Nine Parts of Desire Part 9

With a hand that seemed too palsied for his trade, the old man scribbled an address in Arabic on the edge of a torn piece of newsprint. "Go to this place," he said, handing it to me. "Tell her that the lute stringer sent you."

The taxi drove for almost an hour through Cairo's dense jumble of apartment buildings. Just before the city ended abruptly in desert, the driver stopped to ask directions. As always in Egypt, the two men he asked each pointed a different way. Eventually we found the place: a neat house surrounded by oleander. Music drifted faintly over the low brick wall. The door was open, and I wandered in. Inside, half a dozen women and girls were dancing, balancing canes on their heads as their hips shook vigorously. The women signaled that I could join in. I tried as best I could to follow their movements, but their speed and suppleness were way beyond me. An hour later I gave up, exhausted. Flopping in a corner, I watched as the others continued. One woman, clearly the most graceful and skilled, led the dance. But if she were teaching, it was only by example. She said nothing to the others to correct their stance or movement.

Finally one of the other women stopped, sweating, and went out to get some water. I followed, asking who the teacher was. The woman sipped her water slowly. We were, she said, in the home of one of Cairo's best-loved performers. But for her own reasons she never appeared in public anymore. If I wanted to learn, she said, I would find them there in the afternoons, every Tuesday and Thursday.

I had found my maalimah. From then on I went to the house whenever I could. Gradually I learned how to isolate each muscle group so that the cane stayed on my head. I learned to listen to the music and to follow it with my body. Watching the other women, I learned to move without the cra.s.s, b.u.mp-and-grind exaggerations that Westerners instinctively a.s.sociate with oriental dance. In its pure form, less is more, and the most powerful movements are often the tiniest and most controlled twitches.

I began to wish there was some way to counter the fundamentalists' campaign against this artful dance. Finally I decided that, as a small act of solidarity with the dancers who refused to be pushed behind the veil by fundamentalists, I would take to the stage, somewhere in Cairo, for an unlicensed performance. I confided my plans to my friend Ian, the Australian amba.s.sador. He buried his head in his hands in mock despair. "I can see it now: I'll be hauled out of bed at 2 A.M. A.M. one morning to answer a 'distressed Australian' call, and it'll be you-busted for belly dancing." one morning to answer a 'distressed Australian' call, and it'll be you-busted for belly dancing."

The more immediate problem was finding a venue modest enough to match my talents. I went back to Mohamed Ali Street for advice. I'd become friendly with a young drum maker there, who played in the band of a famous dancer named Lucy. He immediately ruled out the fancy hotels and the clubs along the Pyramids Road. "They range from first cla.s.s to fifth cla.s.s," Khalid mused. "What you need is something really tenth cla.s.s."

He suggested the New Arizona Nightclub, admission ninety cents. With Tony in tow, I cased the joint. There were women as well as men in the audience, the performers' standards weren't very high, and the management seemed laissez-faire enough about risking an unlicensed dancer, so long as my act appeared to be the impulse of the moment. If the politeness police showed up, I was to pretend I'd been propelled to my feet by the irresistible power of the music.

As I sat waiting for my cue a few nights later, I doubted I'd be able to sustain a defense of unpremeditated belly dancing. Under my coat I was wearing a black and gold costume with enough beading to buy a small Pacific atoll.

I was to go on in the middle of the bill, after the third dancer, Ashgan. Like most of the performers, she was a middle-aged woman with a figure well beyond Rubenesque. Her dancing was indifferent, but the audience didn't seem to mind. Judging from their turbans, mostly askew at this late hour, the bulk of the clients were Saydis, Egyptian country folk, in town for a big night out. Dotted among them, I could see one or two tables of Gulf Arabs in their distinctive red-checkered headcloths. The place seemed way too down market for wealthy Gulfies: either they'd drunk so much earlier in the night that they could no longer tell the difference, or the oil-price slump was more serious than I thought.

Finally Ashgan took her bow, then led me onto the stage. I looked down on a sea of turbans and felt a wave of panic. But with an insistent boom-tap-tap from the drummer, the music took off, and I went with it, losing myself in its circles and switchbacks. Oriental dance is improvisational, and demands an intuitive understanding between musicians and dancer. As the drumming gained speed and intensity, I had to match the rhythm with a buildup to a frantic, isolated hip shimmy that sent the thousands of gold beads in my belt shivering. Later the pace slowed until I was almost stationary: just a few muscles twitching to the long-drawn-out notes of the rebaba.

It seemed as though I'd been onstage for a thousand and one nights. Finally I heard the shift in the music that allows the dancer to bring the dance to an end with a graceful salaam. I made my bow and turned to leave the stage. A Saudi leapt up, waving an Egyptian ten-pound note, demanding an encore. To my astonishment, the rest of the audience banged the tables for more. Ashgan, in her most graceful arabesque of the night, reached for the ten pounds with one hand and grasped my wrist with the other, propelling me back under the spotlight. We did the encore together. Halfway through, she leaned over and peered down the front of my costume, then turned to the audience. "Mafish!" "Mafish!" she cried in Arabic. "Nothing there!" We left the stage together to thunderous applause. she cried in Arabic. "Nothing there!" We left the stage together to thunderous applause.

Later the manager, Samy Sallam, gave my performance a more hard-nosed review. "Your dancing," he said, "it is technically quite good. But you don't have enough feeling. You must learn the emotion as well as the steps." He gave me his business card and remarked, rather ambiguously, that I should give him" a call. I knew I wouldn't. I'd made my little protest about a woman's right to dance.

I walked out of the steamy club into the wintry night air. Although it was after 3 A.M., A.M., the streets and cafes were still full of people, laughing together, enjoying themselves. In Egypt it seemed unlikely that a dour, fun-denying fundamentalism could ever really take hold for very long. The Egyptians seemed too much like the Italians: they'd listen politely to the Pope, but they'd still manage to put a p.o.r.n star into Parliament. the streets and cafes were still full of people, laughing together, enjoying themselves. In Egypt it seemed unlikely that a dour, fun-denying fundamentalism could ever really take hold for very long. The Egyptians seemed too much like the Italians: they'd listen politely to the Pope, but they'd still manage to put a p.o.r.n star into Parliament.

Most Egyptians were too intensely pious to accept the extremists' wanton gunning down of tourists or writers or people who happened to be standing in the wrong place when they launched an attack in the streets of a.s.suit and Cairo. Despite lives of hardship and frustration with a sluggish, corruption-riddled government, it was hard to imagine Egyptians turning their backs on the tolerance and good humor that made their crowded cities and muddy villages so pleasant and livable.

The old lute stringer in Mohamed Ali Street was right. It might take awhile, but the dancers would be back.

CONCLUSION: BEWARE O OF T THE D DOGMA.

"Say: O unbelievers! I will not worship that which ye worship; nor will ye worship that which I worship.... Ye have your religion, and I have my religion."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE UNBELIEVERS.

I have learned to live by the rhythm of other people's prayers. In Cairo, I woke at sunrise to the voices of muezzins and timed my lunch break by the midday call to prayer. There are no muezzins where I live now, on a lane of old London houses built two hundred years ago by refugees from France. The refugees, all Catholics, also built a small church by their cottages and so, these days, it is the angelus bell that wakes me in the morning nad sends me to the kitchen at noon in search of food. have learned to live by the rhythm of other people's prayers. In Cairo, I woke at sunrise to the voices of muezzins and timed my lunch break by the midday call to prayer. There are no muezzins where I live now, on a lane of old London houses built two hundred years ago by refugees from France. The refugees, all Catholics, also built a small church by their cottages and so, these days, it is the angelus bell that wakes me in the morning nad sends me to the kitchen at noon in search of food.

One day in the summer of 1992 there was a guest for lunch. A detective arrived first, to search my closets and poke his head into the attic. A filament of dust clung to his hair as he gave the all clear over a walkie-talkie. The cars roared into the lane, fast. "Leave the door open now," the detective said. The guest couldn't risk lingering on the doorstep. He entered, suddenly, at the center of a flying wedge of bodyguards. A floppy brown fedora fell low across his face. Sungla.s.ses hid the distinctive droop of his eyelids and the improbable circ.u.mflex of his brows. After four years in hiding, Salman Rushdie's skin had the fishlike translucence of a man who never sees the sun. His posture had eased into the self-effacing slouch of an adolescent who desperately doesn't want to be noticed.

I was living in Cairo when the storm broke over The Satanic Verses. The Satanic Verses. Just after Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death, I took my copy of the novel to Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's n.o.bel laureate, whose own novels had been censored on religious grounds. I hoped he might write a defense of Rushdie: a plea for tolerance, for the freedom of ideas. Mahfouz took the book from my hands and pushed it to the far side of his desk, where he wouldn't have to look at it. He was tired, he said: worn out from his own battles with fundamentalism. He did not think he would enter this engagement. Just after Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death, I took my copy of the novel to Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's n.o.bel laureate, whose own novels had been censored on religious grounds. I hoped he might write a defense of Rushdie: a plea for tolerance, for the freedom of ideas. Mahfouz took the book from my hands and pushed it to the far side of his desk, where he wouldn't have to look at it. He was tired, he said: worn out from his own battles with fundamentalism. He did not think he would enter this engagement.

Perhaps he was wise. On the day Salman Rushdie came to lunch at my house, we talked together for an article I was writing on the chilling effect the fatwa was having on all writers dealing with Islam. I had felt the chill myself, sitting on a sunny terrace in southern Lebanon with a leading cleric of Hezbollah. By then, I was used to the averted gaze of devout Muslim men, and it seemed normal to me to be conversing with someone whose eyes were focused on a floor tile an inch in front of my shoe. He was considering whether to let me meet his wife. He found it troubling that my book would mention the prophet Muhammad's wives and daughters. "You will have to be very careful," he said. Suddenly, he raised his turbaned head and shot me a single, penetrating glare. "Be sure you do not make any mistakes."

Rushdie and I didn't know, as we sat talking of these things, that the Egyptian writer Farag Foda lay dying, that same day, of gunshot wounds inflicted by Islamic Jihad in reprisal for his eloquent and often scathing critiques of religious extremism.

In the progressive Shiite magazine Dialogue, Dialogue, Ali Allawi writes of the difficulties of potential European converts to Islam in seeing the faith standing separate from "the prejudices and social baggage of Islamic lands." Once Westerners "are able to dissociate Islam from this background noise," he writes, "they are able to quickly appreciate its veracity." Ali Allawi writes of the difficulties of potential European converts to Islam in seeing the faith standing separate from "the prejudices and social baggage of Islamic lands." Once Westerners "are able to dissociate Islam from this background noise," he writes, "they are able to quickly appreciate its veracity."

But these days the background noise is very loud. And every day's news seemed to raise the decibels. The World Trade Center explodes on the apparent say-so of a militant Islamic preacher. A United Nations human rights report finds Sudan's Koran-based punishments in conflict with the international human rights agreements the country has signed. In response, the government of Sudan threatens the report's Romanian-born author with death. In Egypt a militant cleric named Ali Yehya commands his followers to tear down the Pyramids and all other pharaonic monuments because civilizations that existed before Islam were base and idolatrous. In Algeria two women are gunned down at a bus stop because they are not veiled. In Saudi Arabia a newspaper editor goes to jail because his English-language newspaper runs a cartoon strip, "BC", that the Saudi government deems heretical. The offending cartoon was a two-frame piece in which a Stone Age man stands on a hill and asks, "G.o.d, if you're up there, give me a sign." In the second frame, the man is deluged with a sudden rain shower. "Well," he says, "we know two things: He's up there, and He's got a sense of humor." The Saudis jailed the editor, a Hindu, for running a cartoon strip that questioned the existence of G.o.d.

Like the Rushdie fatwa, these incidents come at us from so deep in left field that we, as Westerners, have no coherent way to think about them. We shrug. Weird foreigners. Who understands them? Who needs to?

And yet, as I made my home in London, gradually shaking the last few fine crumbs of Cairo dust from the pages of my books, I found that the background noise of Islam remained always there, in the distance, like a neighbor hammering. And eventually I accepted that it was neither possible nor right to ignore it.

That summer, not long after Salman Rushdie came to lunch, I answered the phone to a distraught friend whose neighbor had just been knifed to death. The dead woman was an imam's daughter from the Sudan. She had been stabbed by her husband, also a Sudanese.

It was winter by the time the case came to trial. Every day for five days I walked through a cold London drizzle to a small court in the Old Bailey. To the great machine of British justice, it was a routine case. The press benches were empty. A simple "domestic" between middle-aged marrieds from a middle-cla.s.s suburb was too ordinary to be of interest.

The facts of the killing weren't in dispute. Just before dinnertime, in the kitchen of his handsome Victorian house, Omar stabbed his wife, Afaf. With the dripping knife still in his hand, he walked to the phone and called his closest friend to tell him what he had done, and then called the police.

In the small public gallery I sat between the man's brothers and the woman's neighbors. The brothers, who had flown from the Sudan for the trial, shivered in their summer-weight suits. The neighbors, well-groomed young mothers who knew the victim from parent-teacher nights and weekday excursions to garden-supply centers, seemed uneasy with the Old Bailey's hard-bitten police procedures. In the gallery they scribbled in notebooks perched on their knees, as if their meticulous records would somehow help them make sense of the thing that had happened on their tranquil, tree-lined street. Just once in the five days, when the barrister for the prosecution held up the weapon-a good-quality Sabatier cook's knife-and questioned a pathologist as to the exact wounds it made when it plunged five times into the victim's chest and abdomen, one of the women put down her pen and sobbed uncontrollably.

At issue in the court was whether the act was a premeditated murder or, as the defense claimed, manslaughter that took place when the accused was temporarily out of his mind as the result of "reaction depression" brought on by the knowledge that his wife had had an affair, and that she had, on the morning of the stabbing, obtained a court order restraining him from taking their children out of Britain to live with his family in the Sudan.

As I listened to the facts of the case, I could interpret them two ways. The Western way, as the jury was interpreting them, led to a description of something we all understood: a crime of pa.s.sion in a spur-of-the-moment insane frenzy. The other way, the way I'd learned living among the women of Islam, described something very different: a cleansing of family honor, a premeditated killing that would, under British law, draw a sentence of life imprisonment.

From where they sat in their jury box, the men and women of the jury couldn't see Omar as he stood each morning beside his police guard, waiting to be escorted into the court. But from the elevation of the public gallery I could see him, and so could his brothers. Each morning he looked up at them and raised a clenched fist in a defiant victory salute. His step, as he entered the dock, was almost jaunty.

Afaf, thirty-eight years old when she died, was a kinswoman who had been married to him by arrangement. She was barely fifteen; he was already thirty. That Omar was her relative, as well as her husband, mattered perhaps more than any other single fact in the court case. It was as a relation, a male of her blood kin, that tradition deemed him most dishonored by her adultery.

Afaf had made the most of a life that had offered her few choices. She had had no choice when they sc.r.a.ped away her c.l.i.toris, married her to a man she barely knew and sent her thousands of miles from home, to a city whose language she didn't speak.

Afaf lived in London with Omar while he studied for his doctorate. In 1985, unable to find an academic post in Britain, he began work in Saudi Arabia. For ten months of every year Afaf raised her four children alone. While working in clerical jobs, she managed to finish high school and a computer course and to begin a degree in social science. A heavy-set woman with a wide smile and an open manner, she managed to break through British reserve and make friends. For Omar, returning only once a year from Saudi Arabia's austere religious atmosphere, it wasn't so easy. He was hostile to some of Afaf's closest friends, especially an unmarried couple who lived across the street. He felt such neighbors created an "atheistic atmosphere" for his children.

Gradually, the long separations and Afaf's change from docile young wife to an independent, accomplished woman began to fray the marriage's fragile bonds. In 1987, Afaf and Omar stopped sharing a bedroom. But Afaf was afraid to ask for a divorce, fearing that Omar would spirit the children back to the Sudan, where Islamic law would give her no right to their custody.

Then one of her work mates, Andrew, a tall, sandy-haired divorce, fell in love with her. At first she kept her distance, but slowly his support at the office extended to help at the house, where the years of Omar's absence had left odd jobs undone and rooms dilapidated. It was Andrew who explained to Afaf that British law would protect her rights to her children. In January 1991 she wrote to her husband asking for a divorce.

Omar agreed. But then, on his next trip home, he learned that Andrew had been to his house and even spent the night there once when he'd worked late painting the sunroom. Omar was outraged that the neighbors might have noticed. His main concern was to keep the visits secret, because, he told the court, he was concerned for his family honor if Afaf's relationship with another man became public. According to Andrew's testimony at the trial, Omar told him he had no objections to his meeting Afaf, so long as it happened away from her home and the prying gaze of the neighbors.

Afaf may well have lived to divorce Omar and marry the man of her choice if it hadn't been for one long, stressful day of arguments over Omar's right to go out alone with the two younger children, whom Afaf feared he might try to abduct. Omar, frustrated and furious, went to visit his one Sudanese friend, broke down, and confided his suspicions of his wife's infidelity.

That friend, called as a witness in court, described how he'd burst into tears as Omar spoke. Those tears-straight from the heart of a fellow Sudanese who knew the depths of Omar's dishonor-may well have caused Afaf's death. Omar's Western-trained intellect might have been able to win the war with his social baggage if, as he'd intended, his wife's relationship had remained secret. But once his friend knew, the dishonor was an accomplished fact that could be wiped away only in the ancient, b.l.o.o.d.y way. That Omar's first call after the killing was to this friend-not a doctor, not an ambulance, not the police-seemed to me the strongest evidence of motive presented in the court. Yet the prosecution never made this connection.

At the end of the week the jury reached a manslaughter verdict on the grounds of "diminished responsibility." For ending his wife's life, Omar received a prison sentence of six years. Taking off the time he'd already served since the killing and a likely two-year remission for good behavior, he will probably be free by July 1996.

From the facts presented in that small courtroom, there was little chance of any other verdict. What was missing wasn't evidence but understanding of the prejudices and social baggage of Islamic lands that Omar had carried with him from the Sudan, his country of upbringing, and from Saudi Arabia, the country in which he worked ten months of every year.

Nothing in their own culture or experience equipped this jury of very ordinary-looking English people to comprehend that what had been described in court was an honor killing, one of the hundreds that every year claim Muslim women's lives.

This was not an isolated case; it simply happened to be the one I heard about. In a British study of family violence completed not long after Afaf's death, the researchers found that women married to men of Muslim background were eight times more likely to be killed by their spouses than any other women in Britain. Yet British barristers, judges and juries continue to a.s.sess these crimes by a yardstick that's completely inadequate to measure what is really going on.

Presented with statistics on violence toward women, or facing the furor over the Rushdie fatwa, progressive Muslims such as Ali Allawi, Rana Kabbani and others ask us to blame a wide range of villains: colonial history, the bitterness of immigrant experience, Bedouin tradition, pre-Islamic African culture. Yet when the Koran sanctions wife beating and the execution of apostates, it can't be entirely exonerated for an epidemic of wife slayings and death sentences on authors.

In the end, what Rana Kabbani and Ali Allawi are proposing is as artificial an exercise as that proposed by the Marxists who used to argue that socialism in its pure form should not be maligned and rejected because of the deficiencies of "actually existing socialism." At some point every religion, especially one that purports to encompa.s.s a complete way of life and system of government, has to be called to account for the kind of life it offers the people in the lands where it predominates.

It becomes insufficient to look at Islam on paper, or Islam in history, and dwell on the inarguable improvements it brought to women's lives in the seventh century. Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith has proved such fertile ground for almost every antiwomen custom it encountered in its great march out of Arabia. When it found veils and seclusion in Persia, it absorbed them; when it found genital mutilations in Egypt, it absorbed them; when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women's partic.i.p.ation withered.

Yet there are exceptions. When the armies of Islam swept into India, Muslims were appalled by the practice of sati, sati, in which widows, on a husband's death, would burn themselves alive on his funeral pyre. In 1650 the traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote of Hindu widows, banned by their faith from remarriage and reduced by their husbands' deaths to penury and contempt, choosing instead to end their lives through sati. "But it should be remarked," he wrote, "that a woman cannot burn herself without having received permission from the governor of the place where she dwells, and those governors who are Musalmans [Muslims] hold this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror, and do not readily give permission." For those women's saved lives, at least, Islam can take the credit. But why did such a powerful and resilient faith not stand its ground more often in the face of "dreadful customs"? in which widows, on a husband's death, would burn themselves alive on his funeral pyre. In 1650 the traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier wrote of Hindu widows, banned by their faith from remarriage and reduced by their husbands' deaths to penury and contempt, choosing instead to end their lives through sati. "But it should be remarked," he wrote, "that a woman cannot burn herself without having received permission from the governor of the place where she dwells, and those governors who are Musalmans [Muslims] hold this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror, and do not readily give permission." For those women's saved lives, at least, Islam can take the credit. But why did such a powerful and resilient faith not stand its ground more often in the face of "dreadful customs"?

Once I began working on this book, I looked everywhere for examples of women trying to reclaim Islam's positive messages, trying to carry forward into the twentieth century the reformist zeal with which Muhammad had remade the lives of many women (other than his own wives and the Muslim army's war captives) in the first Muslim community at Medina. It turned out to be a frustrating search. In most places the direction of the debate seemed to be exactly the reverse. Palestinian, Egyptian, Algerian and Afghani women were seeing a curtain come down on decades of women's liberation as Islamic leaders in their countries turned to the most exclusionary and inequitable interpretations. For those women who struggled against the tide, the results were a discouraging trio of marginalization, hara.s.sment and exile.

In Morocco, Fatima Mernissi's Koranic scholarship has made a formidable case for Islam as a religion of equality and human dignity, whose message has simply been buried over time by self-serving misogynists in positions of power. Yet her work is read in Western universities much more than it is in Moroccan mosques. No matter how precise her research into the hadith, the male-dominated Islamic establishment doesn't seem willing to open its ears to the scholarship of a Muslim woman who doesn't veil or otherwise flaunt her piety.

Perhaps that is why I found the brightest hope for positive change camouflaged among the black chadors of devout Iranian women. Even the most narrow-minded fundamentalists can't criticize the Islamic credentials of women such as Khomeini's daughter Zahra Mostafavi or Rafsanjani's daughter Faezeh Hashemi. Their conspicuous adherence to religious rules gives them a high ground from which to make their case for women's rights. So far, they have used that position sparingly, to get women a greater political voice, more equal job opportunities and the right to partic.i.p.ate in sport. To be sure, these women will never tear down the walls of tradition. They will never make the arguments that can can be made within Islamic reasoning against veiling or polygamy. But within those traditional walls they can make a much safer haven for women at risk of abuse and exploitation in the name of Islam. be made within Islamic reasoning against veiling or polygamy. But within those traditional walls they can make a much safer haven for women at risk of abuse and exploitation in the name of Islam.

To Western women, that mightn't look like much. It is easy to see these grim figures in their heavy shrouds as symbols of what's wrong rather than what's right with women and Islam. But to Muslim women elsewhere in the strictest parts of the Islamic world, the Iranian woman riding to work on her motorbike, even with her billowing chador gripped firmly in her teeth, looks like a figure to envy.

"They are our Superwomen," said Iman Fadlallah, the shy twenty-four-year-old wife of the Hezbollah sheik in southern Lebanon who had sat on his terrace and warned me about this book. Iman's father, the most prominent Hezbollah cleric in Beirut, had abruptly ended her schooling when she was fourteen years old, choosing a husband for her whom she didn't meet until the wedding. Now she stayed mainly in her house raising her children. In Iran, where she had lived with her husband while he continued his clerical studies, she had glimpsed a much wider world, even for the most devout of women. She spoke wistfully of Iranian women's opportunities to study and work. "We have to struggle to be as strong as they are," she said.

Everyone has her own way of remembering her travels. Some keep journals. Others take photographs. I go into the bedroom and open my closet. There are memories hanging there, semaph.o.r.es from six years and twenty countries. There is the homespun scarf in red and black, still faintly scented with wood smoke from the cooking fire of the Kurdish woman who untied it from her own hair to wrap around mine. There is the long Palestinian dress Raed's mother Rahme made for me so that I would feel comfortable sitting on the floor among them. I still have the Italian pin-striped "king suit," a discreet little mend hiding the rip from the day I toured with Hussein in the Jordanian desert. I threw out my wedding shoes-the ones with the tide line of camel blood. And I keep meaning to give away the pair of black acrylic socks I had to buy in a hurry when the Islamic dress inspector at a Tehran bank objected to the inch of too sheer stocking peeking between the top of my shoes and the hem of my chador.

Limp on a hanger is the chador itself, the big black square of silk and synthetic that I used to despise. But that well-worn black rag, stained on the hem and torn on the shoulder, has become an old friend. Like a 1980s dress-for-success suit, it has been the camouflage that helped me do my job in a world where I wasn't quite welcome.

When I look at that chador I no longer get the little shudder of fear or the gust of outrage that I used to feel when I saw the most extreme forms of Islamic dress. These days my feelings are much more complex. Chadors are linked in my mind to women I've felt close to, in spite of the abyss of belief that divided us.

When I lived among the women of Islam, I became part of a world that is still, in the last decade of the twentieth century, an intensely private one. In public, most women move like shadows, constrained physically by their hijab or mentally by codes of conduct that inhibit them. It is only behind the high walls and the closed doors that women are ever really free.

For me, entering that world touched emotions that had been a long time dormant. From the time I'd taken my first job, as a cub reporter on the sports desk of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, my career had pushed me into a man's world. When I became a foreign correspondent, most of my colleagues were men. It wasn't until I went to Cairo and started seeking out Muslim women that I realized I hadn't made a close female friend since I left school. my career had pushed me into a man's world. When I became a foreign correspondent, most of my colleagues were men. It wasn't until I went to Cairo and started seeking out Muslim women that I realized I hadn't made a close female friend since I left school.

I'd forgotten how much I liked to be with women. And yet there was always a sourness lurking at the edge of even the sweetest encounters. Squatting on the floor of a Kurdish friend's kitchen, helping the women with their bread making, I realized what an agreeable thing it was to be completely surrounded by women, to have a task that was ours alone. As the women's deft fingers flung b.a.l.l.s of dough under my rolling pin and the fire roared beneath a baking sheet of blackened metal, I felt contentment in shared work well done.

But an hour into the labor, as my shoulders ached and scalding sweat dribbled down my back, I began to resent the boy toddler who kept ambling up to the steaming pile of fresh bread and breaking off tasty morsels in his fat little fists. His sister, not much older, was already part of our bread-making a.s.sembly line. Why should he learn so young that her role was to toil for his pleasure?

The nunlike clothes, pushed to the back of my closet, remind me of all those mixed feelings. Every time my hand brushes the smooth fabric of the chador, I think of Nahid Aghtaie, the Iranian medical student who gave up an easy life in London to go home and work at low-paying jobs to advance the goals of her revolution. I remember her, in Gum, drifting toward me over the marble-floored mosque to tell me that she'd prayed for me "to have nice children." And then I think of her beautiful face-the small visible triangle between brow and lip-radiant on the morning of the murder of Rushdie's j.a.panese translator in July 1991. "This," she said triumphantly, "shows the power of Islam." I told her that, to me, it no more showed the power of Islam than an Israeli soldier's shooting of a Palestinian child showed the power of Judaism. Why not, I asked her, cite the "power of Islam" in the humanitarian work that Iran was doing for the flood of Iraqi refugees that was then pouring over its borders? "Because n.o.body notices when we do such things," she said. "But every news report in the world will note this execution."

Eventually I became worn out by such conversations. Friendships with women like Nahid were an emotional whipsaw: how was it possible to admire her for the courage of her convictions, when her convictions led to such hateful reasoning?

Just after that trip to Iran, tired from months of covering the war with Iraq and its aftermath, I went home to Australia for a brief vacation. My plane landed in Sydney just ahead of a flight from Jakarta. As I waited for my luggage, the doors to the arrival hall swished open on a crowd of Indonesian-Australians, waiting to greet their relatives. Almost all of the women were veiled. A swift, mean-spirited thought shot through my jet-lagged brain: "Oh, please. Not here too."

I wasn't raised to be a bigot. My parents considered religious intolerance a sin. My mother had seen too much of it in her childhood, among rural Irish Catholic immigrants. Her mother's marriage to a non-Catholic had been an act of courage. Hers was a typically Australian story: within two generations she had kicked the dirt of the old country's prejudices from her shoes and adopted Australia's own "religion"-a pa.s.sionately tolerant secularism. It happened to almost everybody. One of the most revealing statistics I ever learned about my country concerned the twelve members of the Board of Management of Sydney's main synagogue. In 1890 those twelve men were among the city's most observant Jews. Less than a hundred years later, none of the twelve had a single identifiably Jewish descendant. Mixed marriages and the siren song of secularism had claimed them all.

I wondered if that would happen to the new wave of Muslim immigrants. Would their children, too, learn to doubt the Koran's doubt-free prescription for how to live? Would they see that Australia, where atheists routinely got elected prime minister, was a much fairer, gentler society than the religious regimes of places like Saudi Arabia and the Sudan? Or would they, as their numbers increased, seek to impose their values on my culture? During the Rushdie outcry, Australian Muslims had demonstrated, as was their right. But pictures of their toddlers holding placards saying "Rushdie Must Die" had sent a shudder through the society.

An Iranian-born friend who lives in London, a gentle, middle-aged woman who practices family medicine, says the only war she would willingly fight would be one to stop Islamic fundamentalism telling her how to live her life. She is a Zoroastrian, a member of the ancient Persian faith in which dark and light, good and evil are forever locked in a struggle for supremacy.

Should we also struggle to stop Islamic extremists telling others how to live their lives? As Westerners, we profess to believe that human rights are an immutable international currency, independent of cultural mores and political circ.u.mstances. At a Geneva conference on the International Declaration of Human Rights in 1993, Iran was among a handful of countries that argued otherwise. Cloaking their argument in fashionable dress such as cultural relativism, delegates from Iran and Cuba, China and Indonesia argued that the West had imposed its human rights ideology on nations whose very different religious and political histories gave them the right to choose their own. To me, their argument boiled down to this ghastly and untenable proposition: a human right is what the local despot says it is.

The concept of the universality of human rights prevailed at the conference, and the charter was not amended. And yet the charter has done little so far for the genitally mutilated, the forcibly secluded, the disenfranchised women of the world.

Is it even our fight? As a mental test, I always try to reverse the gender. If some ninety million little boys were having their p.e.n.i.ses amputated, would the world have acted to prevent it by now? You bet.

Sometimes subst.i.tuting race for gender also is an interesting exercise. Say a country, a close Western ally and trading partner, had a population half white, half black. The whites had complete control of the blacks. They could beat them if they disobeyed. They deprived them of the right to leave the house without permission; to walk unmolested without wearing the official segregating dress; to hold any decent job in the government, or to work at all without the permission of the white in control of them. Would there have been uproar in our countries by now? Would we have imposed trade sanctions and subjected this country to international opprobrium? You bet. Yet countries such as Saudi Arabia, which deprive half their population of these most basic rights, have been subjected to none of these things.

It is, I suppose, possible to argue that outside pressure is counterproductive when it comes to traditions that are seen to be religious, even if in fact they aren't. Early attempts to ban genital mutilation by colonial-government fiat were dismal failures. But, even if we decline to act on what goes on inside others' borders, there is no excuse for not acting inside our own.

In an era of cultural sensitivity, we need to say that certain cultural baggage is contraband in our countries and will not be admitted. We already draw a line at polygamy; we don't recognize divorce by saying, "I divorce you." We have banned these things even though the Koran approves them. It should be easier to take a stand against practices that don't even carry the sanction of the Koran. "Honor" killings need to be identified in court and punished as the premeditated murders they are. Young women need to be protected against marriages arranged during hasty "vacations" abroad for teenagers too young to give informed consent. And, most urgent of all, c.l.i.toridectomy needs to be made illegal.

In 1994 the United States still had no laws whatever banning migrants from countries such as Somalia and the Sudan from mutilating the genitals of their daughters, and the operation was taking place in migrant communities throughout the country. The first ever bill on the issue had just been introduced to Congress by Colorado Democrat Patricia Schroeder. While it addressed education of migrants and laws against carrying out mutilations within the United States, it didn't propose any means of protecting girls taken out of the country for the procedure.

There is something else we can do: advance the right to asylum on the grounds of "well-founded fear of persecution" to women from any country where fathers, husbands and brothers claim a religious right to inhibit women's freedom. In January 1993 the Canadian government, after almost two years of consideration, granted asylum to a Saudi student who had requested it on the grounds of gender persecution. It was, they said, "an exception." Why should it be? "Nada," as she asks to be called, experienced the same violent hara.s.sment that any woman is subject to from her country's authorities for the "crime" of walking outside her home with uncovered hair. If Nada had remained in Saudi Arabia, and continued to disobey, she might have found herself imprisoned and even tortured, without formal charges ever having been laid.

There is, unfortunately, no chance that granting of automatic asylum to women suffering such gender persecution would lead to a flood of refugees. Only a minority have the means to leave their country, or even their house, when men control the keys to doors and the car, and must sign their approval for the shortest of journeys. But such a step would send a signal to regimes whose restrictions have nothing to do with the religion they claim to uphold. And that signal would be that we, too, have certain things we hold sacred: among them are liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness and the right to doubt.

It is a long time since I stood under Rafsanjani's gaze at a press conference in Iran and told him I was wearing a chador "in a spirit of mutual respect." At that moment, standing in my black shroud under the hot TV lights, I had a mental image of myself, as I liked to be in summer, bare-skinned on the beach near my parents' home. The "mutual respect" I had in mind demanded that he, and those like him, acknowledge my right to sunbake on those Australian sands and, if I chose, to take The Satanic Verses The Satanic Verses along as my beach reading. along as my beach reading.

Last year, when I was home in Sydney, I lay on that beach beside a Muslim family who seemed not the least bit troubled by the exposed flesh surrounding them. While the man splashed in the shallows with his toddlers, his wife sat on the sand, her long, loose dress arranged around her. It made me sad that the woman's tiny daughter, splashing so happily with her father and baby brother, would be, one day soon, required to forgo that pleasure. But that would be her fight, not mine. At least, in Australia, she would have a choice. She would choose between her family's values and what she saw elsewhere.

Every now and then the little girl's mother fiddled with her headscarf as it billowed in the sea breeze. That woman had made her choice: it was different from mine. But sitting there, sharing the warm sand and the soft air, we accepted each other. When she raised her face to the sun, she was smiling.

GLOSSARY.

Abaya: A black cloak with arm slits that falls from the top of the head to the ankles. Generally worn in Persian Gulf countries. A black cloak with arm slits that falls from the top of the head to the ankles. Generally worn in Persian Gulf countries.

Abu: Father Father Allah: The core of the Islamic faith is its monotheism. The core of the Islamic faith is its monotheism. Al Lah Al Lah is simply the arabic for the G.o.d. is simply the arabic for the G.o.d.

Andarun: In traditional Persian homes, the inner, or private, quarter where women live, barred from contact with the outside world. In traditional Persian homes, the inner, or private, quarter where women live, barred from contact with the outside world.

Anfal: Literally, the spoils of war. The name of a chapter of the Koran and the code name given by Saddam Hussein to his terror campaign against the Kurds. Literally, the spoils of war. The name of a chapter of the Koran and the code name given by Saddam Hussein to his terror campaign against the Kurds.

Aqd: A wedding contract. A wedding contract.

Ayatollah: Literally, reflection of G.o.d. In Shiite Islam, the most learned of religious teachers and law interpreters receive this t.i.tle. Literally, reflection of G.o.d. In Shiite Islam, the most learned of religious teachers and law interpreters receive this t.i.tle.

Burka: The face mask, made of leather or stiff fabric, worn by women of the Gulf countries. Covers the entire face except for the eyes. The face mask, made of leather or stiff fabric, worn by women of the Gulf countries. Covers the entire face except for the eyes.

Caliph: Literally, one who comes after. Muhammad's successors as leaders of the early Muslim nation. Literally, one who comes after. Muhammad's successors as leaders of the early Muslim nation.

Chador: A square of fabric that falls from the top of the head to the ankles and is held or pinned closed under the chin. Worn in Iran and among Lebanese Shiite women. A square of fabric that falls from the top of the head to the ankles and is held or pinned closed under the chin. Worn in Iran and among Lebanese Shiite women.

Dhow: A boat commonplace in the Persian Gulf. A boat commonplace in the Persian Gulf.

Esma: A clause in a wedding contract giving a woman the right to divorce. A clause in a wedding contract giving a woman the right to divorce.

Farsi: The official language of Iran. The official language of Iran.

Fatwa: Aformal legal opinion or decision by a religious leader on a matter of religious law. Aformal legal opinion or decision by a religious leader on a matter of religious law.

Feast of the Sacrifice: The last day of the Hajj. All pilgrims, and other Muslims who can afford to, slaughter a sheep and distribute its meat to the poor. The last day of the Hajj. All pilgrims, and other Muslims who can afford to, slaughter a sheep and distribute its meat to the poor.

Fitna: Chaos, civil war. In some Arab countries, fitna is also a slang term for a beautiful woman. Chaos, civil war. In some Arab countries, fitna is also a slang term for a beautiful woman.

Hadith: A saying of the Prophet Muhammad or a saying about him or his teachings by contemporaneous sources. A saying of the Prophet Muhammad or a saying about him or his teachings by contemporaneous sources.

Hajj: The pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to make at least once in their lives, if they can afford it. Also, the month of the Islamic calendar in which the pilgrimage takes place. The pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are obliged to make at least once in their lives, if they can afford it. Also, the month of the Islamic calendar in which the pilgrimage takes place.

Halal: Religiously lawful, fit, permitted. Religiously lawful, fit, permitted.