catch them at any roadblock. For Lou, a European woman who had fallen in love with Persian culture and adopted Iranian citizenship, this posed problems. Although she had to convert to Islam to remain in Iran, her religious leanings were a melange of Zen, yoga and spiritualism. A bohemian at heart with no intention of conforming to Islamic sexual rules, she took many lovers, and many risks, until the reevaluation of sigheh. Now, when she takes a lover, she simply signs him up for a few-months sigheh and has a paper to wave at any prying revolutionary zealots. It probably isn’t what Rafsanjani had in mind.

  Yet, for both Sunnis and Shiites, whatever license their faith allows comes walled around with ghastly penalties for sexual transgression. The limits on sexual freedom in Islam are drawn strictly around the marriage bed, be it temporary or permanent. Extramarital sex and homosexuality are prohibited, and both offenses can draw the most horrific punishments in the Islamic legal code.

  While the death penalty, in Islamic law, is optional for murder, it is mandatory for any convicted adulterer who could have satisfied his or her sexual urge lawfully with a spouse. The sentence is commuted to a hundred lashes if the adulterer is unmarried, or if the spouse was ill or far away when the adultery was committed. In Iran, stonings, or, as the Iranians prefer to translate the word, lapidations, are still carried out in cases of adultery. Saudi Arabia also specifies stoning as punishment for married adulterers. Some of the victorious Afghan mujahedin supported so enthusiastically by the U. S. Government during their war with the Soviet Union want to reintroduce stoning in Afghanistan. Yet stoning is never specified as a punishment for adultery in the Koran. The Koran states that adulterous wives should be confined “to their houses until death overtakes them.” During Muhammad’s years in Medina, however, stonings for adultery were often carried out by the large Jewish community in the town, and several hadith have Muhammad also prescribing this punishment for Muslims. But it was after Muhammad’s death, during the rule of the second caliph, Omar, a man notoriously harsh on women, that stoning became codified as the means of an adulterer’s execution.

  Today, in Iran, men to be stoned are buried up to their waists, women to the chest, and the size of the stones is carefully regulated. Neither boulders nor pebbles may be used, so that death is neither mercifully quick nor endlessly prolonged. In November 1991 a thirty-year-old woman named Zahra, who managed to scramble out of the pit in which she’d been buried, had her death sentence commuted: the judiciary felt that her escape must have been the will of God.

  Those who have recently witnessed stonings describe all-male crowds, different from the mixed groups who attend beheadings. The mood is commonly one of rage and bloodlust. Part of the ritual of the Hajj—the holy pilgrimage to Mecca—is the stoning of pillars meant to represent Satan. Witnesses say the woman being executed somehow becomes as dehumanized as those pillars—an outlet, perhaps, for the men’s guilt at their own uncontrollable sexuality. Yet the stones in this case hit soft flesh. Because of the way she is buried, each impact snaps her neck backward in a series of excruciating whiplashes. Death often comes when her head is knocked completely off.

  It is hard to imagine a worse way to die. Yet the punishments set down for homosexual sodomy are designed to be even more cruel. If the partners are married men, they may be burned to death or thrown to their deaths from a height. If they are unmarried, the sodomized partner, unless he is a minor, is executed, the sodomizer lashed a hundred times. The variation in the penalty reflects the Muslim loathing of the idea of a man taking the feminine role of the penetrated partner. Lesbian sex, if the women are single, draws a hundred lashes. Married lesbians may be stoned.

  “Why is Islam so severe in matters of adultery, homosexuality and lesbianism?” asks Mohammed Rizvi, a cleric with the Vancouver Islamic Educational Foundation, who writes on Islam and sex. “If the Islamic system had not allowed the gratification of sexual urge by lawful means without associating guilt with it, then it would be right to say that Islam is very severe. But since it has allowed the fulfillment of sexual instincts by lawful means, it is not prepared to tolerate any perverted behavior.”

  But “perverted” behavior went on, even among the most sanctimonious Muslims. In the fall of 1990, when American troops were pouring in to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein, I went to report on how the Saudis were reacting. On my first night in the country I interviewed an influential oil company executive. Educated at Georgetown University and the Wharton School, I expected him to give me a Western-influenced, liberal view. Instead, he told me he hoped the Americans would stay sequestered on their bases to prevent “unholy ramifications” from contaminants such as alcohol and women drivers. He said he thought it was “obnoxious” that CNN had sent a woman reporter, the veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour, to cover the troop deployment. For him, America’s obsession with sexual equality was nothing but a front for immorality. “In any corporation, tell me the boss isn’t looking at his secretary and figuring out a way to have her. If it doesn’t happen, it’s only because of self-interest—too much to lose if they get caught.”

  His glass-walled study looked out on a floodlit swimming pool and a flower-filled courtyard. If the wall were not glass, he explained, he wouldn’t be able to sit with me. “If a man and a woman are alone together, the third person present is Satan,” he said. After about an hour I closed my notebook and thanked him for the interview. Showing me to the door, he paused, as an afterthought, and asked if I’d like to meet a few of his friends. Of course, I said.

  Stepping across the hall, he opened a door on a dimly lit room full of blaring rock music and entangled bodies. A gorgeous Filipina in a black Spandex mini-dress was dancing, rubbing herself rhythmically against her white-robed partner. Another man sat cross-legged on the floor, flashing a colored light at her legs. On sunken couches, a beautiful blond-maned Turk caressed an Egyptian woman for the b
enefit of a smiling male voyeur. At a bar in the corner, guests helped themselves to Johnnie Walker whiskey—$135 a bottle on the black market and its consumption punishable by flogging in the city square.

  Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he’d just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. “She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone stared at her,” he said with distaste. After the divorce he had kept the children, as was his right in Saudi law. He had no plans to remarry. “I can have a woman any time,” he said, nodding in the direction of the Filipina. “Last winter I paid a model to be with me for fifteen days in Switzerland.”

  I was baffled by this man’s hypocrisy until I read Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Palace Walk, in which the main character is a man of strong faith who strictly sequesters his womenfolk, but each night goes out whoring with Cairo’s famous singers. When a sheik chastises him for his fornication, he replies that “the professional women entertainers of today are the slave girls of yesterday, whose purchase and sale God made legal.”

  The Saudi clearly looked upon the women dancing in his disco room in a similar way. Most of them worked for Saudia, the national airline. It was one of the few jobs available for foreign women in Saudi Arabia, which generally didn’t grant work visas to women other than housemaids. The airline needed foreigners since no Saudi women could be employed in a job that required unchaperoned travel and constant contact with men.

  When I rose to leave, the Filipina asked if she could get a lift with my driver. She reached for her abaya—the Arabian version of the chador—and face veil. Aware of the men’s eyes on her, she twitched the black silk slowly forward, letting it insinuate itself inch by inch over her cleavage and pour slowly down her thighs. Taking the piece of gauze that covers the face, she tossed her long tresses forward, leaning suggestively toward the men for a moment, then turning slightly to provide a view of her curvaceous rump. She flipped her head back, catching all her hair in the veil. It was a reverse strip tease. At the end of it she stood there, a black cone, the picture of Saudi female probity.

  At first it surprised me that my hypocritical host would risk such a lifestyle in a country with such harsh laws against fornication. But eventually I realized that he was quite safe behind the high walls of his compound. In sexual offenses, executions and floggings usually take place only if the accused confesses. To get a conviction otherwise is almost impossible under Islamic rules of evidence, which demand that four male witnesses (or, since the testimony of a woman equals half a man’s, two female and three male witnesses) testify to having seen penetration. Accusers without the right number of witnesses to back their testimony will be charged with slander and sentenced to eighty lashes.

  But often, for women, none of these rules apply, because executions are carried out long before the accused ever gets near a court.

  “My father died when I was nine years old,” said Tamam Fahiliya, raking her nails through a wedge of curly, cropped hair. “Lucky for me. If he was here, maybe I would have been killed many years ago.”

  Tamam reached across the low coffee table in her apartment and stubbed out a cigarette. As she leaned forward, flesh rippled over the top of a low-cut bustier. Tamam lived alone, and lived dangerously, for a thirty-seven-year-old Palestinian Muslim woman. For three years she had had a lover: a handsome young Palestinian doctor who claimed to be a feminist.

  “Of course, it was just talk. In the end he went back to his village and married his cousin. A man can always go back. But not me. No one would marry me now but a geriatric or a crazy man.”

  Tamam wasn’t exaggerating to say her father might well have killed her if he had known of her affair. Every year about forty Palestinian women die at the hands of their fathers or brothers in so-called “honor killings” that wipe away the shame of a female relative’s premarital or extramarital sex. Most of the killings happen in the poorer and more remote Palestinian villages. Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name. “Honor” killings are somewhat better documented among Palestinians than elsewhere because of the Israeli occupation: many, although not all, of the deaths come to the attention of the Israeli military or civilian police.

  Yet honor killings happen throughout the Islamic world. One of the most notorious, the execution of the Saudi princess Mishaal bint Fahd bin Mohamed in a Jeddah parking lot in 1977, was secretly witnessed by a British expatriate. The airing of a film on the killing, in a documentary titled Death of a Princess, created a diplomatic incident that led to the expulsion of the British ambassador to Saudi Arabia. In the United States, when PBS planned to air the film, a major oil-company sponsor asked that it be canceled. Few of the facts of the affair have ever been confirmed. The story told on British TV held that Mishaal was a married woman who had run off with her lover, Khalid Muhallal, the nephew of the man who is now Saudi Arabia’s information minister, and had spent a few nights with him in a Jeddah hotel before trying to flee the country dressed as a man. She was caught at the airport and handed over to her family.

  But an American woman whose marriage into a prominent Saudi family made her intimate with the people involved in the case tells an even more extreme story. Mishaal, she says, was unmarried. She was killed simply for flouting the family will and running away from an arranged marriage in order to marry a man she loved. Her grandfather, Prince Mohamed, the patriarch of Mishaal’s branch of the ruling family, ignored pleas for clemency even from his younger brother, the king. Mishaal was shot; Khalid Muhallal was beheaded. There was no announcement following the killings as there is with executions that take place after due process of sharia law.

  In either version of the story, under sharia rules of evidence neither of the young people could possibly have been convicted. If the documentary’s account was correct, and Mishaal was a married woman who committed adultery, the penalty would have been death, but only if four witnesses had caught the pair in flagrante delicio at the hotel. Circumstantial evidence, such as being together in the same place overnight, would not have been sufficient. And as an unmarried woman, Mishaal had not committed a capital offense under sharia law.

  It was unusual for an extrajudicial honor killing to be carried out by an upper-class family such as the al-Sauds. Generally, it is the women of poorer and less educated families who are most at risk.

  Tamam’s father had been uneducated and needy: he supported his seven children by working as a gardener. The family lived in the ancient city of Akko, in a crowded quarter close to the Crusader walls that run along the sea front. Because her family was among 156,000 Palestinians who stayed, and didn’t flee, during the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Tamam grew up an Arab with Israeli citizenship, speaking Hebrew as fluently as Arabic. She was the last of five daughters; her name, which translates as “enough,” or “finished,” was her parents’ plea for an end to the long run of unwanted girls. Their prayer was answered, several years later, with the birth of two sons.

  The brothers, too, could have been problems for Tamam. But because they were so much younger, and because she left home when they were still small boys, they never had a chance to feel proprietorial about their sister. “For most of us, our brothers are like big, barking dogs who feel that their whole purpose in life is to guard our bodies,” she said. “It’s a kind of oppression for them, too, that they have to go through their lives feeling this responsibility and worrying that at any moment we will snatch their honor away.”

  After she finished school, Tamam left home immediately to take a live-in job teaching disabled children. Later she trained as a nurse. By the time I met her in 1993 she had been living alone or with friends for more than ten years. She was the only Muslim woman I’d ever met in the Middle East who di
dn’t live with either husband or family.

  In June 1991, Tamam picked up the morning newspaper and read a short item about a murder in the village of Iksal, in the Galilee, not very far from where she’d grown up. The woman was nineteen years old, unmarried and seven months pregnant. Her incinerated body was found tied up in a burned-out car. The murderer was the girl’s seventy-four-year-old father.

  “I felt, This girl is me. She is any one of us. We are all fighting for our lives here.’ “

  For about six months before the murder, Tamam and a few of her friends had been meeting once a week, reading feminist books and discussing the problems of women in Arab and Muslim societies. They had even come up with a name for their little group: Al Fanar—The Lighthouse. “We had big dreams about being a beacon for women in trouble. So I called my friends and said, ‘If we don’t do something about this case, what is the use of all our talking?’ “

  Tamam and her friends made placards which read: “Father, brother, support me, don’t slaughter me.” They called all the Arab women’s groups they knew, asking for support. They didn’t get much. None of the West Bank Palestinian newspapers would touch the subject, steering clear of any criticism of Arab society that could be used as propaganda by Israelis. West Bank women’s groups argued that the time wasn’t right, that the struggle for independence from Israeli rule had to come before questions of women’s rights could be raised. The Israeli-Arab political parties also kept clear, not wanting to antagonize their constituents.

  Tamam and her dozen friends put up the money to advertise the demonstration in two Arab-Israeli papers. Immediately her phone started ringing with harassment and threats. “The callers accused us of promoting promiscuity,” Tamam said. One caller quoted the Koran’s injunction that men are meant to be in charge of women, and accused her of heresy for challenging that notion. “They said if the demonstration went ahead we would all end up like the girl from Iksal.”