Nine Parts of Desire Part 4

Every time I saw Janet she seemed more settled in her community and contented in her private life. So far, Leila has managed to be religiously devoted without drifting into dogmatism. In Iran's family-centered world, Janet and Mohamed saw more of each other and divided their parenting more equally than most Western couples. The Friday weekend for them was always a family day, spent taking the children to the nearby mountains, to a kebab joint, visiting relatives, or just hanging out at home with the latest videos.

"At first, when my husband brought me here, I hated it," said one of Janet's American buddies, stopping in one afternoon for tea. "I just hated every step I took." The woman had left her husband and gone back to the States. "Back there, I couldn't believe the rat race. My job demanded every ounce of energy I had. I kept longing for the slow pace of life here, where the home and the family come first, and the job just gets done somehow in between. Then I got cancer, and I felt so alone there. I had relatives, of course, but they couldn't just drop everything for me. I kept thinking, if I were in Iran the family would would drop everything. As soon as I was cured, I came back here, and it really is a good life." drop everything. As soon as I was cured, I came back here, and it really is a good life."

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But tales of domestic contentment didn't tell the whole story, any more than Betty Mahmoody's domestic nightmare had. I had lost touch with Janet's friend Margaret. Two years had slipped by since our first meeting. But one day we made contact again, and she invited me to one of her mother-in-law's rosees. rosees. For devout women, these gatherings-a cross between an afternoon tea party and a religious-studies cla.s.s-are the major means of socializing. For devout women, these gatherings-a cross between an afternoon tea party and a religious-studies cla.s.s-are the major means of socializing.

When I arrived at the house I barely recognized the black-chadored figure who opened the door. Margaret had scrubbed her pale face of makeup and bound her blond hair out of sight. Even her dramatic height seemed shrunken by a weary stoop. As we walked together through her mother-in-law's courtyard, I admired its centerpiece, a pretty blue-tiled fountain. "My mother-in-law washes there for prayers. It's my job to scrub it, tile by tile, to make sure it's puk puk-religiously clean. I also have to sweep every rug, every day, with that," she said, pointing to a short-handled bundle of straws. "I've got a vacuum cleaner, but I'm not allowed to use it because my mother-in-law isn't sure it gets the rugs puk. Because I'm a convert, I have to do everything better than a born Muslim just to convince them I'm not still a dirty infidel." She sounded tired and bitter. All the feisty insolence seemed to have been scrubbed and beaten away with the specks of mold on the blue tiles and the motes of dust in the rugs.

She ushered me into a salon stripped of furniture except for one empty, ornate carved chair, shrouded in black. The other guests-some dozen women-sat on large cus.h.i.+ons lining the walls. As the mullah arrived, they pulled the edges of their chadors down over their faces. Without even a greeting, the mullah took his place in the chair and began intoning in a sad, hypnotic voice. Within minutes, most of the women were sobbing. Margaret's mother-in-law began to keen violently, her shoulders heaving underneath her black chador. From under their veils, women groped blindly for the boxes of Kleenex set out on the floor between them.

The mullah was telling the story of Hussein, the prophet Muhammad's grandson, leading his army to defeat by treachery on the plains of Karbala, thirteen centuries ago. It is a story every s.h.i.+te knows by heart. I was surprised that its retelling could unleash so much emotion. "They are not just weeping for Hussein," whispered Margaret, sitting on the floor alongside me. "They are weeping for all the terrible things in their own lives-the babies they've miscarried, the children who've died of disease, the brother killed in the war, the husband who divorced them. In a third-world country like this, women have plenty to cry about."

The mullah's singsong voice built to a crescendo, then suddenly ceased. As abruptly as he'd entered, he rose and left the room. The second he was out the door, the women threw off their chadors. They were dazzlingly dressed in silk suits decked with ropes of pearls and gold. A dozen conversations started up all at once. Margaret immediately jumped up and went to the kitchen, returning again and again with platters of fruit, tiny crisp cuc.u.mbers, sweet cakes and tea. The guests primped their elaborate coiffures and wielded tissues on each other's blurred mascara, then piled the sugar into their tiny tea gla.s.ses.

After a while I rose to telephone for a taxi. A few minutes later, when the phone rang, Margaret nudged me and nodded in the direction of her sister-in-law, who was picking up the receiver carefully wrapped in a fold of her chador. "It's the 'dirty infidel' business I was telling you about," Margaret whispered. "Because you're not Muslim, she can't stand to touch something you've touched until she's had a chance to scrub it-or have me scrub it." In that case, I thought, it was lucky that Margaret's sister-in-law didn't know I was Jewish, or she might have felt obliged to throw the phone away altogether. Fear of pollution from Jews is so strong among some Iranians that once, long before the Islamic revolution, the government pa.s.sed a law requiring Jews to stay indoors during rain or snow showers, lest water that had touched their bodies flow into streams that Muslims might use to wash before prayers.

After Margaret had finished serving everyone, taking directions from the wizened mother-in-law propped up on pillows in the corner, she signaled me to come for a quick private chat in her room.

The "room" turned out to be a narrow alcove, divided from the main salon by a flimsy curtain. She shared the alcove with her son, now almost two. There was no s.p.a.ce and little privacy. Her husband had gone on a long business trip to America and, instead of taking her for a visit to her parents, had chosen to leave her behind to do the ch.o.r.es for his mother and sister. "My mom's not too pleased," she said. "She calls up and says, 'You waiting on his relatives again?' She knows they're working me to death. She wants me to come home." Margaret walked with me into the lane behind the house as I waited for my taxi. The neighbor's kitchens all backed onto the laneway, and the air was rich with the spicy scents of Persian cooking. As my cab made its slow way toward us, I asked why she didn't take her mother's advice and go home for a while. She straightened her hunched shoulders and kneaded the small of her back with a clenched fist. "I can't," she said. "My husband doesn't want me to." It was up to him to sign the papers that would allow her to leave the country. As she waved goodbye, I saw her sister-in-law appear at the door. Margaret's hands flew to her head, yanking her scarf back over a few stray wisps of blond hair.

Chapter 6.

JIHAD I IS F FOR W WOMEN, T TOO"O true believers, if ye a.s.sist G.o.d, by fighting for his religion, he will a.s.sist you against your enemies; and will set your feet fast."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF WAR.

At first Hadra Dawish had trouble with the p.r.o.ne position on the rifle range. "I was always wondering, 'Does my uniform cover me enough? Is there a man walking around behind me?'"

But five months later, when she graduated top of her cla.s.s at the United Arab Emirates military academy, Hadra Dawish had learned to empty her mind of everything but the target. She had mastered the M-16 a.s.sault rifle, Russian rocket-propelled grenades, multipurpose machine guns, hand grenades and 9mm pistols. She knew how to rappel from a hovering helicopter and conduct a night reconnaissance patrol through desert terrain. In 1992 she became the first woman from an Arabian Gulf country to enroll for officer training at the British military academy, Sandhurst.

No one seemed more surprised by any of this than Hadra herself. She had been born in 1967 into one of the most conservative Muslim societies. In those days most women of the Emirates lived in strict seclusion. Outside the family they wore the long black abaya and a cloth veil over their faces. Even at home, many women wore the burka burka-a black and gold canvas or leather mask that conceals everything but the eyes. Sending a daughter to an all-girls school was considered a risky step: less than a decade ago, conservative families wouldn't allow their sons to marry any girl who had been seen by anyone, man or woman, outside the family circle.

Hadra's family had been progressive enough to send her to school and allow her to work as a therapist with handicapped children-a job that didn't involve any contact with men. She went to and from her job wearing a cloaklike abaya and niqab, niqab, or face veil. "I never questioned it," she said. "The truth is, I still prefer to dress this way when I can. It's just that it isn't possible for a soldier." Now she wears desert-camouflage fatigues with a jacket cut long and loose to hide the curves of her body. Under her soldier's cap, a tightly wrapped scarf covers her hair. or face veil. "I never questioned it," she said. "The truth is, I still prefer to dress this way when I can. It's just that it isn't possible for a soldier." Now she wears desert-camouflage fatigues with a jacket cut long and loose to hide the curves of her body. Under her soldier's cap, a tightly wrapped scarf covers her hair.

Hadra became a soldier for the same reason most people do: "I love my country," she says. "I don't want to see it destroyed." In 1990, Hadra watched in horror as Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. Kuwait's flimsy forces, mostly staffed by foreign recruits, quickly collapsed. Kuwaiti refugees fled to the Emirates with tales of rape and destruction.

The United Arab Emirates is a mirror image of Kuwait: rich, tiny, and tempting to tyrants. In the palace of the Emirates' president, Sheik Zayed, strategists racked their brains to figure a way to boost their own small army of 50,000 men. The Emirates, after all, had less than half a million citizens to draw on. It was Zayed's wife, Sheika Fatima, who argued that the tiny state could no longer afford to waste half its population. Her radical solution: recruit women.

Sheika Fatima wasn't Zayed's first wife, or his only one. The sheik, a tribal leader in the days before the Emirates united to form a modern state, had married often, like the prophet, to cement treaties and further political alliances. Usually the wives would stay with him for a few years before being divorced and sent back to their families with honor and a sizable fortune. But Fatima had won his heart, and also his respect, and became the official first lady of the Emirates. She had married the sheik as a child bride with little education beyond basic study of the Koran. She had used the resources of the palace to pursue her education, studying English and cla.s.sical Arabic. In 1973 she started the Abu Dhabi Society for the Awakening of Women, aiming to eradicate illiteracy and train women in trades.

Still, by the 1990s, Emirates women were only gingerly arriving in the work force. Just a handful had started taking jobs that put them in contact with men. One of them was a friend of the sheika's, a trailblazer named Hessa al-Khaledi, the Emirates' first woman civil engineer. With Zayed's approval, the sheika delegated Hessa to solve the problems of recruiting the Emirates' first women soldiers and reconciling the religious establishment to their existence.

Hessa took a year's leave from her job at the Public Works Department and went straight to her Islamic history books. At issue was the matter of jihad, jihad, or holy struggle to spread the faith and defend the Muslim community. Jihad is obligatory on all Muslims but can take many forms. In the Western mind, jihad has become synonymous with acts of terrorism carried out by extremist Islamic groups. But teaching the faith, or spreading the word through an exemplary life, are also forms of jihad. or holy struggle to spread the faith and defend the Muslim community. Jihad is obligatory on all Muslims but can take many forms. In the Western mind, jihad has become synonymous with acts of terrorism carried out by extremist Islamic groups. But teaching the faith, or spreading the word through an exemplary life, are also forms of jihad.

Women's role in jihad was an issue even at the time of the prophet. In the first years of the faith, when the Muslim community had to fight to establish itself in the face of hostility from existing religious groups, some women clamored to contribute. Victorious soldiers were blessed by G.o.d and enriched with a share of the spoils of the defeated enemy. A hadith records this exchange between the prophet and one of his followers: "I am the delegate of women to you. This jihad was made obligatory on men. If they win, they are given worldly rewards, and if they are killed they are alive with their Lord, well provided for. But we Muslim women, we serve them; what do we get for that?"

Muhammad replied: "Convey to the women you meet that obedience to their husband, and the acknowledgment of their favors, is equivalent to that jihad."

The Emirates' Muslim authorities quoted that hadith in their arguments against recruiting women soldiers. But Hessa al-Khaledi countered with historical evidence showing that women did did fight alongside Muhammad, and were honored for it. fight alongside Muhammad, and were honored for it.

Nusaybah bint Kaab is perhaps the most celebrated of the many women warriors, since she helped save Muhammad's life in the battle of Uhud. When the Muslim army was dispersed in an enemy charge, she was among the ten fighters who managed to hold their ground, s.h.i.+elding the prophet's body with their own. She received thirteen wounds during her valiant stand; one, a near-fatal sword cut to the side of her neck, took more than a year to heal. Lying close to death the day after the battle, she heard Muhammad calling for volunteers to pursue the enemy and tried to rise to answer the call, but fainted from loss of blood. In a later battle she lost a hand. Muhammad clearly honored Nusaybah's contribution. He often visited her house and took dinner there.

Some of the Muslims' most formidable opponents also were women. The notorious Hind bint Utbah, wife of the leader of Mecca, was a fearsome presence at the battle of Uhud, screaming warlike poetry to exhort her side's fighters and humiliate the enemy. One of her anti-Muhammad chants has survived, in rough translation, as: We reject the reprobate!His G.o.d we repudiate!His religion we loathe and hate!

Omar, Muhammad's misogynist lieutenant, came back with this crude, and revealing, response: May G.o.d curse HindDistinguished among Hinds,She with the large c.l.i.toris,And may he curse her husband with her!

Hind was unintimidated. When the Meccans defeated the Muslims, inflicting heavy losses, Hind searched among the Muslim dead for the man who had killed her father in an earlier battle. When she found the corpse, she cut out the man's liver, sliced off his nose and ears and strung them into bracelets which she wore, as she stood on a rock yelling verses of victory while Muhammad's wives and the other Muslim women scrambled to retrieve the bodies from the field before more could be desecrated.

Stories of Muslim women's battlefield courage abound. Muhammad's aunt, Safiyah, was the first Muslim woman to kill an enemy in battle; Asma bint Yazid killed nine men of the opposing forces at the battle of Yarmouk. Khawla bint al-Azwar rode to battle with her antle pulled close around her face. As she charged the enemy, observers asked each other if they knew the name of the brave man riding beside the prophet.

After Muhammad's death, women continued to take part in campaigns. When the Muslims attacked a Persian seaport, a band of women, led by Azdah bint al-Harith, turned their mantles into banners and, marching in phalanx toward the enemy, were mistaken for fresh reinforcements.

Armed with these examples, Hessa gradually wore down opposition to the new women's military academy. "I would ask them, if it wasn't forbidden then, why forbid it now?" Even the conservatives couldn't argue against the example of the prophet. But one question kept coming up: Who would train the women? The Emirates' only qualified instructors were men, and that was unthinkable. A male officer couldn't supervise unveiled women's physical fitness training, or barge into a women's barracks to enforce discipline; he couldn't touch a woman to adjust her stance with a rifle.

The answer was obvious to anyone who had watched the U.S. military descend on nearby Saudi Arabia. There, U. S. Army women were flying troop transports, maintaining missile batteries, trucking munitions to the front lines. The Emirates asked the U. S. Army if it could spare a few of its senior women to run a basic training course. Fort Bragg chose ten specialists whose average length of service was fourteen years. Their commander, Major Janis Karpinski, was already serving in Saudi Arabia.

Before they began work, Hessa arranged for each of the U.S. soldiers to spend two days living with an Emirates family so they would at least glimpse the cultural background from which the recruits were coming. As she arrived at the huge house of an Emirates army officer, Tracy Borum, a military police captain from Nashville, Tennessee, felt nervous. "I worried they'd see me as a Western woman invading their home and challenging their ways," she said. Instead, she found herself an honored guest. She feasted on camel meat ("sweet and sort of greasy"), tried on a burka ("a weird feeling-like I was trying to hide from somebody") and watched the women perfume themselves by placing burning incense braziers under their long robes ("I was sure they'd set themselves on fire").

Meanwhile, Hessa was screening applications from over 1,200 women who had answered advertis.e.m.e.nts seeking volunteers. She chose 74 women, ranging in age from seventeen to thirty-one, and in education from completion of sixth grade to achievement college degrees. "At first I tried to screen out women with small children," she said, "but that was impossible." In the Emirates, women still marry quite young and start their families as soon as they can, so almost all the women in the right age group had young children. But because most of them lived in extended families there were plenty of mothers and aunts in most households willing to provide child care. Hessa found that many of the applicants came from families with a brother or father already in the military. The chosen group included about seven sets of sisters. At first, as the United States trainers divided the recruits into three platoons, they considered splitting the sisters, but decided against it when they saw that the women seemed to work better with a sister's support. None of the women had been physically active; most had never spent a night away from home. Tracy Borum remembers their extreme shyness. Raised from childhood with the Koranic injunction to "lower their gaze and be modest," the women now found themselves hollered at to square their shoulders and stare their officers in the eye. "At first I had to go around lifting their chins to get them to look at me," Tracy recalls.

The Americans had to adjust some aspects of their training. "The drill sergeants, yelling at them to get in formation or get in the barracks, were just about scaring these poor women to death," recalls Janis Karpinski. "American recruits expect that-they've seen all the movies." The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered, "so we tried to become the people they wanted to please." Other modifications included arranging the drill schedule to include prayer times and rescheduling heavy physical training for nighttime during the month of Ramadan, after the women had broken their day-long fast. Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. "I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If one of them said she couldn't make it through a four-mile run, I'd say, 'You can, because we can, and we were fasting too.' "

Except for Ramadan, the day started with the prayer call at about five-thirty each morning. After prayers, recruits in black sweatsuits lined up for physical training. "We do the PT before any of the male administrators show up," said Tracy. That way, the recruits could work out with their hair uncovered, although they usually kept their scarves tied around their waists, just in case.

Only fifteen women dropped out of the course. Some couldn't cope with the presence of a few male administrators in the military school. Others missed their families, or their maids. Those who stayed thrived. At first the American trainers had revised their fitness targets downward, to accommodate women who'd never had to walk to the grocery store, much less complete a forced march. But within weeks the targets had been raised again, as the women easily mastered a hundred push-ups a day. One recruit shed forty-four pounds during the five-month training.

As the course wound toward its end in May 1991, "we saw this metamorphosis take place," says Janis Karpinski. "In the last thirty days, I never saw these women but their shoulders were squared, their heads tall." When Hadra Dawish took leave to visit her family, they were shocked at the changes in her. "They told me I'd changed too many things, from the way I walk to the way I act with them," she said. "Some they liked. Some, no." Hadra found her women friends hardest to convince. Sitting in their gilded salons, with foreign maids pa.s.sing trays of sweet pastries, they shuddered at Hadra's tales of digging foxholes and standing guard all night in desert camps. "They kept saying to me, 'You have to come out, you've made a terrible choice.' But I knew I'd made the right decision."

Meanwhile, some senior officers in the Emirates' army found it hard to credit the fine results the women recruits were achieving. Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Na.s.ser, the commander of the academy, had admitted from the beginning that he felt lukewarm about the whole idea of women warriors. "If we had a bigger population, I'd rather see women stay at home," he said. But slowly he had to revise his view of their capabilities. At first he refused to believe the omen's shooting scores. "When I see results of thirty-eight out of forty, I have to be surprised," he said. The women, after all, had grown up in an atmosphere in which girls never even played at aiming a toy gun. The lieutenant colonel wondered if the high scores reflected a defect in the newly built shooting range at the women's academy. To find out, he commandeered the men's academy shooting range and ordered the women to redo the test. There he watched in growing astonishment as bullet after bullet slammed home, right smack in the center of the target.

Before I went to the Middle East, I'd always found myself on the dovish side of every argument. Despite glaring evidence to the contrary (Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher) I believed that a world with more women in positions of power would be a more peaceful place. So it seemed odd, and a little sad, that of all the rights a woman might aspire to, the one that Hadra and her friends had won was the right to kill and be killed. And yet it was impossible not to celebrate the strength the Emirates women had discovered in themselves, the skills they'd mastered and the confidence that seemed to s.h.i.+ne from every face I encountered on the base.

I had grappled with this paradox once before, in Eritrea, huddling in a trench burrowed out of an African mountaintop. A few meters away, Ethiopian soldiers stared through binoculars, waiting for someone on our side to make a move. Of the hundred or so soldiers on the Eritrean side of that front line, about fifteen were women, including the commanding officer.

Those Eritrean women guerrillas had witnessed the worst that war could offer. One had seen a friend take a Kalashnikov round full in the face, blasting away half her jaw. Another held the hand of a comrade as her mine-shattered leg was amputated without anesthetic. The women talked of these things with a sad pragmatism. Most had been born since the fighting with Ethiopia started in 1962 and had known nothing but a country at war.

As in the Emirates, Eritrean women had joined the guerrillas because they felt they had to; there simply weren't enough men to challenge the might of black Africa's biggest army. If anything, their society had been even more resistant to the notion of women warriors than that of the Emirates. In the 1960s in Eritrean villages, women's position was so lowly that a wife presumed to speak to her husband only if it was absolutely necessary. From the Koran's p.r.o.nouncement that menstruation is "an illness," during which women must refrain from s.e.x and prayer, Eritrean villagers had developed a tradition of forcing menstruating women to leave their homes for a week each month and seclude themselves, day and night, in a pit reserved for the "unclean."

When war broke out with Ethiopia, a few women insisted on fighting. "At the beginning, they were needed, so there wasn't the luxury of refusing them," said Chuchu Tesfamariam, who became a fighter herself at the age of seventeen. The valor of the fighters won new respect for women in general and broke down many taboos. The Eritreans, desperately poor, had few factories. But, as a gesture to the comfort of the women fighters, they had invested some of their scarce resources in a plant to produce sanitary napkins.

Living conditions at the front line were desperately harsh. The troops, slight and undernourished from years of drought-reduced rations, lived on a porridge of lentils scooped up in spongy bread. Their World War I-style trench system burrowed for miles across high mountain ridges. Supplies had to be hauled by hand up the near-vertical rock face, work that the women shared equally with the men. Everyone slept on the ground.

The guerrillas came from a wide range of backgrounds. Some, like the university-educated idealists who returned from exile to enlist, found it natural that women and men should fight together. Others, simple villagers, had difficulty adjusting to the idea.

Ismail Idriss, a twenty-three-year-old goatherd and a devout Muslim, had never spoken to a woman from outside his family when he suddenly found himself taking orders from one. "Women fighters I knew about from the beginning; even when I was wandering with my goats I'd seen them," Ismail explained, sunning himself on a rocky ledge during a rare break in the fighting. "But I never believed a woman could give orders to a man." Ismail's company commander was a stocky, taciturn woman of his own age named Hewit Moges, a thirteen-year veteran of front-line fighting who came from a Christian background. "Now I have seen it in practice I have had to start to accept it," he said, in a voice that still sounded hesitant about the idea. "When it's a hard climb she runs up the mountain, when it's a battle she's in front of the troops, and when someone is wounded she's the one who carries him from the field." He spread his palms and raised his shoulders in a wide shrug. "What can I say against it when I have seen such things?"

A few nights later the war took a rare break for a wedding. Fighters always married in large groups; a single couple couldn't afford the traditional feast of goat meat. A young dancer dressed in a costume made of grain sacks marked "Gift of the Federal Republic of Germany" leaped and twirled across the sand, followed by 120 brides and grooms, all clad alike in the same shabby khakis they'd worn into battle shortly before. The couples paired up and held hands, waiting for their division commander to read out their names and declare them husband and wife. Each couple received a wedding certificate, produced in the fighters' underground printshop, carrying a quote from the 1977 Marriage Law stating that the union was "the free will of the two partners based on love."

I sat on the sand listening to the long list of names. Nura Hus-seini was marrying Haile Gabremichael. Abdullah Doud was wedding Ababa Mariam. Muslims and Christians were marrying each other by the dozen. "It's possible that these people come from parents who were taught that you starve before you share food from the plate of someone of a different faith," said Chuchu, sitting on sand beside me. But in the trenches of this long war these young men and women had shared much more: fear, and victories, and belief in a cause. In the dark I could just make out Chuchu's profile. A sad half smile played across her face. "Not everything that comes from war is bad," she whispered.

And unfortunately, not everything that comes with peace is good. In 1994 I returned to Eritrea, which by then had been an independent country for almost a year. The capital, Asmara, had fallen to the guerrillas without a struggle. Unscathed by the fighting that had reduced so much of the country to rubble, its Italianate buildings glowed in a gentle wintry light, their terra-cotta walls splashed with sudden tumbles of scarlet bougainvillea. The streets were clean and safe to walk, even late at night. During the war, even schoolteachers had carried AK-47s. Now, no one was armed, even at the airport or entrances to government buildings. One of the world's most militarized populations had put away its guns.

For once, a guerrilla movement had come to power and not been instantly corrupted by it. The movement's leaders still wore the cheap plastic sandals they'd fought in, and none of them, including the president, drew a salary. Like the other fighters, they donated their labor to the rebuilding effort.

But, for the women fighters, peace had brought some unexpected disappointments. The new government offered women political partic.i.p.ation and new legal rights, such as the right to own and inherit land. It also banned genital mutilation in hospitals, and sponsored a radio series in which both the Muslim mufti and the Christian bishop stated clearly that such practices weren't religious obligations.

Still, the traditions of the wider society outweighed the culture that had developed at the front. Suddenly, fighters had come back home to families who had spent the war under occupation by Ethiopian forces. Often, the guerrillas' progressive mores were at odds with the deeply conservative values of their parents. "Most of them respect us-they understand we lived a different way," said Rosa Kiflemariam, a thirty-three-year-old who spent eight years at the front. "But others say to us, That was then-this is now, and now you have to live our way.'"

In 1989, Rosa had married a fellow guerrilla in one of the frontline wedding ceremonies. The couple, serving at different fronts, had spent only one month together before peace came. Now she and her husband were trying to get to know each other in the midst of enormous family pressure. Rosa's mother-in-law didn't approve of her son's wife going out to work and wanted her to give up her job as a financial officer in the Eritrean Women's Union. "Every time she sees me she starts saying, 'Why don't you have children? Why don't you stay at home?'"

In the villages, particularly, families found it difficult to accept the tough young women who were used to absolute equality, or even positions of command in military units. In those cases, families urged divorce, offering their sons young, tractable village girls as alternative wives prepared to wait on them hand and foot. Such tensions were exacerbated if the husband and wife were from different religious backgrounds.

For a young, unmarried woman fighter, the future was problematic. On the one hand, she was a heroine, but that didn't necessarily make her marriageable in villages that still valued modesty and certain virginity.

To Rosa and many other women, a new struggle had just begun. "We have to fight now to make them understand that everyone has the right to live freely. It's another war, I think."

Chapter 7.

A QUEEN"I found a woman to reign over them, who is provided with everything requisite for a prince, and hath a magnificent throne."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE ANT.

The ancient trade routes of Arabia are potholed highways now. The groaning strings of camels that Muhammad led for Khadija from coastal port to inland fortress are gone as well. Instead, trucks thud and grind from Aqaba to Mecca through a miasma of diesel and dust. What pa.s.ses for an oasis these days is a gray concrete truck stop, innocent of a palm tree or even a blade of gra.s.s.

In the spring of 1989,1 went to cover a riot in one of these places-a dismal shanty town named Maan in the middle of the Jordanian desert. The Jordanian prime minister had raised the price of gas, and Maan's truck drivers had poured into the streets to protest. The riots spread from there all over the country, troubling the stability of King Hussein, the Middle East's longest-reigning monarch. It was a story I'd written a half dozen times: a poor country needs aid, the International Monetary Fund comes in and demands economic reform, its terms are too tough, the people revolt.

But this time, as I perched on what was left of a chair in the burned-out ruins of a Maan bank, the story took a sudden lurch away from what I expected to hear. Sitting opposite me on the upturned drawer of a filing cabinet, an edgy Bedouin in a grimy robe played with the fringes of his kaffiyeh. He had been with the mob as it rampaged through the town a week earlier. "The demonstrators want lower prices, yes. They are poor already, and the increase will take the food from their children's mouths. But that wasn't all they were shouting for." He looked around, to make sure no one was listening. "They were shouting for the king to divorce the queen."

Like most Middle East correspondents, I knew vaguely that King Hussein had married an American, but I'd thought of her as photogenic fodder for the social pages, not as someone likely to emerge as a slogan in a price riot.

"People here have many questions about the queen," the Bedouin said, letting go of his kaffiyeh and reaching into the pockets of his robe for worry beads. As the beads traveled through his grease-stained fingers he listed the questions one by one: "Was she a virgin when she married the king? Is she really Muslim? If so, why doesn't she cover her hair? Is it true she supports Christian causes? Her family is from Halab [the Arabic name for the town of Aleppo, in Syria, where her grandfather was born before moving to Lebanon]. Halab has many Jews. How do we know she doesn't have Jewish blood? We have heard that she is from the CIA, sent to poison the king."

The Bedouin was troubled by a familiar bundle of Middle Eastern bogeys: America in general and the CIA in particular; Jews, or if not Jews, then Christians; women's s.e.xuality-both the fear of a "past" and the dread of present emanc.i.p.ation signaled by the absence of a veil.

It was hard to take his ranting seriously. Yet, in Iran and Egypt, rulers' wives had served as lightning rods for dissent, or at least criticism of them had been a barometer of troubles to come. The shah's empress Farah and Sadat's wife Jehan both had been aggressively modern, high-profile women who had fought for reform. What was Queen Noor doing to earn so much opprobrium?

At fifty-four, her husband, King Hussein, was the Middle East's great survivor. At thirteen, he'd narrowly missed being killed in the hail of a.s.sa.s.sin's bullets that murdered his grandfather. In 1951, at fifteen years old, he'd inherited a wobbly throne, survived the loss of the West Bank-half his kingdom-to Israel in 1967, put down an armed insurrection by Palestinian refugees in 1970 and, by 1989, had ruled for thirty-eight years. "He's been to the funerals of all of those who said he wouldn't last a week," said Dan s.h.i.+fton, an Israeli a.n.a.lyst of Jordanian affairs. Within days of the riots, the survivor in the king did what was necessary: he sacked the prime minister, Zaid Rifai, and promised his restless subjects their first general election in twenty-two years. I wondered if his marriage to Noor, his fourth and longest, would also have to be jettisoned in the interests of his survival.

When riots broke out, the king and queen were in Was.h.i.+ngton, dining at the White House. Pictures of Noor, resplendent in a navy-blue chiffon gown, and word that her sister had attended the dinner on the arm of the film producer George Lucas, only fed the angry talk about her American values and extravagance.

I had a standing request at the palace for an interview with the king. Not really expecting a reply, I fired off a new telex asking to see the queen as well, to talk about the way she'd become a target of the rioters. To my surprise, I got an answer back almost immediately: both Their Majesties had agreed to see me, and a car from the palace would collect me from my hotel.

Along with my chador, I always traveled with what I called my "king suit"-one decent Italian outfit in pin-striped silk that wadded up into a corner of a carry-on bag and emerged respectable after a quick press in a hotel laundry. I put the suit on, along with a pair of high heels that I hadn't worn since my wedding, and went down to meet a pistol-packing soldier at the wheel of a silver-gray Mercedes.

The royal palace sits on a hilltop near the center of old Amman, the town whose Roman name was Philadelphia-the city of brotherly love. The royal court does its business behind tall iron gates designed to protect those inside against brotherly hate. I had been inside the palace compound before, but only as far as the king's offices, the Diwan, where Circa.s.sian soldiers in high fur hats stand guard and obsequious courtiers wait for the royal summons. I expected that our meeting would take place in the king's book-lined office. But the car swished past the grand stairway of the Diwan and deposited me under the thudding rotors of a Black Hawk helicopter. The king was already in the pilot's seat. "Hop aboard," he cried, beckoning me into the seat behind him.

The king pushed the control stick forward and we heaved off the ground, hovering low over the palace and Amman's dense honeycomb of flat-roofed houses. Within seconds, the city was gone. We skimmed groves of ancient olive trees and ribs of bleached white stone. In Amman, fast-food joints named New York New York Pizza and giant supermarkets with bagels in the deep freeze gave Jordan a familiar, Western facade. But the modern layer was thin as a crust of sand. Beneath was an ancient, biblical landscape peopled by tribesmen who lived by their goats, their olives and their blood alliances just as they always had.

Winston Churchill used to boast that he'd created Jordan on a Sunday afternoon with the stroke of a pen. At a meeting in Cairo in 1921, Churchill and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) doodled the amoeba-shaped state of Transjordan onto the map of the Arabian Peninsula to provide a throne for their ally, Abdullah, who had helped Lawrence fight the Turks in World War I. Abdullah's father, Sherif Hussein, the thirty-fifth-generation direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, had ruled Mecca and the Hijaz region until the al-Sauds swept down from the Nejd desert in the North and pushed him aside.

A Palestinian a.s.sa.s.sinated Abdullah in 1951. His son, Talal, was mentally ill and abdicated two years later. The teenaged Hussein inherited the throne of a state in which the desert Arabians like himself were quickly becoming outnumbered by Palestinian refugees, pouring across the border after each war with Israel. Jordan, alone among Arab states, gave citizens.h.i.+p to the Palestinian refugees from the West Bank. But in the "Black September" of 1970, Hussein felt the Palestinians were trying to take control of his kingdom. He crushed them, with many casualties.

I stared at the king's crash helmet, which had "Hussein I" stenciled on the back. In the West, it was easy enough to see the king simply as a smooth-talking, Harrow-and Sandhurst-educated diplomat. But out here he was something much more potent: the avatar of his ancestor the prophet Muhammad, prayer leader, warlord and father of the tribes. Such a leader has to be seen by his people-and not just on TV, talking the dry argot of diplomacy with foreigners. Hussein, busy with foreign policy, had lost touch with his people. He was on his way to mend the rift.

The United States never seemed to lose its ability to be amazed when one of its foreign-leader buddies was overthrown. Partly, I thought, it was because we only saw these men as they appeared in their dealings with the West. We had no sense of them as they seemed to their own people: that giant const.i.tuency to which even the greatest despots are eventually accountable.

As Hussein landed the helicopter on the outskirts of a desert town, the chant of the waiting crowd defeated even the thump of the rotors. "Bil rub, bil damm "Bil rub, bil damm... [With our soul and with our blood... we sacrifice for you, O Hussein!]" Through the swirling dust, the faces straining toward the king were twisted, almost pained. Bodies surged forward, held back by cordons of soldiers who cracked skulls and thumped shoulders as though they were dealing with the nation's mortal enemies. The king, usually a grave, gray figure, beamed as he tossed off his crash helmet and threw a red and white kaffiyeh atop his balding head. He plunged into the crowd.

I climbed out of the helicopter in his wake and was instantly swept away from him and his tight capsule of bodyguards. The crowd, moving like a single, demented ent.i.ty, had closed ranks behind the king and carried him forward. I felt myself being dragged in the other direction. I heard the bat squeak of ripping silk as the jacket of my king-suit caught on the hilt of a Bedouin's dagger. Tottering on the unfamiliar high heels, I tried to keep upright. One of the burly soldiers of the king's bodyguard spotted me. Cursing and swatting a path through the press of bodies, he grabbed me in one hand and, continuing to rain blows on everyone around us with the other, propelled me back toward the relatively calm eye of the storm that his colleagues were maintaining around the king.

The surge was carrying us toward an array of tents. As we approached, a gurgling moan rose above the chants. Just in front of the king, a camel stumbled to its knees and then, like an inflatable toy losing its air, slowly collapsed forward, thudding with a tiny splash into a glossy pool of its own blood. Across the curve of the animal's long neck the butcher's ritual dagger had inscribed a parody of a smile. As tradition demanded, the king strode through the welcoming sacrificial blood and the bodyguards propelled me after him. Days later, when I unpacked shoes, I imagined I could still see the rusty tidemark, halfway up the heel.

As we reached the shade of a black goat-hair tent, a white-robed tribesman with shaky hands poured coffee from a long-spouted pot into a tiny handleless cup. Trembling violently, he raised the cup to his mouth and downed the contents, to prove it wasn't poisoned. Then, still shaking, he poured a second cup for his king.

That whole long, scorching day pa.s.sed in a blur of tableaux from The Arabian Nights: The Arabian Nights: a barefoot poet, chanting his verses in praise of the king; an old Bedouin Woman swathed in black veils and marked on the face with blue tattoos, pressing a pet.i.tion into the king's palm; the king at lunch, plunging a hand into a platter of steaming lambs' heads set atop piles of rice; tribesmen, old enough to be his father, kissing him reverently upon shoulders and nose, but addressing him, in their egalitarian desert way, by his a barefoot poet, chanting his verses in praise of the king; an old Bedouin Woman swathed in black veils and marked on the face with blue tattoos, pressing a pet.i.tion into the king's palm; the king at lunch, plunging a hand into a platter of steaming lambs' heads set atop piles of rice; tribesmen, old enough to be his father, kissing him reverently upon shoulders and nose, but addressing him, in their egalitarian desert way, by his kunya kunya Abu Abdullah. Abu Abdullah.

I lost count of how many settlements we visited, flitting between them by helicopter, the king's grave countenance losing more of its grayness as the day wore on. By late afternoon I was almost surprised to find the helicopter easing down once more in Amman, and the king's soft voice asking me to join him at al-Nadwa, his pink stone palace. "Noor is waiting for us," he said.

Inside the grand doorway he discreetly pointed me toward a bathroom, then bounded away, over the Persian carpets, past the display cases of antique guns and swords, up the grand staircase, taking the steps two at a time like a boy.

I splashed my face with the hot water that gushed from gold faucets and attacked my wind-knotted, dust-crusted hair with a gold-backed brush set out on the gleaming marble bureau. When I emerged, the queen was drifting down the stairs in a long, Palestinian-style dress with panels of silk in plum and dull gold. Her hair, a brighter gold, fell in loose tresses down her back. She was a striking woman, slender and very tall-at least five inches taller than her husband. In official portraits she was always posed to look shorter than he. I wondered whether he perched on a box or she stood in a hole.

She smiled and held out her hand for a firm, American-style shake. "I asked His Majesty how you were, and he said, 'Well, she's a bit dusty. " she said. "But you don't look dusty to me. Let's talk in the garden. It's the best room in the house. In 1970 they had to put bulletproof gla.s.s in all the upstairs windows. I think it makes the inside claustrophobic."

She swished through french doors onto a terrace giving way to lawns and flower beds. The afternoon light fell in solid golden shafts. We wandered over to a group of chairs near a tangle of fragrant jasmine. I perched my notebook on my knee. "You need a table," she said. Spying a piece of cast-iron garden furniture across the lawn, she strode over and hefted it herself, waving away the dismayed-looking servant who rushed to help her. She had always been athletic: a cheerleader and a member of the hockey team in the first coed cla.s.s at Princeton in 1969 and an avid skier during a semester spent waitressing at Aspen. Now, she rode, played tennis and did aerobics two or three times a week.

A waiter brought me fresh orange juice in a gold-rimmed gla.s.s. The queen took a sip of an astringent-smelling herbal tea, trained her green eyes straight on me and, simply and frankly, unfolded her thoughts on the riots, their meaning and their aftermath. "We flew straight home from Was.h.i.+ngton when it happened," she said. "And, as soon as I got home, one of my friends sat me down and told me what had been going on-the absolute rubbish rubbish in the air about me." The friend was Leila Sharaf, Jordan's only woman senator and one of the queen's confidantes. "Some of it was so preposterous that you have to meet it with a sense of humor, otherwise it crushes you. I mean, someone in my position will always be talked about, whatever I do." in the air about me." The friend was Leila Sharaf, Jordan's only woman senator and one of the queen's confidantes. "Some of it was so preposterous that you have to meet it with a sense of humor, otherwise it crushes you. I mean, someone in my position will always be talked about, whatever I do."

It was no secret that wealthy Amman wished the king had married one of its own daughters instead of an outsider. His first wife had been Dina Abdul Hamid, a university-educated intellectual with Egyptian roots, seven years his senior. After eighteen months and the birth of a daughter, there had been a sudden divorce. Dina, holidaying in Egypt when she received news of the split, later said that she had been allowed to see her daughter only once during the next six years. The king's next choice was Toni Gardiner, nineteen years old and the daughter of a British military officer. The king met her at a dance and ignored all warnings about the possible pitfalls of the match. He renamed her Muna al-Hussein-Arabic for "Hussein's wish." They had two sons and twin daughters, but when his wishes changed, in 1972, he divorced her to marry a Jordanian of Palestinian roots named Alia Toucan.

Alia was the first of his wives on whom he bestowed the t.i.tle queen. She was the perfect choice to heal the scars of Black September and unite the kingdom in the time-honored tribal way. Her son, Prince Ali, born in 1975, vaulted over Hussein's older sons by Princess Muna to take second place in the succession after Hussein's brother, the crown prince Ha.s.san. Alia also had a daughter and fostered a baby whose mother was killed in an airline crash. Alia suffered her share of malicious gossip while she lived, but her sudden death in a helicopter crash in February 1977 made her certain to be remembered as the king's great love and the country's perfect queen.

So twenty-six-year-old Lisa Halaby had a hard act to follow when the king married her just sixteen months later. There was little in her background to prepare her. She had grown up in a wealthy and influential Was.h.i.+ngton family. Her mother, the daughter of an immigrant from Sweden, married and later divorced Najeeb Halaby, the son of a Syrian immigrant. Najeeb was a success story of the American melting pot who grew up speaking only English and rose to the top in both business and government service. He became chief executive of Pan Am and directed the Federal Aviation Authority under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His interest was domestic politics, not foreign policy, and his daughter could barely remember a discussion of Middle East issues at home. Still, she claimed a stubborn attachment to her Arabic heritage. "The fifties were all about conformity, and I suppose I rebelled against that," she said. "When everybody wanted to be the same, I clung to the things that made me different." For a while she even tried to persuade her bemused fellow pupils at the Was.h.i.+ngton's Cathedral School to call her Lisa Man-of-Halab, since that was the literal translation of her Arabic surname.

At Princeton she completed a BA in architecture and urban planning and, in the four years following her graduation, worked her way around the world as a draftswoman on town planning schemes in Tehran and architectural projects in Sydney. In Jordan, she'd taken a job as a designer with the national airline. It was at a reception celebrating the delivery of the Jordanian airline's first jumbo jet that Najeeb Halaby introduced his daughter to King Hussein. The king invited her to lunch at the palace and entertained her for five hours, showing her the palace and introducing her to his children. For the next six weeks they ate dinner together almost every night. Afterward, they'd roar around the hills of Amman on the king's motorbike, with bodyguards trailing at a discreet distance.

Lisa, working at the airline and living at the Intercontinental Hotel, kept the romance secret. Rebecca Salti, an American married to a Jordanian, had come to know her quite well. She remembers running into her outside the hotel that summer. "It was very hot, and the two of us just sat down on the pavement there and chatted about this and that. Looking back on it, I guess she seemed a little distracted." Later that day the royal palace officially announced the engagement of King Hussein to the woman who from then on would be known as Noor al-Hussein, the Light of Hussein. The official announcement stated that Noor had adopted the Islamic religion.

"When he proposed, I thought long and hard about accepting," said Noor. "Not because I was unsure of my feelings for him. My feelings were so strong for him that I was thinking of him, perhaps, more than myself. I was well aware that I wasn't a typical, traditional wife. I didn't want to be a source of controversy for him."