Nine Parts of Desire Part 2

"Almost all of them check out with a stolen sheet in their bag, you know," said the hotel's lobby manager, leaning exhausted against a pillar. "Their older relatives still insist on seeing it." Almost a third of the hotel's rooms were booked by newlyweds. 'There'll be a lot of you-know-what going on upstairs tonight," he grinned.

I wondered how it was going. Many of the couples were near strangers. Even in Baghdad, where men and women worked alongside one another, their personal lives remained highly segregated. During the war with Iran, when Iraqis were banned from foreign travel, I got used to being the only woman aboard flights in and out of the country. At the airport on my way home to Cairo, I would line up amid a planeful of Egyptian laborers for the Iraqis' intense security inspection. Once a young inspector had peered into my toiletries bag and pulled out a box of tampons. He prodded the contents, then called his supervisor. The two men emptied the box onto the counter and whispered together. Finally, holding one cellophane-wrapped tampon up to the light, the young inspector barked accusingly: "For what is this?" When I tried to tell him, he looked baffled, then horrified. Although he would have read in the Koran that menstruation is "an illness," I don't think anyone had ever explained to him the exact nature of a woman's monthly period.

Until this century, most Muslims married soon after p.u.b.erty. Now, with the need for maturity in marriage widely recognized and the cost of weddings soaring, most young Muslims have to delay finding a spouse into their twenties and early thirties. Until she is married, a devout Muslim girl is expected to avoid even making eye contact with a strange boy. She will never so much as shake hands with a man, much less go out on a date or share a kiss.

In countries such as Egypt, where women had made their way into the work force, it was becoming more common for young people to meet prospective spouses before the family became involved. But in many countries marriages remain arrangements between strangers. In Saudi Arabia it wasn't until 1981 that a committee of Islamic scholars finally ruled that young women could meet their intended spouses, unveiled, before the wedding. "Any man forbidding his daughter or sister to meet her fiance face to face will be judged as sinning," the committee found. But some Saudi women chose not to take advantage of even this small concession. Basilah al-h.o.m.oud, a thirty-eight-year-old school princ.i.p.al, had been twenty-one when her father told her that she had received a marriage proposal. "He said, 'Do you want to see him, do you want to sit with him?' I said, 'If you sit with him, it is enough for me.' " She glimpsed her husband, for the first time, from an upper window of her house as he arrived on the night of their wedding. "He was walking into the house with some of his relatives. My eyes went straight to him and I prayed that he was the one." She believed she had been right to trust her father. "Who wants my happiness as much as he does? Who knows me better? Done this way, my marriage is not two persons only. It involves my whole family, and my husband's whole family. And because the families are involved, I would think a thousand times before I say, 'Can I have a divorce?' "

But some young women weren't so confident. "Marriage for us is a complete risk," said Arezoo Moradian, an eighteen-year-old English-language student in Tehran. "A husband has so much power over you that you have to be mad to marry someone you don't know perfectly. But under the system we have here, it's impossible to get to know a boy perfectly. You can't go out with him, you can't spend time alone with him."

And once you marry him, his word is law, as the religious commentator in the Saudi Gazette Saudi Gazette pointed out to a correspondent in the January 9, 1993, edition of the newspaper. "In today's liberal world it is often a.s.sumed that the wife has absolute equal rights over her husband," wrote Name Withheld of Jeddah. "I think it would be good if you could explain the correct conduct of a wife." pointed out to a correspondent in the January 9, 1993, edition of the newspaper. "In today's liberal world it is often a.s.sumed that the wife has absolute equal rights over her husband," wrote Name Withheld of Jeddah. "I think it would be good if you could explain the correct conduct of a wife."

Name Withheld was no doubt pleased with the explanation. "Leaders.h.i.+p in the family is given to the husband," the commentator wrote. "For a wife to demand complete and full equality with her husband will result in having two masters in the family and this does not exist in Islam." Specifically, the commentator added, "To refuse to go with her husband when he calls her to bed is a grave mistake." Furthermore, "Leaving the house excessively is a bad habit for a woman. She should also not leave the house if her husband objects to her doing so."

If all this becomes too much, and she wishes to leave for good, obtaining a divorce can be fraught with difficulties for a woman.

Technically, Islam frowns on divorce. A hadith attributed to Muhammad states that, of all lawful things, divorce is the most hated by G.o.d. The Koran gives an extensive and discouraging list of requirements to be fulfilled in ending a marriage, beginning with an instruction to bring arbitrators from the families of both bride and groom to attempt to patch up the rupture. In many countries Muslim authorities have expended much energy on debates over whether the arbitration is obligatory or merely recommended. "None came forward to ask why, if it is obligatory or recommended, whichever it may be, no practical steps are taken to comply with this clear commandment," wrote an exasperated Muslim scholar, Muhammad Ras.h.i.+d Rida, who, until his death in 1935, spearheaded an intellectual response to the encroachment of Western values in Muslim countries. Both he and the influential Iranian commentator on women's issues, Murtada Mutahhari, began a rereading of the Koran's p.r.o.nouncements on divorce that, if followed through, could lead to the adoption of laws much more equitable toward women.

But, for now, both the s.h.i.+tes and followers of all four major schools of Sunni thought have enshrined a mode of divorce that only the most convoluted and misogynistic reading of the Koran can support. That is talaq, talaq, or divorce by a husband p.r.o.nouncing the words "I divorce you" three times. No grounds are required of him and the wife has no say. For her part, a Muslim woman has no natural right to divorce, and in some Islamic countries no legal way to secure one. The Hanbali school, followed by the Saudis, gives a woman almost no way out of an unhappy marriage without her husband's consent. s.h.i.+tes and the Sunnis of the Hanafi school allow her to stipulate the right to divorce in her aqd, or marriage contract. s.h.i.+tes, Hanafi and Maliki law all allow a woman's pet.i.tion on the grounds of her husband's impotence, and s.h.i.+tes and Malikis also allow pet.i.tions on the grounds of failure to provide support, incurable contagious disease or life-threatening abuse. Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce. or divorce by a husband p.r.o.nouncing the words "I divorce you" three times. No grounds are required of him and the wife has no say. For her part, a Muslim woman has no natural right to divorce, and in some Islamic countries no legal way to secure one. The Hanbali school, followed by the Saudis, gives a woman almost no way out of an unhappy marriage without her husband's consent. s.h.i.+tes and the Sunnis of the Hanafi school allow her to stipulate the right to divorce in her aqd, or marriage contract. s.h.i.+tes, Hanafi and Maliki law all allow a woman's pet.i.tion on the grounds of her husband's impotence, and s.h.i.+tes and Malikis also allow pet.i.tions on the grounds of failure to provide support, incurable contagious disease or life-threatening abuse. Mental cruelty, nondisfiguring physical abuse or just plain unhappiness are rarely considered grounds on which a woman can seek divorce.

"I tell you, I hope I never fall in love," the young Iranian, Arezoo, said, impatiently pus.h.i.+ng back the fetching black ringlets that kept escaping her magneh. "You know why? Because when girls fall in love here they lose their judgment. Yes, sure, they can put all kinds of conditions in the wedding contract, but who does it? It's always 'Ah, he loves me, he'll never hurt me.' I've watched them. Watched them walking with this stupid smile on their faces into the biggest risk you can take in this life."

For some women, of course, the risk paid off. The happiest couple I knew also happened to be two of the most strictly observant Muslims I'd ever met. Khadija was a young Kuwaiti s.h.i.+te whose marriage had been arranged for her. She had consented to the match without meeting her fiance, only stipulating that he should be someone who would agree to allow her to continue her studies. During the engagement the pair managed to meet, in secret, and found they liked each other enormously.

Khadija's husband was an importer who did most of his business with Iran. When he traveled to Tehran, he always took Khadija and the children along. Their idea of a fun night out was to go to one of Tehran's husseinias husseinias-s.h.i.+te study centers-to listen to a radical mullah lecturing on Islamic revolution. The two would, of course, sit separately-Khadija in her heavy black hijab always in the back with the other women, where their presence wouldn't distract the men.

Sometimes I would go looking for Khadija in her hotel room, only to find her husband there, minding the children, while she spent the day at lectures at one of the Islamic women's colleges. The hotel-room floor would always be completely covered in freshly laundered bedsheets, so that the toddlers, tumbling and playing on the floor, wouldn't pick up any germs from a carpet that might have been walked on by foreigners who didn't remove their shoes on entering a room.

When Khadija decided to do postgraduate work in London, her husband readily rearranged his business to accommodate her. The two of them never showed any physical affection in the presence of outsiders. But there was electricity in the looks they exchanged and warmth in the way they spoke to each other that made the intensity of their relations.h.i.+p quite obvious. When I asked Khadija why her marriage had worked out so well when so many other relations.h.i.+ps looked empty, she smiled. "My husband is a good Muslim," she said. "He knows what the Koran actually says about relations between men and women, and that is what he lives by. It's as simple as that."

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Back in Egypt, my a.s.sistant, Sahar, had become engaged.

A few weeks after she began to wear hijab, she arrived for work bubbling with the news. She beamed as she showed me her fiance's photograph. He was a newly qualified pediatrician and a second cousin. The picture showed a young face, grave and handsome, wearing the stubbly black beard of a devout Muslim.

Sahar had known him for years, seeing him often at family gatherings. But she hadn't considered him a likely suitor. At university he had been active in Islamic groups, risking prison for his opinions at a time when the government was keeping fundamentalists on a tight leash. "I always knew he would only marry a veiled girl," Sahar said. It was after he had seen her, veiled, at a family party, that he had told her parents he would like to propose.

Like many young Egyptian professionals, Sahar's fiance hadn't found a well-paying post in Egypt. Instead, he had agreed to take a job in Saudi Arabia and would have to work there for several months before he could support a bride. Before her betrothal, Sahar's application to Harvard had been accepted; she could have used the delay to take the place in graduate school that she had been offered. Instead, she turned it down. It wouldn't be appropriate, she explained, for a devout Muslim woman to live alone in an American city. Her new plan was to look into Islamic studies at one of Saudi Arabia's segregated women's schools.

Before her fiance left for Saudi Arabia, Sahar's family threw a lavish engagement party. Sahar sat on a flower-decked throne and received the gifts of jewelry from her husband-to-be that would become part of her dowry. "My aunt wanted me to take off hijab for the party," she said later. "She said, 'You want to look lovely for your engagement.' " Sahar stuck to her guns and sat on her throne with her hair wrapped away in a white satin scarf.

But it soon seemed Sahar's scarves wouldn't be enough to satisfy her betrothed. Within weeks of arriving in Saudi Arabia's austerely religious atmosphere, he was on the phone to Sahar, suggesting she lengthen her mid-calf dresses to floor length and put on socks to cover her sandaled toes. "I told him I'm not ready for that yet. I told him I want to go slowly, to be sure of what I'm doing," she said. 'Tve seen other women who go straight into gloves and face veils, and a few months later find they can't stand it. I don't want to put something on that I'm going to want to take off." As the months pa.s.sed, I began to wonder whether her fiance was drifting into a fundamentalism too narrow to admit Sahar's broad mind, no matter how correctly veiled.

Meanwhile, under her shapeless clothes, she started to gain weight. The elevator in our apartment building was so ancient it belonged in the Egyptian museum. It malfunctioned just about as often as it functioned. Sahar began to find the six flights of stairs an increasing trial. Sweating, she would sink into the chair by her desk and beg me to turn on the air conditioner, even on the mildest mornings. Because her coverings made her feel the heat, she no longer enjoyed walking with me when we'd go out reporting. She quickly became too out of shape to cover more than a block without gasping. She seemed to be growing old before my eyes.

Calls from Saudi Arabia invariably brought bad news. The medical center that had hired her fiance had no patients. He would have to wait and see if business improved before he could set a wedding date. When it didn't, he began to search for a better job. But months had pa.s.sed and he hadn't found one.

There were other disappointments. Once, a few months before she adopted hijab, Sahar had brought a videotape of her best friend's wedding to show me. It was a typical upper-crust Egyptian extravaganza, held at the Nile Hilton. Dancers pranced with candelabra on their heads, drummers and pipers provided the din. Everybody dressed to excess. Sahar told me she'd spent60-a civil servant's monthly salary-getting her hair done. She watched the tape with her lips parted and eyes s.h.i.+ning. Her expression reminded me of my five-year-old niece when I read her a fairy story. I couldn't believe that this serious, Harvard-bound woman admired this ostentatious display. But she did. "G.o.d willing, I'll have a wedding just like that," she said.

But it seemed that G.o.d, or at least her G.o.dly fiance, had other ideas. Their wedding, he decided, would be small and austere. "I suppose he is right," Sahar said uncertainly. "At all those grand weddings, n.o.body ever says anything good about the bride or her family. If it isn't fancy enough, they criticize her stinginess. If it is very fancy, they criticize her for showing off." Her fiance had even appropriated the task of buying the wedding dress. "The dresses are much finer in Saudi Arabia," Sahar said hopefully. That may have been so, but I couldn't help wondering what kind of gown a fundamentalist would choose for his bride.

None of my Egyptian friends seemed to have an easy time finding a mate. It became a race to see who would marry first: Sahar the fundamentalist, who had more or less arranged her own marriage, or my very unfundamentalist friend, who was having one arranged for her. She was named in Arabic for a beautiful flower, so I will call her Rose. She was unusual, even in the rarefied world of rich, Western-educated Cairenes. Like almost all unmarried Egyptians, she lived at home with her parents but, unlike almost all young women, she had a job that required her to travel abroad, alone.

On one of these trips she'd fallen in love with a Paris-based American and was, when I met her, in the midst of a pa.s.sionate affair. He had offered to marry her, but she had refused. Although the Sunni branch of Islam allows men to marry other monotheists such as Christians or Jews, it doesn't offer the same liberty to women. Because Islam is pa.s.sed through the paternal line, children of non-Muslim fathers are lost to the faith. Rose's lover came from a Christian fundamentalist family and argued that his conversion would kill his mother. For her part, Rose believed that marrying a Christian would cause a complete rupture with her family. "I would be living in sin," she explained. "And anyway, I want to marry a Muslim. I want my sons to be called Omar and Abdullah. I want to go to the sheik and have a wedding party with dancers and drums. I don't want to slink off to some French bureaucrat for a sly little civil ceremony."

The religious impa.s.se finally ended the affair. As well as a broken heart, Rose had the gnawing anxiety of an Egyptian woman who was over thirty and edging toward irreversible spinsterhood. "I went to my father and said, 'All right. I give in. You've always wanted to arrange a marriage for me, so let's see what you can do. Bring 'em on.' "

Affluent, intelligent and beautiful, with the huge deerlike eyes extolled by Arabian poets, Rose had it all. Using their large network of extended family and business contacts, her parents soon compiled a long list of prospective suitors, and Rose worked her way through it as briskly as a pilot completing a preflight check. Her first meeting was with a young doctor, who came to her house with his father and sat down with Rose and most of her family for tea. "I asked him where he'd traveled and he said Alexandria and Ismailia. Alexandria and Ismailia! How can anyone get to the age of thirty-two and never have gone outside Egypt? His family's rich; he could have gone anywhere. I could never be happy with someone so unadventurous."

After that she vetoed meetings at home. "In the first five minutes I could tell it was pointless, but I was stuck there, being polite, wasting a whole afternoon." She insisted on meeting future prospects at their offices. "Usually they don't get past the first half hour," she reported after a few dismal encounters.

The wealthy young son of a merchant family survived his first interview and seemed promising. Rose even went on a three-week, closely chaperoned holiday to Los Angeles with the family. "I fell in love-with America," she reported on her return. But not with her suitor. "I had to want to do everything when he wanted," she said. "It was a disaster if I didn't like the film he was watching. And he didn't like the fact that I didn't drink. He said when he came home at the end of the day he'd like to share a beer. I said, 'I'll have a c.o.ke and you have a beer; we'll still be sharing the moment.' He said, 'Yes, but we won't be sharing the beer.' It was too ridiculous."

At the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, one would-be spouse, a young diplomat, was preparing for his first posting abroad. "He would have been perfect," Rose sighed wistfully after her brief appointment. "He was witty, cosmopolitan. But he had dirty fingernails."

"Rose," I said, incredulous, "are you telling me you've ruled him out because he had dirty fingernails? For goodness' sake! You can always clean his fingernails." She raised her head and gazed at me sadly with her huge dark eyes. "Geraldine, you don't understand. You married for love. What's a dirty fingernail on someone you love? But if you are going to marry somebody you don't love, everything, everything, everything, has to be perfect." has to be perfect."

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I wondered if my Palestinian friend Rehab had expected perfection from her arranged marriage. If so, I could only guess at the depth of her disappointment.

Rehab lived on a hilltop west of Jerusalem, in an ancient stone village that seemed pinned to the earth by the spindly minaret of its mosque. To get there, it was necessary to drive past the cranes and bulldozers of half a dozen new Jewish settlements. The closest, a kibbutz, was just across the valley, its modern vegetable trellises lacing through the Arabs' ancient orchards like fingers locked in an arm wrestle.

Every time I arrived in the village I looked for Rehab and Mohamed. Rehab was a diminutive, feisty young women who worked as a hairdresser, going from house to house beautifying the village women for weddings and feast days. She kept track of every shred of women's news in town. Her husband Mohamed was an ebullient shopkeeper, strongly built, with muscular forearms, a tangle of thick dark curls and laughing brown eyes. He loved attempting jokes in his colorful, fractured English. I'd often been at their home, a couple of times with Tony along. We shared meals, played with their four-year-old daughter, admired the new coops they'd built for the "Palestine Liberation Chickens" that would free them from dependence on Israeli produce.

Tony and I loved hanging out with Palestinians. They were humorous, outspoken people who seemed to lack Egyptians' cla.s.s consciousness and Gulf Arabs' reserve. What struck us most was the easy interaction of men and women. Women were in the demonstrations against Israeli occupation, in the hospitals treating the wounded, and at home, around the table, arguing politics with the foreigners as loudly as the men. Mohamed and Rehab's house always seemed full of friends of both s.e.xes, and Tony and I were both equally welcomed.

One beautiful late summer day I arrived in the village alone, and met Mohamed at his shop in the tiny main street. He seemed distracted and upset. He had been impatient since my last visit, he said, because he wanted to ask me something important.

He needed a second wife. He couldn't mention his plans to anyone in the village because his neighbors, like most Palestinians these days, considered polygamy backward. Besides, if Rehab heard about his intention she'd go into a frenzy. Did I know any foreign woman who would secretly marry him? Could he get a visa to go abroad and find someone?

No, I said, stunned by his questions. I didn't know anyone, and visas were difficult to arrange without relatives abroad. Mohamed seemed angered by my answers. "You think I am a poor man? I am not!" he exclaimed, jumping up and dragging me by the arm behind the counter of his shop. Pulling down several boxes of goods, he reached back into the darkness and came out with his fists full of gold. I recognized the jewelry: gaudy bangles and necklaces made by the Indian goldsmiths of the Gulf States especially for bridal dowries. All of it was pure, solid, 22 or 24 carat, because that is what Arab buyers insist on. "I will give it all to her. It's just that I must have a son. My wife, after our daughter, they had to cut her up so she can't have another child. I am nothing in this village without a son." His voice cracked. "Please, you have to help me. Will you find someone for me?"

"May your womb shrivel up" is one of the worst Arabic curses it's possible to utter. Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he'd told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter. is one of the worst Arabic curses it's possible to utter. Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he'd told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.

I remembered then that I'd never heard Rehab's kunya kunya-her mother designation. Arab women don't take their husbands' names on marrying, but both men and women do take the name of their first-born sons. They are known to their friends ever afterward as "Umm Fans" or "Abu Aziz"-"Mother of Faris" or "Father of Aziz." Rehab, now infertile, would never have a kunya. Mohamed could get one if a new wife gave him a son.

It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn't wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad is thought to have had three or four sons, two or three by Khadija and one by an Egyptian concubine named Mary. None survived infancy. Instead, the prophet raised four daughters, one of whom, Fatima, he extolled as a perfect human being. "Fatima," he said, "is part of me. Whoever hurts her hurts me, and whoever hurts me has hurt G.o.d." Fatima was the only one of his children to outlive him.

The Koran, meanwhile, has a mixed message about female infants. It orders an end to female infanticide. One of its most beautiful and poetic chapters contains a poignant reference to the practice, then so widespread in Arabia: "When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pa.s.s away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heavens shall be removed; and when h.e.l.l shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: every soul shall know what it hath wrought."

But elsewhere, in a discussion of the idol-wors.h.i.+pers in Mecca, the Koran mocks the Meccans' wors.h.i.+p of three G.o.ddesses known as "the daughters of Allah." Why, it asks, would G.o.d have daughters, when even puny human males can have the more desirable sons?

As Mohamed thrust his fistfuls of gold under my nose, he seemed on the verge of tears. To calm him I muttered something about finding out about visas. His spirits lifted immediately. "Good," he said, smiling broadly. "Now I have something else to show you!"

He'd built a special hideaway at the top of the shop, from which he could spy on Israeli troop patrols. Grateful to get back to what I thought was the solid ground of reporting, I climbed the ladder to his secret nook and humored his insistence that I lie down on the thin mattress by the spyhole to examine the clear view of the street. When he lay down beside me to point out a Palestinian flag in the power lines, I jumped up immediately and climbed back down into the shop.

He had one more piece of news for my article, he said. The Israelis had imposed water restrictions, but the village had circ.u.mvented them by uncovering some ancient Roman-era cisterns on the village outskirts. He wanted to show them to me. We got into his rusty truck and rattled out of the village.

The cisterns were well hidden, at the base of a row of crumbling, abandoned olive terraces. As I scrambled down the rocky ground, Mohamed reached out to help me. His hand landed firmly on my b.u.t.tock. It's a mistake, I thought. He didn't put it there on purpose. Without saying anything, I tried to prise his fingers loose. But he pushed my hand away, tightening his grip into a crude and unambiguous grope. Then, grabbing my arms, he pinned me in a sudden embrace that was more like a wrestler's hold. His bulk bearing down on me sent me stumbling against the wall of old stone. As he rubbed himself against me, I could barely breathe under his weight. I couldn't get my breath to scream, and there was n.o.body near this place to hear me. Wrenching one arm free, I started pummeling him, but he seemed oblivious. He reached for the edge of my s.h.i.+rt, trying to tug it up over my abdomen. His other hand pulled at the waistband of my trousers. "You should see what they did to my wife-here-right here, they cut her up-it is so ugly I can't look at it. I don't want to make love to such a body."

Suddenly, a rattle of stones made Mohamed look up. The vacant eyes of a sheep stared down at him. A flock was making its slow way across the upper terrace. Behind it, somewhere, would be a village child, shepherding. Mohamed would not want him to witness this. As his grip slackened I scrambled for my balance, leaping away up the stony hillside toward the road. I never saw him again.

I don't know if Mohamed ever found his second wife. But a few miles away, in a Palestinian refugee camp, I got to know a family in which the man had made a similar choice and brought a second wife into his first wife's home.

I met them first in the winter of 1987, just weeks after the Palestinian uprising had begun. I was driving through a hard, icy rain when a chunk of concrete slammed into the hood of my car and fanned in fragments against the winds.h.i.+eld. The car fishtailed across the rain-slicked bitumen and twirled to a stop just inches from the wide trunk of an ancient cedar. In the rear-vision mirror I caught a flash of red. A group of youths, their faces wrapped in red-checked kaffiyehs, kaffiyehs, perched on the pile of rubble at the entrance to the camp. perched on the pile of rubble at the entrance to the camp.

I jumped from the car and ran toward them. Thinking I was an armed Israeli settler, they scattered like startled birds. "Please," I called in Arabic. "I don't have a gun. I'm a journalist and I'd like to talk to you."

One of the youths rematerialized atop the rubble heap. "Get out of here!" he cried in perfect English. "There are people in this camp who would kill you!"

I stood my ground and asked to interview him. "I'm too busy now," he said, eying the license plate of a pa.s.sing truck to see if it was colored yellow, for Israeli, or blue for Palestinian. "And if I start on this subject I'll never stop." As a Fiat with yellow plates approached, he wound up like a pitcher and hurled his chunk of concrete at its winds.h.i.+eld. It fell just short. "It hasn't been a good day for me," he said. "I've hardly damaged any cars."

The wail of an approaching army siren signaled that the day might be about to take a turn for the worse. Barking commands to his three accomplices, the boy turned and ran off into the camp, his kaffiyeh wound tightly around his face to prevent identification by camp informers. I turned and walked slowly down the camp's main street, hearing the commotion behind me as an Israeli jeep skidded to a stop and emptied its troops at the camp entrance. A few blocks farther, I glimpsed a flash of red in the window of a half-demolished building. It was the boy. His finger on his lips, he signaled to me to follow him.

Scrambling over rubble, we made our way through back alleys to a large metal door set in a concrete-block wall. The boy rapped gently on the metal and the door flew open. Two pairs of women's hands dragged him inside by his collar, quickly stripped his T-s.h.i.+rt and jacket and flung him a change of clothes. "In case anybody saw me," he explained. "This is Rahme, my mother," he said, introducing the smaller of the two women as she patted down his tousled hair. "And this," he said, turning to the other woman, "is Fatin, also my mother. Well, not my mother... excuse me, I don't know the English word... but she is... married to my father after my mother."

"Darra?" I said. Co-wife. The Arabic word comes from the root "to harm." I said. Co-wife. The Arabic word comes from the root "to harm."

"Yes," he said. "Co-wife."

At fifteen, the boy, Raed, was the oldest of fourteen children. Because Israeli authorities had closed the schools, all of them were at home on that wet day, crammed inside the four-room hovel. Cold seeped up through the bare concrete floors and rain dripped through the leaky roof. Most of the toddlers had runny noses. Over the next six years I visited the family often, sometimes spending the night on a thin mattress on the floor, wedged in with Rahme and Fatin and Raed's sisters. Raed and his brothers slept beside their father, Mah-moud, in another room.

Clearly, given the number of children in the house, the sleeping arrangements weren't always like that. Because it was impossible to have a private conversation in that crowded house, I couldn't raise such a sensitive subject with Rahme or Fatin. I asked a close woman friend from a similar background how people in such situations managed to have s.e.x. What she described was depressing: "If there are three rooms, then the women take one, the boys one, and the husband and whichever wife he wants to have s.e.x with will sleep in the third room," she said. "But in some homes in the camps there aren't three rooms, so the act is a quick, silent fumbling in a corner, hoping the children aren't awake. Of course, neither one of them would ever undress."

At first I visited the camp to write about the uprising. But soon I became more involved in the story of Rahme and Fatin. There is a poignant Berber folk song about the arrival of a second wife, and I thought of it every time I visited them: The stranger has come; she has her place in the house.Her tattoos are not like ours,But she's young, she's beautiful, just what my husband wanted;The nights aren't long enough for their play....Since she's come, the house is not the same,As though the doorsills and the walls were sulking;Perhaps I'm the only one who notices it,Like a mule before his empty manger.But I must accept my new lot,For my husband is happy with his new wife.Once I, too, was beautiful, but my time is past.

To an outsider, the relations.h.i.+p between Rahme and Fatin seemed to have little in common with that sad song. The two women seemed more like loving sisters than bitter rivals. If Fatin cooked, Rahme sewed. If Rahme made bread, Fatin kept an eye on the toddlers. When Raed finally got caught after throwing a Molotov c.o.c.ktail at Israeli soldiers, it was Fatin, not his mother Rahme, who showed up in court to support him. And when Mahmoud, too, was taken to jail in a routine security sweep, the two women relied on each other to get through the long six months until his release. In all the time I spent in their house I never heard a cross word between them.

It was Raed who taught me to look deeper. Raed spent five years in jail for his part in the uprising. When he was released, in February 1993, the fiery fifteen-year-old who'd stoned my car had been replaced by a solemn twenty-year-old who celebrated his new freedom in long, long walks up and down the West Bank's stony hillsides. On one of these walks we stopped for a few minutes to chat with a woman he knew slightly. "Her life is complete misery," he said as we turned away. As we walked, he told me the story of the woman's unhappy marriage, her husband's eventual repudiation, and her return to her parents, her children, of course, left behind with their father. "It is my mother's story," Raed added unexpectedly, "except for the ending."

Rahme's story began in Jordan. In 1972, Raed's father's mother arrived there with her daughter, who had been promised in marriage to a relative in Amman. In Jordan, the mother spotted Rahme, a devout, rosy-cheeked young woman whose tiny stature made her look much younger than her seventeen years. She took the girl home to marry her fifteen-year-old son Mahmoud.

"What did he know at fifteen? Nothing," said Raed. "To him, she was a good girl, a nice girl. But how could he love her? He didn't even know her."

Within a year, Raed was born. His brother Murad carne a year and a half later, and two sisters in the three years after that. Rahme was still pregnant with her fourth child when she forced herself to face the fact that had the whole camp gossiping. Mahmoud had fallen for Fatin, a stunning eighteen-year-old who had recently moved in with relatives in the camp.

The two women couldn't have been more different. Where Rahme was shy and pious, Fatin was outspoken and political. Where Rahme was quiet and diffident, Fatin laughed and a.s.serted herself. Fatin, tall and s.h.i.+ning with confidence, seemed to eclipse the tiny Rahme. Finally, Mahmoud came home with the news that Rahme had dreaded. He had proposed to Fatin, and she had accepted him. Rahme, he said, could have a divorce.

Rahme knew that a divorce meant leaving the West Bank to return to her family in Jordan. In some ways, that would have been a relief. In six years the youth Mahmoud had grown into a fierce-tempered man who occasionally lashed out violently at both her and Raed, who even as a toddler was showing a streak of stubborn courage. To live with him as his only wife had been hard enough: she could barely imagine the greater humiliations and hards.h.i.+ps that would come from being relegated to second place by a woman he really loved.

But when she looked up at Mahmoud and gave her answer, it wasn't what he expected to hear. "I don't want to divorce you," she said quietly. Under Islamic law, divorce meant leaving her children to be raised by Mahmoud and his new wife. "I want to keep my family," she said. "Will you allow me that?"

Mahmoud was bad-tempered and selfish, but he wasn't cruel enough to force Rahme to leave her children. If Rahme wished to stay, he said, he would continue to support her. But she would have to be content to be his wife in name only. Although the Koran declares that a man must treat all his wives equally, Mahmoud made it clear that it was Fatin, and Fatin alone, to whom he was s.e.xually attracted. By choosing to stay, Rahme, at twenty-three, would be choosing a life of celibacy in a crowded hovel alongside a woman for whom her husband felt a pa.s.sionate erotic attraction. Mahmoud made it clear that he would blame Rahme if the relations.h.i.+p between the two women was anything but placid and friendly.

Rahme choked back her tears and agreed to Mahmoud's conditions. A few weeks later she put on her best embroidered dress and danced to the drums at her husband's wedding.

When we returned to the house, I suddenly saw everything differently. Rahme was in the corner, performing her midday prayers, as Fatin laughed boisterously with Mahmoud. Fatin was pregnant with her eleventh child, and basking in Mahmoud's obvious pride in her condition.

Raed was less approving. Since his father's jobs on construction sites were irregular, Raed was working fourteen hours a day in a shoe factory to support the family. "It's stupid!" he fumed. "He can't support the babies he has, and he brings more and more."

Fatin had been nursing a newborn when I first met her in 1987. While I talked to Raed about the intifada, she'd sat in a corner of the room with the baby at her breast. She'd interrupted only once, when Raed's English stumbled over the word "peace." I'd asked him if the Palestinians in the camp were willing to accept peace with Israel. When he had trouble with the word, I tried the Arabic, salaam. salaam. "La salaam!" Fatin yelled suddenly. "No peace! The people of this camp want war!" Fatin, I reflected then, would be a formidable opponent if anyone crossed her. "La salaam!" Fatin yelled suddenly. "No peace! The people of this camp want war!" Fatin, I reflected then, would be a formidable opponent if anyone crossed her.

Fatin's many pregnancies had stripped her of her girlish bloom. She showed me the gaps in her mouth from teeth that had fallen out during the latest one. Yet it seemed to be a price she was willing to pay to retain her husband's approval, and to underline her difference in status from Rahme.

"My mother is waiting only for us," Raed said. "As soon as my sisters are finished school and I can support them, she won't have to put up with this anymore."

I wondered, though, if the complex bonds in the family could be so easily broken. Raed himself said he didn't differentiate between his full siblings and his half brothers and sisters. He loved all of them, and felt responsible for protecting them from his erratic father. His feelings about Fatin also were complex. "I cannot say I hate this woman," he said. "I hate her only for being the cause of my mother's suffering, not for who she is herself."

In a rare private moment, when I tried to ask Rahme about her feelings, her rosy face broke into an enigmatic smile. She wrapped my hands in her two cracked and work-worn ones and whispered simply, "Insha'allah [As G.o.d wills it]." Then she went to wash and began her prayers, as the life of the household swirled unnoticed around her. In a few moments, following the prayer-time ritual, she knelt, touching her head to the floor.

Her religion, after all, was Islam-the Submission. It seemed to me that its rules had required her to submit to a lot.

Chapter 4.

THE P PROPHET'S W WOMEN"O wives of the prophet ye are not like any ordinary women."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE CLANS.

She was playing on her swing when her mother called her. Noticing her dirty face, her mother took a little water and wiped the grime away. The swing had left her breathless, so the two of them paused for a few minutes at the door of the house until she recovered.

Inside, her father and his friends were waiting. Her mother placed her in the lap of one of them, then everyone else rose and left the room.

Aisha was nine years old, and that day, in her parents' house, she consummated her marriage to the prophet Muhammad, who was then over fifty. Ten years later, he died in her arms.

Today, if you ask Sunni Muslims about Aisha, they will tell you she was the great love of Muhammad's later life, a formidable teacher of Islam, a heroine in battle. But ask s.h.i.+tes, and they will describe a jealous schemer who destroyed the prophet's domestic peace, plotted against his daughter Fatima, spied on the household and fomented a tragic factional bloodletting that left the Muslim nation permanently divided.

Aisha-Arabic for "life"-is one of the most popular girls' names in the Sunni Muslim world. But among s.h.i.+tes it is a term ofasperation and abuse. When a s.h.i.+te girl misbehaves, her mother is likely to upbraid her with a shout of "You Aisha!"

Aisha went to live with Muhammad in the year 622 by the Christian calendar-the first year of Hegira by Muslim reckoning. Thirteen hundred and sixty-six years later, an interviewer for "h.e.l.lo Good Morning" a live, national radio show in Iran, stopped a woman on a Tehran street and asked her who she thought was the best woman's role model. The woman answered Os.h.i.+n, the heroine of a j.a.panese-made TV soap opera who had overcome all kinds of adversity by flouting j.a.pan's staid traditions. The interviewer asked the woman why she hadn't named one of the prophet's wives or daughters as her role model. The woman replied that those women belonged to a far-off era that wasn't as relevant to her modern life. Ayatollah Khomeini, listening to the radio, was furious, and demanded that the show's producers be flogged. He relented when an investigation proved that the producers hadn't acted maliciously.

For once I found myself more or less agreeing with Khomeini. The lives of the prophet's wives and daughters were extremely relevant to modern Islamic women. Most of the Koran's revelations on women came to Muhammad directly following events in his own household. Like modern Muslim women, his wives had to cope with the jealousies of a polygamous household, the traumas of war, the hards.h.i.+ps of poverty and the issues of seclusion and hijab.

To me, the hadith's intimate vignettes of life in the apartments around Muhammad's mosque were better than any modern soap opera. I couldn't get enough of these stories of intrigue, argument and romance. Aisha, undoubtedly, was the star, but the seven or eight wives in the supporting cast made for lively subplots.

When Muhammad's first wife Khadija died in 619, the forty-nine-year-old prophet was heartbroken. The Muslim community, especially the women who cooked and cared for him, believed a new wife might soothe his grief. A few months after Khadija's death, Muhammad's aunt, Khawla, suggested to her nephew that he marry again.

"Whom shall I marry, O Khawla?" asked Muhammad. "You women are best knowing in these matters."

Khawla answered that, if he wanted a virgin, he should take Aisha, the beautiful child of his best friend, Abu Bakr. If he wanted a nonvirgin, there was the widow Sawda, a matronly older woman who had been an early convert to Islam and a devoted follower.

"Go," said Muhammad, "bespeak them both for me."

He married Sawda and Aisha in quick succession. But since Aisha was then only six, the marriage wasn't consummated, and she remained with her family. No one told the little girl of her change in status. But when her mother suddenly began restricting her play, Aisha later recalled, "It fell into my heart that I was married," By the time she went to live with Muhammad, the Muslims had fled persecution in Mecca and set up an exile community in the town of Medina. Muhammad lived in the mosque they constructed there-a humble structure of gray mudbricks roofed with the branches of date trees. Aisha and Sawda had a room each. When Aisha moved in, she brought her toys with her. Sometimes Muhammad would find her playing with them. "What are these?" he would ask. "Solomon's horses," or "My girl dolls," she would answer. If her child playmates ran away, intimidated, when he approached, he would gently call them back and sometimes join in their games.