Nine Parts of Desire Read Free Page A

neglected elderly proved to Sahar the bankruptcy of our secular ways. At the root of it, to her, was Western feminism’s insistence on an equality of the sexes that she felt ignored women’s essential nature. “Islam doesn’t say women are inferior to men; it says they are different,” she argued, trying to explain the ban on women judges in some Islamic courts. “Women are more emotional than men, because God has designed them to care for children. So, in court, a woman might show mercy where logic demands harshness.”
Talking to Sahar gave me a feeling of deja vu. When I was fourteen years old, a convent girl in a Sydney Catholic school, the deputy head nun called us to assembly and read us the riot act. Some of us had been seen in the streets wearing our school sweaters without blazers over them. Sweaters, she said, were indecent, since boys would be able to make out the shape of our breasts. The school uniform included a blazer, and if any of us ventured out of the grounds in a sweater without a blazer over it, she would know what kind of girls we were. That same nun insisted we wear hats in church. Quoting St. Paul, she told us that woman, as the instrument of man’s downfall in Eden, wasn’t fit to appear bareheaded in the house of the Lord.
I thought the nun was a fossil. I stopped going to church as soon as I understood how Catholicism’s ban on birth control and divorce could ruin women’s lives. Sahar, a woman of my own generation, had made a choice exactly opposite to mine. Something was going on here, and I determined to try to understand it.
I started with Arabic, the language of the Koran. Only one in five Muslims is an Arab; yet Arabic is the language in which the world’s more than one billion Muslims—a fifth of the world’s population—talk to God.
The Arabic language is as tribal as the desert culture that created it. Each word trails a host of relatives with the same three-letter cluster of consonants as its root. Use almost any word in Arabic, and a host of uninvited meanings barge into the conversation. I learned that one of the words for woman, hormah, comes from the same root as the words for both “holy, sacrosanct,” and “sinful, forbidden.” The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for “source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion.” In the beginning was the word, and the word, in Arabic, was magnificently ambiguous.
The nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was unobtainable. I found myself referring to two quite different English interpretations—George Sale’s for a feel for the poetry of the work, and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall’s for a clearer sense of what the text actually said about sex and marriage, work and holy war. But even when the language was clear the message was often mixed. “Respect women, who have borne you,” the Koran says. But if wives are disobedient, “admonish them, send them to beds apart, and scourge them.” To try to reconcile such conflicting instructions, I sat in on classes at the new women’s religious schools springing up throughout the region, and learned about the dozens of women who shaped the early history of Islam. Again, ambivalence. Women behind the curtain of seclusion; women at the forefront of Islamic holy war.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Algeria and Sudan, Islamic fundamentalists were struggling into power. In Egypt and Jordan powerful minorities pushed their governments toward sharia —literally, the road to the water hole, or the straight path of Islamic law. Muslims migrating to the West also were making demands: ban offensive books, let our daughters wear veils to school, give us sex-segregated classrooms.
Was it possible to reclaim the positive messages in the Koran and Islamic history, and devise some kind of Muslim feminism? Could Muslim fundamentalists live with Western liberals, or would