Finally Ashgan took her bow, then led me onto the stage. I looked down on a sea of turbans and felt a wave of panic. But with an insistent boom-tap-tap from the drummer, the music took off, and I went with it, losing myself in its circles and switchbacks. Oriental dance is improvisational, and demands an intuitive understanding between musicians and dancer. As the drumming gained speed and intensity, I had to match the rhythm with a buildup to a frantic, isolated hip shimmy that sent the thousands of gold beads in my belt shivering. Later the pace slowed until I was almost stationary: just a few muscles twitching to the long-drawn-out notes of the rebaba.
It seemed as though I’d been onstage for a thousand and one nights. Finally I heard the shift in the music that allows the dancer to bring the dance to an end with a graceful salaam. I made my bow and turned to leave the stage. A Saudi leapt up, waving an Egyptian ten-pound note, demanding an encore. To my astonishment, the rest of the audience banged the tables for more. Ashgan, in her most graceful arabesque of the night, reached for the ten pounds with one hand and grasped my wrist with the other, propelling me back under the spotlight. We did the encore together. Halfway through, she leaned over and peered down the front of my costume, then turned to the audience. “Mafish!” she cried in Arabic. “Nothing there!” We left the stage together to thunderous applause.
Later the manager, Samy Sallam, gave my performance a more hard-nosed review. “Your dancing,” he said, “it is technically quite good. But you don’t have enough feeling. You must learn the emotion as well as the steps.” He gave me his business card and remarked, rather ambiguously, that I should give him” a call. I knew I wouldn’t. I’d made my little protest about a woman’s right to dance.
I walked out of the steamy club into the wintry night air. Although it was after 3 A.M., the streets and cafés were still full of people, laughing together, enjoying themselves. In Egypt it seemed unlikely that a dour, fun-denying fundamentalism could ever really take hold for very long. The Egyptians seemed too much like the Italians: they’d listen politely to the Pope, but they’d still manage to put a porn star into Parliament.
Most Egyptians were too intensely pious to accept the extremists’ wanton gunning down of tourists or writers or people who happened to be standing in the wrong place when they launched an attack in the streets of Assuit and Cairo. Despite lives of hardship and frustration with a sluggish, corruption-riddled government, it was hard to imagine Egyptians turning their backs on the tolerance and good humor that made their crowded cities and muddy villages so pleasant and livable.
The old lute stringer in Mohamed Ali Street was right. It might take awhile, but the dancers would be back.
CONCLUSION: BEWARE OF THE DOGMA
“Say: O unbelievers! I will not worship that which ye worship; nor will ye worship that which I worship.… Ye have your religion, and I have my religion.”
THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE UNBELIEVERS
I have learned to live by the rhythm of other people’s prayers. In Cairo, I woke at sunrise to the voices of muezzins and timed my lunch break by the midday call to prayer. There are no muezzins where I live now, on a lane of old London houses built two hundred years ago by refugees from France. The refugees, all Catholics, also built a small church by their cottages and so, these days, it is the Ángelus bell that wakes me in the morning nad sends me to the kitchen at noon in search of food.
One day in the summer of 1992 there was a guest for lunch. A detective arrived first, to search my closets and poke his head into the attic. A filament of dust clung to his hair as he gave the all clear over a walkie-talkie. The cars roared into the lane, fast. “Leave the door open now,” the detective said. The guest couldn’t risk lingering on the doorstep. He entered, suddenly, at the center of a flying wedge of bodyguards. A floppy brown fedora fell low across his face. Sunglasses hid the distinctive droop of his eyelids and the improbable circumflex of his brows. After four years in hiding, Salman Rushdie’s skin had the fishlike translucence of a man who never sees the sun. His posture had eased into the self-effacing slouch of an adolescent who desperately doesn’t want to be noticed.
I was living in Cairo when the storm broke over The Satanic Verses. Just after Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death, I took my copy of the novel to Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel laureate, whose own novels had been censored on religious grounds. I hoped he might write a defense of Rushdie: a plea for tolerance, for the freedom of ideas. Mahfouz took the book from my hands and pushed it to the far side of his desk, where he wouldn’t have to look at it. He was tired, he said: worn out from his own battles with fundamentalism. He did not think he would enter this engagement.
Perhaps he was wise. On the day Salman Rushdie came to lunch at my house, we talked together for an article I was writing on the chilling effect the fatwa was having on all writers dealing with Islam. I had felt the chill myself, sitting on a sunny terrace in southern Lebanon with a leading cleric of Hezbollah. By then, I was used to the averted gaze of devout Muslim men, and it seemed normal to me to be conversing with someone whose eyes were focused on a floor tile an inch in front of my shoe. He was considering whether to let me meet his wife. He found it troubling that my book would mention the prophet Muhammad’s wives and daughters. “You will have to be very careful,” he said. Suddenly, he raised his turbaned head and shot me a single, penetrating glare. “Be sure you do not make any mistakes.”
Rushdie and I didn’t know, as we sat talking of these things, that the Egyptian writer Farag Foda lay dying, that same day, of gunshot wounds inflicted by Islamic Jihad in reprisal for his eloquent and often scathing critiques of religious extremism.
In the progressive Shiite magazine Dialogue, Ali Allawi writes of the difficulties of potential European converts to Islam in seeing the faith standing separate from “the prejudices and social baggage of Islamic lands.” Once Westerners “are able to dissociate Islam from this background noise,” he writes, “they are able to quickly appreciate its veracity.”
But these days the background noise is very loud. And every day’s news seemed to raise the decibels. The World Trade Center explodes on the apparent say-so of a militant Islamic preacher. A United Nations human rights report finds Sudan’s Koran-based punishments in conflict with the international human rights agreements the country has signed. In response, the government of Sudan threatens the report’s Romanian-born author with death. In Egypt a militant cleric named Ali Yehya commands his followers to tear down the Pyramids and all other pharaonic monuments because civilizations that existed before Islam were base and idolatrous. In Algeria two women are gunned down at a bus stop because they are not veiled. In Saudi Arabia a newspaper editor goes to jail because his English-language newspaper runs a cartoon strip, “BC”, that the Saudi government deems heretical. The offending cartoon was a two-frame piece in which a Stone Age man stands on a hill and asks, “God, if you’re up there, give me a sign.” In the second frame, the man is deluged with a sudden rain shower. “Well,” he says, “we know two things: He’s up there, and He’s got a sense of humor.” The Saudis jailed the editor, a Hindu, for running a cartoon strip that questioned the existence of God.
Like the Rushdie fatwa, these incidents come at us from so deep in left field that we, as Westerners, have no coherent way to think about them. We shrug. Weird foreigners. Who understands them? Who needs to?
And yet, as I made my home in London, gradually shaking the last few fine crumbs of Cairo dust from the pages of my books, I found that the background noise of Islam remained always there, in the distance, like a neighbor hammering. And eventually I accepted that it was neither possible nor right to ignore it.
That summer, not long after Salman Rushdie came to lunch, I answered the phone to a distraught friend whose neighbor had just been knifed to death. The dead woman was an imam’s daughter from the Sudan. She had been stabbed by her husband, also a Sudanese.
It was winter by the time the case came to trial. Every da
y for five days I walked through a cold London drizzle to a small court in the Old Bailey. To the great machine of British justice, it was a routine case. The press benches were empty. A simple “domestic” between middle-aged marrieds from a middle-class suburb was too ordinary to be of interest.
The facts of the killing weren’t in dispute. Just before dinnertime, in the kitchen of his handsome Victorian house, Omar stabbed his wife, Afaf. With the dripping knife still in his hand, he walked to the phone and called his closest friend to tell him what he had done, and then called the police.
In the small public gallery I sat between the man’s brothers and the woman’s neighbors. The brothers, who had flown from the Sudan for the trial, shivered in their summer-weight suits. The neighbors, well-groomed young mothers who knew the victim from parent-teacher nights and weekday excursions to garden-supply centers, seemed uneasy with the Old Bailey’s hard-bitten police procedures. In the gallery they scribbled in notebooks perched on their knees, as if their meticulous records would somehow help them make sense of the thing that had happened on their tranquil, tree-lined street. Just once in the five days, when the barrister for the prosecution held up the weapon—a good-quality Sabatier cook’s knife—and questioned a pathologist as to the exact wounds it made when it plunged five times into the victim’s chest and abdomen, one of the women put down her pen and sobbed uncontrollably.
At issue in the court was whether the act was a premeditated murder or, as the defense claimed, manslaughter that took place when the accused was temporarily out of his mind as the result of “reaction depression” brought on by the knowledge that his wife had had an affair, and that she had, on the morning of the stabbing, obtained a court order restraining him from taking their children out of Britain to live with his family in the Sudan.
As I listened to the facts of the case, I could interpret them two ways. The Western way, as the jury was interpreting them, led to a description of something we all understood: a crime of passion in a spur-of-the-moment insane frenzy. The other way, the way I’d learned living among the women of Islam, described something very different: a cleansing of family honor, a premeditated killing that would, under British law, draw a sentence of life imprisonment.
From where they sat in their jury box, the men and women of the jury couldn’t see Omar as he stood each morning beside his police guard, waiting to be escorted into the court. But from the elevation of the public gallery I could see him, and so could his brothers. Each morning he looked up at them and raised a clenched fist in a defiant victory salute. His step, as he entered the dock, was almost jaunty.
Afaf, thirty-eight years old when she died, was a kinswoman who had been married to him by arrangement. She was barely fifteen; he was already thirty. That Omar was her relative, as well as her husband, mattered perhaps more than any other single fact in the court case. It was as a relation, a male of her blood kin, that tradition deemed him most dishonored by her adultery.
Afaf had made the most of a life that had offered her few choices. She had had no choice when they scraped away her clitoris, married her to a man she barely knew and sent her thousands of miles from home, to a city whose language she didn’t speak.
Afaf lived in London with Omar while he studied for his doctorate. In 1985, unable to find an academic post in Britain, he began work in Saudi Arabia. For ten months of every year Afaf raised her four children alone. While working in clerical jobs, she managed to finish high school and a computer course and to begin a degree in social science. A heavy-set woman with a wide smile and an open manner, she managed to break through British reserve and make friends. For Omar, returning only once a year from Saudi Arabia’s austere religious atmosphere, it wasn’t so easy. He was hostile to some of Afaf’s closest friends, especially an unmarried couple who lived across the street. He felt such neighbors created an “atheistic atmosphere” for his children.
Gradually, the long separations and Afaf’s change from docile young wife to an independent, accomplished woman began to fray the marriage’s fragile bonds. In 1987, Afaf and Omar stopped sharing a bedroom. But Afaf was afraid to ask for a divorce, fearing that Omar would spirit the children back to the Sudan, where Islamic law would give her no right to their custody.
Then one of her work mates, Andrew, a tall, sandy-haired divorcé, fell in love with her. At first she kept her distance, but slowly his support at the office extended to help at the house, where the years of Omar’s absence had left odd jobs undone and rooms dilapidated. It was Andrew who explained to Afaf that British law would protect her rights to her children. In January 1991 she wrote to her husband asking for a divorce.
Omar agreed. But then, on his next trip home, he learned that Andrew had been to his house and even spent the night there once when he’d worked late painting the sunroom. Omar was outraged that the neighbors might have noticed. His main concern was to keep the visits secret, because, he told the court, he was concerned for his family honor if Afaf’s relationship with another man became public. According to Andrew’s testimony at the trial, Omar told him he had no objections to his meeting Afaf, so long as it happened away from her home and the prying gaze of the neighbors.
Afaf may well have lived to divorce Omar and marry the man of her choice if it hadn’t been for one long, stressful day of arguments over Omar’s right to go out alone with the two younger children, whom Afaf feared he might try to abduct. Omar, frustrated and furious, went to visit his one Sudanese friend, broke down, and confided his suspicions of his wife’s infidelity.
That friend, called as a witness in court, described how he’d burst into tears as Omar spoke. Those tears—straight from the heart of a fellow Sudanese who knew the depths of Omar’s dishonor—may well have caused Afaf’s death. Omar’s Western-trained intellect might have been able to win the war with his social baggage if, as he’d intended, his wife’s relationship had remained secret. But once his friend knew, the dishonor was an accomplished fact that could be wiped away only in the ancient, bloody way. That Omar’s first call after the killing was to this friend—not a doctor, not an ambulance, not the police—seemed to me the strongest evidence of motive presented in the court. Yet the prosecution never made this connection.
At the end of the week the jury reached a manslaughter verdict on the grounds of “diminished responsibility.” For ending his wife’s life, Omar received a prison sentence of six years. Taking off the time he’d already served since the killing and a likely two-year remission for good behavior, he will probably be free by July 1996.
From the facts presented in that small courtroom, there was little chance of any other verdict. What was missing wasn’t evidence but understanding of the prejudices and social baggage of Islamic lands that Omar had carried with him from the Sudan, his country of upbringing, and from Saudi Arabia, the country in which he worked ten months of every year.
Nothing in their own culture or experience equipped this jury of very ordinary-looking English people to comprehend that what had been described in court was an honor killing, one of the hundreds that every year claim Muslim women’s lives.
This was not an isolated case; it simply happened to be the one I heard about. In a British study of family violence completed not long after Afaf’s death, the researchers found that women married to men of Muslim background were eight times more likely to be killed by their spouses than any other women in Britain. Yet British barristers, judges and juries continue to assess these crimes by a yardstick that’s completely inadequate to measure what is really going on.
Presented with statistics on violence toward women, or facing the furor over the Rushdie fatwa, progressive Muslims such as Ali Allawi, Rana Kabbani and others ask us to blame a wide range of villains: colonial history, the bitterness of immigrant experience, Bedouin tradition, pre-Islamic African culture. Yet when the Koran sanctions wife beating and the execution of apostates, it can’t be entirely exonerated for an epidemic of wife slayings and death sentences on authors.
/> In the end, what Rana Kabbani and Ali Allawi are proposing is as artificial an exercise as that proposed by the Marxists who used to argue that socialism in its pure form should not be maligned and rejected because of the deficiencies of “actually existing socialism.” At some point every religion, especially one that purports to encompass a complete way of life and system of government, has to be called to account for the kind of life it offers the people in the lands where it predominates.
It becomes insufficient to look at Islam on paper, or Islam in history, and dwell on the inarguable improvements it brought to women’s lives in the seventh century. Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith has proved such fertile ground for almost every antiwomen custom it encountered in its great march out of Arabia. When it found veils and seclusion in Persia, it absorbed them; when it found genital mutilations in Egypt, it absorbed them; when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women’s participation withered.
Yet there are exceptions. When the armies of Islam swept into India, Muslims were appalled by the practice of sati, in which widows, on a husband’s death, would burn themselves alive on his funeral pyre. In 1650 the traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote of Hindu widows, banned by their faith from remarriage and reduced by their husbands’ deaths to penury and contempt, choosing instead to end their lives through sati. “But it should be remarked,” he wrote, “that a woman cannot burn herself without having received permission from the governor of the place where she dwells, and those governors who are Musalmans [Muslims] hold this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror, and do not readily give permission.” For those women’s saved lives, at least, Islam can take the credit. But why did such a powerful and resilient faith not stand its ground more often in the face of “dreadful customs”?