Not everyone mourned the passing of Islam’s prophet. In the southern Arabian region of Hadramaut, six women decorated their hands with henna, as if for a wedding, and took to the streets beating tambourines in joyful celebration of Muhammad’s death. Soon, about twenty others joined the merry gathering. When word of the celebration reached Abu Bakr, he sent out the cavalry to deal with “the whores of Hadramaut.” When his warriors arrived, the men of the settlement came to their women’s defense but were defeated. As punishment, the women had their henna-painted, tambourine-playing hands severed at the wrists.
Who knows what motivated the women to make their rousing and reckless celebration? To them, at least, it must have seemed that Muhammad’s new religion had made their lives more burdensome, less free. And much worse was coming. Repression of women was about to be legislated into the religion on a large scale by Abu Bakr’s successor as caliph, the violent misogynist Omar.
That Aisha supported Omar’s bid for leadership shows the depth of her loathing for Fatima’s husband, Ali. Her opinion of Omar was not high. Kno his cruelty to the women of his household, she had cleverly helped foil a match between him and her sister.
Omar cracked down on women in ways that he must have known flouted Muhammad’s traditions. He made stoning the official punishment for adultery and pressed to extend the seclusion of women beyond the prophet’s wives. He tried to prevent women from praying in the mosque, and when that failed, he ordered separate prayer leaders for men and women. He also prevented women from making the Hajj, a ban that was lifted only in the last year of his life.
On Omar’s death, Aisha supported Othman as his successor. When Othman was murdered by members of a rebellious faction, Ali, who had had to wait twenty-four long years since Muhammad’s death, finally got his chance to lead. When he became the Muslims’ fourth caliph, Aisha’s well-known enmity soon made her a lightning rod for dissidents. She spoke out stridently against Ali’s failure to punish Othman’s killers.
As opposition to Ali’s rule mounted, Aisha made a brave and reckless move that might have changed forever the balance of power between Muslim men and women.
She led the dissidents into battle against Ali in a red pavilion set atop a camel. Riding ahead of her troops, she loudly exhorted them to fight bravely. Ali, realizing the effect this was having on his men’s morale, ordered her camel cut down under her. He then routed her forces. Hundreds of her partisans were killed, including her dearest friends and relatives.
The defeat proved disastrous for Muslim women. Her opponents were able to argue that the first battle of Muslim against Muslim would never have happened if Aisha had kept out of public life as God had commanded. After the battle, one of Muhammad’s freed slaves reported a hadith that has been particularly damaging to Muslim women. The man said he had been saved from joining Aisha’s army by recalling Muhammad’s remark on the news that the Persians had appointed a princess as ruler: “No people who place a woman over their affairs will prosper.” Whether or not the former slave’s con venient recollection was genuine, that hadith has been used against every Muslim woman who has achieved political influence. In Pakistan it was frequently cited by opponents of Benazir Bhutto.
After the rout, Aisha finally made her peace with Ali. She retreated from politics but remained an eminent religious authority. Most accounts describe her in later life as a sad and self-effacing woman whose one wish was to be forgotten by history.
It is said that she wept whenever she recited the Koranic verses: “O wives of the prophet… remain in your houses.”
Chapter 5
CONVERTS
“Marry not women who are idolaters, until they believe: verily a maid-servant who believeth is better than an idolatress, although she please you more.”
THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE COW
At sunrise, before the heat slams down and the air becomes heavy with diesel fumes, Tehran smells of fresh-baked bread. At neighborhood bakeries women wait in line with their flowery household chadors draped casually around their waists. Their faces seem less lined than they will look later, as they struggle through the crowded city burdened with parcels and children and the countless worries of women in poor countries. During this pause they have the brief luxury of watching someone else’s labor.
Sometimes, when I tired of the stares and questions I got as the lone woman registered at the Laleh Hotel, I would head for the northern suburbs to stay with a family who had become good friends. They lived on a winding road of mosques, shops and every kind of housing from villas to hovels. In the mornings I would find my way to the local bakery by following my nose. The air carried both the sweetness of seared crusts and the tang of woodsmoke from ovens sunk into the bakery floor. Inside, a four-man assembly line blurred in a heat shimmer of deft hands and flying dough. The bakers made lavosh—thin, flat sheets of bread soft as tissue. They worked like jugglers: one bov weighing dough, another rolling it flat, a third flinging it from stick to stick to stretch it thin, a fourth slapping the wafer against the oven wall. Watching the other women, I learned to reach for the hot bread with my hands wrapped in a fold of chador. I would carry it home that way to the Mamoudzadehs’ breakfast table.
Like houses everywhere in the Islamic world, the Mamoudzadehs’ gave nothing away from the street. Its huge iron gate shut out the world completely, securing the family’s privacy within. The gate opened to a courtyard with flower gardens, children’s bikes and a shady mulberry tree from which Janet Mamoudzadeh made the jam that spread deliciously over the steaming lavosh. I kicked off my shoes into the pile by the front door and stepped onto the softness of handmade rugs and kilims. Just inside, I flicked my chador onto a rack that contained two or three of the coats and scarves that Janet wore for ordinary use; the more concealing, nunlike magneh she wore to her job as an English teacher at her daughter’s grade school, and the chador she kept for religious occasions.
Janet’s husband Mohamed was a trader at the Bazaar-e-Bazorg—the Grand Bazaar—dealing in Persian carpets and foreign currencies. She had met him at college in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he was studying engineering and she was taking computer science. She fell in love, converted to Islam, and traveled home with him to Iran.
Janet married Mohamed before the revolution, when it was possible for non-Muslims to live in Iran with their Muslim spouses. These days, conversion is obligatory, in line with the Shiite view that permanent marriage (as opposed to sigheh) can take place only between Muslims. The prophet’s sunnah on this matter doesn’t really help to clarify the Koranic verses.
The prophet had relationships with at least two Jewish women and one Christian, but Islamic sources differ as to whether the women converted or, if they kept their own faith, whether they became full-fledged wives. Safiyah, the wife of the leader of the Jews of Khaiber who died in battle with the Muslims, converted to Islam and is mentioned in all the sources as a full-fledged wife of the prophet. The status of the other two women isn’t so clear. Some sources say that the other Jew, Raihanah, decided to remain as a slave/concubine in the harem, so that she could keep her faith and remain free of the restrictions of seclusion. Mary, the Coptic Christian, who never changed her religion, is described as a concubine in all but Egyptian sources.
Janet converted to Islam because her husband wanted his children raised as Muslims and she believed that having the same religion would make her household more harmonious. She looked upon her conversion in a matter-of-fact way. “Allah, God—it’s the same guy, isn’t it? And if you read the Koran, Mary is in there, and Jesus—it’s just that they’re called Maryam and Isa.”
Janet’s conversion had been a simple matter. In her family’s living room in Kansas, in front of two witnesses, she had simply proclaimed the shehada, the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Because her husband is Shiite, she also added the additional, optional sentence: “Ali is the friend of God.” Once she said the simple fo
rmula, she was a Muslim. To be a good Muslim, she also had to live by the other four of the faith’s Five Pillars: praying five times a day; fasting in Ramadan; giving alms to the poor—usually set at 2.5% of a person’s net worth, not mere income—per year; and making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in her life, if she could afford it.
I was intrigued by Janet’s decision. Early one morning in the winter of 1984, I had made a similar choice. I’d gone to a dank room in a Cleveland suburb, submerged my body in a tiled pool of rainwater, and come up pronouncing the words: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord Our God, the Lord Is One.” Later, I celebrated with my rabbi and my fiance over matzo-ball soup and potato latkes at a nearby Jewish deli.
My conversion had more to do with history than faith. If I were going to marry a Jew, it seemed important to throw in my lot with his often threatened people. I didn’t know then that I would spend the best part of the next decade in the Middle East, where being on my husband’s side made me an automatic enemy to many of those we lived among.
Janet, too, wanted to be on her husband’s side. But in Iran in the late 1970s, her nationality was an obstacle that her new faith couldn’t entirely overcome. “It wasn’t a great time for a bride from Kansas City to be setting up house in Tehran,” she recalled with a wry grin. Within a couple of months of her arrival the city was paralyzed by demonstrations, fires, gun battles. When Khomeini returned from exile in 1979, Mohamed was exultant. Like many young, well-educated Iranians, he despised the corruption of the old order and admired the way Khomeini thumbed his nose at the great powers who had vied with each other to exploit the wealth of his homeland.
Janet had to sit through family gatherings listening to Mohamed’s relatives pillory her country. As her Farsi improved, she began to challenge them. “They would say, ‘Oh, Janet, you know we like American people, it’s just the government we hate.’ I would say, ‘Yeah? Well, in my country, buddy, the government is the people.’ ”
When Iranian students occupied the U. S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, the State Department told all United States citizens to leave. Janet watched as an exodus emptied the city of the thousands of American expatriates who had once made fortunes there. Soon only a handful of Americans remained, most of them wives of Iranians too financially or ideologically committed to their country to leave. “The State Department said we’d be on our own if we stayed here. And we have been. But if you love your husband, you stay.”
Janet also gradually found herself coming to love many aspects of her life in Iran. She found that Iranians lavished affection on the few Americans who stayed. Some Iranians had warm memories of American teachers or technicians who had helped the country, while even those who saw Americans only as rapacious exploiters felt that Janet, by staying, had aligned herself with Iran. Instead of being greeted with hostility, she found herself welcomed everywhere—pushed to the front of food lines, given the best meat, and helped in every possible way. “They treat me like a queen here,” she said.
But convincing her parents back in Kansas City took some doing, especially after Betty Mahmoody published her memoir, Not Without My Daughter. The book is a nightmare tale of an American wife who agrees to visit her husband’s family in Tehran only to find herself trapped there by Iranian laws that forbid women to leave the country without their husbands’ permission. It gives an unremittingly bleak picture of life in Iran, describing wife beatings, filthy houses and vermin-infested food.
“My father would get on the phone and say, I know Mohamed is beating you,’ and I’d say, ‘Dad, he’d no more beat me than you would.’ I even took pictures of my freezer to show how much food we have.” She tried to describe the split-level luxuries of her spacious villa, the leisure provided by her regular cleaner and her easy access to good child care for her three children. It was a life that many Americans would have found enviable. But her parents weren’t reassured. So she agreed to see me in the hope that her parents might believe a report by an outsider. She invited a friend, a Californian also married to an Iranian, to meet me as well.
Janet gaped as she opened the door to her friend. It was the week of Khomeini’s funeral, and the whole of Tehran was shrouded in black. Black crepe decked public buildings, men wore black shirts, women packed away their colorful scarves for the forty days of official mourning and donned their black chadors. Amid all this gloom, Janet’s friend stood out like a clown in a convent. Six feet tall and seven months pregnant, she wore a huge cotton caftan splashed with pink and red roses, and a pink silk scarf that barely covered her sun-bleached hair.
“Good grief, I hope Hajji Yousefi didn’t see you!” gasped Janet, referring to her next-door neighbor, a member of the local Komiteh responsible for enforcing Islamic discipline. The woman, whom I will call Margaret, just shrugged and flopped into an armchair. “Who cares?” she said. “I got abuse on the way over here, with some old bag in a chador coming up to me and saying, ‘How can you dress like that? Don’t you know the imam is dead?’ I said, ‘What’s it to me? I’m an American.’ I told her I knew better than she did what the Koran says women should wear, and it doesn’t say anywhere that it has to be a big old black rag.”
Margaret knew what the Koran said because she spent every morning sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her mother-in-law, studying the holy book line by line. Margaret had wed a scion of the Islamic Republic’s aristocracy: the son of a long line of eminent ayatollahs. The family tolerated a lot from their son’s odd choice of bride because she had done two things to earn their approval: converted to Islam and quickly become pregnant. Her mother-in-law fervently believed that winning a convert was a passport to paradise and, as none of her children had yet given her a grandson, she had high hopes for Margaret’s pregnancy.
Margaret also spoke frankly about the sexual power she believed she wielded over her husband. Growing up in California’s hedonistic beach culture, she had acquired a sexual repertoire undreamed of by an Iranian boy closeted among clerics. “He runs after me like a puppy,” she giggled. All this, she believed, protected her from conforming to the iron disciplines of Iranian society that Janet barely questioned. In Tehran, all government buildings have female guards who strictly enforce Islamic dress codes, and Margaret had recently been turned back at the door of a post office for wearing lipstick. “I asked for a Kleenex, and she said, ‘Here’s your Kleenex,’ and slapped me across the face.” Margaret complained to her family and they had the guard sacked.
A few days after our meeting at Janet’s house, I invited both women to join me for lunch in town. Margaret chose her favorite place, a once grand French restaurant with linen tablecloths and red banquettes. The restaurant waiters greeted her like a long-lost sister. Complimenting her on her colorful dress, one of them asked why her two friends were wearing such dowdy black hijab. Margaret replied with a quick Farsi crack. The waiter looked startled, then laughed. “I told him you were ass kissers,” she grinned.
But even Margaret had learned that there were limits. Once, her irreverence had almost gone too far. She had been annoyed for days by some anti-American graffiti scrawled on a wall at the end of her street. One night she’d taken a can of paint and altered the lettering to turn the insult back against the Iranian government. At daybreak the new message caused a furor and a witch hunt. Margaret, delighted by the frenzy she’d created, confided to her husband, thinking he’d enjoy the joke. “I never knew he could be so angry,” she said. Furious, he screamed at her, calling her a madwoman: “Do you want to be killed? There are some things even I can’t save you from.” In the end, no one managed to identify her as the culprit.
For me, Janet’s friendship offered a window into women’s lives in Iran. Mohamed’s huge extended family included the poor and the affluent, the religiously convinced and the skeptical. Whenever I was in town it became understood that I was included in all family events.
For me, being Jewish had remained an abstraction: something that had defined the kind of wedding I’d had, and afte
rward meant a once-a-year family feast at Passover, a fast at Yom Kippur, a certain awkwardness at Christmastime and a label, often an inconvenient one, that I had to write on visa forms when I visited Middle Eastern countries. But, for Janet, religion shaped every day’s routine.
No one in the Mamoudzadeh family lived a secular life. Mohamed’s mother rose every morning before dawn to ready herself for the first of the five prayers she would offer each day. Mohamed and Janet were less meticulous, but even Janet said she enjoyed the moments when she joined her mother-in-law at prayer. “It’s just such a peaceful few minutes in your day,” she said. “If the kids call for you, or someone comes to the door, you just raise your voice and intone ‘Allah’ to signal that you’re praying, and no one can interrupt you.”
To prepare for prayers, Janet and her mother-in-law would wash carefully, scrubbing the face, feet and hands, rinsing the mouth, and rubbing damp hands over the hair. Women can’t wear nail polish in Iran because of the law that hands have to be clean for prayer, and a coating of polish is considered polluting. At the airport, even foreign women are handed petrol-soaked rags to wipe varnished nails. But perfume is encouraged at prayer time, so Janet and her mother-in-law would sprinkle themselves with scent, enfold themselves in their prettiest floral chadors, roll out a special prayer rug, and begin the series of bows, kneeling and prostration that accompany the Muslims’ melodious poem of devotion: “Praise be to God, lord of the creation, the compassionate, the merciful, king of the last judgment… You alone we worship, and to you alone we pray for help…. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have incurred your wrath….” Men must recite the prayers audibly enough for someone nearby to distinguish the words. Women whose voices are considered sexually arousing, are supposed to whisper.
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