by Wafa Sultan
When I look back and remember those days I know that I began, at a very early age, to refuse to allow anyone to raid my world without my permission. The voice of the muezzin burst into my bedroom at five o’clock in the morning and I struggled with myself, even at a young age, as to how I should respond. Why was I irritated by this early-morning raid? It was bringing me the voice of God and his Prophet. Why would I reject the voice of God and his Prophet? Surely God is severe in retribution! I rejected the shouting, but, at the same time, I was afraid to reject it.
My confusion was compounded by my mother’s reaction to the shouting. My mother is illiterate. She can barely read or write a single word. Arabic is different from many other languages in that the official language used for reading and writing is completely different from the colloquial language used in conversation. Illiterate people are perfectly fluent in the colloquial language, but are virtually unable to comprehend the form of Arabic used for reading and writing. My mother had never read the Koran or any other book on Islam, its teachings or its history. Her knowledge did not extend beyond what was transmitted orally by the local women from one generation to the next. Naturally, my mother could not understand what the preacher in the mosque was saying. Although she could perhaps pick out a word here and there, she most certainly could not understand any of the expressions used. Nonetheless, listening to the preacher at the local mosque fascinated her. She would rate preachers by the stridency and volume of their voices and the degree of emotion they displayed; some she praised, with others she found fault.
My mother was fascinated by the shouting and I hated it. I had to work this out for myself and I have parted company with the culture of shouting and raiding in the Islamic environment. My experience has been that two Muslims cannot talk together without their conversation turning into shouts within minutes, especially when they disagree with each other, and no good can come of that. When you talk to a Muslim, rationally, in a low calm voice, he has trouble understanding your point of view. He thinks you have lost the argument. A Muslim conversing with anyone else—Muslim or non-Muslim—cannot remember a single word the other person has said, any more than my mother could remember a single word of what the preacher in our local mosque said.
* Al- Qurtubi was a famous classical Muslim scholar (1214–1273). The most famous of his books is Tafsir al-Qurtubi, which is a ten-volume commentary on the Koranic verses dealing with Islamic legal issues.
6.
Muslim Men and Their Women
FEAR OF COURSE, extends in the Muslim world to the way men treat their women. It is, in many ways, the vilest and most hateful treatment the Muslim world visits on others.
I was in my fourth year at medical school. A woman came to the gynecological clinic at the university hospital where I was doing my training and complained of a number of symptoms. When the doctor examined her he found a number of inflamed circular burns the size of small coins on her thighs and abdomen. The doctor on duty that day, who was head of the hospital’s gynecological department, asked her: “What’s this?”
She hid her head in her hands with embarrassment and replied in a voice that was barely audible: “My husband stubs out his cigarettes on my body to punish me for being a stupid woman.”
Without pausing to think even for a moment Dr. Saad replied: “You must deserve it. He wouldn’t do it if you weren’t really stupid.” The students laughed and I laughed openly with them to gratify the vanity of our teacher, whom we wanted to please.
Dr. Saad had studied medicine in Britain and would often tell us of the shameless conduct of the godless British women. He saw nothing in Britain except shamelessness, and he forgot that it was there that he had learned of a doctor’s moral and legal responsibility toward a woman who had been subjected to abuse.
The telephone rang in the emergency room of the hospital where I worked. I lifted the receiver and was surprised to hear a voice raging at the other end: “This is Dr. Ahmad. I’m sending you a whore. Open up her cunt and take out what you find in there!” He hung up without giving me the chance to ask for an explanation. A cold shudder ran through my body and I felt I might faint. Addressing a woman in street language of that kind shows profound contempt for her womanhood, her dignity, and her humanity, especially if she is a doctor and the speaker is her colleague.
Dr. Ahmad was head of the town’s medical administration and a large number of patients attended his private clinic and paid him higher fees than any other doctor could command, not because they had faith in his medical abilities, but because they had faith in his prestige, which enabled him to get them free treatment at this state-run hospital.
Suha, the young girl Dr. Ahmad called “a whore,” arrived in the emergency room about half an hour after this telephone conversation. She was a thin pale girl of under twenty dressed in rags insufficient to keep out the cold of that icy February day. As she walked over to the examination table she waddled like a sick duck on the verge of departing this life. The vaginal examination revealed a medium-sized conical glass inside her.
“What’s this, Suha?”
She buried her face in her hands and burst into copious tears: “One of them shoved it up my vagina.”
“What do you mean by ‘one of them’?”
“Mr. X. I clean his office and he pays me a monthly wage, which I use to help my unemployed father bring up my seven sisters.”
“But why did he do it?”
“He said I was dirty and that his sperm was too sacred to touch my body.”
“And what do you think?”
Her voice was hoarse with crying. “I think I am dirtier than dirt,” she said.
When I was working in one of the rural areas, Fatima, a peasant woman in her late thirties, came to our clinic complaining of nausea, vomiting, and back pain. An examination revealed that her womb was of a size which indicated the third month of pregnancy. As soon as I told her the news she collapsed on the chair opposite and began to shudder, smack her own face, and shriek, “I beg you, Doctor, I beg you to rescue me from the mess I’m in. My son will kill me. I don’t care about my life. I deserve to die, but I don’t want my son to dirty his hands with my blood.”
“What is it, Fatima?”
“I’m a widow. My husband died five years ago and left me with four children. My husband’s brother rapes me every day in exchange for feeding my children. If he knew I was pregnant he’d provoke my son into killing me rather than be exposed to public disgrace.”
“How old is your son?”
“He’s fifteen. Doctor, I’m begging you! He’s still young and I don’t want him dirtying his hands with my filthy blood!”
I sent her to see a gynecologist. When she came back to see me about two weeks later, she looked gaunt, haggard, and ill.
“What is it, Fatima?”
“I came to thank you. I got rid of the fetus, but I saw the angel of death with my own eyes! They performed the operation to remove the fetus without an anesthetic, and the pain of it nearly killed me.”
“He did it without an anesthetic! Why?”
“I didn’t have enough money to pay for the drugs to anesthetize me, so the doctor had to operate without them.”
Amal—a different Amal than the one who had such disregard for America—was a doctor who worked at the same hospital as I did. One day I heard that she had been rushed urgently to the eye department the previous night after suffering chemical burns to the face and eyes. I went to her room at once and asked, “What happened, Amal, my dear?”
“I slipped in the bathroom while I was trying to light the water heater, the pail of fuel fell on my head, and I suffered some burns.”
Days passed, and once I was alone with Amal and we were able to have a private talk, she told me what really happened. “That evening I was about to leave the house to go to a friend’s wedding. My brother, who is fifteen years younger than me and never graduated from high school, came up to me and warned me not to leave the house. When I tried to pus
h him away he took the fuel bucket and poured it over my head. I’m almost forty, Wafa, and I still dream of a husband who will rescue me from life with my brother and father.” Then she continued, “But what guarantee do I have that my future husband will be any better than them. It’s a trap, and it’s very hard indeed to get out of it. And just imagine what my mother said to me when I talked to her about it. ‘You got what you deserved! I’ve warned you more than once not to go against your brother’s wishes, and now you’ve paid the price for your stubbornness.’ Wafa, I sometimes think that it’s not just men who are against women, but women themselves who are hostile to other women. All my scientific and educational accomplishments are not enough to give me the credibility to run my own life, and my brother, who doesn’t know how to write his own name, is considered better equipped to look after me than I am myself.”
Aleppo was the Muslim Brotherhood’s most important stronghold after Hama, and they committed a great many crimes there. I found life there unbearable and decided to move to a teaching hospital attached to a different university in another town, and so Lattakia became my next stop. Lattakia is a tranquil town slumbering on the shores of the Mediterranean north of Baniyas, where I was born and grew up.
At the time Lattakia had two training hospitals. I applied to the smaller and less crowded of the two—a military hospital that treated Syrian army personnel and their families—and was accepted at once.
My decision to leave Aleppo brought Morad to the brink of emotional collapse. He had become used to spending most of his time with me, far from his problems with society and his mother, and was convinced that our relationship would suffer if I went away. He had graduated from university two years earlier but was not working in the field in which he had specialized. He wanted to stay close to me and, in order to do so, had accepted a humble post on the university campus.
My mother had visited me a number of times in Aleppo, where she had stayed with Ahmad and Huda, and I had had no choice but to introduce her to Morad so that she would not be shocked by any rumors she might hear from them. She liked Morad from the very first but had concealed her feelings from me in order to avoid any appearance of legitimizing our relationship. She alternated between encouraging me to keep seeing him, so as to ensure that we would marry, and refusing to acknowledge a relationship that overstepped the bounds of convention, so as not to have to take responsibility for having sanctioned it. No woman in our society, even if she were a mother, could assume responsibility for such a thing, and she would tell me from time to time, “Just you wait and see what your brother has to say!”
My decision to leave Aleppo almost put an end to my relationship with Morad. He appeared to be on the verge of a breakdown, and I had no choice but to let him meet my brother and tell him he wanted to marry me. We decided things on the spur of the moment, without any preparation. He didn’t even have enough money to buy me a wedding ring, let alone enough money to raise a family. Deep in my heart, I knew what my brother’s reaction would be. The person who had treated me with respect from the moment my father had died would not be a stumbling block on my path to happiness. Morad called my brother and introduced himself, then asked if he could go and visit him, and my brother welcomed the idea.
Morad sat down to lunch with my brother and his family in accordance with the Syrian custom that decrees that the guest must lunch at the host’s home on the first visit, especially if that guest has just arrived after a long journey. Morad was twenty-seven years old at the time. Cultured, sensitive, and quietly spoken, he avoided looking other people directly in the face. However, he rose to the occasion and was sufficiently composed to explain our relationship to my brother—without going into too much detail—and to express his hopes of obtaining his consent to our marriage. My brother’s warm welcome and willingness to listen helped to reduce the tension of the occasion, and he told Morad as they shook hands on parting, “It was a pleasure to meet you. Give me a little time to ask my sister what she thinks, as the decision is hers, not mine. I wish you good luck!”
Never, as long as I live will I forget my first meeting with my brother after he had met Morad. It was, without doubt, the most difficult moment of my life. He asked me what I knew about Morad and if I in all conscience and understanding wanted to marry him. He tried to explain to me that, though he would raise no objections under any circumstances, he wanted me to be judicious in my decision and not to be in any hurry, as I was still young and had another year of studies ahead of me before I graduated. I summoned all my strength and told my brother of my admiration for this young man, explaining that I had met him at university and had come to realize through our meetings that he would be a suitable life partner for me.
My brother gave my decision his blessing and telephoned Morad to congratulate him. I borrowed some money from my sister, who was a year older than me, had already graduated from university, and now had a good job. I used the money to buy two rings for Morad and myself, but asked him to keep quiet about this and not to let anyone know that my sister had paid for them. Morad returned to our house with the sheikh and the two rings, which he pretended to have bought himself. The engagement ceremony was conducted quietly, in accordance with Muslim teaching, which, though it supports public celebration of marriage, insists upon discreet engagements for one reason: If the couple changes their minds, the girl might miss her chance to marry someone else since most men would rather not marry a girl who has already been engaged to another suitor.
We got engaged in August and decided to get married that same month. My brother was not very happy with our decision, which he considered rash. People firmly believed that it was unlucky to get married in the two months and ten days between the end of Ramadan and the Feast of the Sacrifice. My brother took advantage of this and suggested postponing the marriage, hoping that I would change my mind in the intervening period, but I insisted on getting married immediately after the Feast of the Sacrifice. We rented a small furnished apartment near the hospital I had moved to in Lattakia. On October 10, at a small party for friends and family, we said our good-byes and left Baniyas for a new life.
My husband exchanged his job at Aleppo University for one at the University of Lattakia, where he earned enough to pay our rent and buy a few basic necessities. I supplemented this with occasional help from my family. Immediately after our marriage, I discovered I was pregnant and thought that I would lose my mind. We both now faced a new problem that depended on our capacity to assume parental responsibilities. I decided to have an abortion, but my mother intervened at once and declared that such a thing would be done only over her dead body and I had no choice but to go ahead with the pregnancy. Syrian society allows its members no privacy, and decisions cannot be taken in isolation; the opinions of both family and society have to be taken into consideration.
In any case, my marriage provided me with a partial release from family and social pressures. In Islam, a husband owns his wife just as he does the furnishings of his home. My mother was well aware of this, and in order to assert her authority, she took advantage of the fact that we needed financial help from the family, and she triumphed. I am glad that she did, as our son, Mazen, was the result of that pregnancy. I gave birth to Mazen on the first day of the Muslim festival that marks the end of the monthlong Ramadan fast, on August 1, 1981. Fate decreed that my brother should come to visit me that same day, only to be told that I was in the hospital, where the doctors had decided to perform a cesarean as I was having a very difficult birth.
On the way from the operating theater to my room, while I was still under the influence of the anesthetic, he came over to where I was lying and planted a kiss on my forehead, saying jokingly, “Don’t be upset that you’ve had to have an operation. You’ve got a son, and he’s as handsome as his maternal uncle.”
I did not get a chance to talk to him before he left the hospital, as he had to catch the bus from Lattakia back to Baniyas before the bus station closed. After he left the hospital t
hat day, I never saw him again. It is one of fate’s ironies to give with one hand and take away with the other. Fate gave me Mazen and took Muhammad from me in the space of a single day. My brother died from a heart attack ten minutes after he got home. He was forty-four years old.
Muhammad’s death shocked and saddened me, but at the same time released me to a certain extent from my familial and social obligations. He was the only person I had loved and respected, and for his sake I had felt obliged to submit to many social conventions in order to preserve our relationship. After his death there was no one else whose opinion I cared about. Even after my marriage I felt I had to do everything I could to please my brother, even if he did not directly tell me to do so. I knew what he wanted and what he did not, and did my best to please him. After my marriage and his death I became relatively free of obligations. I set no great store by the opinion of my other brothers, especially as I was now married, and, in the eyes of Islam, the exclusive property of my husband.
I had now spent five years away from my family and close to Morad. This had allowed me to begin to think for myself, and my personality was now formed to a certain extent. After our marriage, my domestic life with Morad was very different from our life outside the home. Together, protected from the influence of our surroundings, we tried to construct a belief system different from that of most other people, and we kept ourselves to ourselves.
I was an avid reader, fascinated by anything that could tell me about life in the West, beyond the confines of the ideological prison we lived in. My sister had a friend who worked at the public library. Through her I was able to borrow a number of books, and for long time I was in the habit of photocopying articles. A neighbor of ours, who was originally from Lebanon, would smuggle in many of the books I wanted when he returned from his frequent visits to his homeland. In exchange, I provided free medical treatment for him and his family.