Nine Parts of Desire (6 page)

But all over the Islamic world men flouted that code. Crotch-hugging jeans were the fashion among the youths of the Gulf. Soccer players—national heroes—competed in thigh-high shorts. Top-rating televised wrestling matches featured sweaty men in jockstraps. At the Caspian Sea, where Iranian women had to swim in chadors, no one insisted that the men wear swimsuits covering their navels.

The hypocrisy was especially evident at Iranian soccer matches, where chador-wearing women couldn’t take their sons to see a game because the male players weren’t Islamically dressed. Meanwhile, the same matches were televised nightly on state TV that called itself the Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic. Whenever I asked Iranians about this, they would simply laugh or shrug. “Women are supposed to leave the room if their husbands want to watch football,” one
friend said. “Even this government knows there’s a limit. You can ask a country to make many sacrifices, but expecting men to give up watching football would be pushing things too far.”

The answer, of course, went much deeper. In Muslim societies men’s bodies just weren’t seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women’s. Getting to the truth about hijab was a bit like wearing it: a matter of layers to be stripped away, a piece at a time. In the end, under all the concealing devices—the chador, jalabiya or abaya, the magneh, roosarie or shayla—was the body. And under all the talk about hijab freeing women from commercial or sexual exploitation, all the discussion of hijab’s potency as a political and revolutionary symbol of selfhood, was the body: the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.

Chapter 2

W
HOM
N
O
M
AN
S
HALL
H
AVE
D
EFLOWERED
B
EFORE
T
HEM

“The whore, and the whoremonger, shall ye scourge with an hundred stripes. And let not compassion towards them prevent you from executing the judgement of God.”

THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE LIGHT

T
he operating theater was a whitewashed cavern gouged out of an African hillside. In its bleaching light, the patient’s flesh looked like a slab of putty. Reaching wrist-deep into an abdominal incision, the surgeon grasped the woman’s slippery, glistening uterus as if it were the enemy.

The patient, at forty, was an old woman by the harsh reckoning of this Ethiopian province. She was a survivor of famine, war and the routine violence waged against women by the country’s ancient customs. At the age of eight, she had been held down while her clitoris was scraped away with an unclean knife and the raw flesh sealed with inch-long acacia thorns. On her wedding night, her husband had to use his dagger to slice his way into the jagged cicatrix that had become her genitals. That pain had been the prelude to recurring agonies as she delivered four children through a birth canal choking on its own scar tissue. Here, one in five births ends in the mother’s death.

That risk, at least, would soon be over. Wrapping her gloved fingers around the woman’s diseased uterus, the surgeon hacked with unexpected force at the last shreds of tissue holding it in place, bracing her foot against the operating table as she tugged the organ free.
The smell in the small, rock-walled room was a pungent medley of ether, disinfectant and freshly butchered meat.

Wielding clamps the wrong shape for pelvic surgery and aged, bent suturing needles, the doctor paused from time to time to wring blood from the swabs packing the patient’s abdomen. “We have a shortage of gauze.” she explained.

Abrehet Gebrekidan was used to shortages of almost everything, except patients. In 1977 she left her job at Syracuse Medical Center in New York to join a ragtag secessionist movement waging Africa’s longest war. As an obstetrician and gynecologist, she knew her skills would be needed in the mountain hideouts from which her people, the Eritreans, fought Ethiopian annexation from 1962 until the central government fell in 1991.

When I met her, late in 1989, Dr. Abrehet worked in a hospital whose “wards”—thatched shelters with saline drips hanging from tree branches—rambled for almost three miles through a steep-walled mountain valley. Much of her work had nothing to do with the war. Instead, it involved saving women from the worst consequences of genital mutilation. In Eritrea, girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the malnourished little girls didn’t bleed to death from the procedure itself, they often died from resulting infections or debilitating anemia. In others, scar tissue trapped urine or menstrual fluid, causing pelvic infections. Women with scar-constricted birth canals suffered dangerous and agonizing childbirth. Sometimes the baby’s trapped head led to fatal hemorrhage or ruptured the bladder, causing seepage of urine that made the woman smell like a latrine and poisoned her later fetuses.

With antiquated equipment, each procedure took much longer than it should. The hysterectomy, a job of about an hour and a half at Syracuse Medical Center, dragged on into the night. From first incision to final, awkward suture took Dr. Abrehet almost five hours. Outside, the next case, a thirteen-year-old, waited patiently for the operation that would reconstruct her vaginal wall. The girl, a Muslim nomad, had been married at ten. Her husband’s rough intercourse had been too much for her immature body, tearing the tissue that divides
the vagina from the rectum. The girl had run away from her husband and joined the Eritrean guerrillas. They had enrolled her, for the first time, in school, and brought her to Dr. Abrehet.

Above her green surgical mask, Dr. Abrehet’s sweaty brow bore a crudely tattooed cross. Eritrea, an England-sized wedge of land along Ethiopia’s coast, has three and a half million people divided almost equally between highland-dwelling Christians and coastal-lowland Muslims. Dr. Abrehet drew her patients from both communities. The practice of mutilating women’s genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The Eritreans’ guerrilla movement was among the few African organizations trying to wipe it out. The campaign was part of a wider agenda of promoting women’s rights that included reforming land distribution to give women a share and pressing for women’s representation in politics.

“We can’t force them, we can only teach them,” said Amina Nurhussein, one of six women elected to the Eritreans’ seventy-one-member policy-making body. Infibulation had begun to decline in the highland areas, where the predominantly Christian population saw the custom as a cultural duty rather than a religious command. But in the Muslim lowlands the issue remained extremely sensitive. As a Muslim herself, Amina understood the obstacles. “The women have been told it’s written in the Koran that they must do these things,” she said. She could tell them it wasn’t but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik.

Educating the women so that they could read the Koran for themselves was the keystone in the Eritreans’ patient campaign against genital mutilation. A year before I met her, Aset Ibrahim would have told anybody who asked that clitoridectomy and infibulation were essential to a woman’s beauty and well-being. “My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute,” said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old. “I even learned to believe that it looked nicer that way. We grow up reciting the saying, ‘A house isn’t beautiful without a door.’ “

As it turned out, infibulation hadn’t saved her from prostitution. Because of her beauty, Aset had been forced into servitude by the Ethiopian army, required to work as a domestic servant and sometime prostitute in a soldiers’ barracks. When the town fell to the Eritreans, the guerrillas offered Aset a chance to train for four months as a birth attendant, learning nutrition, hygiene, family planning and midwifery. Part of the course covered the dangers of genital mutilation, information that Aset now passes on to each of her patients.

Aset’s job wasn’t easy: she had to talk her patients out of ancient practices such as placing heavy stones on the bodies of laboring women to hasten delivery, or firing off rifles next to their ears to “frighten” the baby out of the womb. Traditionally, infibulated women are restitched after each childbirth, an excruciating procedure that delays recovery and increases the risk of infection.

“Now I know there’s no use to it, and as I was convinced I hope I’ll convince others. But it’s a difficult job,” Aset said. Sometimes women demanded the stitches because they feared their husbands’ rejection. Others just didn’t believe Aset’s assertion that the practice was damaging. If a woman insisted, Aset reinfibulated her, hoping at least that the clean instruments she used would do less damage than those of the traditional local midwife, who would almost certainly be called in if she refused.

Because some Christians and animists also practice genital mutilation, many Muslims resent the way it is linked most closely with-their own faith. But one in five Muslim girls lives today in a community that sanctions some sort of interference with her genitals.

Widespread mutilation seems to have originated in Stone Age central Africa and traveled north, down the Nile, into ancient Egypt. It wasn’t until Arab-Muslim armies conquered Egypt in the eighth century that the practices spread out of Africa in a systematic way, parallel to the dissemination of Islam, reaching as far as Pakistan and Indonesia. They drifted back to a few places on the Arabian Peninsula: in the Buraimi Oasis in the United Arab Emirates, it was traditional until a few years ago to remove about an eighth of an inch of the clitoris from all six-year-old girls. Asked the reasons for the practice,
the Buraimi women couldn’t give any. Well versed in their religion, they knew that no such practice was advocated in the Koran, and they were aware that many neighboring tribes didn’t do it. But they knew that what they hoped for from the operation was to safeguard their daughters’ chastity, because upon that chastity depended the honor of the girls’ fathers and brothers.

While some Muslims protest the linkage of mutilation with their faith, few religious figures speak out against the practice, and numerous Islamic texts still advocate it. In Australia, I once heard an educated and articulate young Muslim express gratitude for the removal of part of her own clitoris: “It reminds me that my marriage is about more important things than pleasure,” she said.

In London in 1992, Donu Kogbara, a
Sunday Times
investigative reporter, had no trouble finding a doctor who agreed to remove her clitoris, even though the operation has been banned in Britain since the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act was passed in 1985. The reporter simply told the Harley Street doctor, Farouk Siddique, that her fiance was insisting she have the operation before their marriage.

In most Muslim countries women are the custodians of their male relatives’ honor. If a wife commits adultery or a daughter has sex before marriage, or is even suspected of having done so, they dishonor their father, their brothers and sometimes the whole family that bears their name. To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job.

Yet the lessening of women’s sexual pleasure directly contradicts the teachings of Muhammad.

To Muslims, every word of the Koran is sacrosanct. “There is no doubt in this book,” the Koran says, and every Muslim believes that its 6,000 verses constitute the direct instruction of God. But there
are
debates about Islam’s second source of religious instruction: the massive body of
hadith,
or anecdotal traditions about the prophet’s life and sayings, compiled by the early Muslims in a formidable research effort in the two centuries following Muhammad’s death. Because Muslims feel that emulation of Muhammad is ideal, every detail of
his habits, no matter how apparently trivial, has been preserved from the accounts of his survivors. The result is a collection of anecdotes, each with a genealogy that documents the source of the story and exactly how and through whom it was passed on. Each tradition gets a ranking: “true,” “good” or “weak.” Thus, Muslim scholars can make their own determination about whether the chain of transmission is reliable.

From the study of hadith, various schools of Islamic thought have emerged, and within those schools, particular teachers have developed wide followings. Most agree on what is
haram,
or forbidden, such as eating pork and drinking alcohol, and also on what is
wajib,
or obligatory, such as the content and timing of the five daily prayers. A Muslim sins either by doing a forbidden act or by neglecting an obligatory one. In between, though, are
makruh,
or discouraged and unbecoming acts; and
sunnat
acts, which are desirable but not obligatory.

To most Muslim men, growing a beard is sunnat—a desirable act that expresses humility and emulates the prophet. A man will be rewarded for doing it; he won’t be punished for neglecting to do it. In the Muslim communities that practice female genital mutilation, removing the clitoris is on a par with growing a beard—a sunnat act. Some Muslims believe Muhammad’s sunnah—tradition or “trodden path”—encouraged the removal of one third of a female child’s clitoris. The majority of Muslims say no such sunnah exists. The evidence supports the latter view, for there is an immense body of hadith in which Muhammad and his closest disciples extol women’s sexuality and their right to sexual pleasure.