If the Oceans Were Ink, page 18
Knowing taqwa couldn’t be dictated, the Sheikh left his daughters to decide how to dress. When his younger girls reached puberty, the age at which many Muslim women begin wearing the jilbab, the flowing, long-sleeved robe, they asked whether they’d need to wear it, and Akram’s response was mild. “I’m not going to force you to wear it,” Sumaiya recalled him saying. “I think you should. But it’s up to you.”
“Because he didn’t force us,” she shrugged, “the jilbab stayed.”
So did her devotion to modesty. Sumaiya’s decisions on what constitutes modesty varied from day to day. She was not a veiled woman, but a woman who chose how she veiled. Some days she wore the niqab, a choice that often hinged on geography. When she and her husband moved to their East London neighborhood, she found the mood there to be “very anti-Islamic.” It was nothing overt, but she couldn’t help but notice little things: chilly nods in the street, terse notes left on the doorstep reminding the couple to trim their grass. When she and her husband first moved in, somebody complained to the local government authorities about the fact that there was furniture on the sidewalk. “Of course there was furniture outside,” Sumaiya sighed. “We were moving in!”
Whether her neighbors were being Islamophobic or merely rude, Sumaiya decided to forgo the niqab in her own neighborhood in favor of a simple hijab. She still wore the niqab when going to more Muslim-friendly parts of London. The day we spoke about it, she was unsure as to whether she would wear the niqab while attending graduate school; she’d stopped wearing it when she was an undergraduate and had resumed wearing it—when she wanted to—only after leaving the university. “I feel more comfortable wearing it,” she observed, “rather than not wearing it.”
* * *
One day, midway through the Sheikh’s seminar on manners, I looked up to see a late arrival, a woman in a niqab, trundling in with a stroller. I nodded and smiled, moved my backpack so she could sit, and turned back to the lecture. A nudge, a whisper—“Hi, Carla”—and possibly, I inferred from the warm eyes, a smile. Sumaiya was now a voice and a presence rather than a face. Later, during lunch break, I watched as her son Asim toyed with the face veil. “He’s used to it,” she said. “He loves playing peek-a-boo with it.”
For centuries, male leaders have played veil peek-a-boo, too. But their game is less about clothes than about power. “All the problems Muslims have faced in recent decades are more or less boundary problems,” wrote the Moroccan feminist writer Fatima Mernissi. In the Islamic world over the last two centuries, the biggest boundaries crossed have been territorial, in the form of Western imperialism. But these incursions into Muslim lands frequently led to skirmishes over more intimate boundaries: those related to women, and how they covered, or didn’t cover, their bodies. From the French in nineteenth-century Algeria to the Americans in twenty-first-century Afghanistan, Western military invasions of Islamic countries have been accompanied by rhetoric about liberating Muslim women from their hijabs. To “modernize” or subdue a country meant to unveil its women. “The Arabs elude us,” noted General Bugeaud, the French administrator of Algeria in the 1840s, “because they conceal their women from our gaze.” After 9/11, in the run-up to the American bombardment of Afghanistan, politicians and pundits linked the country’s liberation from Taliban rule to the liberation of women from their burqas. In the months after the Taliban’s fall, the Western press would rush to capture women shedding their veils. It was as though this transition from burqaed lump to woman was a twenty-first-century Pygmalion myth: a breathing of life into Afghanistan’s people.
The extent to which a Muslim country’s women veiled—or didn’t veil—has long served as a sort of litmus test for its relationship to the West. For the Middle Eastern dictator, making your women take off their veils was a cheap and easy way to prove you were moving toward Western-style “progress.” When the Iranian dictator Reza Shah, father of Iran’s last shah, banned the chador as part of his modernizing drive in 1936, police were told to rip the coverings off women’s heads if they persisted in wearing them. The edict was soon followed by a sort of regional dance of the veils. Rulers from Afghanistan to Turkey encouraged women to uncover their heads; traditionalists fought back, either in the mosques and streets or in parliaments. Making women take off their headcoverings signaled assertive Westernization, or secularization. Orders to veil sent a countermessage, telegraphing a commitment to traditionalism and independence from the West.
It’s an epic struggle that continues to this day, not just in the Muslim-majority countries but also in Europe. The judgments—for wearing a hijab, for not wearing a hijab—rain down on women as well as nation-states. Too often the meaning of the hijab is taken as clear and unequivocal, like an on-off switch, a neat binary code. A Muslim woman is “traditional” if she wears one, “modern” if she doesn’t. “Oppressed” if she wears one, “liberated” if not. Scarf on: “devout.” Scarfless: “moderate,” or, who knows? Perhaps even “secular.” Much like my efforts to locate the Sheikh on a spectrum modeled on the American scale from left to right, such conceits are doomed to fail. Sumaiya’s confidence is palpable—indeed, has grown—under the niqab she chooses to wear.
In the Taliban’s Kabul, veils weren’t about choice, but submission. Under Taliban rule, women shrank against the walls when the Vice and Virtue squads rolled by in their red Toyota trucks. While there in 1998, the photographer Nina Berman and I both wore burqas so as to sneak into Afghan homes undetected as foreigners. But a burqa couldn’t hide the bulge of Nina’s Nikons and lenses, nor did it hobble her strides. Even shrouded, she looked like what she was: a Manhattan woman in a hurry. “Baby steps!” I hissed at her from under my burqa. “Remember, you’re oppressed!”
In societies where women themselves decide what they wear, a hijab can mean any number of things. It can suggest a woman’s relationship to God, or peer pressure. It can signal obedience to her state or to herself, or can just mean a bad hair day. The Cairo commuter may don a headscarf to avoid harassment on crowded buses. The Lebanese villager may wear her headscarf to signal that she’s a Muslim, not a Christian. An American feminist Muslim could don her hijab to demonstrate a defiance of consumer culture. But her sister, whose hijab has a Nike swoosh on it, embraces it. Sumaiya thought perhaps she took up the niqab against sexual temptation; another woman told me she felt like “a right sexy bitch” when she put on her red-and-white-flowered niqab.
* * *
I was only five when my parents bought me my first chador in Iran, but I still remember the charge of excitement it gave me whenever I wore it. Its soft polyester gave it a spooky warmth and stretch. To put it on was to be folded in an oversoft, overclose embrace: cozy but cloying, like the moist hug of a great-aunt. I stood beside my mother at a merchant’s stall in the Tehran Grand Bazaar, finally settling on a print of peacock greens in swirling paisley, chosen from hundreds of bolts, from the palest dove gray to the fieriest orange, stacked floor to ceiling. I remember the kiss kiss of scissors blades as the merchant cut into the fabric. The pleasure of watching him fold it into a squashy bundle, wrapped in brown paper. Even then, I knew that sometimes a length of cloth was not just a length of cloth. A veil was special, I recognized, a strong signal of something about adulthood, and its dangers.
To a kid with the luxury of not having to wear it, the chador meant power, not submission. There was glamor in its sweep, drama in its drape. I’d seen Sleeping Beauty and knew what real femininity entailed: flowing garments and, if not a trancelike sleep, then at the very least a mysterious silence. When my friend Tara and I spent afternoons playing Iranian Ladies, dandling our baby dolls while wrapped in our chadors, there was a tacit agreement that the women in chadors held far more dramatic potential than our American mothers. With their jeans and uncovered hair, American women lacked the force field of femininity that the women in chadors possessed. In 1972, with our feminist mothers jettisoning their heels and lipsticks, it was chador-clad Iranians who embodied a five-year-old’s vision of what it meant to be a woman.
I was a child then, and I have since put away childish things. But when it comes to the veil obsession in the West, many haven’t. Why is it that the hijab seem to obsess non-Muslims so much? Muslim men are supposed to wear beards, but this covering of chin and cheeks is seldom described as a human rights violation. Under the Taliban, Kabul’s men would nervously pull and fluff their facial hair, worried it would not meet the “fist and a half” standards required by the Virtue and Vice squads.
But it’s the veil that gets all the attention, drawing a near-fetishistic interest by religious zealots and Western media commentators alike. Sensational legislations by strident secularists like the French, or religious zealots like the Taliban, make veils into news, of course. But more fundamentally, the veil wreaks havoc on the standard secular notion of what is private and what is public. When a woman puts one on, her head is suddenly signaled as an erotic site. What secular society deems public is now made private, while one’s religion—what is in many Western societies considered to be private—is exposed for everyone to see. As the Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi observed, modern tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims come down to boundaries.
Once, back working at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, I’d accidentally walked in on my Pakistani colleague Iftikhar while he was praying. Mortified, I quickly turned and left, shutting the door behind me. Later, he brushed away my apologies. “That’s the difference between us,” he said, waving a hand breezily. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”
* * *
At a lecture by the Sheikh in Manchester one Sunday, I felt profoundly dowdy amid a sea of hijabis. Mere hair can’t compete. My mousy-brown pixie cut made me as invisible as any niqab, surrounded as I was by heads swathed in scarves draped as carefully as Chanel gowns, with fabric covered in leopard print, roses, bright plaids, or stripes. Pearl and diamanté clips secured headscarves, some folded so voluptuously that they resembled cloth crowns. The irony of the fashion for lavish hijabs wasn’t lost on the Sheikh. “Many Muslim women make them so they become more attractive!” he told me later, with a rueful smile. “That’s not the function. Islam wants to develop simplicity of the clothes for the woman. You can’t just put a hijab on your head while you’re wearing tight jeans. You should wear it to show your purity.”
To be fair, it wasn’t just women who’d indulged in pre-lecture primping that morning in Manchester. Riding the elevator up to the auditorium, I caught one youth raking his fingers through his beard, patting and tugging it for maximum length and heft. The Sheikh’s theme that day was how to create a good Muslim marriage. The crowd—young, and largely single—packed the lecture hall, which hummed with possibility. The Sheikh chose his words to chill any romantic illusions in the room. “Very often, people think, ‘I have fallen in love with someone,’” he began. But all too often, love proved to be mere desire. Allah had put sexual impulses into the hearts of humans in order to continue the propagation of our species. But like other basic human urges, the desire for sex with someone can’t last. Once it is quenched, warned the Sheikh, it subsides: “If you marry someone because of desire, your desire will go down. Just like when you are hungry, and you eat, the desire for food goes down. Desire, by nature, is something that diminishes. Love, by nature, grows.”
Marriages born of desire are destined for failure. “If you marry a woman because she has a good character, you will see more and more of her qualities. If you marry a woman because of desire, the marriage will fail. If you marry a woman because she is a twenty-year-old, what will happen? The next day, she’ll be more than twenty years old.”
The difference between desire and love, said the Sheikh firmly, was like the difference between a meal at a fast-food restaurant and a home-cooked meal. The hungry man passing a McDonald’s might eat, but it would be bad for him. Far better to forgo that burger and go home instead to eat healthful food prepared with care. “Force your desires to listen to you!” he exclaimed. “If people just have what they desire, then they will ruin their health. If people marry someone just for enjoyment, that marriage will never last. When the desire for sex comes, don’t rush. Think properly: ‘Am I ready for marriage?’”
Returning home from the lecture, I passed through Victoria Station. I heard the din of chanting men, stumbling in packs from a rugby match, wafting beer and testosterone. A hen party tottered out of a suburban train, the bride-to-be trussed up in a fat pink sash with the word “Bride” on it. Her friends hustled after her in high stilettos and low necklines. Above me, a poster of two breasts, and behind them their owner, hawked beer. How curious, I thought, that so many Westerners think it’s just the Muslims who mark out the differences between the genders, through segregation and the hijab. At the Sheikh’s lecture that day, men and women both had been so modest that the differences between them seemed smudged and muted. Everyone had been so demure that the sexes seemed to blend.
But that’s exactly it, the Sheikh exclaimed delightedly when I told him. “Uncovering makes more clear who are men and women,” he said. “And when they cover their differences, they are more like the same.”
The big issue was whether they were at home or in public. “God has made men and women both as human beings, but with certain differences,” said the Sheikh. “Inside their houses, they can meet as men and women.” Out in the street, they should meet as humans. “Covering those differences,” he said, “helps people to be treated as human beings.”
* * *
Talking to Akram and his wife, I found that the veil seemed to keep moving. Suddenly, the curtain dividing public and private would close, covering up topics I’d assumed were perfectly proper for public discussion. Farhana’s childhood games were to be left off-limits in print. No amount of probing could get Akram to speak with any nuance about moving from India to Britain. But sometimes, just as suddenly, the hijab would be lifted off, often exposing surprising revelations. Nowhere was this curtain raising more dramatic than on the subject of sex. Figuring out when the Sheikh would draw the curtain and when he’d raise it felt as befuddling as desire itself. Once, I simply happened to ask whether Aisha ever had any disputes over a hadith with a particular companion of the Prophet, Abu Huraira. Suddenly, without warning, we were on the topic of ejaculation—or rather, the lack thereof. Akram said that Aisha did voice her differences of opinion with Abu Huraira on reporting sayings of the Prophet. “For example, Abu Huraira used to say ‘If someone has relations with his wife, and nothing came out, there was no need for a bath upon him.’ But Aisha, she said ‘No, he is wrong.’”
Islam has a clear-eyed acceptance of sex as part of life. Early Islamic texts declare it a good part, so long as it occurs within marriage and between a man and a woman. “Your women are a field of yours,” the Quran tells Muslims. “So come to your field as you wish.” (That’s Thomas Cleary’s translation: other English translations sound even more macho: “Your wives are a tilth for you, so approach your tilth when or how ye will,” reads one.) When I first read that oft-quoted line, I was taken aback at the comparison of women to soil, and at the implication that men were entitled to free and open access to it whenever they wanted. That was until Lily Munir, an Indonesian Islamic feminist, helped me tease out the metaphor’s nuance. “Soil has to be prepared for the seed,” she told me, eyes twinkling. “It has to be watered, it has to be made soft, and smooth, and ready.”
The collections of hadith stress a married couple’s rights not just to sex, but to enjoying it. “Don’t come onto your wife just like an animal,” the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, counseling kisses, caresses, and soft words to get her in the mood. In Cairo, I once interviewed an Egyptian religious scholar about Islam’s attitudes to sex, and he was similarly enthusiastic on the subject of foreplay: “The woman is not a chair that you can just pull out and sit on!” he explained, slapping his knee for emphasis.
Done right, sex is an Islamic blessing. “A man’s sexual play with his partner, when accompanied by sincere intent, causes him to be rewarded by Allah,” wrote the sixteenth-century hadith scholar Ali Muttaqi. “As the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘Allah is pleased with a man’s playing with his wife, and records a reward for him and makes a worthy provision in the world for him because of it.’” Christianity links sex to sin, but the Cambridge theologian Tim Winter notes that Islam casts it as “a glimpse of transcendence.” Islam doesn’t endorse celibacy and has no mainstream traditions of monks or nuns. “In the Christian context,” Winter once explained to a British newspaper, “sexuality is traditionally seen as a consequence of the Fall, but for Muslims, it is an anticipation of paradise.”
Muhammad’s biographies detail moving accounts of sexual tenderness between the Prophet and his wives. When Muhammad was unsure as to whether the Revelations were a sign of madness or a sign from God, Khadija asked him to alert her whenever he next saw the Angel Gabriel. When the Prophet did so, his wife asked him to sit next to her right thigh. Could he still see the Angel? Yes, just as he could when he sat next to her other thigh. But when she then opened her robe, the creature fled. For Khadija, that was proof that the being appearing before Muhammad was an angel, not a devil. Had it been a malevolent creature, it would have stayed to watch.
