Nine Parts of Desire (24 page)

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

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

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

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

I hesitated. “It’s too much trouble for you to put me up,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“I’m Jewish.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good luck,” I said, and we both giggled.

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

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

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Good night.”

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

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

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

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

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

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