Nine Parts of Desire Part 5

And now she was. It wasn't difficult to pinpoint what had gone wrong. At first the people of Jordan had been warm. "I hadn't expected the outpouring of affection," she said, thinking back to the early days of her marriage. Others in Jordan remembered it too. "She tried to give a speech in Arabic, and halfway through she got a bit fl.u.s.tered and looked as though she was about to cry," recalled Metri Twall, a young Amman businessman. "The whole audience was behind her. People were calling out, 'Don't worry, we love you, you're doing great.' " The births of four children in six years also had pleased a population obsessed with family.

Those were the oil-boom years, when bright Jordanians could make a fortune working in the Gulf. Coming home, they built bou-gainvillea -splashed villas where thick-pile carpets m.u.f.fled the footfalls of Filipino servants and the only sound was the tinkling of decorative fountains.

In that era of conspicuous consumption, Noor at first stood out as being rather less ostentatious than the elite among her new subjects. Her wedding, in June 1978, was low-key by royal standards, held in the gardens of the king's mother's palace. Engagement and wedding photos show an unregal-looking bride, with a scrubbed face and lank hair. But that unstudied coed style soon vanished. With the media's need for a new Grace Kelly, international photographers such as Norman Parkinson made their way to Jordan, trailing famous makeup artists. Anthony Clavet, who specialized in creating distinctive "looks" for celebrities such as David Bowie and Sophia Loren, gave Noor a look of sleek, queenly glamor, accented by fine jewelry and French couturier clothes. The king and his beautiful wife became fixtures on the royalty and head-of-state circuit. It was possible to find them at their London address, opposite Kensington Palace, or in their hilltop retreat near Vienna as well.

But times had become harder in Jordan since then. The oil boom busted, and the bright young Jordanians who formerly would have been able to make their fortunes in the Gulf were staying at home, underemployed. Hardship bred frustration, and frustration fundamentalism. America's support for Israel, even during the violence of the intifada, had inflamed ever present anti-American sentiments.

In Amman, after the riots, everyone seemed ready to attack the queen as an extravagant clothes horse. "She has become our Imelda Marcos," sneered a young businessman. Even government officials joined in. "People remember the young girl who came here wearing blue jeans. They expect someone down to earth, not dripping with jewelry and jetting off to Europe," said one prominent politician.

The city, he said, was abuzz with the latest outrage. While the king had been in Kuwait seeking aid to patch up Jordan's ravaged economy, the queen had gone shopping. "She bought a piece of jewelry that cost three quarters of a million dollars," he said. "A Kuwaiti newspaper got ahold of the check and printed it under a headline, 'While the king begs, the queen spends.' " I asked him if I could borrow his copy of the article. "Well," he said, "I didn't actually see it myself. My friend saw it." For the next few days I chased this article across Amman. The friend would refer me to a neighbor who'd refer me to a shopkeeper who'd swear his son would be able to show me a copy. But he couldn't. I tried combing every Arabic information service and checking with press attaches at foreign emba.s.sies. Nothing. Finally I got out the Kuwaiti telephone directory and called each of the emirate's newspapers, one by one. At every paper the answer was the same: no such article had ever run. But in the minds of Jordanians it was as real as if they'd held the dog-eared clipping in their hands.

The king had joined us in the garden. Now, he interjected gently, in his soft, deep voice. "It's natural that someone close to me should become a target." The ancient bonds between the Bedouins and their leader, especially a leader descended from the prophet, created strong taboos against direct criticism. Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn't instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If Jordanians were unhappy, they couldn't punish their king. But they could make his wife's life a misery.

King Hussein had always been an accessible ruler who understood the Western press and rarely shied away from the chance to put his point of view on Middle Eastern affairs. But in the late 1980s things started to change. By the time I became Middle East correspondent in 1987, he had become harder to reach, walled off by an impenetrable defensive line of palace advisers. They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The fired prime minister, Zaid Rifai, had been a brave diplomat, astute at a.n.a.lyzing the shifting moods of Jordan's dangerous neighbors-Syria, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But his domestic politics were a disaster. His authoritarian streak led him to distrust the ordinary people of Jordan and disregard popular opinion. Under his direction, control of the press and TV was total, and a whisper of dissent, especially from citizens of Palestinian background, often led to a jail cell. It was ironic to me that in 1987 and 1988, when Israel was engaged in a virtual civil war with its Palestinians, I could go to a refugee camp anywhere on the West Bank or Gaza and talk to whomever I wanted. But across the river in Jordan a trip to a Palestinian camp required a permit and an intimidating escort of secret police whose presence stifled any possibility of a frank discussion. The riots had been a reaction to Rifai's repression, and the king had already eased the rules on free speech.

Hussein looked at his wife as if apologizing for what she had borne on his behalf. "It's sad and difficult for Noor, who has done so much here and in the outside world for Jordan."

Noor acknowledged that some of the criticism had to be addressed, and was trying to distinguish between behavior that she was prepared to change and behavior she wouldn't sacrifice. She had more or less decided that her style would change, but not her substance. After the riots she switched to clothes that were almost all Jordanian-made, from ballgowns to blue jeans. The big jewels vanished into a vault somewhere, to be replaced by down-homey pieces such as a charm bracelet decked with ornaments chosen by her children. Just after our first meeting she invited me to go with her to Jerash to inspect the preparations for that year's arts festival. She wore a mid-calf khaki skirt; mine came just to my knees. In the newspaper the next day I was amused to find myself in a picture standing just behind the queen. The photograph had been retouched to give me a modest pair of trousers. Sensitivities were obviously so great that even someone in the queen's entourage had to be covered.

But the queen was not going to submit to demands that she wear Islamic headscarves. "I don't play to one group or another, and I don't plan to start now," she said. "I think it's possible to-and I think I do-balance a respect for what's traditional in this society with what's practical for the role I have to play."

That role-her projects-would all continue, although, she said wistfully, "some of them will take years to be understood." When she married the king, she had asked him what she should do. "He said, 'Whatever you decide I'm sure will be right,' " she recalled. At the time she had been buoyed by his confidence in her. But her first visits to government officials were less encouraging. One minister strongly advised her to confine her public role to cutting an occasional ceremonial ribbon.

"Everyone would have understood that," said Ranya Khadri, a Jordanian law graduate. "If you just sit home and have kids, that's fine with everyone. The minute you try to do something different as a woman in this society, you open yourself up to gossip and criticism."

But Noor couldn't imagine a life without something resembling a job. "I'd always worked," she said. At first she involved herself with projects linked to her former career: urban planning, building codes and environmental issues. As her children were born, she became increasingly involved with issues of mother and child health and education, then women's training and employment, then sports and culture. By 1985 she was heading a large foundation from an office in a refurbished palace that had belonged to King Abdullah. Her projects tended to focus on women, especially the women of isolated rural areas. Many Bedouin tribes had stopped wandering with the seasons and settled down year round in makeshift settlements that lacked transport, clean water, health care. Lisa Halaby, the town planner, looked at these places and imagined them differently. Noor, the queen of Jordan, goaded the politicians to make them so. The men who ran Jordan weren't used to taking orders from a young woman.

And the men whose wives she was helping didn't always like the effect of her help. A rug-weaving project on a wind-swept hilltop named Jebel Bani Hatnida had been a roaring success because the women could do the work at home on simple, traditional looms made of sticks and stones. The queen had helped with design and organization, then bought the rugs as gifts for Jordan's official visitors. She also visited the women, squatting beside them in the dust and listening to their problems. The money for the rugs went straight to the women, giving them a measure of independence for the first time in their lives. One of them used the money from her first rug to pay for bus fare to the city to file for a divorce.

Noor had other interests that didn't sit well with religious extremists. There had been threats to disrupt the arts festival at Jerash, of which she was the princ.i.p.al patron. The festival had been growing every year, drawing traditional artists such as Arabian poets but also increasingly attracting European performers, such as foreign ballet companies, whose acts the fundamentalists considered lewd. They also opposed the creation of a scholarship boarding school, which the queen had sponsored. The school was to be coeducational-anathema to Islamic hard-liners. The "Christian causes" that had so worried the Bedouin in Maan entailed working with denominations such as Men-nonites, Anglicans and Roman Catholics who had refugee-relief programs running in Jordan.

Whenever Noor spoke about becoming a Muslim, she always stressed Islam's compatibility with the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which she'd been raised, and of the need to "promote an accurate image" of Islam's humanism and universal character. She criticized "extremists" for conveying what she said was a distorted picture of the faith.

Her sudden return from Washington in the midst of the riots had left her staring at a diary of empty, unscheduled days. She had to decide how to fill them: to hide from the criticism or to go out and face it. She went out. "It might be easier to retire slightly or retract slightly," she said, gazing at a fading beam of sunlight falling gently on a bed of soft pink roses. "I'd have more time with the children"-her own were then aged nine, eight, six and three. "I could exercise more or even read a book. But I feel I have a responsibility to those young people who believe in the same ideals as me but don't have the power to carry them out. If I pull back, I'm letting them down-especially the women." Her first public appearances had gone well. "I was so relieved to find that the rubbish in the atmosphere hadn't had any impact, thank G.o.d. I'd worried whether the rumors could affect the way people related to me. It was a mood that came, and seemed to pa.s.s... although you never let go of the knowledge that people could feel that way."

Later, when I got to know her better, she confided that she'd considered an alternate answer to her critics: having another baby. "I thought, That's something I can do that would please everyone.' " But in the end she decided against it. "I'd love to have another baby, but I also want to be a good family-planning model," she said. I laughed and said that the king's eleven children rather militated against that. She pointed out that fertility rates-Jordan has one of the highest in the world-are calculated on offspring per woman, not man. "By Jordanian standards, four children is still considered a large small family. If I had five, it'd be a small large family." That evening in the garden she hinted that the riots had not been quite the calamity for her that I had a.s.sumed. I had asked the king whether he felt the riots were a one-time explosion of emotion, or whether unrest could occur again. "I think it was a one-off," he said. The queen shook her head. "I don't think you can a.s.sume that, Sidi," she said. Sidi, meaning leader, was what the king's closest deputies called him. I wondered if she was the only one of them brave enough to contradict him. She went on to say that much would depend on whether people believed the promised changes to be genuine. She spoke warmly of the king's decision to call elections and the freeing of comment in the local press. A few days earlier an outspoken Palestinian journalist who had had her pa.s.sport confiscated and her career ended by Zaid Rifai's government had been invited to the palace for a meeting of reconciliation. "I was so glad," said Noor. "These are things that I have been pushing for and that His Majesty has always wanted for Jordan. But some of the people around him have tried very hard to prevent them from happening."

Between the lines, what had happened was clear. The queen's Western values had been at war with Zaid Rifai's authoritarianism. The riots had proved the queen right and Rifai wrong. Rifai was gone; the queen wasn't going anywhere.

Later that year the king's democratic initiative bore fruit in an election that left Islamic hard-liners dominating the Parliament. Just before the election, a delegation of liberal-minded Jordanians had come to the palace to brief him on the persecution of Toujan Faisal, a candidate whose campaign for greater women's rights had made her a target of extremist threats and hara.s.sment. The night before the vote, Hussein went on television and warned against religious extremism. The division of his country along religious lines, he warned, would never be tolerated while he lived. The extremists seemed to get the message and stopped short of violence against Toujan or her supporters.

Until August 1990, Jordan ticked along, the fundamentalist parliamentarians making a proposal, such as the banning of male hairdressers for women, and the rest of the community panning the idea and carrying on much as it always had. Free speech was exposing the fundamentalists' agenda to a healthy airing, and most people, it seemed, weren't buying it. One initiative that cost the Islamic bloc credibility, even with very religious Jordanians, was a proposal to ban fathers attending their daughters' school sports days. "Are they saying I'm so dirty-minded that I can't even be trusted to watch my daughter play basketball?" fumed one intensely religious father who had previously been in sympathy with the Islamic bloc.

Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the United States sent troops to Saudi Arabia, and Jordan erupted in an outpouring of support for Iraq. I went to a sermon at one of Amman's largest mosques and heard the preacher whip the overflow crowd into an anti-American frenzy, warning the U. S. Government that "your pigs will only come back to you in coffins, G.o.d willing."

It was the queen's moment. Suddenly, she could serve her adopted country in a way that no Arab-born consort could have. When Washington snubbed the king, sending Secretary of State James Baker and other officials to every other country in the region but Jordan, she got on a plane and went to her old hometown, lobbying senators and congressmen, asking them to understand the king's quest for a negotiated settlement. It was interesting to compare the press coverage she gleaned on these trips with the articles that had appeared on her first visit to Washington after her marriage. "I'd Be Delighted to Have His Child" cooed the headline on a 1978 People People magazine article, full of her thoughts on sport and shopping. This time she spoke at the Brookings Inst.i.tution and appeared on "Night-line," no longer asked about hairstyles and child rearing, but required to field hard questions about Jordan's foreign policy. She did it well, with poise and clarity. magazine article, full of her thoughts on sport and shopping. This time she spoke at the Brookings Inst.i.tution and appeared on "Night-line," no longer asked about hairstyles and child rearing, but required to field hard questions about Jordan's foreign policy. She did it well, with poise and clarity.

Back home in Amman, she encouraged the king to brief reporters hurrying to and from Baghdad through Jordan, the only gateway to Iraq that U.N. sanctions had left open. She arranged small dinners in a salon at her office for ten or twelve reporters at a time to meet the king and hear his version of events.

I saw a lot of her as I pa.s.sed back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Baghdad. Sometimes she invited me to the palace for supper. It was damage control, done with the lightest touch. And it worked. It was impossible to sit with the two of them for hours on end and not emerge with a better understanding of the king's delicate balancing act between Iraq and the hard place of American disapproval.

There was a guilty pleasure in these visits. My hotel room in Jordan was littered with packs of dried food, jerry cans for petrol and a pallet of bottled water: the gear I needed for trips to the front in Saudi Arabia or to the ruins of Iraq. Hanging in the closet were my khaki pants, marbled with baked-bean stains from my last stint with the United States marines, when we'd crouched on the sand, eating our slops from makeshift plates of torn-up cardboard.

Nadwa palace was the non sequitur in my wartime travels. When Noor excused herself to "see about dinner," what usually followed was a battery of servants carrying in a choice of two soups, three middle courses and four main dishes-always including the light, healthy things she liked, such as seaweed soup, grilled fish or spiced lentils with yogurt. The king rarely ate any of what he jokingly disparaged as Noor's health food. Every evening he picked at the same meal: a skewer of grilled lamb on a bed of rice. As soon as etiquette allowed, he pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. Noor, anxious for his health, would furrow her brow if he lit more than one. "When people say, 'Do you mind if I smoke?' I always say, 'I mind for you,' " she said. "I hate to think of people doing that to their bodies." Her oldest son, ten-year-old Hamzah, was an ally, berating his father in sotto voce sotto voce Arabic. Arabic.

The dinners, even the least formal ones around the circular cane table in the family room, were always lit with little candles in gla.s.s bowls edged with feathery greenery. The conversation was both a journalist's dream and worst nightmare. For once, here was a source who actually knew what was going on and was prepared to talk about it. On the other hand, most of what was said was off the record. Listening to talk like that is dangerous when it induces a sense of having the truth, when all one might actually have is self-serving spin.

Still, the king had known every United States president since Truman and been friends with most of them. He could be witty, and sometimes scathing, about Arab leaders. But he didn't dominate the conversation. Unlike many husbands, he seemed genuinely interested in what Noor had to say. Even Hamzah wasn't excluded. Although the boy's command of English was perfect, he preferred to speak Arabic, and would force his father to act as translator.

One day I flew with the queen to the border camps, where a flood of Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Sudanese and Bangladeshis were pouring out of Iraq, leaving behind their jobs and the fruits of years of hard work. It was a pathetic scene: rows and rows of tents packed with despairing people. Noor would wander through the hospital tent, talking to anyone who spoke Arabic or English, pulling a tissue from her pocket to comfort a crying Sri Lankan woman, feeling the forehead of a child to check for fever. With the camp administrators, she would pore over the plans for the tent camps, figuring better layouts for services such as water and food distribution points. Back in her office in the palace grounds, she would work the phones, calling Richard Branson, the head of Virgin airlines, to ask for extra planes to ferry the people home; asking other wealthy connections to help pay for a mountain of blankets. Suddenly, her star-studded Rolodex was a national a.s.set.

She would arrive home late and collapse, rumpled and exhausted, into the cotton-covered cane sofas of the palace's upstairs family rooms. Across Jordan, a dozen years of her work was unraveling. Jordan had made a good living as the transit point for trade with Iraq, but the U.N. boycott had left ports idle and drivers unemployed. "We're seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families' incomes are falling and girls' schooling is the first place they economize," she sighed. The first signs of malnutrition were showing up at child health centers. "People are cutting down on the protein in their diet and it's starting to affect the children's development." Often the palace phone rang as aid workers, her friends, called her at home to ask for her help to cut through red tape.

Sometimes we would watch the war news on CNN, sipping our seaweed soup from mugs. If Hamzah was still up, he sat by us on the couch, hunched over his Gameboy, fighting imaginary enemies as CNN showed footage of the preparations for a real war just across the border. Sometimes the king would borrow the Gameboy, to ease his nerves. There were stacks of videos piled up by the TV-Clint Eastwood Westerns for the king; romantic dramas for the queen. And there were videos they'd taped themselves during the crisis, including a Ross Perot appearance with Larry King, in which Perot, then a little-known Texan businessman, eviscerated Bush's Gulf policy.

Hussein played the Perot tape for me and laughed out loud at the Texan's account of the mysterious workings of Arab diplomacy. Much of what Perot was saying wasn't very flattering. In his folksy drawl, Perot was telling Larry King that the Arabs, left alone, would go inside some tent, rearrange the sand and come out with some deal Americans would never understand. It was an odd scene: the king, a master diplomat facing the negotiating challenge of his career, laughing his head off as Perot boiled down his life-and-death dilemmas to a series of quips.

A few days later Hussein received word of the first bombing of Baghdad in a predawn phone call. Noor, lying in bed beside him, felt his body go rigid as he held the receiver and listened to the bad news. He got up, put on his fatigues and went to visit his troops.

Since that morning the king had visibly relaxed. It was as if he'd tried everything to avert the war, done his best, and now was willing to leave it to fate. I visited the palace two nights after he'd gone on Jordan TV and made a speech that had enraged the Bush White House. Hussein had accused the United States and its allies of trying "to destroy Iraq," and had praised the bravery of the Iraqi people in the face of the onslaught. That night at the palace the king, watching CNN, learned that the United States was considering cutting Jordan's $50 million aid package. He shrugged and flipped off the remote control. "The noose is tightening," he said. "But I'm not prepared to subject every word I say to censorship or criticism from any source." In fact, he knew he didn't have to: the Americans needed the king to keep Jordan stable, and despite hard words on Capitol Hill, they kept up a clandestine flow of a.s.sistance.

Downstairs, in the formal sitting room, I'd been keeping my eye on a side table full of silver-framed pictures of world leaders. Since the start of the Gulf crisis, the pictures had been in constant motion. Saddam Hussein had slipped from the front row after his invasion of Kuwait. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak had disappeared altogether, while George Bush had been pushed behind a lamp. That night George Bush had reemerged, positioned cheek by jowl with Saddam, as if to send the message that Jordan was, after all, a neutral party in the conflict. In front was a picture I'd never seen before: Pope John Paul II, who had just called for an immediate end to the war.

Upstairs, Noor, wearing blue jeans, was on the phone to friends in the States, offering to fax them copies of the king's speech, so that they could read his remarks in context. On the street in Jordan, her efforts were winning praise in the salons and the mosques. Even the fundamentalists thought she was doing a good job of putting Jordan's case to a hostile outside world. It was the first time I'd heard the mosque crowd praise any woman for taking an active role.

Without the Gulf crisis, it was impossible to know whether she would have been able to live down gossip and criticism. But the war had won her a measure of popularity unimaginable a year earlier. One young taxi driver I rode with had a picture of her tucked into his sun visor. She was wearing military fatigues, as if she were about to literally do battle with America. Did he know, I asked him, that she was American? "She is Arab," he replied fiercely. "She is one of us."

But just a year after the war the rumor mills were grinding again with whispers of divorce. This time most Jordanians were hoping it wasn't true. The king, the rumors claimed, had fallen in love with a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian journalist and had promised to marry her. The young woman had worked for CNN during the war and had recently been tapped as the king's press secretary as part of an effort to get some younger staffers into the royal court. "If you put young people in the palace, and some of them are women, and one of them is beautiful, then you are bound to get these kinds of rumors," said one Amman journalist.

A cynical Arab businessman had a different view. "All the king's marriages have been state marriages," he said. "When he needed to be close to Na.s.ser, he married an Egyptian. When he needed England, he married an English rose. When he needed to mend fences with the Palestinians, he chose a woman from a West Bank family. The 1980s were the American decade, so the marriage for the eighties was with an American." In the 1990s, the businessman said, the king might sense the need for a different alliance.

But most Jordanians seemed to discount the story. They reasoned that, even if Hussein were infatuated with a younger woman, a divorce at his age would seem frivolous. What's accepted, even expected, for a man in his twenties is unseemly for a man of fifty-seven, even if he is a king. Some put the talk of divorce down to professional rivalry from men who had had their eyes on the press secretary's job. A scandal had traditionally been an easy way to dispose of an inconvenient woman.

Noor was now forty-one years old, had been married to the king for fifteen years, and was much better understood and respected in Jordan because of her role during the war. Her sons had been seen on TV on religious holidays, reading the Koran in flawless cla.s.sical Arabic. Some Jordanians had even started to murmur about the succession, saying that if the king lived long enough to raise these boys to adulthood there was no reason why one of them shouldn't be considered for the crown. Fifteen years living alongside the Middle East's great survivor had taught Noor a thing or two about securing her own position.

Still, the rumors proved unusually durable, and when press reports of an impending divorce made the papers in the United States and Britain, the Jordanian emba.s.sies took the unprecedented step of issuing denials. In Washington a friend who saw Noor at a small reception in her honor found her nervous and brittle, her usual composure and charm completely deserting her.

A few weeks later another explanation for her nerves emerged. The king had been rushed into hospital in the States to be operated on for cancer. The disease had attacked his urinary tract, and while the surgery was said to be successful, his condition would require regular monitoring.

In Jordan the mood was somber and uncertain. When the king arrived back after his surgery, the crowd that thronged the road to the palace was the biggest in the country's history. Their cries of "Aish "Aish Hussein Hussein [Long Live Hussein]" had a desperate intensity. It was hard to imagine another country in the Middle East where the outpouring of support for a leader would be as spontaneous or as sincere. [Long Live Hussein]" had a desperate intensity. It was hard to imagine another country in the Middle East where the outpouring of support for a leader would be as spontaneous or as sincere.

There would be no more gossip. No one now, not even the extremists, would risk a whisper of criticism of the king, even indirectly through attacks on the queen. For however long her husband had left to live, Queen Noor seemed certain to be secure on her throne.

If there had been a marital rift, it wasn't obvious when the couple came to the United States in 1994. After a checkup at the Mayo clinic at which the king got a clean bill of health, the couple were spotted in Washington, shopping for Harley-Davidson and BMW motorbikes. Together, they picked out three new bikes to be shipped back to Jordan, and took away about $2,000 in matching motorcycle clothes. The spending spree would help them reprise their courtship bike rides around the hills of Amman.

The king's recovery from life-threatening illness also seemed to reinforce the risk-taker in him. Perhaps he sensed that time was short. In 1993, just after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their sudden and controversial peace accords in Washington, Hussein allowed Jordan's scheduled elections to go ahead as planned. Foreign diplomats and most of his own government ministers had warned against it, fearing that a political campaign would become a front for agitation by Islamic extremists and hard-line Palestinians who didn't want peace with Israel. Jordan, they said, would be destabilized.

Instead, the elections went off without a hitch. Behind the king's resolve, I was sure I saw the queen's quiet influence at work, and his world view gradually becoming identical with hers. Not long after the elections, in the winter of 1994, a satirical revue lampooning the pomposity of Arab leaders opened in Amman. Some of Jordan's neighbors were not amused, and tried to have the revue shut down. The king stood up to the pressure and said the show must go on, including the skit that skewered his own sometimes ponderous rhetorical style.

Jordan was one of the first countries I'd visited when I moved to the Middle East in 1987. In six years I saw it transform itself from a tense police state to the most promising cradle of political freedom in the region. The fundamentalists were still there, but so were the feminists. No group's rights had been trampled for the sake of another's. The struggle went on, but it went on in the open. And the weapons were words, not bombs or gunshots or ma.s.s arrests.

To me, it was clear that much of the credit for that transformation belonged to a woman.

Chapter 8.

THE G GETTING OF W WISDOM"Read, in the name of thy Lord, who hath created all things; who hath created man of congealed blood. Read, by thy most beneficent Lord, who taught use of the pen; who teaches man that which he knoweth not."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF CONGEALED BLOOD.

In Saudi Arabia the road north from Riyadh is a flawless strip of six-lane bitumen slicing through wind-sculpted sand dunes. Every few miles, through the shimmering heat haze, it is possible to glimpse the ruins of yellow mud lookout towers cut with rifle slits. They are eroding, like children's sand castles.

My Saudi friend took a hand off the steering wheel, reached into the refrigerated glove compartment of his luxury four-wheel drive and tossed me a frosty can of soda. Then he threw one to the American in the back seat, a colleague he had enlisted for the day to play the role of my husband.

My Saudi friend, an urbane, Western-educated professional, wanted me to meet his uncle, an old man who lived out among the sand dunes near the hometown of Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, the preacher who had taught a form of Islam so severe it banned even whistling. The uncle was a true Wahhabi, strict and austere. It wasn't certain he'd agree to speak to me-"he's never spoken to a woman outside his family before," my friend said, but he thought it would be worth a try so that I could understand the forces stacked against change for women in Saudi Arabia. The "husband" in the back seat was essential. "My family is used to a lot of strange things from me, but showing up alone in my car with a foreign woman would be pushing their understanding a bit too far."

The uncle, Mohamed al-Ghazi, lived in a flat-roofed house beside a grove of date palms. High orange sand dunes cradled his fragile little farm. When I opened the door of the air-conditioned jeep, a blast of hot air hit me like a gust from a crematorium. My eyeb.a.l.l.s felt desiccated, like dried peas. T. E. Lawrence described the heat of these Arabian sands: "The sun came up like a drawn sword and struck us speechless." And he wasn't wearing a black abaya and opaque stockings at the time. I squinted enviously at my friend and his uncle embracing each other in their cool white robes and sandals. An irreverent thought occurred to me: if G.o.d really liked women, He would have revealed the Koran to an Inuit fur trader rather than an Arabian camel-caravan manager.

Calling to his wife, Mohamed al-Ghazi signaled me to follow her to the women's quarters. My friend placed a hand on his uncle's arm and explained that he wanted me to sit with them, in the men's reception room, to talk about local history. I stood a small distance away, my abaya billowing in the hot wind, as a rapid-fire dialogue in Arabic ensued. Finally the uncle shrugged glumly and, without looking at me, beckoned me inside.

The men's majlis, majlis, or reception room, stretched the length of the house. Mohamed al-Ghazi was an important man in his tiny village. Five times a day he led the prayers at the local mosque. As prayer leader, or imam, he was the villagers' spiritual guide, and for performing that service he received a stipend from the government. Before oil wealth had allowed the government to afford such handouts, Mohamed had eked out a living from his dates, rising before dawn each morning to hand-water trees so few and precious that he had given each of them a name. He had been fifteen years old before he even had time to learn to read the Koran, so demanding was the toil required to wrest a subsistence living from the desert. Now, oil had brought electricity to power a water pump, and enough income to employ a foreign laborer. Every Friday, after community prayers, the imam slaughtered sheep and covered the floor of his majlis with platters of lamb and rice. The men of the village joined him for lunch and a discussion of the issues of the day. or reception room, stretched the length of the house. Mohamed al-Ghazi was an important man in his tiny village. Five times a day he led the prayers at the local mosque. As prayer leader, or imam, he was the villagers' spiritual guide, and for performing that service he received a stipend from the government. Before oil wealth had allowed the government to afford such handouts, Mohamed had eked out a living from his dates, rising before dawn each morning to hand-water trees so few and precious that he had given each of them a name. He had been fifteen years old before he even had time to learn to read the Koran, so demanding was the toil required to wrest a subsistence living from the desert. Now, oil had brought electricity to power a water pump, and enough income to employ a foreign laborer. Every Friday, after community prayers, the imam slaughtered sheep and covered the floor of his majlis with platters of lamb and rice. The men of the village joined him for lunch and a discussion of the issues of the day.

I asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. "They put their problems to him through their husbands, of course," he said.

"But what if their husband is their problem?"

That possibility hadn't crossed either man's mind.

The Friday before our visit, Mohamed's majlis had been abuzz with rumors about the women who, demonstrating for the right to drive, had dismissed their chauffeurs and taken to the wheels of their cars in downtown Riyadh. The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: "I hope I never see it in my lifetime," he said.

But once, many years earlier, he had become a radical in his small rural community. He had pet.i.tioned the government to open a boys' school in the village. Some of his neighbors were scandalized by the idea of secular education. Imams in neighboring towns sermonized against education, subst.i.tuting the word filth, or mingissa, mingissa, for the word for school, for the word for school, madra.s.sa. madra.s.sa. To them, the only subject worthy of study was the Koran, and their boys were already learning that at the local mosques. Of what use were history, geography and foreign languages, they argued, when such studies brought knowledge of unG.o.dly lands and peoples? To them, the only subject worthy of study was the Koran, and their boys were already learning that at the local mosques. Of what use were history, geography and foreign languages, they argued, when such studies brought knowledge of unG.o.dly lands and peoples?

But Mohamed al-Ghazi knew that the prophet's lieutenants had spoken foreign languages, and that they had used that knowledge to spread Islam. And what was the danger, he argued, in teaching the geography and history of Islamic lands? In the cities, the ulema, ulema, or religious regulators, had already fought these battles, making sure that the curriculum banned subjects such as music, which is considered too sensuous by Wahhabis, and art, which could lead to the creation of graven images. Mohamed al-Ghazi's campaign eventually won the village its school. Two of the imam's sons who studied there had gone on to university; the third had joined the military. or religious regulators, had already fought these battles, making sure that the curriculum banned subjects such as music, which is considered too sensuous by Wahhabis, and art, which could lead to the creation of graven images. Mohamed al-Ghazi's campaign eventually won the village its school. Two of the imam's sons who studied there had gone on to university; the third had joined the military.

His daughters were another matter. To the gnarled old imam, sending his daughters out of the home-to walk in the streets, even if veiled, to sit among strangers, even if all girls-was wicked. His daughters learned what he felt they needed to know, which was to recite the Koran, in the seclusion of the women's quarters of their house.

Today in Saudi Arabia, fathers like Mohamed al-Ghazi can still make such a choice for their daughters. Schooling for girls, although now widespread, has never been compulsory if their fathers disapprove. Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.

Saudi Arabia didn't get its first girls' school until 1956. Its opening was contrived by Iffat, the wife of King Faisal, and the only Saudi ruler's wife ever referred to as queen. Iffat, who had been raised in Turkey, wanted to broaden education to include more science and more Western subjects, but she had to proceed cautiously even in opening such a school for her own sons. The girls' school was an infinitely more delicate matter. When Dar al Hanan, the House of Affection, opened in Jeddah in 1956, it did so in the guise of an orphanage. Since the Koran repeatedly orders Muslims to care for orphan girls, such an inst.i.tution was beyond reproach. It had been running a year before Iffat felt able to risk explaining the inst.i.tution's real intention.

In an article in a local paper t.i.tled "The Mother Can Be a School in Herself If You Prepare Her Well," the objectives of Dar al Hanan were described as producing better mothers and homemakers through Islamically guided instruction.

Iffat, through Faisal, based her case for women's education on a famous set of verses in the Koran that have become known as Umm Salamah's verses. Umm Salamah, the beautiful widow whose marriage to the prophet had so upset Aisha, is said to have asked Muhammad one day why it was that, when G.o.d sent his revelations, the language in them was always addressed to men.

According to a hadith, Umm Salamah was in her room by the mosque, combing her hair, when she heard the prophet's voice from the minbar, minbar, or pulpit. "I hastily did up my hair and ran to one of the apartments from where I could hear better. I pressed my ear to the wall, and here is what the prophet said: or pulpit. "I hastily did up my hair and ran to one of the apartments from where I could hear better. I pressed my ear to the wall, and here is what the prophet said: " 'Lo! Men who surrender unto G.o.d, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth, and men who persevere, and women who persevere, and men who are humble and women who are humble, and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard their modesty, and men who remember G.o.d much and women who remember-G.o.d has prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward.' "

What the verses made clear was that the obligations of the faith fell without differentiation on men and women. To carry out those obligations, Iffat argued, women had to be educated and informed. By 1960 the ulema had been brought to grudging acceptance of this principle, and cautiously agreed to the spread of girls' schools throughout the country. The provisos were that the schools would remain under the control of the ulema and that no father who objected would be obliged to send his daughters to them.

But for some Saudis that wasn't enough. In the town of Burayda, not far from Minsaf, men rioted in protest at the opening of the first girls' school in 1963. At around the same time as the United States was calling out its National Guard to enforce racial desegregation of schools in the American South, King Faisal had to call out the National Guard to keep the Burayda school open by force. For a year, the only pupil in the school was the headmistress's daughter.

Many fathers continued to exercise their option of keeping daughters ignorant. By 1980, only 55% of Saudi girls were attending primary school, and only 23% were enrolled in secondary education. Only 38% of women were literate, compared with 62% of men.

Still, some girls managed to get the best education that money could buy. At Dar al Fikr, a private school for girls in Jeddah, the German-built campus is about as magnificent a school building as it's possible to imagine. Inside the privacy of a towering white wall, gla.s.s doors swish open into a crisply air-conditioned foyer of polished stone. The layout is star-shaped, with cla.s.srooms radiating from large indoor recreation areas. High ceilings and huge panes of gla.s.s give an open, airy feeling to art studios, a gymnasium, science labs and a computer center humming with Commodore and Macintosh desktops.

No cla.s.s has more than twenty pupils. There is a day-care center, being used when I visited by the teachers' infants, but available to the students in a country where early marriage and pregnancy are accepted and encouraged. In addition to an academic curriculum that stressed languages, girls could choose courses in cookery or dressmaking, karate or ballet, desktop publishing or motor mechanics. The motor mechanics course puzzled me, since Saudi women weren't allowed to drive. "If her driver says there's something the matter with the car, I want her to know if he's telling the truth," explained the headmistress, Basilah al-h.o.m.oud.

The pupils had the well-tended look of the very rich. They were tall, with l.u.s.trous hair swept back in thick braids. The headmistress, a svelte, silk-clad thirty-eight-year-old, had the unlined skin of a teenager and the taut body of an aerobics addict. "The gym is the most important room in my house," she said. Twenty years earlier, her older sister had wanted to study dentistry, impossible then for women in Saudi Arabia. Basilah's father had moved the whole family to Syria so her sister could study at Damascus University. She came home as the first Saudi dentist and opened a clinic to treat both men and women. But she soon found that some Saudi men used to strict segregation couldn't cope with having a strange woman touch them, even with a dentist's drill. Tired of propositions and misunderstandings, she separated her clinic into men's and women's sections and hired male dentists to treat the men.

Basilah, too, preferred professional segregation. Dar al Fikr had a neighboring school for boys and a male board of directors. When Basilah had to have a meeting with the board, or with her boys' school counterpart, she used closed-circuit TV. "I might need a colleague's support, but I don't need to be sitting in a room with him," she said. "If the men could come in here and be with us, they would end up dominating and telling us how to run things. I prefer to run my own show."

Basilah also used closed-circuit TV at the university, where she was studying for her MBA. Women were first admitted to university in Saudi Arabia in 1962, and all women's colleges remain strictly segregated. Lecture rooms come equipped with closed-circuit TVs and telephones, so women students can listen to a male professor and question him by phone, without having to contaminate themselves by being seen by him. When the first dozen women graduated from university in 1973, they were devastated to find that their names hadn't been printed on the commencement program. The old tradition, that it dishonors women to mention them, was depriving them of recognition they believed they'd earned. The women and their families protested, so a separate program was printed and a segregated graduation ceremony was held for the students' female relatives. Two thousand women attended. Their celebratory ululations raised the roof.

But while the opening of women's universities widened access to higher learning for women, it also made the educational experience much shallower. Before 1962, many progressive Saudi families had sent their daughters abroad for education. They had returned to the kingdom not only with a degree but with experience of the outside world, whether in the West or in more progressive Arab countries such as Egypt, Lebanon or Syria, where they'd breathed the air of desegregation and even caught a breath of secular culture. Now a whole generation of Saudi women have completed their education entirely within the country. While thousands of Saudi men benefit from higher education abroad at government expense, women haven't been granted such scholarships since 1980. The government's position is that women's educational opportunities have improved within the kingdom to the point where a woman's needs can all be met within its borders. The definition of her educational needs, as set out in a Ministry of Higher Education policy paper, are "to bring her up in a sound Islamic way so that she can fulfill her role in life as a successful housewife, ideal wife and good mother, and to prepare her for other activities that suit her nature such as teaching, nursing and medicine."

The result is a cadre of older Saudi women professors who are vastly more liberal than the younger women students they now are teaching. When some of these women professors took part in the driving demonstration, it was their women students who turned on them first. One student barged into one professor's office and started pulling at the professor's hair and abusing her for demonstrating. Young women objecting to the drivers led an angry protest from the campus mosque. Among the calls of the zealots following the demonstration was for the women's university to be permanently closed.

Lack of opportunity for education abroad means that Saudi women are trapped in the confines of an education system that still lags men's. Subjects such as geology and petroleum engineering-tickets to influential jobs in Saudi Arabia's oil economy-remain closed to women. Three of Saudi Arabia's seven universities-Imam Mohamed bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, the University of Petroleum and Minerals and the Islamic University in Medina-don't accept women. Few women's colleges have their own libraries, and libraries shared with men's schools are either entirely off limits to women or open to them only one day per week. Most of the time women can't browse for books but have to specify the t.i.tles they want and have them brought out to them.

But women and men sit the same degree examinations. Professors quietly acknowledge the women's scores routinely outstrip the men's. "It's no surprise," said one woman professor. "Look at their lives. The boys have their cars, they can spend the evenings cruising the streets with their friends, sitting in cafes, buying black-market alcohol and drinking all night. What do the girls have? Four walls and their books. For them, education is everything."

When Saudi women did go abroad to be educated in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the places they often selected was the American University of Beirut. In 1866 a Vermont missionary named Daniel Bliss laid the foundation stone for the men's college that was to become AUB, declaring that the school was for "all conditions and cla.s.ses of men without regard to color, nationality, race or religion. A man white, black, or yellow, Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this inst.i.tution... and go out believing in one G.o.d, in many G.o.ds, or in no G.o.d."

The AUB opened a Women's School of Nursing at the university as early as 1905 and accepted its first woman student to the general campus in 1921. She arrived fully veiled and accompanied by her husband. By the mid-sixties, the last all-male bastion, engineering, had fallen to coeducation.

For a while, the transplant of American liberalism seemed to work. Leila Sharaf, a Lebanese Druse, witnessed the birth of dozens of political and philosophical movements on the campus in the 1950s, and fostered the rise of Arab nationalism. "There were so many clubs," she says. "The Arab Cultural Club, the Loss of Palestine Club, the Baathists." Women sat with men in the coffee shops fringing the campus, arguing pa.s.sionately into the night. Leila Sharaf met her future husband, a Jordanian Muslim, at one of the clubs and returned with him to Jordan, where she eventually became minister of information in the Jordanian government and a close adviser to Queen Noor.

But by the middle of the 1960s the return to Islamic fundamentalism began to emerge as an ideology in compet.i.tion with Arab nationalism. The university's liberalism, and its American name, began to make it a target of extremists.

The heart of the liberal program at AUB has always been a cultural studies course that takes students from the Epic of Gilgamesh through Homer and Virgil to Locke, Descartes and Hobbes. In 1966 the imams of some Beirut mosques got hold of a required text from the course that quoted the medieval Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, saying that the Islamic faith's swift expansion didn't indicate the religion's inherent truth. Police burst onto the campus to arrest the heretical author. "I told them Mr. Aquinas wasn't available at the moment," recalls Tarif Khalidi, a medieval historian who helped develop the cultural studies program. He found himself hauled off to be interrogated instead. It was one of his students, Hanan Ashrawi, who raised the alarm and brought the president of the university and the Lebanese interior minister to have him set free.

By the 1980s the attacks were no laughing matter. One day in 1984 a crowd of Hezbollah activists poured into the campus and planted a green Islamic flag atop one of the buildings. Sheik Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, gave a speech about the prophet's daughter Fatima and her importance as a role model for Muslim women. "It wasn't that he said anything particularly controversial, but you can speak about the weather, and everyone knows what is meant," says Wolfgang Kohler, a German scholar who happened to be on campus that day. To him, the message was that Hezbollah's power extended even within the gates of the most important American inst.i.tution in Lebanon.

That message was conveyed brutally in January 1984, when the university president, Malcolm Kerr, was murdered near his office by gunmen with silenced pistols. AUB faculty and staff also became kidnap victims. In 1985, in the wake of the Kerr murder, the cultural studies program came under fire again. This time the issue was the teaching of sacred texts-one of the gospels, an epistle of St. Paul, parts of the Koran-that was led by a Christian member of the faculty. "With the growth in the number offundies in the arts faculty, more and more students found it objectionable to be taught the Koran by a Christian," Tarif Khalidi recalls. "So we decided to throw out the sacred texts, much to my regret. How can you understand, say, St. Augustine, if you haven't read any Old and New Testament?"

Mostly, the university resisted sectarian pressures. Men and women continued to mix freely on the tree-shaded, seaside campus, and more women still wear blue jeans than veils. And that is a thorn in the side of extremists. In 1991 a powerful bomb tore the heart out of the campus, leaving a pile of rubble beneath the gate inscribed with the university's motto: "That they may have life and have it more abundantly."

Tarif Khalidi has no doubts about where he and his colleagues stand with fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim. "I have reason to believe they hate our guts. I know myself I set out consciously to sow doubt in their minds." One area in which he likes to sow doubt is the role of women. His mother was one of the first Arab women to appear in public without the veil. "She was always reading the Koran and shaking her head," he recalls. "The line about 'men are in charge of women' used to make her really angry."

To go from the liberal, tolerant campus of the AUB to the gates of the Islamic University of Gaza feels like traveling backward in time. In fact, it is the Gaza campus that offers the more accurate vision of the future as Islamic groups gain increasing influence.

The campus of the Gaza university is split down the middle, with one section for men and one for women. When I visited the women's campus in the spring term of 1993, I wore a scarf and a loose-fitting, long-sleeved ankle-length dress, since I knew the inst.i.tution strictly enforced hijab. But my arrival at the women's gate caused a flurry anyway. "We have to find you a jalabiya," jalabiya," explained Asya Abdul Hadi, a recent graduate, pointing to her own neck-to-toe b.u.t.ton-through coat. "Even on the women's campus, we have men professors." explained Asya Abdul Hadi, a recent graduate, pointing to her own neck-to-toe b.u.t.ton-through coat. "Even on the women's campus, we have men professors."

Eventually, someone found a baggy blue serge garment that belonged to a student at least five inches taller than I. Grabbing a fistful of fabric so I could walk, I tottered after Asya into the high-walled campus and past a jumble of low, asbestos-roofed huts.

What Berkeley was to the antiwar movement of the sixties, the Islamic University of Gaza is to the holy-war crowd of the nineties. Most of the campus supports Hamas, the Islamic group that calls for a war to the death against Israel. The university's militance was so menacing to the Israelis that the army declared the campus a closed military zone from 1987 to 1991 and hauled most of the faculty and a large swatch of the student body to prison.