by Wafa Sultan
On one occasion he brought me two books by a Saudi writer and thinker named Abdullah al-Qasimi whose life had been declared forfeit in Saudi Arabia. He fled to the West, and no one knows what has become of him since. Two of his books, “The World Is Not a Mind” and “This Universe—What Is Its Conscience?,” gave me an intellectual shock when I read them. Their contents turned my whole life upside down. My husband and I began to hold daily discussions on various aspects of Al-Qasimi’s thought, every detail of which we had begun to adopt. We did not dare tell anyone what we were reading lest we should be accused of apostasy. My husband was more receptive to what he read than I was. Like most Muslims today, I tried to interpret everything on the basis of a belief that I was frightened to see contradicted: I believed that people’s interpretation of Islam, rather than Islam itself, was responsible for the shortcomings of our Muslim countries. My husband did not agree with me on this point, but this difference of opinion between us was not so serious as to affect the warm friendship that bound us, and each of us continued to respect the other’s opinions.
My husband had felt from the outset that my belief that it was Muslims rather than Islam that was at fault would perhaps help to protect us from the potentially serious consequences of living in a society that did not permit its individual members to take the smallest step toward examining any of its taboos, and so he did not object to my thinking as I did. When we got into discussions with people at social events I would assume the role of faithful sentinel, keeping a close watch over everything Morad said, and intervening and reinterpreting his remarks in a more acceptable manner whenever it looked as if he might be straying into dangerous territory. Because I was very careful never to come close to crossing the line myself, Morad felt secure because he knew I was there to protect him whenever he felt the need to get things off his chest. His childhood and the circumstances of his life seemed to make it easer for him to believe that the fault lay in Islam itself, and that Muslims were victims of their belief system.
During the first five years of my marriage I moved gradually to a different stage in my thinking in which I allowed myself to ask questions about the truth of our Muslim beliefs and culture, and started looking for answers. We passed around books in secret, as if they were opium. Al-Qasimi denied the existence of God and attacked Islam, analyzing it in such as way as to make the most closed mind stop and really think. He was an original and creative writer with an excellent command of Arabic. His style was enjoyable to read and easy to understand, and it led his readers almost imperceptibly to the point where they could not help but agree with him, at least privately. The fact that he was from Saudi Arabia, the cradle of Islam, gave him another kind of authenticity. His books were not readily available, but we found a way to get copies and share them. I remember a young woman in her early twenties at the hospital where I worked once confessed to me secretly that she read Al-Qasimi’s works, and asked if she could borrow one of them from me. I wrapped the book in one of my dresses to conceal it and, as I gave it to her, made a great show of telling her she could wear the dress to her sister’s wedding on condition she return it afterward.
The Egyptian doctor Nawal el-Saadawi also played an important role in my intellectual reprogramming Although her books were not as strictly forbidden as Al-Qasimi’s, her ideas were anathema to most sections of society. She became my mentor, and her books gave me a glimmer of hope for a future that nothing else in our society indicated would be any better than the present. After I had finished reading her book The Female Is the Source, I felt as if I had been revived from a drug-induced coma. In a society that believes the Prophet Muhammad’s dictum that a man’s prayer is nullified if a dog or a woman passes close beside him, it is not easy for a writer to say that the female is the source.
Dr. El-Saadawi lived in the same society as I did—a society that does not just believe that women are dirty, but considers anyone who does not believe this an infidel, and calls for him to be killed. In a society such as that it was not easy for Dr. El-Saadawi to prove her contention, nor was it easy for women like me to adopt her ideas. Dr. El-Saadawi is still an ideal figure and an example as far as I am concerned, and I acknowledge that she played a major role in making me the person I am today.
In 1984 my husband was a member of a Syrian delegation that was sent to Britain to study teaching methods. At the time he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Agriculture at Syria’s Tishreen University. His trip was another turning point in our lives, as he was now able to observe in practice in the West the things we had learned from books. He was astonished by British society, just as a prisoner born behind bars is astonished the first time he experiences life on the other side of them.
He sent me a secret message telling me: “Take Mazen and go to the British Embassy then just leave everything and get out! Life here’s different but I c an’t go into details.” Naturally, I refused to do anything of the kind. I knew that he was in England at the expense of the Syrian government, that his visa would run out as soon as the allotted time was up, and that he had no skills to help him build a new life. He remained in Britain for three months, then came back home at my request. His experiences in Britain continued to preoccupy him, however, and he talked about them from the day he came home until the moment he left for the United States four years later.
His three-month stay in Britain confirmed his deep-rooted conviction that we in our Muslim societies were slaves to a doctrine that neither respected people nor valued their ideas. For some reason I continued to disagree with him about this, and insisted that the problem lay with Islam’s followers, not in Islam itself. When I look back now and try to understand my insistence on this point, I can find no convincing reason for me to cling to this point of view other than the survival instinct, which made me adopt this attitude to protect our safety and our lives.
Without our being aware of it, our new beliefs began to affect the way we lived. We no longer practiced any form of religious observance and avoided visiting my family during the month of fasting. Moreover, our attitudes affected the way we treated each other. Most of our acquaintances accused me of being a domineering woman and my husband of being weak. When a man treats his wife with respect and listens to her opinions, he is thought weak and she is considered bossy. Whenever my mother came to stay with us she would express indignation at the way I treated my husband if, for example, I asked him to bring me a glass of water while we were sitting at the dinner table. She was accustomed to a tradition in which a woman waited upon her husband, and in which it was unseemly for her to ask him to do anything for her. I would argue with my mother, and she would usually leave the house swearing never to visit us again.
My two brothers were no less critical of the way my husband and I behaved and, half jokingly, half seriously, would refer to my husband as my slave. My husband treated their jokes with magnanimity and insisted that I was a woman who deserved to be treated well. Our “odd” beliefs—as others considered them—set us apart, and we were sometimes accused of being Marxists, as people believed that anyone who deviated from Islam had to be a godless communist.
I graduated from medical school in 1981, three months after Mazen was born, and was immediately given a job as a doctor in a mountain village far from the center of the country and sixty kilometers away from the nearest first-aid center. My husband and I moved to the village called “Kinsebba” and rented a house from the local sheikh, Muhammad. He looked after the mosque, called people to prayer at the appointed times, and lived in a little room behind our house.
The sheikh’s wife and seven children lived far away in another town where some of them were at university, and came to visit him only for a short period over the summer holidays, as they were not on good terms with him. We became very friendly with the sheikh, largely because he was a cheerful man with a sense of humor, and we would spend long hours together in half-serious, half-humorous discussion of Islam and its teachings. He often repeated to us his dictum: “Believe me,
if they stopped paying mosque sheikhs’ salaries, there wouldn’t be a single mosque left open in all Syria!” I remember one stormy winter’s day when the village was struck by lightning and the sheikh discovered the following morning that the minaret and its equipment had been damaged. He came back to us smiling, saying jokingly, “I thank God for having given me a holiday until the mosque gets repaired.”
He treated my husband and me as if we were his children, trusting and confiding in us. He told us more than once of his experiences as a policeman and how he would accept bribes and beat people up in the interrogation rooms. Later he changed jobs and became a truck driver, and he told us how he would steal some of the goods he was transporting. Later still he became a doorkeeper at a brothel, before eventually returning to his native village after his wife and children had disowned him. He repented, asked God for forgiveness, and became the village sheikh. His fondness for joking was not in any way frivolous; rather, it reflected the psychological struggle he was engaged in, which I had observed ever since we had first met him.
Our friendship with him increased our doubts regarding the sincerity of the clergy, and in our conversations with him we often strayed into forbidden territory on the pretext of just joking around. He was by no means an ignorant man and was a fine practitioner of the art of conversation. He may have sensed from the outset that we wanted to use the appearance of joking to arrive at a number of truths. He himself had never doubted the truth of Islamic teachings for a minute. Nonetheless, he would usually evade answering direct questions by saying that only God knew, leaving us with the impression that he himself was not fully convinced of what he believed. In this he was very different from other sheikhs, who insisted that they had a monopoly of absolute truth.
When we left the village after three years of living next door to him, we had hundreds of unanswered questions. Our friendship with him had intensified both our doubts and our desire to search for the truth. However, I still insisted on retaining my links with Islam, fragile as they were.
Sheikh Muhammad was not our only local source of doubts regarding the teachings of Islam. During my time in the village I faced challenges of another kind. Its primitive rural society did not acknowledge that a woman was capable of being a doctor. In our first year there, I managed, through patience and persistence, to win the trust of the villagers, and of the women in particular. At night our house turned into an emergency room. I would be awakened in the middle of the night by knocking at the door and the sound of a voice calling out, “Please, Dr. Mo-rad, open the door, we need Wafa.” My husband is not a doctor but the villagers called him “doctor” nonetheless, while addressing me by my first name.
Because they trusted me, I penetrated further into their homes than even the rays of the sun did, and experienced firsthand all the secrets that lay behind their locked doors. What I found there appalled me and made me want to protest; but my voice was stifled by my fear for our own lives, which prevented me from speaking out against the injustices I witnessed.
The month of Ramadan, during which Muslims neither eat nor drink from sunrise to sunset, was one of the hardest months of the year for me. Many more patients flocked for treatment at the medical center where I worked than the number we usually saw. The number who collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration soared startlingly during the day, as did the number of those who suffered from indigestion and vomiting at night, as they stuffed themselves with food in an attempt to compensate for their daytime fast. Both men and women worked in the fields from early morning, performing arduous and exhausting agricultural labor, which, especially when the weather was hot, necessitated large quantities of water that the fast did not allow them to drink. Spurred on by my feelings of pity for them, I tried to persuade them—the women, especially—not to fast, then withdrew my suggestion when it was met with disdainful glances.
It goes without saying that the men treated their women inhumanely and, in this rural society, they were even more pitifully exploited. Many of them gave birth in the open fields, and I would sometimes be called out to help a woman whose labor pains had come upon her as she tilled the ground. My anger rose as I stood helpless, not knowing what to do in the face of such injustice. Sometimes I would exert my authority as a doctor and scream at the men, “Don’t you feel guilty at all?,” but they would usually just laugh and refuse to take my question seriously.
The exploitation of women as a workforce was not, however, my main concern. I was much more worried by the sexual abuse they suffered. Because I was a woman, I got to know about a great many cases that a male doctor would never have learned of. Although sexual assault was widespread in the area, it was well protected from the view of others. By showing my sympathy for the women I was able to win their confidence, and they told me secrets of a kind they usually took to the grave. Many had been raped and most of these rape victims had fallen prey to male members of their own family, usually their own fathers. Unmarried women who became pregnant as a result of these rapes were murdered as soon as their condition was discovered to wash away the disgrace and keep the scandal hidden. In some cases the murderer was the rapist himself. Some victims were deliberately poisoned with the pesticides that were used to spray the apple trees in that region famous for its apple production. The death certificate would read: “Death from natural causes.” No doctor was required to obtain a death certificate for these women. Witnesses were sufficient.
By the time I had completed my period of service in the village my heart had bled and I was seething with fury. I returned to Lattakia three years later a more experienced woman, well schooled in the human rights abuses that took place in the society in which I lived.
7.
First Step to Freedom
AT THE END of the 1980s the world accused Syria of supporting world terrorism; its name was added to the international terrorism list and rigorous economic sanctions were imposed on it. I believe it was at about this time that a young Palestinian who held a Syrian passport placed a bomb in his girlfriend’s suitcase before she boarded a plane at a London airport. After his action was discovered the culprit took refuge in the Syrian Embassy in London, and British police had to storm the building before they could arrest him. After this incident Syria broke off diplomatic ties with Britain, and its relations with the international community reached a crisis point.
The economic sanctions began to affect Syria, and life there in the last four years of the 1980s became an unbearable hell. The ideological oppression rife in Syrian Muslim society on the one hand and its dictatorial regime on the other made young Syrians want to look for somewhere else in the world to live. Then the deteriorating economic situation poured oil on the flames and made them feel even more unjustly treated, further increasing their desire to emigrate.
My husband spent many nights waiting outside every single foreign embassy in Damascus, and we suffered repeated disappointments each time another embassy turned down our application. He spent most of our income on fares for his journeys back and forth to Damascus, where all the foreign embassies were, and on the hotels where he stayed while he waited to submit his papers to yet another consulate. I became impatient with his constant traveling and his unceasing search for somewhere else to live, as they were eating up most of our income. But whenever I brought the issue up he would tell me hopefully, “I’m utterly convinced I don’t belong in this country and that there is somewhere else in the world that deserves me more.”
In May 1988 the miracle came to pass and confirmed that my husband had been right in thinking that there was another country waiting for him that deserved him more than the land of his birth did. He received his visa for the United States, and left Syria eight months before I did. During the period we were separated he wrote to me at least twice a week. In his letters he described to me at length and in detail his impressions of American society. I still have those letters. In one of them he wrote, “Today I saw an American woman climbing an electricity pole to carry out some repairs�
�can you believe it?” In another letter he told me, “I saw on TV today how American emergency services tried to rescue a little cat that had fallen into a pit. Their attempts continued for about two hours, and everyone clapped when the cat was brought out alive.”
When I read his letters to my colleagues at the hospital where I worked I was accused of being dazzled by American society and ignoring its moral decadence. Privately I some-times wondered what our conception of morality was, and why we should not consider an action like the American emergency services’ rescue of a kitten to be a moral act. I wondered, why are people in our homeland less well treated than a cat in America? I couldn’t understand why my colleagues considered the United States to be a morally decadent society when they had no firsthand knowledge about it. If the United States is morally decadent, I wondered, then why are so many of my fellow Syrians standing in line at the door to its embassy? I knew that the only way I could answer all these questions was to join my husband and write about it firsthand.
My husband knew that I had a gift for writing and an unusually fine command of literary Arabic, and insisted in his letters to me that life in the United States would give me a unique opportunity to attain prominence as a writer in the Arab world. The dream of leaving grew day by day, and the way the people around me gossiped about my husband’s absence made me cling to it all the more and increased my longing to escape from a society in which I could not reconcile my religious convictions with the reality I observed around me.