Beyond the Veil

by Fatema Mernissi

  6

  Husband and Wife

  The dynamics of shared spaces between the sexes can best be understood by analysing the functioning of the conjugal unit, the only model of heterosexual relationships that Muslim Moroccan society offers its children.

  The ideal wife for the believer, according to Ghazali, is

  Beautiful, non-temperamental, with black pupils, and long hair, big eyes, white skin, and in love with her husband, looking at no one but him.1

  Ghazali explains that Arabic has a word, aruba,2 meaning a woman in love with her husband who feels like making love with him. This is one of the words used to describe the women promised to believers in Paradise.3 He adds that the Prophet said that a woman who loves and obeys her husband is a gift from Allah. Such a woman would indeed be a miracle, given the conflict structure of the conjugal unit,-based on a relationship of forces in which the most likely outcome is the woman’s dislike of and rebellion against her husband.

  Marriage as Conflict

  All the women interviewed talked about l’entente conjugale as a magic phenomenon that levels all obstacles.

  When there is an entente between husband and wife, all obstacles can be overcome. Big crises become easy to deal with. When there is no entente, everything becomes a crisis.

  Fatiha F.

  We never fought each other. He always treated me as a guest, with a lot of respect; he will do things before I express the need for them. For example, the day I decide to clean the house thoroughly I will try, on my own, to move the sofas and the wooden boards. He runs out to the street and hires a maid or two to help me. It is a gift of God when there is respect.

  Hayat H.

  He never thwarted my wishes. I did my best never to thwart his. He is still treating me with the same consideration. He never raises his voice with me. He respected me and I treated him like a king. Praise to God. I hope my daughters will have the same luck as I.

  Kenza

  The perception of a husband’s love and respect as a miracle probably stems from the fact that the woman cannot legally demand respect or love. This is illustrated in the list of respective rights and duties in the 1957 Moroccan Code.

  Art. 36 The Rights of the Husband Vis-à-vis His Wife

  Fidelity.

  Obedience according to the accepted standards.

  Breastfeeding, if possible, of the children born from the marriage.

  The management of the household and its organization.

  Deference towards the mother and father and close relatives of the husband.

  Art. 35 The Rights of the Wife Vis-à-vis Her Husband

  Financial support as stated by law, such as food, clothing, medical care, and housing.

  In case of polygamy, the right to be treated equally with other wives.

  The authorization to go and visit her parents and the right to receive them according to limits imposed by the accepted standards.

  Complete liberty to administer and dispose of her possessions with no control on the part of the husband, the latter having no power over his wife’s possessions.

  Note that the husband owes no moral duties to his wife. Moreover, apart from the rights of the wife listed in numbers 1 and 4 above, all other alleged rights are in fact either restrictions of her freedom (like item 3) or restrictions on her claim on her husband’s person (polygamy in item 2). She cannot expect fidelity. What she expects to get from her husband are orders, and what she expects to give is obedience. It is a power relation. This is emphasized and justified by a social order that encourages the husband to command his wife and not to love her, as Ghazali describes.

  Some souls sometimes let themselves be completely overtaken by passionate love [for a woman]. It is pure madness. It is to ignore completely why copulation was created. It is to sink to the level of beasts as far as domination and mastery of oneself go. Because a man passionately in love does not look for the mere desire to copulate, which is already the ugliest of all desires4 and of which one should be ashamed, but he goes as far as to believe that this appetite cannot be satisfied except with a specific object [a particular woman]. A beast satisfies its sexual appetite where it can, while this type of man [the man in love] cannot satisfy his sexual appetite except with his beloved. Thus he accumulates disgrace after disgrace and slavery after slavery. He mobilizes reason in order for it to serve appetite, while reason was created to command and to be obeyed.5

  The religious duty of the husband to command his wife is enforced by numerous sayings and proverbs in Moroccan folklore, some of which are supposed to be direct quotations from the Prophet and his disciples.

  Ask your wife’s opinion, but follow your own.

  Ask your wife’s opinion, but do the opposite.

  Don’t ever follow your wife’s suggestions.6

  The duty of the man to command his wife is embodied in his right to correct her by physical beating. The Koran itself recommends this measure, but only as a last resort. If his wife rebels, the husband is instructed to scold her and then to stop having sexual intercourse with her. Only if these measures fail should he beat her to make her obey.7 The right of correction, which was thought likely to be used to excess by husbands, was restricted by the Prophet (who was very kind to his wives) to ‘decent’ proportions.

  Do not beat your wives like one beats a slave and then copulate with them at the end of the night.8

  Fear of mistreatment and beatings is one of the reasons why girls and their families usually prefer marriage to a husband who lives in the same neighbourhood.

  In modern Morocco, women can bring suit against their husbands for beating them. But they have no recourse if they cannot establish physical evidence of mistreatment. Even so, mistreatment must have reached a demonstrably unbearable stage for them to obtain a divorce. It is the judge who must estimate whether the mistreatment is bearable or not and decide whether or not to issue a divorce.9 Judges are not reputed to favour women in Moroccan society, which means that the right to beat his wife is an almost unchecked privilege of the husband.

  In traditional Moroccan society there is no openly admitted behaviour pattern for the wife to express her physical love for her husband, while an openly admitted behaviour pattern for her rejection of him does exist: the karh. If, after the first few days of marriage, the wife does not like her husband, she is said to become harjat karha, or ‘hateful’. This is expressed by ritualized behaviour, usually, according to my interviews, a complete refusal to share space with him (she will leave the room whenever her husband steps in) or to communicate with him verbally. When the wife is karha, it is considered a catastrophe by the respective families and by the individuals, involved. The woman’s rejection of her husband, in spite of the usually binding nature of marriage for women, often ends in the breaking of the marriage bond. The experience of one woman who was married when she was thirteen reveals that the parents who arrange the marriage, contrary to what one might think, are very concerned about their daughter’s fate if their plans fail. Women are usually remarried soon after the karha experience and often block it out of their memories, as is illustrated in the following interview.

  ‘Zahra and Hamid don’t have the same father.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who is Hamid’s father then?’ ‘

  My first husband.’

  ‘You promised to tell the story of your life, and you forget something as important as that?’

  ‘I really forgot it. It is not important anyway. I don’t like to talk about it.’ ‘How long did it last?’

  ‘He was our neighbour. His wife died and my parents arranged the marriage. When he got in the dahshousha10 I hated him. It lasted one year and a half. I spent most of the time in my parents’ house. He did everything he could to make me love him, but when he tried to get near me, it used to aggravate things. When I got pregnant, that was it. I’d see him and I’d start shivering. We organized my running away. My father arranged for me to go and stay with an uncle who was living far away fro
m town. The judge got involved in the affair. My father started sending delegations of shorfas [people who think they are, and are believed to be, direct descendants of the Prophet] to my husband’s family. Finally, my poor father decided to buy my freedom, and I was liberated!

  Tamou T.

  Imam Ghazali agrees that marriage is equivalent to slavery for the woman because it places her in a situation in which she ‘has to obey him [her husband] without restrictions, except in cases where what he asks her to do constitutes a flagrant violation of Allah’s orders.’11

  Why does Moroccan society encourage the husband to assume the role of master instead of lover? Does love between man and wife threaten something vital in the Muslim order? We have seen that sexual satisfaction is considered necessary to the moral well-being of the believer. There is no incompatibility between Islam and sexuality as long as sexuality is expressed harmoniously and is not frustrated. What Islam views as negative and anti-social is woman and her power to create fitna. Heterosexual involvement, real love between husband and wife, is the danger that must be overcome.

  The Prevention of Intimacy

  The sexual act is considered polluting12 and is surrounded by ceremonials and incantations whose goal is to create an emotional distance between the spouses and reduce their embrace to its most elementary function, that of a purely reproductive act. During coitus, the male is actually embracing a woman, symbol of unreason and disorder, anti-divine force of nature and disciple of the devil. Hence a dread of erection, which is experienced as a loss of control and, according to Ghazali,13 referred to as darkness in verse 3 of sura 113:

  Say: I seek refuge in the lord of daybreak

  From the evil of that which he created

  From the evil of darkness when it is intense.

  In an attempt to prevent a complete merging with the woman, the coital embrace is surrounded by a ceremony which grants Allah a substantial presence in the man’s mind during intercourse. The coital space is religiously oriented: the couple should have their heads turned away from Mecca. ‘They should not face the “holy shrine” in respect for it.’14 This symbolism of spatial orientation expresses the antagonism between Allah and the woman. Mecca is the direction of God. During intercourse, the man is reminded that he is not in Allah’s territory, whence the necessity to invoke his presence.

  It is advisable for the husband to start by invoking God’s name and reciting ‘Say God is one’ first of all and then reciting the takbir ‘God is most great’ and the tahlil ‘There is no god but God’ and then say, ‘In the name of God, the high and powerful, make it a good posterity if you decide to make any come from my kidney.’15

  At the crucial moment of ejaculation, when the physical and spiritual boundaries of the lover threaten to melt in a total identification with the woman,16 the Muslim lover is reminded

  It is suitable to pronounce without moving the lips, the following words: ‘Praise be to God who created man from a drop of water.’17

  The conjugal unit presents an even graver danger than ephemeral sexual embrace; erotic love has the potential to grow into something much more encompassing, much more total. It can evolve into an emotional bond giving a man the plenitude that ‘only God is supposed to give’.

  The erotic relation seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfilment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. . . . A principal ethic of religious brotherhood is radically and antagonistically opposed to all this. From the point of view of such an ethic, this inner earthly sensation of salvation by mature love competes in the sharpest possible way with the devotion of a supramundane God . . .18

  The Muslim God requires a total love from his subjects; he requires all the believer’s capacity for emotional attachment.

  Yet of mankind are some who take unto themselves [objects of worship which they set as] rivals to Allah, loving them with a love like [that which is due] Allah [alone] those who believe are stauncher in their love for Allah.19

  Or, again:

  Emotional attachment divides man’s heart, and Allah hath not created man with two hearts within his body.20

  Muslim monotheism was consolidated in fierce warfare against ‘associationism’, the predominant religious practice in Arabia during the early seventh century. Idolatry, and therefore the recognition of a multiplicity of incarnations of the divine,. the ‘association’ of various gods and goddesses, was the most widespread belief. Allah was worshipped as one god among others. Islam therefore had to purge the Arab heavens of any other divinity that might threaten Allah’s monopoly. Hence the opening statement of the Muslim profession of faith: ‘There is no god but God [Allah].’ (In this regard, see Ibn Hisham’s Sira, Ibn al-Khali’s Kitab al-Asnam, and other works on the native religions of pre-Islamic Arabia.)

  The Muslim god is known for His jealousy, and He is especially jealous of anything that might interfere with the believer’s devotion to him.21 The conjugal unit is a real danger and is consequently weakened by two legal devices: polygamy and repudiation. Both institutions are based on psychological premisses that reveal an astonishing awareness of the couple’s psychology and its weaknesses.

  Folk wisdom perceives polygamy as a means by which men make themselves valuable, not by perfecting any quality within themselves, but simply by creating a competitive situation between many females.

  Tamou is a treasure chest [Tamou is a woman’s name]; Aisha is the key to it [Aisha is another woman’s name].22

  Polygamy in this sense is a direct attempt to prevent emotional growth in the conjugal unit, and results in the impoverishment of the husband’s and wife’s investment in each other as lovers.

  The obvious consequence of polygamy is that the wife does not ‘own her husband’, she shares him with one or more co-wives. What does this mean? For one thing, it must mean that the polygamous husband tends to have a less emotional investment in any single wife. He does not have ‘all his eggs in one basket’. The meaning for the co-wives is less clear. I suspect that polygamy has a general ‘lowering effect’ on the emotional importance of the husband-wife bond and that this applies to the wife as well as to the husband. She also invests less in her husband and invests more in other relationships.23

  The meaning of polygamy for the co-wives is clarified by Salama, a sixty-year-old woman who lived as a concubine in a Moroccan harem from 1924 to 1950.

  I was happy to be raised to the status of his lover but I was afraid of all the dangers attached to it.24

  (What dangers?)

  Many, the most frightening is the hjar.25

  (Did he ever hjar any of you?)

  Yes, he did. Zahra. He only solicited her once and never talked to her after that. I was obsessed by Zahra’s case. Every time I went to his apartments, I lay there wide awake in the dawn asking myself, ‘Is it the last time he is to call me?’ I was no different from Zahra. Zahra was more beautiful than many of us.

  Why will he choose me again?

  (Were you jealous?)

  You’re joking. Jealous of whom? And of what? We had no rights. No one had any rights over him, including the legitimate wife. For once we were all equal. Democracy.

  Harems are not exceptional in modern Muslim societies plagued by economic problems. Polygamy is dying statistically,26 but its assumptions are still at work even within monogamous households, as is illustrated by one of the interviews.

  He keeps repeating that he will get a new wife. He threatens me every morning. I do not worry anymore. He is unable to support us. He cannot do anything anymore. How can he put up with one of those modern women? It would be a circus, but it hurts me when he says that, and I feel like hurting him back.

  Maria M.

  Muslim polygamy, although generally thought of as a male privilege, contains a subtle institutional detail that prevents the male from exercising his most intimate prerogative: the right to have intercourse with whichever wife he desires at any particular moment.

  It is ne
cessary for the polygamous husband to observe equality among his wives and not favour one at the expense of the others. If he leaves for a journey and wants one of them to accompany him, he has to draw lots as the Messenger used to do, and if he frustrates a wife from the night due to her, he should replace it by another night. This is a religious duty.... The Prophet (salvation upon him), because of his noble sense of justice and his virile vigour, used to have intercourse with all his other wives when he felt the desire to sleep with a woman who was not the one he was supposed to spend the night with according to the rotation system. That is how, according to Aisha [the youngest of the Prophet’s wives and the one he loved the most], he performed such a task in one single night. According to Anas (salvation upon him), the Prophet’s nine wives received his conjugal visit in one single morning.27

  The Prophet’s sexual prowess was considered part of his outstanding personality. He was supposed to have the miraculous sexual vigour of forty men,28 but the ordinary believer is not expected to live up to the Prophet’s example. Pragmatism is a Muslim quality and the strict application of the rotation system, for the average man, who could not satisfy nine women in one morning, means that he must refrain from giving in to sexual desire when it involves a woman not indicated by the rotation schedule. This ensures scarcity in the midst of plenty. Not only does it oblige the male to scatter his emotional involvement, but it reinforces the rule of interchangeability. It obliges him to have intercourse with women he does not desire and forbids him from yielding to the attraction of another woman even though she is his own wife.

  The underlying assumptions of polygamy also apply to repudiation. Like polygamy, repudiation seems to be a male privilege allowing the man to change partners by the simple verbal pronunciation of the formula, ‘I repudiate thee’. But it is a boomerang. It works against the mamas much as for him.