When Manal didn’t take off the veil, her mother eventually became resigned to the idea. In return, Manal promised herself to honor the battles her mother had fought for women by being a forward-thinking Muslim woman. She wouldn’t crawl under a shell and become submissive. Rather, Manal argued, she was charting a different path for Muslim women: being deeply committed to the requirements of the faith but also strong, outspoken, and equal to men. To prove her point, Manal continued playing on her town’s girls’ basketball team—elbowing for rebounds and hustling up and down the court with pants under her shorts and wearing a hijab. After a while, the stares she received only made her feel more special for bucking the stereotype.
Although confident beyond her years, Manal was still young and could have bouts of insecurity about her unusual identity. The year she graduated from the Islamic Saudi Academy, on a trip to Jordan to see her family, a cousin proposed to the then seventeen-year-old Manal through her father. No one saw this as unusual, not even Manal’s mother, as arranged marriages were the norm in Palestinian society. Many of Manal’s classmates had returned to their Arab homeland and gotten married. However, Manal was aware that she was no longer going to be able to maintain her two identities, as an American teenager and a Muslim daughter. After much deliberation, she opted for the latter. When her father asked her opinion of the marriage, she remained silent—a statement equal to acquiescence. It was an inconsistency in Manal’s personality that would plague her for years: while she was outspoken about women’s rights in general, she swallowed her voice when it came to herself, calling to mind the Arab phrase “A carpenter’s door is never fixed.”
The engagement was set and Manal returned to the States, where she agonized silently for months before finally stepping up and expressing her unhappiness. Her parents would never force a marriage on their daughter, and they called off the engagement shortly thereafter.
A few years later, while she was working toward a master’s degree in Arab studies at Georgetown University, she attended a protest against the sanctions that were destroying Iraq. At the protest, she met an Iraqi man, a Muslim eleven years her senior, who quickly proposed. Even as she married him at twenty-five, part of her felt she was not ready, that he was too conservative, but another part was reacting to decades of silent messages that she ought to be married by twenty-five, that she ought to be the quiet, demure wife that Arab men preferred. She regretted it even as she was going through with it, but she married him anyway.
Manal would realize what a mistake this was on the first night of her honeymoon. The couple had consummated the marriage, and though it was Manal’s first experience, she had barely bled. Her husband, who, unbeknownst to Manal, had already grown suspicious of his wife’s virtue, became even more so. One evening, in an Internet café in Santorini, Greece, Manal uncovered an email he had written to an online doctor asking how a husband could know if his wife truly was a virgin. Manal was furious. Of course she was a virgin, and his suspicion not only called into question her entire identity as a Muslim and Arab woman, but it revealed an enormous gap in trust between the newly-weds. (The doctor’s response had been “The best way to know would be to ask.”) Yet her husband told her she ought to be grateful he didn’t divorce her right away, due to her “defect” of not bleeding.
Manal stayed in the marriage, believing she ought to suppress her feelings. In the next year, he grew more controlling, while Manal tried harder, assuming the whole responsibility for their happiness until she found herself spontaneously bursting into tears for no apparent reason. He wanted her to be slimmer, to cook better, to do more laundry, and even implied she should ask permission to leave the house. Theirs was not a partnership. She was to be subservient to him.
During this time, Manal continued her studies at Georgetown. She committed herself to exploring what the Quran and the hadiths truly said about women, as well as the history of women in Islam. She read books by Islamic feminists such as Fatima Mernissi, whose groundbreaking book The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam popularized the idea that many of the most conservative aspects of Islam were in fact incorrect translations of the Quran or false recordings of the Prophet’s words. This “Islamic feminism” was a break from the feminism of Manal’s mother’s generation. Rather than calling for a repudiation of Islam, Mernissi and others used the Quran to challenge the very patriarchy that clerics claimed it legitimized, disputing the myth that the Prophet had said, “Those who entrust their affairs to a woman will never know prosperity.” Over the centuries, this hadith had been repeatedly evoked to forbid Arab women from voting or any kind of political participation. Scholars like Mernissi claimed that the way to challenge inequality in Islam was not to move away from religion, but to push for a correction of its teachings. They argued that the Prophet was a great defender of women’s rights, and that practices such as honor killings were perversions of the sacred texts. This position appealed greatly to Manal, and yet she realized her marriage was a contradiction of it.
The marriage finally reached its boiling point on the docks of the Potomac River. Her husband became enraged at a friendship she had struck up with her rowing coach, and, upon seeing them talking by the river’s edge, he had launched into a public tirade. Manal was horrified—not so much by the embarrassing spectacle, but by the look of pity on the coach’s face. What must he think of me? she wondered. She had chosen the veil to challenge Western misconceptions of Muslim women, but now, instead, she was confirming the worst stereotype of the belittled wife.
So, after less than two years of marriage, Manal left her husband and filed for divorce. She knew divorce would bring a stigma, and that her chances of remarriage were slim, since she’d lost her virginity. She felt the disapproving glares from her relatives when she visited them in Jordan. The period was a painful one for her, yet ultimately liberating. She survived and got to know herself better, and grew stronger, to the point that she barely recognized the young woman who’d allowed herself to be pushed into marriage.
She knew that Muntaha wouldn’t have all the opportunities she herself did, to bounce back from such difficult situations, but she saw pieces of her own story in the girl’s plight, and understood intimately that sense of being trapped. She was determined to help her in any way she could.
AT SEVEN, MANAL awoke with an idea. She would use Muntaha’s case as an opportunity to push for the funding of a shelter as part of the new Iraqi Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, which was still under the supervision of the Americans. After a morning of phone calls, she tracked down the office and drove over to meet with the ministry officials.
“She’s under eighteen, and she’s in your jurisdiction,” Manal said. “You should place her in a protective shelter at least until we figure out what to do.”
The minister’s deputy listened, and then said that he didn’t consider Muntaha a minor because she was a married woman. “Look, if this was my daughter, she would be dead,” he said. “I think you should give some thought to letting justice take its course.”
“If you were not forcing girls to get married at fourteen you would not have to deal with this,” Manal responded curtly. Others suggested putting Muntaha in an orphanage, which soon came to seem like the only solution.
When Manal went to the police station to transfer Muntaha to the orphanage, she found the girl in an excited state.
“Look, I can get out of this myself,” she said. “One of the policemen offered to take me to Dubai and be my pimp. I will get clean there, save up money, and then find a job.”
“No, no, don’t do that,” Manal insisted. “I have a better solution.”
The orphanage, however, was filthy. Inside a dilapidated house, several disabled children roamed around unsupervised, their pants soiled. No one was paying attention to them, and the men leered at Manal. Muntaha looked horrified.
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to stay here,” Manal said, trying to be reassuring.
Manal and Ahmed drove off in silence. They both felt terrible. “We can’t leave her there,” Manal whispered. “She can sleep in our office.”
“No way,” Ahmed said. “Manal, we are just beginning. We are already confronting many suspicions in the community about our Western agenda. We must slow down, and not push too hard, too fast.”
“But she’ll be raped,” Manal said. “We can’t leave her there!”
Ahmed turned the car around. There was only one other group that could help Manal: the U.S. troops. She asked Sergeant Lautenschlager to take Muntaha for a couple of days while she tried to find a suitable shelter so the family could cool down. Lautenschlager agreed, even though doing so could plunge her into serious trouble if a commanding officer found out.
Muntaha spent two nights in the small château that Lautenschlager’s unit occupied, as Manal ran around looking for a solution. The most promising seemed to be a shelter called ASUDA: Organization for Combating Violence Against Women. It was several hours’ drive north, in the city of Sulaimaniya in the Kurdish region. She inquired about transporting Muntaha there. However, the next time she visited Muntaha, the young woman had had a change of heart. She had phoned her family and learned that her sisters were being punished for her crimes. She wanted to go home.
“I don’t believe my father will hurt me,” she promised.
Manal reluctantly returned with her to the police station. The police chief had spoken to the father, who had told him that Muntaha had been “troublesome” from an early age. The father had been eager to get her off his hands as soon as possible. He was a wealthy man, who paid a large sum of money to the ugly cousin to marry her. When Muntaha ran away, the cousin complained to the father that he owed him a replacement wife. If Muntaha wasn’t returned to the husband, the tribes would get involved to settle the situation. Most likely they would demand that the father compensate the husband with one of Muntaha’s sisters.
“I made a mistake and my sisters are going to have to pay the price. I can’t let that happen,” Muntaha said. Manal had no choice, but at least she wanted someone to negotiate the return. She looked at Ahmed.
“You’re going way too far if you think I’m going to negotiate,” he said. “Manal, I’m from another tribe. I have no position in the community. Who would I be to dare approach the family?”
The police chief put his hand to his heart. He was an avuncular old man who Manal had come to respect over the course of the past forty-eight hours. She trusted his word meant something. “I will negotiate,” he offered.
The next afternoon, Muntaha disappeared out the police station door and into the back of a car. A month later, Manal ran into the police chief, who said he had visited the family and that Muntaha had survived, but Manal was never sure what really happened.
The experience left Manal with mixed feelings. Perhaps she had saved Muntaha’s life—perhaps—but doing so had had repercussions. The U.S. military police had undoubtedly made enemies of Muntaha’s extended family. The police chief had risked his own skin. Women for Women had put themselves in jeopardy and had antagonized the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.
She didn’t expect women’s rights to be handed to her—she knew she would have to fight for them. But the situation was very, very complicated. It wasn’t always easy to know when you had done the right thing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WITHIN SIX MONTHS of the Americans’ arrival in Iraq, Zia’s career path had far exceeded even her wildest dreams. She had gone from being a harassed, lowly secretary at the Egyptian embassy to a manager of a U.S.-contracted company inside the Green Zone. She had authority, respect, and a big salary to prove it. Men listened to her, and career opportunities seemed endless. Despite the ongoing violence, life was much better than under Saddam and they had hope for the future. In her closet, she had hung an image of George Bush printed out from an IMN computer. Each night, Mamina said a prayer of blessing for him. When her grandmother visited, she kissed the picture. “If I could die now and give this man my extra years, I would.”
Zia’s promotion from reporter to transition site manager had occurred shortly after she had challenged the U.S. senior adviser with her question about when salaries to Iraqi government officials would resume. Her promotion boosted her salary to five hundred dollars a month, with an extra month’s pay as a signing bonus. Rather than report, she would take on managerial duties, such as overseeing budgets, handling construction projects, and dealing with personnel matters. Her father also benefited, winning a $120,000 contract to build a security fence around the perimeter of IMN’s new headquarters. She also landed an internship for Nunu, but after a few weeks, Nunu complained the pace was too fast. Zia had taken to her job like a racehorse finally let out of the gate, but Nunu couldn’t break free of the role she had been groomed for so long to play, as the meek, subservient Arab girl. She cringed when given a task without specific instructions and was too shy to talk to the American men. When a few Iraqi employees received threats for working with the Americans, Nunu decided to quit, and Zia agreed it wasn’t worth the risk. But Zia never once contemplated quitting. She loved her job. Each day, she felt more and more like IMN was her family.
But the situation inside the Green Zone was changing, too, as time went on, and not always for the better. By early fall, a group of Americans had begun arriving to work for the CPA who were very different from the ones she’d been meeting and working with in those first few months. They were civilians whom Zia came to know collectively as “the contractors,” and they were not exactly, as Zia put it, “high quality” people. Until then, most of the CPA staff had been college-educated government employees from the State Department and the White House: young, ambitious, and deeply loyal to President Bush. Around the office, they posted copies of the Bill of Rights, and compared Paul Bremer to Thomas Jefferson. They spoke passionately about improving Iraq.
The contractors, though, didn’t seem to care about Iraq. Muscular, tattooed guys with mirrored sunglasses, five-o’clock shadows, and a hung-over look, they carried guns and swaggered around like they owned Iraq. They had been hired on temporary contracts by corporations such as Bechtel and Halliburton for technical jobs: setting up Internet systems, logistics, radar, supply, maintenance, truck driving, and security details. Many were older divorced men whose every other word was fuck and who boasted about working in a country that had “the highest virginity rate in the world,” they estimated. When Zia left the office late, she saw them grouped around a picnic table, beer cans piled high and whiskey bottles on the ground, making raucous jokes.
Zia had no choice but to work with them. Some were nice, like Pat and Pappy, two retired Vietnam vets in their sixties who had been hired to provide security at IMN’s new Salhiya site. At least they were respectful; most of the contractors treated the Iraqis as though they were inferior. A lot of the Americans were like this, Zia had noticed, even the ones who knew a lot about Iraqi history and spoke some Arabic—she still detected a condescending tone when they talked to her.
The female contractors were the rudest. Sailors in Basra didn’t have mouths as foul as these women’s, Zia told Mamina. In the evenings, as Zia left work, she saw the women spilling beer on their tiny tank tops and sitting on the men’s laps. Zia’s Iraqi male colleagues were obsessed with these women, convinced that they needed only to wait for their turn, presumably, to have sex with them. Once, Zia overheard a woman named Meghan openly bragging about sleeping with a different guy every night. So it’s true, she thought. The sleaziness all came to a head over the summer, when photos surfaced online of an American cameraman for IMN sitting bare-chested at Saddam’s pool in the palace, with Iraqi women in bathing suits balanced on each of his knees. Everyone gossiped that he was running a prostitution ring inside the Green Zone, hiring Iraqi women to have sex with the contractors.
Other, equally worrisome changes were happening at the IMN channel itself. The insistence that IMN was “independent” had
always been fairly ridiculous to Zia, since the Americans were constantly doctoring the news to portray their efforts in a positive light. The programs they ran had clearly been pieced together by the military. Bremer’s spokesman, Dan Senor, was constantly coming and going, directing story ideas and angles, and rounding up reporters for interviews with specific officials in which they suggested the questions. Iraqi journalists were told to refer to the military as the “forces of liberation,” although Al Jazeera and most other channels called them “the occupation.”
“Do they think we are stupid?” Zia wondered over lunch with her Iraqi colleagues.
“No one knows propaganda better than Iraqis!” a friend joked.
They were still trying to run the channel on the cheap, too, and sometimes poor conditions made it difficult to get the job done. Zia’s and the other Iraqis’ complaints about the problems fell on deaf ears, but, luckily, they weren’t alone. Leading the criticism was the IMN program manager, Don North, a cameraman for U.S. news channels who had reported from Vietnam. He was so frustrated that he threatened to quit. Ahmed Rikaby, an Iraqi expat from Sweden who had been news director, had already quit in August.
Zia was disappointed that things weren’t going better for the channel she’d become so devoted to, but the good far outweighed the bad. She reminded herself that for every sleazy American on the staff, there were two good ones, like her buddy Daniel, who worked as a cameraman, or Don North. Her Iraqi colleagues felt similarly.
“At least it’s not Uday,” pointed out one female reporter, who had worked for Saddam’s channel. Saddam’s son had run Iraqi television and was known for raping the pretty reporters.
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