The Books: “Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women” (Geraldine Brooks)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

Next book on this shelf is called Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks, a foreign correspondent for the WSJ (she’s also married to Tony Horwitz – a guy whose books about travel literally make me laugh OUT LOUD … He wrote a book called Baghdad Without a Map (excerpt here) – which is a complete joy, and which I’ll get to later). Nine Parts of Desire is just one of a TON of books I have in this line. A mix of history, political analysis, and anecdotal information – describing the lives in various Islamic regimes. This one focuses on female lives. Each chapter explores a different topic: marriage, war, divorce, sex, career … Geraldine Brooks, having lived in many of these countries as a correspondent, befriended many women – who let her into their inner sanctum – something that is VERY difficult. It’s easier for a female journalist to get behind the veil than a male journalist, obviously. Brooks was invited to private parties, where women took off their veils to reveal slinky designer clothes – where they would drink bootlegged liquor, and sit around and talk about sex. It’s a fascinating book.

The title comes from a quote from Ali – the founder of the Shiite sect whose death (I think he died in the 4th century) is still commemorated to this day (you know those pictures we see on occasion of bloody Shiites, marching through streets with blood pouring down their faces? That’s the commemoration march for Ali – their founder). Anyhoo – he apparently said something about God creating sexual desire in ten parts – women got nine of those parts and men got one. Which gives you some idea of the FEAR of women inherent in this culture. It’s sort of the opposite of the idea that we have (at least, judging from movies in the 1950s – movies like Splendor in the Grass etc – anything to do with teenagers falling in love) – The attitude here is, apparently, that men’s sexuality is out of control and it is up to the GIRLS to put a rein on it, and be responsible. Do not expect that the boys will be able to STOP when you say STOP. Because their sexuality is BIGGER than ours (the girls) and it is up to US to control the event. It is the opposite in the Islamic world. Women are seen as so much more sexual than men (they got NINE parts, men only got one!) that women need to be completely controlled, and men need to protect themselves from the wildly out of control lascivious sexual desire of the female – it will threaten to drown him if he does not rein it in.

I will excerpt a section from the chapter entitled: “Politics, With and Without a Vote”. It describes a protest organized by 47 Saudi women against the rule that they are not allowed to drive. The last quote in this excerpt never fails to bring a huge lump (of sadness and outrage) to my throat.

From Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks

Across the border in Saudi Arabia, even the notion of a debate is anathema. Saudi Arabia has virtually no political culture. “We don’t need democracy, we have our own ‘desert democracy,” explained Nabila al-Bassam, a Saudi woman who ran her own clothing and gift store in Dhahran. What she was referring to was an ancient desert tradition known as the majlis, weekly gatherings hosted by members of the ruling family, where any of their subjects were free to present petitions or air grievances. In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a fefw seconds’ opportunity to whisper in their prince’s ear.

Nabila told me of a friend who had recently petitioned King Fahd’s wife to allow the legal import of hair-salon equipment. Technically, hairdressing salons were banned in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment frowned on anything that drew women from their houses. In fact, thriving salons owned by prominent Saudis and staffed by Filipina or Syrian beauticians did a roaring trade. “My friend is tired of having to run her business in secret,” Nabila said. But so far she had received no response to her petition. “Petitions do work,” said Nabila. “But in this society you have to do things on a friendly basis, like a family. You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right.” A rejected petitioner had no choice but to accept the al-Sauds’ decision. With no free press and no way to mobilize public opinion, the al-Sauds ruled as they liked.

If there was one thing that Saudi women were prepared to criticize about their lot, it was the ban that prevented them from driving. During the Gulf War the sight of pony-tailed American servicewomen driving trucks and Humvees on Saudi Arabian roads invigorated a long-simmering debate on the issue. The Americans weren’t the only women drivers the war had brought. Many Kuwaiti women, fleeing the Iraqi invasion, had arrived in Saudi Arabia unveiled, at the wheel of the family Mercedes.

By October 1990, articles about Saudi women seeking the right to drive had begun appearing in the heavily censored press. Women quoted in these articles said they’d been alarmed to realize that they wouldn’t have been able to transport their children to safety as the Kuwaiti women had done. Some raised economic issues, calculating that twenty percent of average Saudi family income was spent on drivers, who had to be fed and housed as well as paid a salary. Saudi had 300,000 full-time private chauffeurs — a staggering number, but still far short of providing a driver for every Saudi woman who needed mobility. Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some proponents of allowing women to drive played the Islamic card, pointing out how undesirable it was for a woman to be forced to have a strange man as part of her household, and to drive around alone with him.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early November, forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, converged on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, they dismissed their drivers. About a quarter then slid into the drivers’ seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as passengers. They drove off in convoy down the busy thoroughfare. A few blocks later, the cane-wielding mutawain of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at intersections, ordering the women out of the drivers’ seats. Soon, regular police arrived, and the women asked them to see that they weren’t taken off to the mutawain headquarters. There was a scuffle between the mutawain, who yelled that the women had committed a religious crime, and the traffic police, who said the matter was their affair. In the end, the police drove the women’s cars to police headquarters with a mutawa in the passenger seat and the women in the back.

The women who had taken part in the demonstration were all from what Saudis call ‘good families’ — wealthy, prominent clans with close ties to the ruling al-Saud dynasty. All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers’ licenses they’d acquired overseas. Many of them were from the faculty of the women’s branch of Riyadh university, such as Fatim al-Zamil, a professor of medicine. Others were women of achievement such as Aisha al-Mana, who had a doctorote in sociology from the University of Colorado and headed a consortium of women-owned businesses from fashion to computer-training centers. Even though some of these women didn’t normally veil their faces, for the demonstration all wore the covering that leaves only eyes exposed.

Before the demonstration, the women had sent a petition to the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who was thought to be a fairly progressive member of the ruling family. The petition begged King Fahd to open his “paternal heart” to what they termed their “humane demand” to drive. They argued that women of the prophet’s era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The evidence, they wrote in their petition, was there in Islam, “such is the greatness of the teacher of humanity and the master of men in leaving lessons that are as clear as the sunlight to dispel the darkness of ignorance.”

While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent religious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violations had occurred, since the women all had international drivers’ licenses recognized by Saudi law. The religious representatives found that no moral issues were at stake, since the women were veiled and the Koran says nothing that could be construed as forbidding an act such as driving. The women were released.

In Jeddah and Dhahran, women gathered to plan parallel demonstrations, encouraged by the what they saw as tacit support from the ruling family. But then came the backlash.

Word of the demonstration spread quickly, despite a total blackout of coverage in the Saudi media. When the women who had taken part arrived for work the next day at the university, they expected to be greeted as heroines by their all-women students. Instead, some found their office doors daubed with graffiti, criticizing them as un-Islamic. Others found their classes boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets. Under a heading “Names of the Promoters of Vice and Lasciviousness,” the demonstration participants were listed, along with their phone numbers, and a designation of either ‘American secularist” or ‘communist’ after each name. “These are the Roots of Calamity”, the leaflets shrieked. “Uproot them! Uproot them! Uproot them! Purify the Land of Monotheism.” Predictably, the women’s phones began ringing off the hook with abusive calls. If their husbands answered, they were told to divorce their whorish wives, or berated for being unable to control them.

The royal family immediately caved in to the extremists’ pressures. Prince Salman’s committee’s findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their passports. The security police also arrested a prominent, well-connected Saudi man accused of leaking word of the protest to a British film crew. He was given a grueling interrogation, including a beating, and thrown in jail for several weeks.

The ruling family could have stood by the women on Islamic grounds. What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.

But a week after the demonstration Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstrations as “a stupid act”, and said some of the women involved were raised outside Saudi Arabia and “not brought up in an Islamic home.” He then read out a new fatwa, or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia’s leading sheik, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, stating that women driving contradicted “Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens.” If driving hadn’t been illegal before, it was now. Naif’s remarks got front-page coverage, the first mention of the driving demonstration that had appeared in the Saudi press.

Although I had been in touch with some of the women drivers before the demonstration, none of them would take my calls afterward. They all had been warned that any contact with foreign media would lead to rearrest. All were sure that their phones were tapped and their homes watched. I did get a sad letter, signed simply, “A proud Saudi woman” detailing the “witch hunt” under way. “Fanatics,” she wrote “are forcing students to sign petitions denouncing the women.” They were “using this incident to demonstrate their strength and foment antiliberal antigovernment and anti-American feelings.” Another woman sent me a simple message: “I did it because I want my granddaughters to be able to say I was there.”