If the Oceans Were Ink, page 19
Within marriage, sex is a right for both married men and women. If either partner can’t perform in bed, the marriage contract can be dissolved. “One of the classic reasons that a woman can go to the court and get a divorce is if a husband cannot have relations with her, or cannot satisfy her desire,” Akram told me. Once, a student confided to him that after a year of marriage, she was still a virgin. “I told her not to be so shy. If he cannot do these things, it is important to find a solution. Now, she is married to someone else.”
The Sheikh had a fairly low opinion of lust, which allowed him to talk freely about it. “Everyone wants passion,” he conceded. But too much of it squeezed out room for God. “It means you are basically worshipping someone else than Allah.” When it came to sex, his discussions weren’t gummed up by romanticism or stifled by shame: lust was just an urge placed in humans by Allah for the sole purpose of procreation. I once asked him about the Quran’s “tilth” verse. Where Lily Munir had read the verse about wives being tilth to cultivate as a call for lots of foreplay, Sheikh Akram emphasized its agricultural imagery. You till in soil, a place where things are planted to grow. “Some people think if they get desire, they can do it anywhere, like in the back place, or in the mouth,” he explained. “But this desire is for a family purpose. You must do it in the right place. Any position they like, people can do, as long as they do it in the place that is meant for the purpose of having a family.”
Lust required regulation: it was why the curtain hung in some mosques and classrooms, and why modesty was a cardinal virtue for all Muslims. Along with most classical scholars, the Sheikh considered sex outside marriage, or zina, to be among the gravest sins in Islam. Sex may have been regulated by Islam’s moral dictates, but in this it was no different from prayer, eating, or giving charity. Since Islam was a way of life, and sex a part of it, one needed to ascertain whether one was approaching it in the spirit of piety. Shyness should never prevent anybody from finding out how to live as a good Muslim. Muhammad himself used to hold special women-only sessions, so there’d be no excuse for bashfulness. Good Muslims needed to ask questions about sex just as about other issues: “Shy people can never learn,” Akram said with a shrug. “Arrogant people can never learn.”
The Sheikh’s ideas on sex were unlike any I’d heard firsthand. My own sex ed was fairly standard for the child of 1970s liberals. It began in the fifth grade at Linda Schuham’s house, poring over the hairy couple doing nudie gymnastics in The Joy of Sex. Then came the day I overheard my mother discussing the So-and-So’s, who were busy consulting divorce lawyers because their last-ditch experiments with whipped cream hadn’t worked out. Hollywood played its usual role as erotic instructor. There was the flushed stillness required while watching The Last Picture Show next to my parents, and later, the damp thrill of Kathleen Turner and William Hurt’s loveless couplings in Body Heat. Furtive flips through Fear of Flying. My mother’s proud presentation, on my fifteenth birthday, of my first copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. These rites imbued me with the orthodox sexual worldview of a modern Western feminist. Unshackled from marriage, pregnancy, and even love, sex was but another mode of self-expression. Provided you visited Planned Parenthood and pushed the specter of AIDS out of your mind, it was freedom incarnate.
The Sheikh had never read a Playboy or seen an R-rated matinee, but that didn’t stifle frank discussion at his females-only day seminar, “What Every Muslim Woman Should Know.” It was held at a Muslim primary school in South London, so I walked through hallways full of kids’ drawings of London’s Big Ben and Mecca’s Kaaba before entering an auditorium with hundreds of young women and being handed the lecture notes. On the front page, in the discussion of wudu, or ritual ablution, was a hadith from the Prophet’s wife Aisha that was so gamy that, certain I’d misunderstood, I had to read it twice: “I used to scratch the sperm off the Messenger of Allah’s clothes if it was dry, and wash it off if it was still wet.”
This information wasn’t cordoned off from other advice in the notes, such as the number of shrouds required to wrap a woman’s corpse (five), or the placement of women’s hands when they pray (over their chests). Sperm, and its disposal, were simply seen as issues a good Muslim should know about, much as they knew about the rites of death or prayer.
The morning’s lecture tackled wet dreams, both male and female—“a sign of desire, and becoming mature,” said the Sheikh. There was a discussion of menstrual blood, and when precisely one could judge it had stopped so that one could resume sexual relations and return to the mosque to pray. To demonstrate the proper way to do wudu, the Sheikh came out from behind his desk. He slipped his feet out of his shoes to demonstrate where the water should go. Putting his hands on his head, he showed women how to cleanse their heads, how to place their fingers under their hijab to do so. He showed the subtle differences between men’s and women’s prostration: men touched their foreheads to the earth, with enough space that a baby goat could pass under them. Women keep their bodies close to the ground, for modesty’s sake.
Nothing felt off-limits. “No doubt you will have certain questions different from men,” said the Sheikh, looking out at the women encouragingly. “So many rules in hadith came because women asked questions!”
The crowd’s main concern appeared to be makeup. Young women with open faces and open notebooks posed question after question. Could one wear toenail polish? Not during prayers, if the polish kept water from cleansing the nails properly during ablutions, responded the Sheikh. What if one wore socks over painted toes? What if the manicure had glued-on decals on it? Did waterproof makeup make ablutions invalid? Anything that keeps water from cleansing the skin, advised the Sheikh, would prevent a proper ablution.
The Sheikh’s patience in fielding questions on Islamically correct beauty routines astounded me. Could one dye one’s hair? asked one young woman. Pluck one’s eyebrows? another pursued. The Sheikh replied that faith meant that you didn’t need to spend your money on makeup and manicures. “You see,” he said brightly. “Islam makes life cheaper!”
Besides, he said, launching into a speech nearly identical to the ones I’d given my daughters: “Don’t just do things because other people do them. Always think that you’re different, and you have to do things that are better for you, not other people! People are not going to respect you because you’ve got more nail polish!”
Before the lunch break, a woman with a microphone made an announcement, asking us to support HHUGS, a charity for the families of men detained under Britain’s antiterrorism laws. “Close your eyes,” she told the audience, and imagine that life as you knew it was taken away from you with a policeman’s knock on the door. Your children are crying, she instructed us. “You’re forced outside, without time to put on your hijab,” she said. “You’re in your nightgown.” Your husband, or your father, is taken away, and you’re never certain when you’ll see him again. That, the speaker told us, was the experience of so many wives of prisoners, in Guantánamo or in British prisons.
When she finished asking for donations, I opened my eyes. I was now doubly dizzy from a morning spent careening between bodily functions and equality, nail polish and police detentions. Girly preoccupations had bumped up against the sacred; profundities were chased by trivialities. The flow of ideas simply didn’t conform to my own logic. Edward Said’s Orientalism argues that the Western study of Islamic cultures was in fact “a system for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” I wondered just how much my own project was guilty of this: of trying to stuff the Sheikh’s worldview into Western categories.
I wandered out, impressed with the Sheikh’s sang-froid. Not many men could face an all-female audience to discuss sperm and menstrual blood. But Islam gave him a blueprint to discuss these issues. Few scholars of the Sheikh’s stature would have tolerated teenagers asking question after question about toenail polish. It was a bit like having the head of the Mayo Clinic write you a prescription for your tickly throat. But the Sheikh’s absence of vanity allowed him to swerve away from the hidebound masculinity that so often seemed to be expected of males, Muslim or otherwise. “Sheikh Akram’s not a typical man,” his student Arzoo once observed. “He’s got a perfect balance of masculine and feminine qualities.” In this, he was sticking to tradition. The Prophet Muhammad was gentle, affectionate with children, and did housework. Marriage was a partnership, believed the Sheikh: women had the duty to educate the children, and men the responsibility to provide financially. Even though Akram believed in those gendered roles, he conceded that the roles could be swapped, “although it would be difficult.”
* * *
There were limits, however.
“You know, God has made a difference between men and women for a purpose: to make family. If you have two men in the house, that hurts the whole family. Some women are very strong, and some men are very weak. That’s not a problem. But people should not exceed the limit.”
The limit, of course, was homosexuality.
“But why, if God has created these feelings?” I ask. “Should they not enjoy sexual relationships too?”
Sex, said the Sheikh, is for just one thing: the continuation of the human race.
“But why is homosexual desire there, if we agree that some people are just born that way?” I pursue. “Surely if God created these feelings, they are fine.”
“Enjoyment of the body is just for the purpose of the family. Nothing else.”
“But if you have inclinations, Sheikh…?”
“Well, just because you have inclinations does not mean you should give in to them. That doesn’t mean they should give in to those desires. These people should be supported to strengthen their faith.”
My chest tightened, much as it did later that week when I read a newspaper story about persecution of Nigeria’s yan daudu. An established subculture of men who act feminine, the yan daudu wear scarves and makeup, even as they live as husbands and fathers. Long tolerated, I read, they’re now targeted by a Muslim religious revival in Northern Nigeria, and by renewed pressure on sexual minorities. “It hurts my heart that people say, ‘May Allah reform you,’” one yan daudu said as he did wudu and made his way to the mosque. “A judgment belongs to Allah, so if we are different, it is because Allah made us different.”
In a sentence, the Nigerian had succinctly summarized an emerging body of progressive Muslim theologies. In new readings of the Quran, whether from feminists, or Queer Theorists, or readers arguing for political pluralism, there is an emphasis that diversity is something not to be shunned, but embraced.
On this issue, I remained firmly in the Muslim progressive camp. Or rather, in the camp of most everyone but religious conservatives, be they Christian or Muslim. During my studies with the Sheikh, Christian evangelists in Africa were pushing through legislation to make homosexuality a crime. In a decade when new laws allowed gay marriage in many places, and when even the Pope said he was in no position to judge what consenting adults did in bed, Akram’s views on homosexuality felt countercultural. Yet they were also a reminder that the fault lines we walked were not between Islam and the West, but between orthodox interpreters of the major faiths—and nearly everyone else.
10
Reading “The Women”
When I told a Muslim friend of mine that I was to be studying with a sheikh, she had one request. “Ask him,” she said, “why Muslim men treat women so badly.”
When I did, he said it was because men weren’t reading the Quran properly: “If they don’t fear God, then they oppress their women.” And yet many of the men who deny their wives and daughters basic freedoms hide behind their Qurans. A favorite passage for patriarchs: the famous 4:34, the thirty-fourth verse of “The Women,” the Quran’s fourth chapter. These six lines must surely rank among the most hotly debated in the Muslim scripture. The Muslim women’s group Musawah has called them the “DNA of patriarchy” for the Islamic legal tradition. For it is here that many scholars have claimed to find Allah setting out men’s superiority and authority over women, an authority that can be backed up by force.
One popular translation, by the early-twentieth-century English translator Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, reads:
Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property [for the support of women]. So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them.
As debates on how to translate the verse rage online and at academic conferences, new translations suggest less sexist meanings than earlier ones. Thomas Cleary, whose work is used throughout this book, suggests a slightly more equitable arrangement—at least in the verse’s first line:
The men are supporters of the women, by what God has given one more than the other, and by what they provide from their property.
So women of integrity are humble, guardians in absentia by God’s protection.
As for those of whom you fear perversity, admonish them; then leave them alone in bed; then spank them.
And if they obey you, then seek no means against them. (4:34)
Another translation casts men as women’s “protectors and maintainers,” and yet another says that “men are to take care of women, because God has given them greater strength.” The Arabic word that Pickthall translated as “scourge,” and which other translations rendered as “beat,” Cleary translates as “spank.” But the word, notes Reza Aslan, can also mean “turn away from,” or “go along with,” or even to “have consensual intercourse with.”
One may debate 4:34’s meanings, but one thing remains certain: men’s interpretations of the verse have made millions of women miserable. Muftis, or Islamic judges, cite it to excuse domestic violence. Husbands have hijacked it to stop wives from going to graduate school, to work, or to the bazaar. The Saudi Arabian government leveraged its message to legislate a “guardianship” system in the Kingdom wherein women could not, until recently, open a business or a bank account, travel abroad, or enroll at a university without a male relative’s permission. A few days before my lesson with Akram, I’d received an e-flyer advertising a trip to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Under the price, the travel dates, and the assurance of four-star accommodations was a line derived from a Saudi reading of 4:34: “Females,” it read, “must be accompanied by a mahram”—male guardian.
* * *
Like Akram, I had grown up in a household with many copies of the same book. In the Sheikh’s case, it had been the Quran. In my parents’ house, the multiple copies were not of a single scripture, but of a handful of seminal feminist texts. My mother taught women’s studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and being a devoted professor but an erratic housekeeper, she littered the house with copies of her course books. One Norton Anthology of Literature by Women lived in my parents’ bathroom upstairs, while another, annotated in my mother’s spidery hand, sat atop the brass tray in the dining room between its trips to the university for classes. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye functioned as our household version of the Gideon Bible: you could find a copy of it in most bedrooms. And we seemed to have a shelf of copies of A Room of One’s Own, in a paperback edition as slim and elegant as Virginia Woolf herself. It was as though my mother, heeding Woolf’s call for her own room, had given Woolf the run of not just one, but many.
Growing up in a household with a Woolf in every room, I was trained to spot the signs of sexism young, in much the same spirit that pioneer kids were taught to hunt and fish. At abortion rights rallies, at seminars on Thelma and Louise, at Take Back the Night speak-outs, I learned that only I could protect my own rights. When I was four years old and wondered aloud why my mother never served cookies to the ladies at her consciousness-raising group, I was told that the personal was political. Coffee was allowed, but anything more was banned at these events lest they trigger a carbs arms race brought on by competitive baking and hostessing. One Valentine’s Day in St. Louis, sometime in my teens, my mother and I drove past a billboard advertising a suburban flower shop: it featured a pair of disembodied, naked female legs sticking out of a vase next to the slogan “We’ve got great stems.” My mother reversed and drove to the florist in question, and together we went in and complained about the sign’s sexism. Women’s body parts sticking out of a vase weren’t romantic in the least, my mother told the sales assistant. He looked bemused but promised he’d convey our concern to the owner. “Make sure you tell him that it was a mother and daughter, together, who came in to complain,” my mother pressed sweetly.
Though she would often quote me that great feminist line about well-behaved women seldom making history, my mother was a well-behaved woman. She’d begun her academic career at a time when undergrads still wore white gloves on dates, and she only wholeheartedly embraced feminism during the Reagan presidency. Since she was happy to leave her teaching for years at a time to follow my father around the world, she’d missed the furor over Roe v. Wade and the Equal Rights Amendment and had sat out the sexual revolution. While her colleagues battled on the wilder shores of women’s studies, like queer theory or feminist economics, my mother found her feminism in the essays of Woolf and Mary Wollstonecraft and the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontës. “Oh, I do love teaching all these kids about the possibilities out there for women, and how they shouldn’t take equality for granted,” she once exclaimed. And then, leaning forward, she offered a guilty confession, sotto voce: “But sometimes, I just want to close the book and tell them how fabulous it is to have children and a family.”
Still, my mother applauded Virginia Woolf’s critique of nineteenth-century family life. In class, she’d parse the writer’s disdain for the Victorian ideal of the “Angel of the House,” obedient, pure, self-sacrificing. At home, she’d press a copy of A Room of One’s Own on me with touching urgency, echoing Woolf’s call to young women “to go about the business of life,” to shuck off the provincialism of confinement in drawing rooms and family life because “no human being should shut out the view.”
