Nine Parts of Desire Part 7

There had been an opening at the Ministry of Health for which Adela was qualified, but Mohamed had been against it because it involved some contact with men. "She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile-if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As he sat on the sofa flipping the TV channel selector, he paused for a minute on a Saudi channel where a woman announcer, her hair carefully veiled, was reading the news. "This is new," he said. The television had had women presenters before, but rarely a Saudi. What if Adela wanted to be a news reader? I asked. "She would never agree to be seen in public like that, and I wouldn't permit it," Mohamed said firmly. Soon Adela would start work in the only job she could find that both she and Mohamed deemed suitable: a clerical position in a girls' school. The job wasn't up to her qualifications, "but the hours are good, and it is better than sleeping all day," she said. Without a job, any job, Adela had little to fill her empty hours besides TV, videos and women's tea parties. There were no theaters or cinemas in Saudi Arabia, and she couldn't go shopping alone without risking stares and hara.s.sment.

As the afternoon turned to evening, Mohamed suggested a drive along Jeddah's seaside. Before Adela stepped outside, she tied her hair back in a large black scarf, wrapped a small piece of black cloth around her face like a baddie in a Western, leaving just her eyes exposed, then slipped an abaya on top of everything, covering her colorful floor-length dress. The two of us sat in the back seat of the car with the children, with Mohamed and his uncle up front. All along the Red Sea sh.o.r.e, clumps of white-robed men sat just a little apart from cl.u.s.ters of women, their black cloaks billowing in the hot sea breeze as they arranged their evening picnics.

We parked and strolled along the waterfront, the white pavement throwing out the day's stored heat. As the sun eased into the sea, the city behind us exploded in a cacophony of calls to evening prayer. Mohamed reached into the trunk of his car for prayer mats. He and his uncle lined up, raised their palms to G.o.d, and bowed toward the nearby city of Mecca. Adela didn't join them, explaining that Saudi women usually didn't pray in public. As we waited, she groped for a tissue, lifting her black veil to wipe the sweat-drenched face beneath. Nevertheless, Adela seemed to be enjoying this modest outing. It was one of the few things she and Mohamed still could do together. A few months earlier they'd been able to take the children to an amus.e.m.e.nt park, or skating at a rink where dense white plastic subst.i.tuted for ice. But both places had come under pressure from the religious establishment and now offered only segregated men's and women's hours that made family visits impossible.

Some Saudi businessmen were fed up with segregation's effects on their companies. Hussein Abudawood, whose factories produced Clorox bleach in Saudi Arabia, had wanted to do some Western-style market research to see how Saudi households did their laundry. "Obviously, I couldn't send male market researchers to talk to women. But I couldn't send Saudi women, either, because they might run into the men of the household. And how do I find enough Arabic-speaking women here who aren't Saudi?" He'd eventually sc.r.a.ped together a few Egyptian and Lebanese interviewers, who'd had a terrible time explaining themselves in a land where strangers just don't come to the door. "Most places have a guard at the gate with instructions not to admit anyone who doesn't have an appointment," he said.

Hussein found the whole system riddled with contradictions. "If a Saudi woman wants a new bra and panties she has to discuss it over the counter in a shop staffed by a bunch of guys from India. Yet if she's a businesswoman who needs to file a doc.u.ment at a government ministry, she can't set foot in there-she has to send a man." Hussein had been part of a group ofbusinessmen asked to comment on a draft of a Ministry of Development economic plan. He had taken issue with a line in the draft that stated that the government would promote women working according to Islamic rules. "I got up and said, 'Here's half a line about women in a thirty-six-page development plan and you have to put 'according to Islamic rules.' What about the rest of the thirty-six pages? You mean the rest of it isn't isn't according to Islamic rules? Are you just trying to satisfy the extremists?' " according to Islamic rules? Are you just trying to satisfy the extremists?' "

The extremists were almost impossible to satisfy. Even segregated workplaces were at risk. Saudi Cable Company, the kingdom's biggest industrial concern, had floated a proposal to build a factory where every job, from production line to senior management, would be filled by women. In a country with an acute labor shortage, I thought such a plan would be hailed for its initiative. But when I went to see the official in charge of the project, he begged me not to write about it. "We have already had too much attention,." he said. He worried that the project would be scuttled if the fundamentalists started a campaign decrying it for luring women from their homes. However, he did introduce me to his wife, Basilah, who ran the magnificent Dar al Fikr girls' school.

After showing me the school, Basilah invited me to her home for afternoon tea. The pale stone villa, with its floodlit pool, Persian carpets and elegant furnishings, made it clear that her job wasn't a case of "financial necessity," such as the Saudi Gazette's Saudi Gazette's religious editor would have approved. "I didn't work when I first got married," she said. "I would spend most of the day in bed, then when Fawaz would get home tired from a hard day's work I'd be so bored I'd insist he take me out to the shopping mall. After a while we both decided the situation was crazy, that I should be doing something with my life that would make some kind of contribution." religious editor would have approved. "I didn't work when I first got married," she said. "I would spend most of the day in bed, then when Fawaz would get home tired from a hard day's work I'd be so bored I'd insist he take me out to the shopping mall. After a while we both decided the situation was crazy, that I should be doing something with my life that would make some kind of contribution."

Basilah had invited a woman friend who helped her mother run a successful construction company to join us for tea. When her father died, she and her mother had expected his male relations to run the business and provide for her and her children. But they were lazy and incompetent, and it seemed that everything her father had worked for was going to be destroyed. "Finally my mother took over," the woman explained. "She went to the Ministry of Construction with the papers that needed official approval. No woman had been in there before. The officials ordered her out. She refused to go. She sat there, and sat there, until they were forced to deal with her. She turned out to be a very good manager, and she saved the business."

As maids glided in and out with gla.s.ses of tea and a dazzling array of French cakes and pastries, conversation turned to how my husband felt about all the traveling I had to do for my job. I told Basilah that neither of us liked being apart so much but that, as a journalist himself, he understood the job's demands. Then, bragging a little, I told her how he'd rearranged his own career to accommodate mine. "When my newspaper offered me the Middle East post," I said, "he gave up his own job so I could accept it." I had expected Basilah to be surprised; Tony and I were used to the automatic a.s.sumption in the Middle East that he was the one whose job had brought us there. But the look on Basilah's face was beyond surprise. She looked utterly dismayed, as if I'd just admitted that my husband had committed ma.s.s murder. She fussed with her tea gla.s.s, cleared her throat and changed the subject.

It was hard to get information on women who worked in jobs outside the relatively safe spheres of girls' education, women's banking and medicine. When I asked the Ministry of Information for help, I was stonewalled. So I tried various other contacts. "Don't even touch this subject unless what you plan to write is a hundred percent positive," warned a Lebanese businessman in Jeddah. When I indicated that was unlikely, he refused to arrange any introductions. I'd heard of women in Jeddah and Riyadh who were the bosses of businesses as diverse as photography studios, clothing manufacture and computer training schools. I thought the Chamber of Commerce might be able to give me some leads. "No problem," said a helpful official, "I'll set you up some appointments."

The next day he told me to be at the administrative office at Jeddah airport at 2 P.M. P.M. I thought he'd found a woman executive for me to talk to there. But when I arrived I found I'd been scheduled for a mind-numbing "official tour" that had absolutely nothing to do with women. I was there for hours, being shown videos, walked through computer rooms and deluged with official statistics-a 625% increase in pa.s.senger traffic between 1975 and 1988, an 870% rise in cargo traffic, a terminal the size of eighty football fields just for pilgrims making the Hajj, roofed with Teflon-coated fibergla.s.s to deflect the heat. There was no polite way to cut the tour short. Developing countries always complain that reporters don't write about their achievements; that we focus on colorful tribal traditions and neglect technological progress. Still, I was irritated with the Chamber of Commerce for wasting my time and the time of the airport officials. I thought he'd found a woman executive for me to talk to there. But when I arrived I found I'd been scheduled for a mind-numbing "official tour" that had absolutely nothing to do with women. I was there for hours, being shown videos, walked through computer rooms and deluged with official statistics-a 625% increase in pa.s.senger traffic between 1975 and 1988, an 870% rise in cargo traffic, a terminal the size of eighty football fields just for pilgrims making the Hajj, roofed with Teflon-coated fibergla.s.s to deflect the heat. There was no polite way to cut the tour short. Developing countries always complain that reporters don't write about their achievements; that we focus on colorful tribal traditions and neglect technological progress. Still, I was irritated with the Chamber of Commerce for wasting my time and the time of the airport officials.

As it happened, there was a part of the shining modern airport that had relevance to my story on the status of women in Saudi Arabia. But it wasn't part of the tour. I didn't see it until I was leaving the country, two weeks later. While I was waiting in the departure lounge I had to use the women's toilet. I walked past the polished gla.s.s and gleaming chrome of the public areas and pushed on the blond wood door marked by a stylized drawing of a veiled head.

Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in weeks. n.o.body had noticed, because n.o.body who mattered ever went in there.

Saudi Arabia is the extreme. Why dwell on the extreme, when it would be just as easy to write about a Muslim country such as Turkey, led by a woman, where one in six judges is a woman, and one in every thirty private companies has a woman manager?

I think it important to look in detail at Saudi Arabia's grim reality because this is the kind of sterile, segregated world that Hamas in Israel, most mujahedin factions in Afghanistan, many radicals in Egypt and the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria are calling for, right now, for their countries and for the entire Islamic world. None of these groups is saying, "Let's recreate Turkey, and separate church and state." Instead, what they want is Saudi-style, theocratically enforced repression of women, cloaked in vapid cliches about a woman's place being the paradise of her home.

In the vast majority of Muslim countries, barriers to women's employment have fallen so far in the last fifty years that it seems it would be impossible to reerect them, even if hard-line fundamentalist governments one day came to power. But under the surface there is often ambivalence about women at work that makes their position vulnerable.

In Egypt women are everywhere in the work force: in the fields, as they always have been, sowing and planting; and sitting on city sidewalks, selling their produce. But they are also in positions that would have been unthinkable in the first half of the century, when only the poorest and most wretched families subjected their women to the "indignity" of work outside the home. Egyptian women are doctors, filmmakers, politicians, economists, academics, engineers. Mostly they are public servants, cogs in the country's bloated bureaucracy. Now, it is almost unthinkable that a young Egyptian woman won't go to work, at least until she marries. Often she will find the man she will marry among her coworkers.

It was President Na.s.ser who made way for women in the government, promising a job to any Egyptian who got a college degree. Now, many an educated, lower-middle-cla.s.s woman finds work as a muwazzaf, muwazzaf, a government employee, typing, filing or otherwise pushing paper six days a week, from about eight in the morning to two in the afternoon. The size of the bureaucracy means that most workers are underemployed, and most, men and women, pa.s.s the workday gossiping and sipping endless cups of sugary tea. While the pay is pitiful-less than $40 a month-the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget. a government employee, typing, filing or otherwise pushing paper six days a week, from about eight in the morning to two in the afternoon. The size of the bureaucracy means that most workers are underemployed, and most, men and women, pa.s.s the workday gossiping and sipping endless cups of sugary tea. While the pay is pitiful-less than $40 a month-the money gives the women at least a small degree of discretion in spending and the prestige that comes from contributing to the family budget.

Most of the young, unmarried women I knew enjoyed the freedom of a salary and the challenge of even an undemanding workplace. But my married friends often saw things differently. Often, the job itself was a respite, wedged with great difficulty between hours of backbreaking household labor.

An afternoon I spent with a recently married woman went like this. After commuting for about an hour and a half on a bus so packed that three or four pa.s.sengers hung out the door with just one foot each on the step, she elbowed her way off at a stop about half a mile from her apartment and stood in line for twenty minutes at a government food store, to get the lower-priced food available there. She hauled the groceries home to a cold-water kitchen with no fridge, and immediately made tea for her husband, who'd arrived home from work and plopped on the sofa to chat with his father and a young nephew. Next she climbed the stairs to the pigeon coops she kept on the roof of the apartment building, fed yesterday's leftover bread to the birds, then chose the two plumpest and wrung their necks on the spot.

She plucked the birds, gutted and cooked them, boiled cracked wheat and noodles for the stuffing, served the meal to the men, who seemed a bit grumpy to be kept waiting so late to eat; made and served more tea, scoured the cooking pans and plates, swept the ubiquitous Cairo dust from the floors and furniture, scrubbed everyone's clothes by hand and left them in a bucket to hang out on the roof before she left for work the next morning; set some lentils to soak for the next day's meal, finally sat down, with some sewing on her lap, at about 9 P.M., P.M., only to jump up ten minutes later to make another round of tea for some neighbors who'd popped in. There were only two unusual things about the woman's situation; she didn't have other women in the house-a sister-in-law or mother-in-law-to help her with the ch.o.r.es, and she didn't yet have children to add to her responsibilities. only to jump up ten minutes later to make another round of tea for some neighbors who'd popped in. There were only two unusual things about the woman's situation; she didn't have other women in the house-a sister-in-law or mother-in-law-to help her with the ch.o.r.es, and she didn't yet have children to add to her responsibilities.

While women now share the economic burden of their families, very few Egyptian men are prepared to share the housework. To women run ragged by the routine of rushing home from work to have a large meal ready for a demanding family, the fundamentalists' message of women's place being in the home sometimes has some appeal.

Husbands, too, hear that message. Mostly raised by women who didn't work outside the home, they are used to a household where their shirts are ironed, the floors swept, the food elaborately prepared and always ready. Now, a young man might meet his bride as a coworker in his office. Before their marriage, he enjoyed the chance to admire her beauty, share a joke and gossip with her. But once she is his wife, he resents the fact that other men in the office have the pleasure of her company. If she is not already veiled, he may begin pressuring her to wear hijab.

When home life with a working wife turns out to be less salubrious than with the nonworking women of his youth, he doesn't think of lending a hand with the ch.o.r.es, for he has never seen a man do such a thing. Instead, he curses the government for a ruined economy that makes his wife's salary a necessity. And when he hears an imam or sheik preaching of a woman's place, and promising better times under an Islamic regime, he eyes the pile of rumpled laundry, the dusty floor and the simple lunch his exhausted wife has slapped together, and wonders whether such a cause might not be worth supporting.

To see what happens if he takes the next step and joins the revolutionaries, it is necessary to look at Iran.

Even when a revolution succeeds, it doesn't always achieve everything its extremists have envisioned. It is one thing to hold tenaciously, as Saudi Arabia does, to traditions that have existed unchanged for centuries. It is another thing altogether to reimpose such traditions after change has already reshaped a culture.

Since the 1920s, Iran's Pahlavi rulers had tried to Westernize their nation, sometimes by force, sc.r.a.pping thousands of years of traditional separation of men and women. By the time the Iranian revolutionaries threw out the shah in 1979, there were male hairstylists for women, male tailors fitting women's gowns, male teachers in girls' cla.s.srooms.

The extremists set out to end all that, telling male gynecologists that they should find another area of medicine, attempting to install curtains to divide university lecture halls into male and female sections, and banning male barbers from touching female heads.

Apart from the barbers, very little of it worked. What the extremists hadn't realized was that, when it came to s.e.x segregation, Khomeini wasn't entirely with them. Khomeini, always a literalist, read the words of the Koran and the hadith and didn't extrapolate from them. When he read that the prophet's wives were to remain in their houses, he took that to mean the prophet's wives, and only the prophet's wives. Other Muslim women had roles to play outside their houses, and he encouraged them. From the beginning he encouraged women to come into the streets to demonstrate and praised their role as revolutionaries, fighting in the streets side by side with the men.

To him, the rules were clear: unrelated men and women mustn't be alone together; they mustn't touch each other, except in medical situations; and women must wear hijab. Obviously, since hairdressers touched their clients and saw them out of hijab, there would be no more male staff in salons serving women. The same went for gym instructors whose students worked out in athletic gear, and reporters who covered women's activities where hijab wasn't worn.

But that didn't mean that such activities should cease. What happened instead was a sudden flowering of job opportunities for women. The prohibition on men and women being alone created a demand for women driving instructors. In the media, the need for women to cover certain women's sports and other segregated events opened jobs for producers, directors, reporters and sound recordists.

Since the hadith made it clear that the prophet had approved of women tending men's war wounds, there was to be no segregation when it came to medicine. But since the new Islamic atmosphere made many women prefer to be seen by women doctors, there was an upsurge in demand for more women's places in medical school. Nurse-midwives saw their status rise. While schools were quickly segregated to protect the impressionable young, the idea of curtaining off university cla.s.srooms was abandoned in most places. Since the universities were to be thoroughly Islamic, with admission requiring a reference from the would-be student's local mosque, there was no need to physically separate these devout youngsters, who automatically separated themselves. In lectures, men sat on one side of the room, women on the other. Only the placement of the professor's podium posed problems. In some lecture rooms, builders bolted it to the floor on the men's side of the room, on the obsolete premise that professors were all male. That left the growing number of women professors standing on the women's side for the sake of the new proprieties, but having nowhere to rest their notes.

At the university in the southern city of Awaz, I met a young student who had benefited from the postrevolutionary changes. She was studying medicine, living in a dormitory far from her extremely religious rural family. Her parents, she said, would never have permitted her to go to university under the shah, or to live away from home, or to work in a hospital. But now they saw the universities and the hospitals as part of the Islamic system, and therefore safe places for their daughter. Away from home, she had the freedom to meet men, albeit in very controlled circ.u.mstances, and had recently found the one she wanted to marry. Her parents, to her astonishment, had accepted her choice, making her the first woman in her family's history to marry for love.

In the theocratic Iranian government women have risen to the ranks of deputy ministers, and at each election Rafsanjani has called on voters to return more women to the Parliament. In business, I met a woman running a valve factory and another heading a trucking company. Nasi Ravandoost, who ran the factory, said she had no problems getting on with her business inside Iran. "My problems are all created outside," she said. Traveling to buy parts was often complicated by embargoes and visa obstacles. The woman who ran the trucking concern said that success was a matter of common sense and tact, just as it was in business anywhere. "Obviously, I don't go into the Transport Ministry wearing this," she said, fingering the floral silk outfit she'd worn to an evening party in North Tehran.

By now, women have so solidified their place in postrevolution-ary society that some of them are outspokenly criticizing it. At the offices of the satirical magazine Golagha, Golagha, some of the sharpest political cartoons are penned by a woman. But even more tellingly, in the fall 1991 issue of the some of the sharpest political cartoons are penned by a woman. But even more tellingly, in the fall 1991 issue of the Iranian Journal for International Affairs, Iranian Journal for International Affairs, Iran's showpiece foreign policy publication, an a.s.sistant professor of anthropology named Fatemeh Givechian wrote a paper that criticized the lingering remnants of the policy of s.e.x segregation. Iran's showpiece foreign policy publication, an a.s.sistant professor of anthropology named Fatemeh Givechian wrote a paper that criticized the lingering remnants of the policy of s.e.x segregation.

"No doubt," she wrote, the policy led to "more awareness of one's own gender, but not necessarily any increase in one's knowledge of the opposite gender. s.e.x segregation to this extent is not natural.... There will emerge a dual society of male and female stranger to one another and unaware of each other's anxieties."

Chapter 10.

POLITICS, W WITH AND W WITHOUT A V VOTE"Say, O G.o.d, possessor of all sovereignty, you give sovereignty to whom you wish and take sovereignty from whom you wish."THE K KORAN

CHAPTER OF THE FAMILY OF IMRAN.

A year after the Gulf War, in the mountains and valleys of Iraqi Kurdistan, the lines of women seemed to stretch forever. Spring sunbeams glinted on sparkling dresses of silver and gold. They had worn their best, because this was a day of celebration. For the first time in their lives, the women of Kurdistan were lining up to vote for their own representatives. year after the Gulf War, in the mountains and valleys of Iraqi Kurdistan, the lines of women seemed to stretch forever. Spring sunbeams glinted on sparkling dresses of silver and gold. They had worn their best, because this was a day of celebration. For the first time in their lives, the women of Kurdistan were lining up to vote for their own representatives.

A year earlier, during the Kurdish uprising that followed the end of the war, I had seen similar sparkling, bright-colored dresses torn and discarded in a dusty pile by a door to a prefab hut on the grounds of an Iraqi prison. A stained mattress lay inside the hut.

Kurdish women had been brought to this place, stripped naked and raped. For some, the rape had been part of the regime of torture they experienced as political prisoners. Others had been raped as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands. The idea was to break the spirit of the men by destroying their honor through the violation of the bodies of their women. The procedure was so routine that the bureaucrats of the prison had made up an index card for one of the employees, a Mr. Aziz Saleh Ahmad. Neatly and methodically, in the bottom left-hand corner, it listed his profession, Fighter in the Popular Army, Fighter in the Popular Army, and his "Activity," and his "Activity," Violation of Violation of Women's Honor. Women's Honor. Aziz Saleh Ahmad was, in other words, employed as a rapist at the prison. Saddam Hussein had called his campaign against the Kurds the Anfal, after a chapter of the Koran which speaks of the spoils of holy war. It was hard to imagine a more perverse appropriation of religion. Aziz Saleh Ahmad was, in other words, employed as a rapist at the prison. Saddam Hussein had called his campaign against the Kurds the Anfal, after a chapter of the Koran which speaks of the spoils of holy war. It was hard to imagine a more perverse appropriation of religion.

For most of their lives, this had been the meaning of politics for the women of Kurdistan: a dangerous and possibly deadly activity that led to places like the stained mattress, or the airless, feces-smeared cells tunneled through the earth beneath it. To me, it seemed like a miracle that the meaning had changed, in one short year, to something so different as lines of smiling women, lining up to vote. Even more surprising were the names of the women on the ballot.

The road to political power is full of obstacles for women in most Muslim societies. In countries such as Kuwait, women have yet to win the right to vote, much less govern. And even where the system is supposedly open to women, claiming a place in it often means standing up to abuse and the threat of physical violence. In Jordan's 1993 election, one woman candidate had to fight for the right to even speak at a rally, because Muslim extremists objected to the sound of a female voice at a mixed gathering.

In 1994, women led three Muslim countries. Yet often their place at the top has little effect on the lives of women at the bottom. As Tansu Ciller turned her attention to remaking Turkey's economy, young Turkish women caught socializing with men in rural areas were being forced to undergo "Virginity checks" at local police stations. As Bangladesh's Begum Khaleda Zia became the first Muslim woman head of state to address the U. N. General a.s.sembly in 1993, extremists were using death threats to attempt to silence a Bangladeshi woman writer who criticized aspects of Islam. In her first term in office, Pakistan's Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto let stand rape laws that punished the victim as a "fornicator" and let the rapist go free. On her return to power in 1993, it seemed that she might do better, promising to set up all-women police stations and appoint women judges.

Part of the difficulty for women leaders in Muslim countries is that their own position is often so tenuous and the risk of a backlash always a threat. In Turkey, signs of resentment of Ciller's s.e.x surfaced at a conference in August 1993 for former Prime Minister Mesyut Yilmaz when delegates began chanting "Mesyut koltuga, Tansu mutf.a.ga "Mesyut koltuga, Tansu mutf.a.ga [Mesyut back to power and Tansu back to the kitchen]." [Mesyut back to power and Tansu back to the kitchen]."

Muslim women politicians tend to be a special breed. On election day in Kurdistan in May 1992, one woman candidate, Hero Ahmed, didn't wear a sparkling dress. She wore the same earth-toned baggy pants and sashed shirt she'd worn since 1979, when she went to the mountains to join the Pesh Merga, the Kurdish guerrillas whose name means We Who Face Death. During her twelve years in the mountains Hero, a psychologist, learned to use an a.s.sault rifle and an antiaircraft gun. But mostly she shot film. Her most famous clip shows clouds of gas rising over the village of Yak Sammer in 1988-one of the few pieces of film known to exist of an Iraqi poison gas attack.

On election day, women stood in line all day to vote for her. Some, illiterate, had never held a pen before. At the end of the count, seven women, including Hero, had been elected to the hundred-and-five-seat Parliament.

What happened next followed a pattern that has repeated itself in almost every Islamic state where women have won a political voice. Almost always, women politicians try to reform the inequitable personal status laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody and property. In Kurdistan, the women parliamentarians began to campaign for reform of laws based on sharia that deprived them of equal rights with men. Among their demands: outlawing polygamy, except in the case of a woman's mental illness, and changing inheritance laws so that daughters receive an equal share of a parent's estate, instead of half the share allotted to sons.

Hero thought the Parliament would probably pa.s.s the anti-polygamy law. In the Koran, polygamy is presented as an option for men, not as a requirement. In seventh-century Arabian society, there had been no restriction on how many wives a man could take. The Koran, in stipulating four as a maximum, was setting limits, not giving license. A close reading of the text suggests that monogamy is preferred. "If you shall not be able to deal justly, [take] only one" the Koran says, then later states: "You are never able to be fair and just between women even if that is your ardent desire."

The issue of polygamy is a.n.a.logous to that of slavery, which was gradually banned in Islamic countries. Saudi Arabia was among the last to legislate against it in 1962, when the government bought the freedom of all the slaves in the kingdom at three times the going rate. As with polygamy, the wording of the Koran permits, but discourages, slavery. Muhammad's sunnah included the freeing of many of his war-captive slaves. Because freeing slaves is extolled as the act of a good Muslim, most Muslims now accept that conditions have changed enough since the seventh century to allow them to legislate against a practice that the prophet probably would have chosen to ban outright, if his own times had allowed. Polygamy is already on the decline throughout the Islamic world, and many Muslim scholars see no religious obstacle to a legal ban on the practice.

For the Kurdish Parliament, the difficulties would come with demands for change in things that the Koran doesn't present as optional, such as the division of an estate to give sons double the share of daughters.

The Koran sets out the formula for inheritance as an instruction which all believers must follow. In seventh-century Arabia the Koran's formula was a giant leap forward for women, who up until then had usually been considered as chattels to be inherited, rather than as heirs and property owners in their own right. Most European women had to wait another twelve centuries to catch up to the rights the Koran granted Muslim women. In England it wasn't until 1870 that the Married Women's Property Acts finally abolished the rule that put all a woman's wealth under her husband's control on marriage.

Today, Muslim authorities defend the unequal division of inheritance by pointing out that the Koran requires men to support their wives and children, whereas women are allowed to keep their wealth entirely for their own use. In practice, of course, it rarely works that way. Hero headed the Kurdish chapter of Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in women's hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.

I went to visit Hero in January 1993, as Parliament got ready to debate the women's platform. Her office was a small room in a large house that had once belonged to one of Saddam Hussein's top officials. Hero had stripped the room of furniture and tried to recreate the mood of a traditional Kurdish mountain dwelling. Kurdish kilims and cushions covered the floor. Climbing plants wound their way up the walls and over the rafters. Near the ceiling, a squirrel darted in and out of a small knitted pouch that dangled from a beam.

To Hero, legislation was only a beginning. "I don't believe some habits and ways of thinking can be changed by making a new set of rules," she said. "It needs time, publicity, education; first to make people understand it, then, gradually, to get them to accept it."

At that time, members of a committee formed by the women parliamentarians were traveling Kurdistan, trying to raise support for the law reforms. They visited women in towns and remote villages, carrying a pet.i.tion in favor of reform. In August 1992, the pet.i.tion carried 3,000 names. A year later, 30,000 had signed.

In principle, the support of ten parliamentarians is all that is required for a proposed law reform to be put to a vote by legislators. By September 1993, thirty-five MPs had signed the proposals. But still the reforms languished. Timid MPs said it was necessary to wait for what they called the "right" time to present them.

It wasn't clear when that "right" time might be. And by the summer of 1994, it seemed it might not come at all. By then, the Kurdish parliament had collapsed amid bitter fighting between the two main Kurdish parties. It seemed unlikely that any meaningful change would come from there.

Even if it had, legislative reform of sharia-based law has rarely been a lasting success. Tunisia in 1956 replaced its Koranic law with a unified code for Muslims, Christians and Jews that banned polygamy and repudiation, and gave women equal pay and equal rights in divorce. But the law was so far ahead of public att.i.tudes that it never succeeded in creating deep change. To walk the streets in Tunis today is to be transported to a planet where women barely exist. Apart from a few foreign tourists, women aren't seen in public places.

In Iran the shah's laws banning polygamy and child marriage were overturned after the revolution. In Egypt, the birthplace of the modern Arab feminist movement, legal reform had a mixed history. In 1919 veiled women marched through the streets of Cairo to protest British colonial rule. In 1956, with British rule banished, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser granted women the vote. But until 1979 restrictive personal status laws prohibited a woman leaving her husband's house without his permission or a court order.

In his novel, Palace Walk, Palace Walk, Egypt's n.o.bel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz writes movingly of Amina, who leaves her house just once in twenty-five years of marriage to visit a nearby mosque. When her husband learns she has defied him and gone out, he orders her from the house: "His command fell on her head like a fatal blow. She was dumbfounded and did not utter a word. She could not move... she had entertained many kinds of fears: that he might pour out his anger on her and deafen her with his shouts and curses. She had not even ruled out physical violence, but the idea of being evicted had never troubled her. She had lived with him for twenty-five years and could not imagine that anything could separate them or pluck her from this house of which she had become an inseparable part." Egypt's n.o.bel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz writes movingly of Amina, who leaves her house just once in twenty-five years of marriage to visit a nearby mosque. When her husband learns she has defied him and gone out, he orders her from the house: "His command fell on her head like a fatal blow. She was dumbfounded and did not utter a word. She could not move... she had entertained many kinds of fears: that he might pour out his anger on her and deafen her with his shouts and curses. She had not even ruled out physical violence, but the idea of being evicted had never troubled her. She had lived with him for twenty-five years and could not imagine that anything could separate them or pluck her from this house of which she had become an inseparable part."

Perhaps even worse than the threat of banishment, though, was the law of Bait el Taa, or House of Obedience. This law empowered a husband to compel an estranged or runaway wife to return home and have s.e.x with him, no matter how great her hatred or aversion. If necessary, the police could be called to drag a woman back to her husband's house. Other laws meant Egyptian women could be divorced without even knowing it. Polygamous husbands weren't legally required to tell their wives about one another. Some found out only on the death of the husband, when a "new" family showed up to claim a share of the estate.

Gradually, Egyptian women worked their way into politics. In 1962, Hakmet Abu Zeid became the first woman in the cabinet, in the post of social affairs minister. But it wasn't until 1978, backed by the president's wife, Jehan Sadat, that her successor, Aisha Rateb, began a sustained campaign for reform of the personal status laws. They were mild reforms, calling for a husband to inform a wife of divorce, or of his intention to take another wife. If he married another, the first wife had the right to divorce him within twelve months. The reforms also gave divorced women custody of children at least until age ten for boys and twelve for girls, extendable, by court order, to fifteen and marriage. There was to be fairer alimony; the right of a wife with children to retain the family home; and the right of appeal to a court against a husband's enforcement of Bait el Taa.

But despite their mildness, the reforms immediately provoked cries of "Islam's Laws not Jehan's Laws." Radical sheiks branded Jehan Sadat and Aisha Rateb atheists and enemies of the family. Rioting broke out at Al Azhar, the ancient Islamic university. "One, two, three, four!" screamed the male students. "We want one, two, three, four wives!" In fact, the laws hadn't challenged the right to polygamy or unilateral divorce. They hadn't even mentioned c.l.i.to-ridectomy.

In 1979, Anwar Sadat enacted the laws by presidential decree, during a parliamentary recess. He also set up new quotas aimed at raising the number of women in government. But opponents continued the battle in court. In 1985 they succeeded in having "Jehan's Laws" struck down. Now the fight has widened, with fundamentalists seeking to overthrow Egypt's government in favor of what they say is a pure Islamic system. And that system is at odds with all forms of government that currently exist, including Western democracy.

In its ideal form, the Islamic state isn't a nation in any modern sense of the word. It has no borders. It would be a political and religious union of all Muslims, modeled on the community Muhammad set up in Medina. There would be no political parties, just a single, unified Islamic ummah, ummah, or community. At its head would be a or community. At its head would be a caliph, caliph, literally, successor, who would follow in the footsteps of the prophet Muhammad as the Muslims' leading political and religious authority. literally, successor, who would follow in the footsteps of the prophet Muhammad as the Muslims' leading political and religious authority.

The caliph must be a man, for part of his duty is leading community prayers, and a woman isn't allowed to lead men at prayer lest the sound of her voice arouse carnal rather than spiritual thoughts. The caliph should be chosen by the distinguished members of the community and ideally would be someone who serves reluctantly rather than one who puts himself forward for election.

Under the caliph are legislative and judicial branches of government: a majlis as shura, majlis as shura, which resembles a parliament in some ways, although its role is more advisory than legislative; a council of experts who serve as the caliph's close advisers; and the qadis, or judges, who according to most sources also must be men, since women are considered too emotional to sit in judgment. which resembles a parliament in some ways, although its role is more advisory than legislative; a council of experts who serve as the caliph's close advisers; and the qadis, or judges, who according to most sources also must be men, since women are considered too emotional to sit in judgment.

The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The hadith fills many gaps. A third source of legislation, on matters not touched on in either Koran or hadith, are practices decided upon by the unanimous agreement of the Islamic community, for Muhammad is believed to have stated that "my community will not agree upon an error."

While Muslims may vote for their representatives in an ideal Islamic state, the system can't be a democracy in the sense of tolerating competing ideologies, for no earthly ideology-even if supported by the will of the majority-can ever be allowed to overrule the divine laws of the Koran. When the Algerian government called off elections that looked likely to bring an Islamic government to power in 1992, it did so on the basis that the Islamicists, once democratically elected, would then dismantle Algerian democratic inst.i.tutions. Members of the main Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front, even joked that their slogan was: "One man, one vote. Once."

How women would partic.i.p.ate in an ideal Islamic state is a matter of debate. While they can't be caliph or qadi, the history of the community at Medina shows women taking part in key decisions and being present at discussions of policy. Women often argued with Muhammad and the caliphs who followed him, and sometimes their opinions proved decisive.

Yet at the Islamic University of Gaza women students get a decidedly dimmer view of their likely role in a future Islamic state. "Politics needs a certain mental ability," explained Ahmad Saati, the university's spokesman. "Very few women have this kind of mind." I found his answer odd, seeing that the most prominent Palestinian political figure at that moment was Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman at peace talks in Washington.

"Ask Ashrawi's husband. Ask her children," Ahmad Saati responded. "If she is a good wife, and a good mother, and a good sister-if she is perfectly fulfilling all those roles, and then has some ability to partic.i.p.ate beyond that, fine, she is welcome in politics. But if her husband and children are suffering from her absence or her preoccupation with politics, then this is not Islam." It was widely known that Hanan's husband cared for their two daughters in her absence, was comfortable in the kitchen and proud of his wife's work. Ahmad Saati neither understood nor approved of any of this. "How," he asked contemptuously, "can I build homes for others when my own home is falling down?"

In Iran, which has tried to model many of its political inst.i.tutions on those of the original Islamic community, women's political partic.i.p.ation has been encouraged since the demonstrations that brought the revolution. There are women in the Parliament, and some women have risen to as high rank as deputy ministers.

After its revolution, Iran nodded once in the direction of democracy by holding a referendum asking the question: Islamic Republic, yes or no? An overwhelming "yes" opened the way for a ban on political parties and a prohibition on anyone standing for office who didn't support the goals of the Islamic revolution. In Iran everyone over the age of sixteen has the vote. Since voting is considered a religious duty, turnout is high. But the choice of candidates is strictly limited to those acceptable to the theocracy.

Marziyeh Dabbagh, one of four women elected to Iran's first postrevolutionary Parliament, is typical of politicians likely to succeed in the Iranian system. With a hunched asymmetry caused by severe beatings, she looks much older than her fifty-three years. Her wrists bear a bracelet of scars from cigarette burns, inflicted in the jails of the shah's secret police. Before the revolution Marziyeh used her father's book business as a front for arms smuggling and bomb making. When the police tracked her down and tried to torture information from her, they forced electrodes into her v.a.g.i.n.a, causing an infection so severe, she says, that "the Savak chief wouldn't come into my cell for the smell." In a final effort to extract a confession, the police tortured her twelve-year-old daughter. But even that failed. "When I heard my daughter screaming," she said, "I recited the Koran."

Marziyeh would probably have died in the Savak prison if a woman relative hadn't agreed to take her place while Marziyeh crept out disguised in the woman's chador. When she recovered her health, she went back to smuggling arms and training commandos from bases in Lebanon. During Khomeini's Paris exile, she became chief of his household security. She told me she'd never quite forgiven the press for making her miss Khomeini's historic flight home in 1979. The day before, a French reporter had tried to get a scoop by climbing into the ayatollah's house over a back wall. "I tackled him, and sprained my ankle," she confided. When she did get home, she found her military skills in heavy demand. For six months she commanded a Revolutionary Guards corps in her hometown of Hamdan. The men, she said, had no problems taking orders from a woman: "I knew how to shoot, and they didn't."

After her election to Parliament, she became one of Khomeini's two envoys to Mikhail Gorbachev when Iran restored relations with the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev extended his hand in greeting, she remembers a moment of alarm. Muslim women aren't allowed to touch unrelated men, but she didn't want to insult the Soviet leader at such a sensitive diplomatic moment. She solved the problem by sticking out her hand wrapped in her chador.

In Parliament, Marziyeh generally voted with the hard-liners on matters of foreign policy and economic reform. But she always supported initiatives for women, such as easing access to pensions, improving benefits for single mothers and ending discrimination in the distribution of foreign-study scholarships.

It seemed ironic that women like Marziyeh could get elected in hard-line Iran, while women in much more moderate Islamic countries often got nowhere. In Jordan women got the vote in 1973. Unfortunately, since Parliament was suspended in 1967, they didn't get a chance to exercise it until King Hussein finally called elections in 1989. Toujan Faisal, a forty-one-year-old TV presenter, thought she had a good chance of winning a seat. A year earlier, Toujan had been made moderator of a new chat show called "Women's Issues," which dealt each week with a particular topic of special concern to women. It had quickly become the most controversial TV show in Jordan's history. One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a G.o.d-given right.

For Muslim feminists, few issues are more sensitive. "Good women are the obedient," says the Koran. "As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them." Muslim feminists argue that "scourge" is only one of the possible translations for the word used in the Koran, dharaba. dharaba. They say the word can also be translated as "strike with a feather." In the context of the Koran, which elsewhere urges gentle treatment of women, they argue, it is illogical to accept that the word is being used in its severest definition. The pa.s.sage, they say, is meant to be read as a series of steps: first, admonish them; if that fails, withdraw s.e.x; as a last resort, hit them lightly. No Muslim emulating Muhammad would ever go as far as the third step. While the prophet is known to have deprived his wives of s.e.x as a punishment, there is no evidence that he ever raised a hand against them. One hadith records Muhammad telling his followers: "Some of your wives came to me complaining that their husbands have been beating them. I swear by Allah those are not the best among you." Toujan delved deep into the hadith to make her case for an end to domestic violence. But a literal reading of the Koran clearly sanctions beatings, and the men who attacked her were quick to brand her a heretic. They say the word can also be translated as "strike with a feather." In the context of the Koran, which elsewhere urges gentle treatment of women, they argue, it is illogical to accept that the word is being used in its severest definition. The pa.s.sage, they say, is meant to be read as a series of steps: first, admonish them; if that fails, withdraw s.e.x; as a last resort, hit them lightly. No Muslim emulating Muhammad would ever go as far as the third step. While the prophet is known to have deprived his wives of s.e.x as a punishment, there is no evidence that he ever raised a hand against them. One hadith records Muhammad telling his followers: "Some of your wives came to me complaining that their husbands have been beating them. I swear by Allah those are not the best among you." Toujan delved deep into the hadith to make her case for an end to domestic violence. But a literal reading of the Koran clearly sanctions beatings, and the men who attacked her were quick to brand her a heretic.

When the television station canceled her program after nearly a year of threats, Toujan decided to run for election. Part of her platform was reform of family law to give women more rights. Fundamentalists answered her candidacy by bringing charges against her in religious court, accusing her of apostasy. While the Koran prescribes death to apostates, Jordan doesn't sanction such executions. Still, if convicted, Toujan faced dissolution of her marriage and loss of custody of her children. Unsatisfied by that, her accusers also called for the lifting of penalties on any Muslim who chose to a.s.sa.s.sinate her. At her court appearances, Toujan had to be protected by the police from hordes of yelling zealots.

"I started getting calls in the middle of the night, women as well as men screaming at me," she said. "They promised I would die." Toujan was forced to campaign surrounded by volunteer bodyguards. Her husband, a gynecologist, had to close his clinic because of the intense hara.s.sment. In the election, Toujan finished third out of six candidates. Her seat was one of only two where electoral officers found evidence of serious irregularities, possibly fraud. No woman candidate won a seat in Parliament. The Islamicists ended up as the dominant faction, with twenty seats going to the Islamic Brotherhood and another dozen to independent Muslim hard-liners.

Immediately the Islamic bloc began campaigning for segregated schools, a ban on alcohol and an end to interest payments. In Parliament they introduced debates over issues as trivial as outlawing male hairdressers for women. When some were appointed ministers, the ministries they controlled became difficult places for women workers. Some were pressured to cover their hair; others, especially married women, were urged to resign to open jobs for unemployed men.

Soon Toujan had a steady stream of women turning up at the door of her small flat. "Most of them came to say how sorry they were that they hadn't taken the election more seriously," she said. Jordan's moderates, the wealthy and well educated, had been cynical about the election and hadn't believed that Jordan's king actually intended to give the Parliament real power. They'd used election day as a holiday, heading for the beach at Aqaba or on a shopping trip to Damascus, and hadn't bothered to vote. "All of them say they'll vote next time," said Toujan. "I just hope that by then it isn't too late."

When Jordanians went back to the polls in November 1993, more than sixty percent of the electorate voted, up from forty-one percent in 1989. The extra votes were enough to throw out almost half the fundamentalists and put Toujan into Parliament as Jordan's first elected woman representative.

The outcome rested in part on a nudge from King Hussein, who ordered subtle changes in voting rules to lessen the fundamentalists' advantage in urban areas, where their following was strongest. In a speech just before lifting a ban on ma.s.s rallies, Hussein warned those who "climb the pulpits... to fear G.o.d in what they say." The king's deftness lay in containing fundamentalist influence without excluding it from the political process and driving it underground, as had happened in Algeria.

But even without the electoral changes, Toujan's support had swelled. Many Jordanians admired her courage throughout a campaign in which extremists once again declared it a religious duty "to shed her blood." A competing candidate in Amman ran on a platform promising "to wrest women's const.i.tutional rights" away from them.

"I did it by being myself, and it worked," said Toujan, ecstatic about her victory. Other women candidates didn't fare so well. Nadia Bouchnaq, a fifty-year-old with a record of three decades of social service, was stoned after leaving debates in which fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman's voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia greeted her loss philosophically. "There will come a time when people will get used to having women in Parliament," she said.

Toujan certainly aimed to make it so, and not by treading softly. Her first goal as a legislator was a modest but telling reform of one of the many laws that belittle women. She sought to change an old travel regulation that required wives to seek their husbands' permission before leaving the country. She also wanted to alter women's pa.s.sports that list them as 'wife of,' 'widow of,' or 'divorcee of a husband or ex-husband, rather than giving them the dignity of their own names.

It is still too early to know what Toujan will be able to accomplish in Parliament. But the extremists know she has already achieved something vastly significant just by being there, in place of one of those who tried every means to destroy her.

In some Islamic countries, even the idea of women politicians remains a distant dream. In Kuwait it was women, during the seven-month Iraqi occupation, who faced Iraqi bullets, demonstrating for the return of the emir. Women kept the small resistance movement alive, smuggling weapons and food, hiding foreigners and fighters. But when the emir came back, he showed his appreciation by declining to let them vote in the 1992 parliamentary election.

Before the invasion a medical student named Areej al-Khateeb did her political organizing from the car phone in her gold Mercedes sports car. The Iraqis stole the car, complete with its "I Love Democracy" b.u.mper stickers. While Areej's socialist parents didn't care about Kuwait's traditional view of women, Areej herself trod a careful path, tempering her own feminist views with a keen sense of how far she could go and still be listened to by a wide range of her fellow university students. To conform to Kuwaiti traditions of separating the s.e.xes, she organized separate rooms for women at political gatherings, with audio hookups so they could listen to the debate.