Nine Parts of Desire Part 6

We wandered to the students' common room, where a few women sat sipping c.o.kes and chatting. All of them wore jalabiyas in dull shades of brown, olive or navy. Asya introduced me to some of her friends who worked in the university administration. I asked if I could meet some of the women professors as well. "We don't actually have many women professors," said Majida Anan, a thirty-year-old administrator. "The priority here is for men to teach, because the man is the one who needs a career. The woman will be married and her husband will take care of her. And besides, if the university hires a woman, she can only teach here, on the women's campus, whereas a man can teach both here and across the street with the men. When we achieve our Islamic state there won't be any mixing at all."

Khomeini's daughter Zahra taught philosophy to mixed cla.s.ses at Tehran University. I asked Majida her opinion of that. "There are no opinions in Islam," she responded brusquely. "Islam says that men and women can mix if it is absolutely necessary. If there is no necessity, then they mustn't do it."

I'd hoped to find something different at Gaza University-perhaps the emergence of an Islamic feminism. Palestinians had always been among the most progressive on women's issues, and I thought the fusion of that spirit with militant Islam might produce something interesting.

But in Gaza the militants had latched onto a brand of Islamic radicalism that threatened to do worse than set the clock back for Palestinian women. What Majida was proposing had never been part of Palestinian culture. Instead, her ideas were imports: they had "Made in Saudi Arabia" stamped all over them.

Hamas devotes two articles of its thirty-six-article charter to the role of Muslim women. Women, it says, "manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation. The enemies have understood that role, and therefore they realize if they can guide and educate [the women] in a way that would distance them from Islam, they would have won that war. Therefore you can see them making consistent efforts by way of publicity and movies, cur-riculi [sic] of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like.... Therefore, we must pay attention to the schools and curriculi upon which Muslim girls are educated, so as to make them righteous mothers, who are conscious of their duties in the war of liberation. They must be fully capable of being aware and of grasping the ways to manage their households. Economy and avoiding waste in household expenditures are prerequisites to our ability to pursue our cause...."

When I'd first visited Gaza in 1987, girls, unveiled and wearing blue jeans, had been in the streets alongside the youths, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Mothers had been right behind them, ready with wet cloths or cut onions to counter the effects of tear gas. Women had gained stature from their role in such protests. Now, thanks to Hamas, women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures. "The struggle has changed," said Asya, a tall, intense woman with large dark eyes and heavy brows. "Throwing stones, it's for kids now. The activists who have real weapons don't stay in their homes; they are always moving from place to place, sleeping here and there. A woman cannot do that."

The struggle had changed, and so had Gaza. Driving from the huge military roadblock that divides the Gaza Strip from Israel, I hadn't seen a single unveiled woman. "There is no coercion," said Majida. I gazed down at my dowdy serge sack. "Of course, we can impose it here, inside the university. But outside we don't impose it. The relationship is with G.o.d and each woman can decide for herself."

I sipped my c.o.ke and said nothing. I had been in the emergency room of a Gaza hospital when a young Palestinian nurse came in, shaking, her uniform covered in wet, brown stains. "It was the boys in the market," she said. "They told me to cover my head. I told them I was Christian, but they said it didn't matter. They said, 'The Virgin Mary covered her head, so why not you?' They threw rotten fruit at me and told me next time it would be acid."

Most of the cla.s.ses were finished for the day. If I wanted to sit in on a women's religion cla.s.s, Asya told me, I'd have to come back in the morning. "Why don't you stay with me tonight?" she said.

I hesitated. "It's too much trouble for you to put me up," I said.

"What's the matter?" she laughed. "Are you afraid to stay in the camps? We are hospitable people here."

I was was a bit nervous. That week, an Israeli lawyer working on development projects in Gaza had been hacked to death with an ax as he met with his Palestinian clients. My journalist colleagues in Jerusalem had warned against even staying in a Gaza hotel. "Word gets around that you're there-anything more than one night is definitely unsafe," one journalist said. a bit nervous. That week, an Israeli lawyer working on development projects in Gaza had been hacked to death with an ax as he met with his Palestinian clients. My journalist colleagues in Jerusalem had warned against even staying in a Gaza hotel. "Word gets around that you're there-anything more than one night is definitely unsafe," one journalist said.

I told Asya that I'd be delighted to stay with her.

She walked ahead of me to the gatehouse, where I would have to hand back my long robe. "By the way," she said over her shoulder, "what is your religion?"

"I'm Jewish."

Asya spun around. Her mouth narrowed to a thin line. Her eyes darted across my face, then drifted off to scan the horizon. I tried to read her expression. Angry? Offended? I couldn't tell.

I'd only lied about my religion once, just after I'd arrived in the Middle East. It left me feeling so ashamed and cowardly that I resolved never to do it again. Since then my policy had been to tell anyone who asked. Usually the people I told were intrigued rather than hostile. An interrogation usually followed: What did I think about Zionism? Did anyone in my family give money to Israel? But Asya said nothing.

I put a hand on her arm. "If you'd rather I stay at the hotel, I'll understand," I said.

"No," she said, snapping out of her trance. "You must sleep at my home." Striding ahead of me, she hailed a cab, and we b.u.mped over the potholes toward the refugee camp of Dier el Balah. As the taxi sped out of Gaza City and through orange groves fragrant with spring blossoms, Asya changed the subject from religion to books. Her degree was in English literature. She talked of the novels she had liked best in her studies: Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jane Austen's and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Pride and Prejudice. I smiled. It was hard to think of two Western books more in tune with an Islamic world view than Hardy's tale of a woman ruined by s.e.xual dishonor or the Bennet sisters and their parlor-based quests for suitable spouses. I smiled. It was hard to think of two Western books more in tune with an Islamic world view than Hardy's tale of a woman ruined by s.e.xual dishonor or the Bennet sisters and their parlor-based quests for suitable spouses.

Asya's home wasn't anything like the cramped hovels of the camps. It stood right at the edge of Dier el Balah, where the claustrophobic, ill-drained alleys opened to farmland and the sweet scent of the sea beyond. The house was solid, generously built, and walled off from the street with a high, graffiti-covered brick fence. Asya lived with her widowed mother, a stooped, potato-shaped, uneducated woman who seemed more than a generation removed from her tall, intellectual daughter. Two younger sisters, a brother and his wife also shared the house. Asya's younger brother was in prison, accused of being an activist of Hamas. The others were scattered across the map of the Palestinian diaspora. One was a Palestine Liberation Organization fighter in Iraq, one a teacher in Saudi Arabia, one a worker in Greece. Diaspora remittances had built the house.

The brother she lived with usually worked as a laborer in Israel, but for several weeks, because of a series of murders by Palestinians,Israel had barred Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank from going to their Israeli jobs. That left Asya, who worked as an a.s.sistant to a Palestinian journalist, as the family's main breadwinner. When she walked in the door, her mother and little sisters hovered around her, bringing tea, a change of clothes, a hairbrush, bustling to serve her with a respectful attentiveness I'd usually seen lavished only on men.

Asya threw off her hijab, pulled on leggings and fluffed out her shoulder-length hair. When her sister brought her a knitted jersey, she pushed it away, asking in Arabic for a prettier one. The sister returned with a black polished-cotton smock with maroon flowers hand-painted around the hem. "You see," she said, "I look a lot different now." She did, of course. She had high cheekbones that were lost behind the scarf, and a lithe, athletic figure. I realized I'd disappointed her. She'd expected a compliment along the lines of the old black and white movies where the secretary lets out her hair and takes off her gla.s.ses: "Why, Miss Asya, you're lovely!" But I had become too used to these kinds of transformations to be surprised by them anymore.

When her sister-in-law brought supper, it was a collection of Egyptian staples: foul, tamiyya foul, tamiyya and and molokiyya molokiyya-mashed beans, fried chickpeas and an okralike green. Egypt had ruled Gaza between 1949 and 1967, and the Egyptian influence remained strong. Squatting on cushions, we scooped up the various vegetables on flat bread that Asya had baked before leaving for work that morning.

Asya usually slept in the women's reception room, which she shared with her younger sisters, but tonight she decided we would have a room to ourselves. She dragged two thin mattresses into a large salon, empty but for a closet against one wall. My instinct would have been to spread the mattresses out, to give us each a measure of privacy and personal s.p.a.ce. But Asya placed both mats in one corner, side by side, almost touching.

Asya reached for her radio and twirled the dial. I smiled as I recognized my own habit of reaching for the radio last thing at night and first thing in the morning, to catch the news. Through the static, she found, in turn, the BBC's Arabic service, Cairo's Voice of the Arabs, Radio Monte Carlo. She frowned intently as she recognized a voice she knew: the spokesman for the Hamas activists deported to Lebanon by the Israelis. In heated tones, he was denouncing the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. A peace agreement, he said, would open the bab al fitna, bab al fitna, the door to civil war. Asya nodded. "He's right. Hamas will never accept such an agreement." But when Arafat the door to civil war. Asya nodded. "He's right. Hamas will never accept such an agreement." But when Arafat did did sign a peace agreement that fall, no civil war broke out between Hamas and the PLO. While opposing the pact, Hamas vowed it wouldn't shed Palestinian blood. Instead, the Islamists stepped up their attacks on Israelis, and waited for the deal to founder. sign a peace agreement that fall, no civil war broke out between Hamas and the PLO. While opposing the pact, Hamas vowed it wouldn't shed Palestinian blood. Instead, the Islamists stepped up their attacks on Israelis, and waited for the deal to founder.

As the news ended, Asya rose and turned out the overhead light. She left a small night light glowing in the corner. In the semidark, we chatted in whispers, like teenagers at a pajama party.

Asya had become religious because of the example of her younger brother-the jailed Hamas activist. She had begun to wear hijab ten years earlier, at the age of nineteen. "Everyone was so surprised," she said. "It was, 'Why is Asya wearing that?' You see, this was a long time before the Islamic movements became very strong here, as they are now. Before I put on hijab, I used to be afraid of everything; afraid of ghosts, afraid of being alone in a room. When I put it on, the fears vanished. Now I know that this life is just a game, a house for testing people. Once you submit to that, there is nothing in this life that can frighten you."

Asya had just won a British Council scholarship to study journalism in London. "Do you know any journalists who wear hijab?" she asked. I said I couldn't think of any in the mainstream media, except in Iran, where there were women TV crews, sports reporters, photojournalists.

"Perhaps I will be the first one in London," she said.

Being twenty-nine and unmarried made Asya unusual in Gaza. She had already been through the initial stages of a number of proposals. "First, his mother and sister come to visit, to get a look at me out of hijab. If they admire me, they say they'd like to bring their son to meet me. But I say, 'Not so fast.' First, I must know, is he religious? What is his work? If he prays and he has a good job, I send somebody to ask his neighbors about him; friends bring me detailed reports. In most cases that's enough: I say to his mother, 'Don't bother to bring him, I'm not interested.' "

Because she worked, she also had the opportunity to meet men by herself, unfiltered by the rigmarole of matchmaking. But she ruled out anything like a Western-style romance. "The first time a man says to me that he likes me, that will also be the last time," she said. "I will tell him, 'Don't say these words to me. Here is the name of my brother. Go and see him with what you have to say.' " After Asya had interviewed for her job with the Palestinian journalist, her brothers conducted their own interview of her prospective employer to make sure that he and his office were suitable for their sister. They were. Her boss, himself a devout Muslim, worked out of his home with his wife and kids underfoot at all times, acting as chaperons.

Asya lay on her back with her hands linked behind her head, continuing her monologue. "Actually, I'm not very interested in men. Only to have babies."

Was this, then, the logical end to the ideals of segregation? A profound rejection of the opposite s.e.x? As I lay there, listening to Asya, I thought of all the smart young Islamic women I knew: Hamideh, my translator in Iran; Nahid, the former medical student and one of the four or five most beautiful women I'd ever met; Hadra, the soldier in the Emirates; a Kuwaiti political activist, a Jordanian journalist, a Kurdish teacher-all of them were single, long after the normal marriage age for women in their societies. And all of them, now that I thought about it, had talked about the problems of meeting men that they could talk to, who understood them, that they could trust.

"Yes, yes," Asya was saying, as if she had followed my thoughts. "It would be very nice to have a good relationship with a man that you marry, but that's not so easy with Eastern men." It wasn't, she stressed, the Islamic part of their heritage that made them difficult. "I would like to marry an Islamic preacher-a Western Western Islamic preacher." Islamic preacher."

"Good luck," I said, and we both giggled.

Asya turned on her side to face the wall. I thought she was ready to sleep. I rolled over myself and was almost dozing when she spoke again, her face still turned away from me. "Every time, when someone comes here to research about Islam, it turns out they're Jewish. Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know," I said. I really didn't. My interest in Islam had everything to do with being a woman and zero to do with being a Jew. But I knew what she meant. Many of the Western reporters in the Middle East were Jews. "Perhaps it's because Jews grow up more interested in Middle Eastern issues," I said. "Or maybe it's because Jews and Muslims are fighting each other here, and Jews think understanding Islam might help find ways to solve the conflict?" Asya was silent. "Perhaps," I mused, "some of them are convinced that Islam is dangerous, and they come here to find evidence to support that view."

"That's what I thought," she said. "Good night."

At the university the next morning, we made our way to a cla.s.s in the religion faculty, where women students were due to hear a lecture on Islamic regimes. "You'll find it very lively," Asya said. "Lots of questions and argument."

But when we arrived, the lecture room was deserted. A veiled student told Asya that the women had decided to protest the previous day's announcement of a resumption in peace talks with Israel, and had gone to a sit-in outside the home of Dr. Haider Abdul Shafi, the head of the Palestinian peace negotiators. The only cla.s.s under way was a math tutorial.

Asya and I braved the men's campus in search of the university spokesman. The corridors were full of bearded students, all conscientiously averting their eyes as we swished past them in our jalabiyas. Ahmad Saati, the spokesman, was a short, fleshy man who, like most of the faculty, had done his time in an Israeli prison, suspected of being an activist for Hamas. He apologized for not offering a handshake. "We have a saying: Tt's better to stab yourself in the hand than to touch a woman's hand.' "

"But doesn't intention matter?" asked Asya. "I thought it was all right to shake hands if you have a good intention." Ahmad, himself a graduate of the Islam Inst.i.tute of Higher Studies in Egypt, corrected her politely. "Your "Your intention might be okay. But what about mine? How can you know the other person's intention?" intention might be okay. But what about mine? How can you know the other person's intention?"

When I asked about coeducation, Ahmad almost exploded with excitement. "Coeducation is prevented in Islam! We know the disastrous results of coeducation. We have names, we have numbers." Zina, Zina, or out-of-wedlock s.e.x, had taken place at Birzeit, a coed Palestinian university on the West Bank, he said. "This is disastrous, especially for young girls." or out-of-wedlock s.e.x, had taken place at Birzeit, a coed Palestinian university on the West Bank, he said. "This is disastrous, especially for young girls."

It could be disastrous, I agreed, since fathers and brothers still killed their teenaged girls if they they suspected them of having s.e.x. "We are not for these extrajudicial killings," he said. "Islam is not for them. Islam demands proof. Not just a witness: four witnesses. Not just a confession: a credible confession." suspected them of having s.e.x. "We are not for these extrajudicial killings," he said. "Islam is not for them. Islam demands proof. Not just a witness: four witnesses. Not just a confession: a credible confession."

Then why didn't learned Islamic scholars, such as the university faculty, speak out more vehemently against these killings, instead of turning a blind eye? Why weren't the scholars speaking out against c.l.i.toridectomy, which had made its way to Gaza while the Strip was under Egyptian rule?

"It is a sensitive subject. Some people say it makes women calmer. But of course Islam is against it. Every part of the body that is created has a function. It's like tonsils: only if it is threatening health should you remove it; if it is not threatening, leave it be. Perhaps the women preachers are preaching against it. Of course, we don't have such operations here. In Egypt, but not here."

"Among the older women ..." Asya began, but Ahmad interrupted. "Not here. Never among Palestinians." Asya was silent. The night before, she had told me that her mother's c.l.i.toris had been removed.

"This is an Eastern society," he continued. "There are many things to do with women in Eastern societies that are not correct according to Islam. But it takes time to change them. First we must get an Islamic state. All the disasters in the world are from not adopting Islam. When Islam is adopted, all will be right."

When Ahmad excused himself for a moment to speak with a colleague, Asya told me she wanted to visit the lavatory on the women's campus. "I can go here, but I don't feel comfortable."

When Ahmad returned and found me by myself, he recoiled from the doorway. "Where is Asya? It's forbidden to me to sit with you alone." We were hardly alone. The door to the office stood wide open, onto a pa.s.sageway teeming with students.

"Even with the door open?" I asked.

"Yes, yes, I am sorry. You must bring Asya," he said, backing away down the corridor as if I had the plague. When Asya returned, we continued oussr discussion, turning to the role of women in politics. Ahmad was explaining that, while women can't lead a Muslim community, they have a duty to comment and protest to the leader if they feel he's astray.

"It's exactly the same as the role of women during family prayers," he said. "A woman can't lead her husband-or any man-at prayer, but if he makes a mistake-say he leaves something out-she must let him know by clapping her hands."

"Can't she just say the right words?"

"No, because her voice is alluring. She mustn't raise it."

Asya broke in. "Surely, if it is her family, she can raise her voice to say 'Subhan Allah.'" 'Subhan Allah.'"

"No, no," he said. "She can't raise it at all. She may only clap. Women must be very careful of their voices. If someone comes to my house and asks for me, my wife may say, 'Yes, wait,' or 'He's not here.' Very briefly, very formally. She must not speak in a delicate tone. This is from the Koran. Things begun with a few words will continue to other things."

I left Gaza that night and drove, the next day, out through the stony hills and olive groves of the West Bank, to meet with some women professors from a very different Palestinian university, Birzeit.

These women were less than a generation removed from Asya-women in their late thirties and early forties who could have been her older sisters. But something had happened in the years that separated her education from theirs, and the gulf, widening between them, seemed almost unbridgeable. Yet the women professors at Birzeit, while acknowledging the problem, seemed to me to be in deep denial about its extent.'The trouble is, these people don't understand their own culture," said Islah Gad, sipping fresh orange juice after a day's teaching. We sat in the sunroom of her house, a huge, Ottoman-style stone building with a portico and domed ceilings. Islah's eyes drifted to the garden, where carefully tended fruit trees blossomed in the red soil. She was watching a small tortoise make its uncertain way through the furrows of plowed earth. She had noticed the creature on the roadway as she drove back from the university and had rescued it from being splattered under the wheels of a car.

Islah had grown up in Egypt and met her husband, a prominent Palestinian activist, at university there. She had returned with him to El Bireh, the West Bank village where his father was mayor until the Israelis deported him as a PLO activist. "Israelis did a lot to uproot traditional Palestinian culture here, but not as much as the Islamic movements are doing," she said. She ticked off the problems on her long, elegant fingers. First, there was the issue Hamas had made of traditional Palestinian dress-the beautiful long black or maroon caftans that Palestinian women had always worn, elaborately embroidered in cross-st.i.tch in the front and at the hem, twinned with a delicate white scarf wrapped around the hair. "This is Islamic dress-but not to them. According to them, the colors in the embroidery are haram. Where in the Koran does it say so? A thousand Palestinian women are earning their bread making those dresses. But they don't think of that. They accuse leftists of having imported ideas. But all of their ideas are imported. At the Birzeit book fair this year I counted a hundred books on women and Islam-all from Egypt and Saudi Arabia."

At Birzeit, the Palestinians' most liberal and secular college, Islamic movements such as Hamas and Jihad had made less headway than at any other school, but still their influence was being felt. "They are like mushrooms," said Lily Feidy, one of Islah's colleagues. "They grow up in certain conditions, and then when the conditions change, they die out. Right now, their resurgence is a sign of pessimism. Because people are desperate, they are resorting to the supernatural."

Lily Feidy, who taught linguistics at Birzeit, had never set foot on the campus of the Gaza Islamic University. "I can't go there because I won't put on the veil. And anyway, I'm not interested in sitting and arguing with them. What was true fourteen hundred years ago is not true now. I'm sorry, but we're not living in the desert anymore; we're not living in tents."

Islah Gad, for her part, welcomed the chance to argue her case. "It's easy to break their logic," she said. "At a debate we had on coeducation, the Hamas boys were saying coeducation is haram-that we must close the coed schools. I said to them, 'Wait: in all our villages, the schools are coed. The villagers can't afford to build two schools. So what will happen in your scenario? All the girls will have to stay away from school. Is that what you want?' They of course said, 'No, no-we didn't think about the expense of new schools.' So I said to them, 'Go, read your own reality. Forget these prefab ideas from Saudi Arabia.' "

Both Islah and Lily seemed to be unwilling to accept that the rising Islamic tide could pose a threat to their own cherished liberal views. To me, their a.n.a.lysis seemed wishful. I heard it a lot from the educated women of their generation-women like Jordan's Leila Sharaf, who had grown up in the heady days of the Arab nationalist movement, when the charismatic figures were all secular leftists who urged women's emanc.i.p.ation. For these women, Hamas's view of women was laughable. And since they couldn't hear the appeal of such views themselves, they were deaf to the appeal they held for their students.

Islamic movements were on the ascendant in almost every university in the Middle East. And the faculties in which they were most heavily represented were the bastions of the most gifted-the medical schools, the engineering departments. The students who were hearing the Islamic call included the students with the most options, not just the desperate cases: the Sahars and the Asyas, with the scholarships to Harvard and London. They were the elites of the next decade: the people who would shape their nations' futures.

A decade or two earlier, these same gifted intellectuals would have been Arab nationalists, but that idea had failed to deliver anything but military defeats and crumbling economies. To an outsider, it was hard to imagine this new "big idea" doing any better. But the return to roots and the rejection of outside influence is always an attractive notion; I had felt its pull myself as an Australian adolescent, living in the shadow of United States influence and watching my country march lockstep into the quagmire of Vietnam. For intelligent young Muslims facing futures limited by the failures of so many imported ideologies, Islam's lure was its very homegrownness. Sahar had said it from the beginning: "Why not try something of our own?"

What worried me most was that the Islam taking hold in so many of the universities wasn't their own; not the tolerant tradition of Egypt nor the progressive practices of Palestinians, but rather the warped interpretation promoted by the wealth of the Saudis. I hated to think of a generation squandering its talent in the service of that repressive creed.

When my Saudi friend took me into the sand dunes north of Riyadh to meet his uncle, I'd a.s.sumed that the older man was a relic of a pa.s.sing era, whose values would erode as surely as the old sand-castle fortresses we'd pa.s.sed along the highway.

My friend seemed to have traveled such a vast distance in the span of half a lifetime. Born under a palm tree on his uncle's farm, he'd been carried home to his father's house by camelback. Twenty-five years later he crossed the Atlantic by Concorde. Educated at the best colleges in the United States, dividing his professional life between London, Washington and Riyadh, he had an iconoclastic intellect that reveled in exposing cant and upending orthodoxy.

It seemed clear to me that he was the future: his uncle, with the sad story of the sequestered, school-deprived daughters, was the past. It took me awhile to realize that it wasn't as clear as I thought.

My friend was more comfortable critiquing the oddities of OPEC or lamenting the dominance of the Levantine voice in Arabic literature than he was in discussing his personal life. Once, when I pestered him, he described in a slightly self-deprecating way how he'd returned from his liberated life in the West to marry a Saudi bride he "managed to see" just once before their wedding. He never took her with him on his business trips and never offered to introduce me to her when I was in Saudi Arabia. He had daughters, who clearly delighted him, although he never spoke of them unless I asked after them.

How, I asked him one night over dinner in London, was he planning to educate them? He looked down into his plate of pasta and played with his fork. "I will raise them as Saudi women. I won't make the mistake some people make, of bringing them up half here and half there, so that they don't know who they are," he said.

"But what if one of them is a gifted physicist or mathematician?" I asked. "What if she needs to go abroad to study?" I thought he would say, "Well, in that case, of course, she'll study at Harvard, or Princeton, or Cambridge." But he didn't say that at all.

Instead, he sighed. It was a long, deep sigh that reminded me of his uncle when I'd asked him about women driving.

"That," he said, "would be a problem. And I would have to solve it when it happened." It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn't nearly as great as I'd a.s.sumed.

Like most Westerners, I always imagined the future as an inevitably brighter place, where a kind of moral geology will have eroded the cruel edges of past and present wrongs. But in Gaza and Saudi Arabia, what I saw gave me a different view.

From there, the future is a place that looks darker every day.

Chapter 9.

RISKY B BUSINESS"I suffer not the work of any worker, male or female, to be lost."THE K KORAN THE FAMILY OF IMRAN.

At the office of the Arab News Arab News in Jeddah, a reporter named Faiza Ambah had a cartoon tacked to the bulletin board over her desk. "Behold the turtle," said the caption under a whimsical drawing of the creature. "He makes progress only when he sticks out his neck." Every now and then Faiza would uncoil from a hunched position over her keyboard and tug pensively at the black chiffon scarf tied around her face. in Jeddah, a reporter named Faiza Ambah had a cartoon tacked to the bulletin board over her desk. "Behold the turtle," said the caption under a whimsical drawing of the creature. "He makes progress only when he sticks out his neck." Every now and then Faiza would uncoil from a hunched position over her keyboard and tug pensively at the black chiffon scarf tied around her face.

Faiza was sticking her own neck out. By Saudi standards, her articles were daring. In the aftermath of the Kuwait invasion, she probed the new mood of Saudi women and the delicate question of press censorship. But the most daring thing she did was to come to work at all. Even cloaked and veiled, she ran a risk every day she came to the newspaper's unsegregated office, where men worked in cubicles alongside her. "When the editor hired me, I think the idea was that I'd work at home: do my reporting by phone and file my copy electronically," she said. "But a reporter can't work like that. You have to see what's going on in the world."

At the end of the day, when she'd filed her article, she would adjust her scarf and abaya and head for the carpark. There, because Saudi law banned her from driving, her Yemeni chauffeur waited to take her home. The first time I met Faiza, she berated me for an article I'd written about the difficulties faced by Saudi women. She was proud of her achievements and those of her friends, who worked as doctors or ran their own companies. She felt I hadn't paid enough attention to the Saudi women who were were working and making a difference in the society. working and making a difference in the society.

What women like Faiza and her friends were doing was simply reclaiming the ground lost in the centuries since the death of the prophet. Every Saudi knew that Muhammad's first wife, Khadija, had run an international trading company. Sawda, his second wife, had been famous for her leatherwork, which she sold to help support the household. Fatima, the prophet's daughter, had labored at spinning until her hands bled, alternating days at work and at study. When she worked, she gave her slave girl time off to study, insisting that everyone had a right to learn.

Faiza was the most visible of the handful of working Saudi women because her name appeared so often in the newspaper. There were a few other Saudi women journalists, but Faiza was the only one I knew who risked working in her newspaper's office. The risk was that the mutawain mutawain-religious police from the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice-would one day burst into the office and discover her breaking the rules on segregation. The mutawain are the loose cannons of the Saudi justice system; fanatical volunteers who patrol the streets and shopping malls yelling at people. Women with uncovered faces are one target; men dawdling over closing their shops at prayer time are another. Some mutawain wielded long canes with which to whip offenders. The government didn't encourage the mutawain's excesses, but it didn't rein them in, either. The Saudi ruling family was terrified of a fundamentalist upsurge that would sweep it from power in the way the Iranians had disposed of the shah. So it bought off the mutawain with fleets of fancy cars to use in its patrols, and with a hands-off policy toward its activities. As a result, the mutawain were fearless, even abusing an al-Saud princess when they caught her walking with a maid who wasn't wearing a face veil.

Perhaps the most humiliating thing about the mutawain was that, apart from abusing women in the streets, they didn't deign to deal with them directly regarding so-called "offenses." If a woman transgressed a rule of dress or segregation, the mutawain would take the matter up with her husband, father or brother-the "responsible male" deemed to be in charge of her-in the manner of a school princ.i.p.al dealing with a recalcitrant child. Women of all ages are in-fantilized by the Saudi system. A woman, no matter how old, has to be able to show a signed permission from her husband, son or grandson before she is free to travel, even inside her own country.

Once, Faiza left her permission behind in Cairo. Her husband was traveling out of the country and was unreachable. She was due to travel herself, but without her permit, she was trapped in Jeddah. "I was tearing my hair out," she said. Her father couldn't help her because, once a woman marries, only her husband's word counts with the Saudi authorities. In the end, she had to wait for a cousin to travel to Cairo and collect the doc.u.ment. Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.

Partly because of the risk of such humiliation, few Saudi women work outside the home. In 1986 women made up only four percent of the paid work force. Mostly, the small number reflected a lack of jobs open to women. In the Saudi government, even jobs directly concerned with women's affairs were held by men. At United Nations International Women's Year conference in Mexico City in 1975 and the Decade for Women conference in Nairobi in 1985, the Saudi Arabian "women's delegation" was entirely composed of men.

But even in fields where women could work, some husbands were reluctant to let them. Faiza's husband, a Lebanese, was proud of her accomplishments. And some Saudi husbands felt the same. But often there was tension between pride in a wife's achievements and apprehension about where her work might lead her. One businessman bragged of his wife's graduation from medical school, then told me he hoped she would go on to specialize in surgery, "so her patients will be unconscious when she touches them."

The issue of working wives came up frequently in Saudi newspapers, especially on the religion pages. "What are the conditions relating to a wife going out to work? Is this permitted under Islam, and if so, under which circ.u.mstances?" asked "Working Wife, Jeddah" in a letter to the Saudi Gazette's Saudi Gazette's religious editor. "There are legal and moral rights that become consequential on marriage," responded the editor. "Because of their different physiological structures and biological functions, each s.e.x is a.s.signed a role to play in the family.... It is the husband who is supposed to provide for the family. If he cannot gain enough to support the family, or if his income is too low to provide for a relatively acceptable standard of living, and provided the wife is willing, both of them may work for gain. However: religious editor. "There are legal and moral rights that become consequential on marriage," responded the editor. "Because of their different physiological structures and biological functions, each s.e.x is a.s.signed a role to play in the family.... It is the husband who is supposed to provide for the family. If he cannot gain enough to support the family, or if his income is too low to provide for a relatively acceptable standard of living, and provided the wife is willing, both of them may work for gain. However: 1. The husband has the right to terminate a wife's working whenever he deems it necessary; 2. He has the right to object to any job if he feels that it would expose his wife to any harm, seduction or humiliation; 3. The wife has the right to discontinue working whenever she pleases.

Once, flying to Saudi Arabia, I'd sat next to a Saudi who had been grappling for a year with the issue of what kind of job might be appropriate for his wife. His own business was trading, and he became increasingly edgy when our plane approached Jeddah. As we circled for landing, he mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief. He was worried about the underwear in his luggage. "More than two hundred bra.s.sieres," he whispered. "I bought them in London, from Marks and Spencer. All made in Israel." Saudi Arabia enforced a boycott on goods from the land it referred to as "the Zionist ent.i.ty." So the night before, in his London hotel, he had sat up late with a thick marker pen, writing Saudi-riyal prices over the offending labels to make the country of origin illegible. "But by the end I was very tired," he said. "If I missed one, and customs sees it, I will be in big trouble." He swabbed again at his brow. "What can I do? I'm a trader, and these are the bra.s.sieres that Saudi women like to buy."

Saudi customs searches were notorious. One American who'd gone to work there had had his five-generation family Bible ripped up in front of him, because it flouted the kingdom's ban on non-Muslim religious items. The Saudis took the ban on other religions' symbols to such an extreme that the plane in which we were flying had just been repainted, along with the rest of the Saudia Airlines fleet, following a fundamentalist's complaint that the s.p.a.ce between the s s and the and the a a in the previous Saudia logo had formed the shape of a Christian cross, in the previous Saudia logo had formed the shape of a Christian cross, I thought I had purged my luggage of anything that could be construed, or misconstrued, as religious. But at the customs desk in Jeddah the grim young inspector scowled as he plucked two pieces of contraband from my bag: a dry reference work t.i.tled Political Dictionary of the Arab World Political Dictionary of the Arab World and a book about early explorers in Arabia called and a book about early explorers in Arabia called Pa.s.sionate Pilgrims. Pa.s.sionate Pilgrims. He objected to the first because the word "political" in the t.i.tle made it potentially seditious; the second because the word "pa.s.sionate" had p.o.r.nographic potential, while the word "pilgrims" might have referred to religion. He objected to the first because the word "political" in the t.i.tle made it potentially seditious; the second because the word "pa.s.sionate" had p.o.r.nographic potential, while the word "pilgrims" might have referred to religion.

The trader, Mohamed, had been luckier. I saw him in the arrival hall, grinning broadly. The illicit bras had pa.s.sed inspection. To celebrate, he said, I should come to lunch the next day and meet his wife, Adela.

Mohamed shared a small apartment building with his extended family: father and mother on the ground floor; brothers, their wives and children filling the flats above. Even in Saudi Arabia's modern cities, families still followed the tribal patterns of the desert. Saudi men, when they married, brought their wives into their parents' home. Rich families managed this in rambling walled compounds with several villas arranged around a garden. Poorer families built slab houses that grew by a floor every time a son took a wife. As a result, Saudi cities seemed dotted with unfinished buildings. Tufts of steel reinforcing bars stuck out of the flat roofs as if the houses had been given punk haircuts.

To me, with family scattered on three continents, having everyone together in one building seemed enviable. But Mohamed had begun to find it stifling. When we climbed the stairs to his flat, doors opened on every floor, as brothers and tiny nieces and nephews peered out to see who Mohamed was bringing home. To get some privacy, he'd started to build a new house, just for himself, Adela and their three children. But he didn't know if he'd be able to move into it. "It's difficult to convince my father that moving away is a good idea," he sighed. Mohamed was thirty-five years old, but his father's word was still law. Like most Saudis, Mohamed worked from 7 A.M. A.M. until one in the afternoon, then returned to his business for a few hours in the evening. Schools and offices closed during the heat of the day, and families gathered to take lunch together. Mohamed and Adela ate at a table, Western style, instead of spreading a cloth on the floor in the traditional Arabian way. They served an array of Arabian specialties-steaming bowls of rice, braised lamb in saffron gravy, skewers of grilled chicken-and a Western-style plate of french fries. After lunch the family sprawled in front of the TV, flipping past the heavily religious Saudi stations to pick up the wobbly signal from Egypt, with its racier fare of movies and variety shows. until one in the afternoon, then returned to his business for a few hours in the evening. Schools and offices closed during the heat of the day, and families gathered to take lunch together. Mohamed and Adela ate at a table, Western style, instead of spreading a cloth on the floor in the traditional Arabian way. They served an array of Arabian specialties-steaming bowls of rice, braised lamb in saffron gravy, skewers of grilled chicken-and a Western-style plate of french fries. After lunch the family sprawled in front of the TV, flipping past the heavily religious Saudi stations to pick up the wobbly signal from Egypt, with its racier fare of movies and variety shows.

Adela had been just sixteen years old and still at school when she married Mohamed. She completed a sociology degree while having her children. "Most of the women in the course were doing the same," she said. Many Saudi schools provide day-care centers and nurseries for their students' children. Exams can be rescheduled to accommodate the arrival of a baby. After university, when her two sons and daughter had all started school, Adela became miserable. "There was just this terrible boredom every morning once the kids left," she said. In the past, she would simply have had more children. In rural areas, many Saudi women still reproduced to their utmost capability. One British doctor, on an eighteen-month posting to a Jeddah hospital, thought his interpreter had failed him during an ante-natal checkup on a twenty-eight-year-old Bedouin. "I asked her when she'd had her last period, and she said, 'What's a period?' It turned out she'd never had one. She'd been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since."

But, for the majority of urban Saudis such as Adela and Mohamed, the tribal imperative for a huge family no longer applied. So more and more educated women were competing for the few Islamically sanctioned jobs in medicine, education or women's banks. The banks, run by Saudi women managers and staff, had opened in 1980 because, although the Koran gives women control of their own wealth, Saudi segregation rules were denying them that control by effectively banning their entry to banks used by men. Even though daughters inherit only half as much as sons, in post-oil Saudi Arabia that often comes to a fortune. The new banks were meticulously segregated, down to women auditors to oversee the accounts of the female branches and guards posted at the door to see that men didn't enter by mistake. Usually a guard was married to one of the women employees inside, so that if doc.u.ments had to be delivered he could deal with his wife rather than risking even that slight contact taking place between unmarried members of the opposite s.e.x.

Medicine, the only career in which segregation isn't enforced, is under constant attack by fundamentalists, who object to women doctors treating male patients. Their campaign has been unsuccessful so far because the government has been able to show that there aren't enough Saudi men in medicine yet to handle the demand.