XII.
A Western Woman in Islam
"Avoid the cliché of your time."
--Vladimir Nabokov
"You will never be able to work as a woman in the Moslem world," I was told over and over when I went to the Middle East for the first time in the fall of 1969. It was just more of what I had heard all my professional life: the litany of "You can'ts." But this time I almost believed them. After all, Moslem women were as oppressed as any on the face of the globe. Besides, the Middle East was a violent place, far more violent than Latin America.
As I have mentioned, however, I found that I became a kind of "third sex" to the Arabs. It was all explained to me several years later when an Egyptian male journalist said to me, "We restrict our own women because they have been raised under Islamic precepts. But you are a Western woman and a Christian--you are not expected to live by our beliefs." In addition, as with the various guerrilla movements, I was the Western female creature: the woman of the men they hated, for their power and for their success, but now also a woman in their very own realm who was fascinated by them and would gladly spend hours listening to them. Again I was appreciated not for what I could accomplish but for how they saw me and for what they read into me. But I did not have to go the Middle East to learn that.
In the Arab world I lived and behaved like the Virgin Mary. This was crucial, for they watched me carefully. One night in Amman, Jordan, the hotel clerk said to me, really in a pleasant and well-meaning way, "Miss Geyer, when we need the men correspondents, we look in two places: the telex room and the bar. With you, we only look in the telex room." That was a great compliment -- it was also my protection.
In Cairo that first night I sat in my room in the Nile Hilton, drinking in the sight of the great river with its glorious pinks and golds. Where would I start? The next morning I called -- cold -- an Egyptian newspaper critic whose name had come to me from someone, I don't really remember who. He was cordial. "Come on over," he said, and I did. He asked me to go to a luncheon with him; and at that luncheon in a beautiful villa near the pyramids I met remark able people. Clovis Maksuud sat next to me... . From
then on I got to know just about everybody in Cairo. Soon I found that as a Western woman I was having exceptional luck in a most unlikely area: interviewing leaders--ironically, leaders whose own women were often kept in purdah.
I think I have mentioned before that I do not particularly like leader interviews. I find "leaders" boring. With only a few exceptions like Eduardo Frei of Chile and Gerald Ford of the U . S ., they tend to be egomaniacs; they issue tiresome pronouncements about what "the people" want when they are talking about what they want; I would much rather talk to a Jorge Luis Borges or an Arch bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador--those are the real menshen. But you do it. You do it (1) because it is an important part of the profession of journalism, since we have to know what our "leaders" are thinking, if anything; (2) because it may help you know more about his people and his reign; and (3) because it makes you famous.
If I am to be truthful, let me admit right off that I would like to be like Oriana Fallaci. I would like to spin in on them, crashing the door behind me, and say, "All right, Anwar, why don't you wipe out Qaddafi ... ?" But I would not be capable of acting that way even if I were high on hashish. I work, rather, in what I call the "absorptive" style. I go into "His" office and sit there. I am sympathetic. I may well look a little pathetic. I present "Him" with a vacuum and he virtually always fills it. I do present questions -- and I can present them very directly indeed if need be -- but 95 percent of the time I have found that that is not necessary. Men tend to open up and reveal themselves if you present them with the proper psychological presence, particularly a female one.
I almost forgot that there is certainly at least one other major reason for doing the "leader interview." This is because they are so goddamned hard to arrange that if you love the game and the chase, there is nothing quite so invigorating!
An exception to all the above was my first interview with Jihan Sadat, wife of the then-new Egyptian president. It was in 1971 and was the first interview she ever gave to a Westerner. At their beautiful seaside home in Alexandria she sat in the swing, wearing a beautiful flowered dress that made her look very much like the romantic heroine she is. She was lovely, with dark, liquid eyes and a spiritual manner, and I liked her immediately.
When she and Anwar were first married, she told me, and their fortunes were at their lowest ebb, they had spent their last few coins at a fortune-teller's. The woman told them, "You will be the first lady of Egypt," which sent them into spasms of laughter. She was obviously deeply and, even then, still passionately in love with her husband, who was physically and emotionally worthy of that passion. But at the same time what was most touching to me was the degree to which she truly cared about women and about women's rights -- on the deepest and most rational level, as I liked to think I did. She believed, given the bitterly retrogressive qualities of Moslem life, that women must, like the peace process in the Middle East, move "step by step." She believed in "showing people" what women could do, instead of telling them. She was not a preacher, except by example -- the opposite of me.
But by the time I saw her again in 1974, she was deeply disappointed; she had not been able even as the president's wife to get the most simple legislation on women's rights through the parliament of old sheikhs. Then, she was quite desperate, talking of sterilization in exchange for a water buffalo for the fellahinfamilies who were destroying any hope for Egyptian development with their wanton population growth.
By the time Anwar Sadat was killed by the assassins' bullets in those dark days of October 1981, Jihan Sadat was extremely unpopular in her own country. Never mind her graciousness and charm! Never mind the wonderful impression she made for Egypt wherever she went in the world! Never mind her conservative dress! Jihan Sadat had tried not to be free or independent in our sense, but only to give women the most basic of rights, like requiring that divorces started by their husbands be heard before a judge. The treatment of Jihan Sadat gave me great cause for concern as to whether women were really progressing in the world.
For several years I also worked on seeing President Sadat, trying always to do it in the straight and official way. But nothing worked, despite my many contacts and friends. By the fall of 1974 it had all made me so angry that I picked up my phone in the Nile Hilton and phoned Mrs. Sadat's secretary and explained my plight. By the following day Mrs. Sadat had intervened and even had the precise date for the interview set.
In the four hours I spent with Anwar Sadat at their home up the Nile at The Barrages, a sensuous spot with the arms of the Nile delta stretching out into the sun and reflecting gold in all directions, I found one of the few charming men in power that I have met. His chocolate-colored face was beautiful, with its black olive eyes. We sat at two ends of a formal, gilded couch in his ballroom of an office, and he talked and I laughed. The more funny and witty he became, the more I laughed, which pleased him just as much as it does all men.
This was just weeks after the famous Rabat conference, where the Palestine Liberation Organization had been named the "sole representative" of the Palestinian people and where the PLO second in command, Salah Kahlef, or Abu Iyad, had tried again to assassinate King Hussein of Jordan. Naturally, I asked Sadat about this.
"I had him here last week," he said, beginning sternly enough. "He was sitting right where you are. And I told him, 'Abu Iyad, if you try to assassinate King Hussein one ... more ... time.'" We both laughed. Then I asked him if he were not afraid that they would try to assassinate him. Now the levity dropped. "Of course not," he said. "They know my family."
I thought of that seven years later when I was analyzing the Moslem fundamentalist groups who had assassinated him.
Knowing a little about Sadat's personality and about his sense of apocalyptic mission in the world, I did not find myself in the least surprised when he went to Jerusalem three years later.
This is one of the obvious advantages of the "leader interview."
But by the time I saw him again, in 1980, he was a deeply different man. Now he sat in the luxuriant garden of The Barrages, a haggard, lined, aged replica of himself. He had also grown quite desperate for the full peace with Israel, which he knew he had to have (and this had to include a real Palestinian solution to the West Bank, which the Israelis were busily annexing) was being totally stalled by the Israelis. He had always known that his peace was a gallant gamble, but a gamble. It needed movement; it required phasing and timing; and that just wasn't happening.
He rambled that day, his eyes flashed. And when I asked him about the infamous "Law of Shame" which he had just put through and which allowed him in effect to imprison any of his enemies (or friends, for that matter) who criticized him, he looked at me, a strange glitter in his eyes. He proceeded to give a most preposterous explanation, which came out of his love for movies.
"Did you see the film on the love affair between Clark Gable and Carole Lombard?" he asked me. By chance, yes, I had. "Well, you remember in that film how, because they were not married, Hollywood prosecuted them under this morals law and they could not perform in Hollywood." I nodded. "That is what I have in mind," he said. When I heard that, I knew that something was indeed wrong with our hero, Anwar Sadat.
And when he was killed that October a year and a half later, Sadat was probably killed because he had rounded up, indiscriminately, sixteen hundred of his real and imagined enemies. A certain paranoia and desperation had overtaken him. Was this the destiny of peacemakers?
As I roamed around the Middle East in those years, I had better and better luck with "leader interviews." And there was always something interesting, or quirky, or odd, or funny, about them even when I quietly made a fool of myself. In 1969, when 1 interviewed President Gaafer Nimiery of the Sudan, it was my first year in the area and he was so new to power that we had not even been shown any pictures of him.
The day of the interview two of us waited outside, and finally Nimiery's secretary came out and said, "I am very sorry, but the president will not be able to see you today." We sighed, again, at the ways of the world. "But the head of the cabinet will see you," he went on.
In a while we were ushered into an enormous office and at the end there sat an attractive, copper-skinned man sitting at an imposing desk. We began asking questions, and I would say, "Does President Nimiery think that ... ?"
And he would invariably answer, "President Nimiery thinks that... "
After several exchanges of this caliber and genre, the other journalist with me punched me not so carefully in the ribs, and whispered loudly, "That is Nimiery." How was I to know? I ask you. Besides, I suspect from his demeanor that he rather liked the idea of referring to himself in the third person and thought it quite an appropriate term of reference.
***
Then in the spring of 1973 I applied in Cairo for a visa to Iraq. Since this country of Nebuchadnezzar and the doomed ancient cities of Babylon and Ur and the great empires of the past was the most closed in the Middle East -- and indeed probably in the world -- I did not have any extravagant hopes. But I always exercised a kind of "scorched earth" policy regarding getting visas and attempting to cover whole areas. To my amazement the visa came through and I found myself approaching Baghdad from Beirut.
The first morning I was there, I did not rush over to the Ministry of Information, for I was well aware that letting them know you were there only gave them a head start on getting the bodyguards out to follow you. I did stroll in about eleven, knowing that by then they would be looking for me anyway. To my amazement three heads bounced to attention in the little office, and one gentleman said, with obvious and even ominous joy, "You're here."
Those few journalists who had ever gotten in in the past had never seen anybody and had constantly been harassed by the oppressive, clandestine, brutal Iraqi Ba'athist regime. To my surprise, that very first day I had four interviews, and all with important people like the head of the Communist Party. While not knowing exactly what was going on, I naturally soon became enchanted with the entree I was getting.
That Friday, while using the Moslem sabbath to visit the ruins of Babylon, I suggested innocently, "Why don't we stop at Kerbela on the way back from Babylon?"
The young man in the ministry, who had been so helpful up until then, turned several colors and gulped several gulps. "You don't really want to see Kerbela?" he declared hopefully.
I nodded. "Why not?" I said. "I understand it's very pretty."
Then, to show how shame falls by the wayside when a journalist gets even the suggestion of a go-ahead, I added, "And I'd like to see Saddam Hussein, too."
I thought the poor man would sink into spasms.
Saddam Hussein, the mysterious underground strongman of Iraq, was someone whom no one ever saw. He was the toughest of the tough, the most brutal of the brutal, also the best economic developer and the single most mysterious and unknown leader in the Middle East, in the most closed and unknown land. To my surprise my guide said only, "Let's see.... " The wonderful hesitation hung pregnant in the air.
At that time I was mercifully ignorant of the fact that the Shi'a Moslem shrine at Kerbala, the home of the Shi'a Moslems and the place where the brutal and sanguinary ceremonies of self-flagellation take place every year during the exotic holy days of Muharram, is like Mecca. It is closed -- but utterly closed -- to non-Moslems and to Westerners. In my ignorance I had asked to visit the very symbol of religious and cultural paranoia and hatred of the "other." And the amazing thing was that it worked!
The next day they informed me that, yes, I could go to Kerbala, if I would wear the long black abaya of the Arab woman. I would. And it was not until my guide and I stood inside the giant mosque, with its tiny pieces of mirrors sparkling like a thousand candles and the gold trimming everywhere shimmering like sea waves in the sunlight, that I suddenly realized we were not supposed to "be there." Luckily, the Iraqis had sent with us the Kerbala police chief, an enormous man who must have weighed approximately three hundred pounds! The pilgrims, showing in their slanted eyes or golden skin their homelands as far away as Mongolia or Pakistan, looked at me with unbridled hostility as I tried to hide the shock of blond hair on top with my abaya. That sunny afternoon in the Great Mosque of Kerbala I saw the real roots of Arab unity, for these people had come from everywhere in Central Asia, all to worship together.
Five days later I also saw Saddam Hussein, and without my abaya. Indeed, I became the first American ever to lay eyes on this important man -- afterward the American diplomats were dying to hear what the world's great terrorist leader was like!
No man in khakis, no Arafat in Arab headdress and olive drabs, Saddam Hussein was tall, dark, and erect, with beautiful black hair, a neat mustache, and eyes that were hooded much like the Arab falcons. He was as properly dressed as a French count at court. Indeed, he was wearing a perfectly tailored pinstriped suit, a white silk shirt, and a silk tie. He came forward toward me, his hand outstretched. Against the background of the gilded rooms of the palace of the kings, the last one of which was dragged through the streets until he died when the revolution occurred in 1958, the image was perfect. But it was certainly not that of the underground terrorist, which was the image he wanted to leave behind and which was what this interview was all about!
We talked for a full four hours, an odd pair, this man whom the Western world had never seen and the foreign correspondent from the South Side of Chicago. He kept looking at me and repeating, "Don't hesitate, ask me anything you want."
So I asked him about his years as a terrorist for the Ba'athist Party before it came to power under him in 1962. He answered, "Some times you have to do things for your party that you would not do yourself."
He was trying so hard to be, or to appear, open and frank. But all of my questions evoked only hooded responses--as hooded as those handsome but chilled eyes. After several hours, out of desperation I fis
hed about in my mind for still another question. "When did you join the Ba'athist Party?" I asked, thinking to myself, "What a foolish question."
And now his entire demeanor and mien changed. All the friendliness, so carefully constructed to go with the gilded room, dropped away. He looked at me now with open and unmasked hostility. "I don't remember," he said.
He didn't remember the watershed event of his life? I puzzled over this for a long time. Why should that utterly innocuous question have affected him when nothing else did? Years later a knowing psychiatrist said to me, "But of course -- that was the moment he became a terrorist."
Before I left, I found out what it was that had provided me with these great strokes of luck. Iraq, that spring of 1973, had reached a turning point. Only weeks before, they had finally settled their old problem over the British-owned petroleum; they in effect nationalized it, but in agreement with the British. Saddam in those days wanted to turn toward the West, or at least to be open to it. My presence and newspapers presented a small vehicle that could serve that purpose -- and it was only by chance that the timing served mine.
***
We all have our favorite political-leader interviews, and countries, and historic experiences, and I have to admit that mine was with a perhaps unlikely leader, Sulton Qabus, in the remote and exotic sultanate of Oman, at the bottom of Saudi Arabia where the shimmering turquoise blue of the Indian Ocean meets the strategic opening to the Persian Gulf.
In truth my romantic imagination had been fed by Oman -- "Muscat and Oman," they called it historically -- for many years. Until 1970 Oman had been the most backward country in the world. Ruled by the old sultan, a cruel curmudgeon who still kept slaves, who shot people for being outside the city walls after seven o'clock at night, and who forbade not only smoking and drinking but even sunglasses and bicycles, Oman was disintegrating. The most able young men were joining the Dhofar liberation movement, inspired by Marxists from nearby South Yemen. Moreover, the old sultan had kept his only son, the handsome, intelligent, languid-eyed Qabus, locked in a tower in the old mud palace in Salalah in the south for seven years! All this because Qabus had returned from Sandhurst with outrageous ideas about developing the country, which then had twelve miles of roads and no schools.
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