Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

While I would champion any campaign to support Muslim women who do not wish to cover. I would now also protest vigorously for the right of a woman to wear that covering, if it is what she wants and believes in. Ayatollah Khomeini and Jacques Chirac have much more in common than either of them would care to acknowledge. Each tried to solve overarching social problems by imposing his will on the bodies of women.

In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge.

The laws of the Islamic state would be derived first from the Koran. But since only about six hundred of its six thousand verses are concerned with law, and only about eighty of these deal directly with crime, punishments, contracts and family law, other sources also have to be consulted. The

The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered,

Janis Karpinski and a few of the instructors fasted all day along with their troops. “I wanted to show solidarity with them, but I also wanted to know exactly what their physical condition was. If

Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn’t instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If

They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The

Politics needs a certain mental ability,” explained Ahmad Saati, the university’s spokesman. “Very few women have this kind of mind.” I

Women, it says, “manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation. The

The lieutenant colonel wondered if the high scores reflected a defect in the newly built shooting range at the women’s academy. To find out, he commandeered the men’s academy shooting range and ordered the women to redo the test. There he watched in growing astonishment as bullet after bullet slammed home, right smack in the center of the target.

women had been sent back home, to manufacture male babies and avoid waste in household expenditures.

Rehab had been cursed indeed. There was no way Mohamed could have raised the money to buy his secret stash of gold without scrimping on his family. I imagined the lies he’d told, as he denied her every little luxury. Four years of privation: the punishment for having only a daughter.

if her husband and children are suffering from her absence or her preoccupation with politics, then this is not Islam.” It

They threw rotten fruit at me and told me next time it would be acid.

It astonished me that Muslims, who put such store on emulation of their prophet, didn’t wish to emulate him in something so fundamental as fathering daughters. Muhammad

Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,

In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic

It is this notion of women’s barely controllable lust that often lies behind justifications for clito-ridectomy, seclusion and veiling.

We have to fight now to make them understand that everyone has the right to live freely. It’s another war, I think.

Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he’d just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. “She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone stared at her,” he said with distaste. After

One program that deplored the high incidence of wife beating drew hundreds of letters from angry men, who insisted that beating their wives was a God-given right.

fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman’s voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia

No, no,” he said. “She can’t raise it at all. She may only clap. Women must be very careful of their voices. If

She must not speak in a delicate tone. This is from the Koran. Things begun with a few words will continue to other things.

Often the women are burned, so that the death can be passed off as an accident. The killer usually becomes a local hero: a man who has done what was necessary to clear his family name.

In fact, the majlis was an intensely feudal scene, with respectful subjects waiting humbly for a few seconds’ opportunity to whisper in their prince’s ear.

You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right.” A

We’re seeing a rise in the school dropout rate for girls because their families’ incomes are falling and girls’ schooling is the first place they economize,” she sighed. The

This is Islamic dress—but not to them. According to them, the colors in the embroidery are haram. Where