Nine Parts of Desire Part 1

Nine Parts of Desire.

by Geraldine Brooks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Lee Lescaze, for his calm voice on the end of so many crackly phone lines; Paul Steiger, for tolerating a leave that lasted too long; Karen House, for having confidence that I could cover the Middle East long before I had; Mary Ellen Barker, John Fitzgerald and Elinor Lander Horwitz for their comments on the ma.n.u.script; Melissa Biggs for painstaking fact-checking; Michael Lewis for neighborly advice and inspiration; Deborah Amos, Christiane Amanpour, Nora Boustany, Jacki Lyden and Milton Viorst for good company in war zones; and David Chalfant, agent and champion, without whom this book would not be.Finally, I would like to thank the many Muslim women who, across so many obstacles, made me welcome in their world.

"Almighty G.o.d created s.e.xual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men."-Ali ibn Abu Taleb, husband of Muhammad's daughter Fatima and founder of the s.h.i.+te sect of Islam

PROLOGUE

"Say, I fly for refuge unto the Lord of the daybreak, that he may deliver me from the mischief of those things which he hath created."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE DAYBREAKThe hotel receptionist held my reservation card in his hand. "Mr. Geraldine Brooks," he read. "But you are a woman."Yes, I agreed, that was so."I'm sorry, but our reservation clerk has made a mistake.""That's okay," I said. "Just add an s s and make it 'Mrs'." and make it 'Mrs'.""No," he said. "You don't understand. I can't give you a room. It's against the law for women."I glanced around the hotel's gleaming lobby. "What about them?" I said, nodding my head in the direction of two black-cloaked Saudis heading for the elevator."They are here with their husband," the receptionist explained. "In Saudi Arabia a lady does not travel alone. There is no reason for it. Unless she is a prost.i.tute."There was a time-a year, two years earlier-when I would have lost my temper. Now I just sighed and walked away from the desk. It was after 11 P.M. P.M. I knew no one in the city of Dhahran. I could take a taxi back to the airport and wait out the night on one of its plastic chairs. But at the hotel entrance there were no taxis. The plush sofas of the empty hotel lobby looked inviting enough. I made myself comfortable behind a potted plant and pulled my black chador out of my bag to use as a blanket. I was closing my eyes when the receptionist coughed behind me. I knew no one in the city of Dhahran. I could take a taxi back to the airport and wait out the night on one of its plastic chairs. But at the hotel entrance there were no taxis. The plush sofas of the empty hotel lobby looked inviting enough. I made myself comfortable behind a potted plant and pulled my black chador out of my bag to use as a blanket. I was closing my eyes when the receptionist coughed behind me."You cannot stay here."I quietly pointed out that I had nowhere else to go."Then," he said, "I have to call the police."The Dhahran police station had the same hard benches and harsh lights as police stations everywhere. The only difference was that the plain-clothes detectives wore long white thobes. thobes. Whenever I'd been in police stations before, it had been to report on crime. This was my first visit as a criminal. Whenever I'd been in police stations before, it had been to report on crime. This was my first visit as a criminal.Behind a desk across the room a young police lieutenant shuffled my ident.i.ty doc.u.ments. I had press credentials from Australia, Britain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, the United States and Yemen. I had pa.s.ses to Arab summit meetings and presidential palaces. I even had a plastic press badge issued by Saudi Arabia's own Information Ministry. The lieutenant peered at them all. First he lined them up vertically, then horizontally. Then he stacked them in a neat pile, as if to evaluate them by height.Finally he looked up, letting his gaze rest on a patch of wall just above my head. Like most very strict Muslims, he didn't want to risk polluting himself by gazing at a strange woman. When he spoke, he addressed me in the third person. "I think the lady hasn't been in Saudi Arabia very long. She doesn't know our customs." He resumed his tedious perusal of my doc.u.ments. Plucking one of my pa.s.ses from the pile, he dangled it between his thumb and forefinger. "This one," he said with a tiny triumphant smile, "expired yesterday."Sometime in the wee hours of the morning the lieutenant handed back my doc.u.ments, adding a permit allowing me to spend the next few hours in a hotel. Back at the front desk, the receptionist summoned a bellman, a Filipino, to show me to my room. It was on a completely empty floor. An armed guard hovered by the elevator."They must think I'm dangerous," I muttered. The bellman didn't smile."They think all women are dangerous," he replied, dropping my bag just inside the door and retreating under the guard's watchful gaze.I lay on the bed, staring at the decal glued to the mirror, showing Muslims the direction that they should face to pray. Nearly every hotel room I had stayed in during the past three years had had a similar arrow-stuck on the night table, pinned to a curtain, fixed to the ceiling. It was just a few minutes before dawn. I walked to the window and waited. As a pale disc of light crept up over a hazy blue horizon, the stillness shattered, as it did every dawn, and had done for the last thirteen hundred years."Come to prayer!" wailed the muezzins of the city's hundreds of mosques. "It is better to pray than sleep!" As the sun edged its way westward, a billion Muslims would do as the citizens of Dhahran were doing at that moment: rise from their beds and bow toward the town of Mecca, about seven hundred miles west of my hotel room.The reason for my sleepless night lay in that desert town. I couldn't check myself into a Saudi hotel room in the 1990s because thirteen hundred years earlier a Meccan named Muhammad had trouble with his wives.Islam's prophet loved women. He married his first wife when he was twenty-five years old. Illiterate, orphaned and poor, he hardly expected to receive a proposal from his boss, Khadija, a rich Meccan businesswoman at least ten years his senior who hired him as a manager for her international trading company. While it wasn't typical for women to propose to men in Meccan culture, Khadija was among those with the clout to do so. She gave him money, status and four daughters-his only children to survive infancy. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, King Hussein of Jordan and the thousands of sheiks and mullahs who today wear the black turban that signifies descent from the prophet all trace their lineage to one of those daughters.It was to Khadija that Muhammad crawled, trembling, the first time he heard the voice of the angel Gabriel p.r.o.nouncing the word of G.o.d. Despairing for his sanity, Muhammad found himself repeating the first words of the Koran-which means simply "recitation." Then he made his way to his wife on his hands and knees and flung himself across her lap. "Cover me! Cover me!" he cried, begging her to s.h.i.+eld him from the angel. Khadija rea.s.sured him that he was sane, encouraged him to trust his vision and became the first convert to the new religion, whose name, Islam, means "the submission."The message of Islam arrived in seventh-century Arabia where female infants, of limited value in a harsh herding and raiding culture, were exposed on the sands to die. In Mecca's slave market, soldiers sold the women captives they'd won as spoils of war. But a few women, like Khadija, had the money and influence to choose their own husbands and shape their own lives.For twenty-four years Khadija was Muhammad's only wife. It wasn't until she died, nine years after that first vision, that Muhammad began receiving revelations from G.o.d on the status of women. So Khadija, the first Muslim woman, was never required to veil or seclude herself, and never lived to hear the word of G.o.d proclaim that "Men are in charge of women, because G.o.d has made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property [to support them]." Such a revelation would have come strangely from Muhammad's lips had Khadija still been alive and paying his bills.Six years after her death, and after a battle between the Muslims and the ruling tribe of Mecca that had left about sixty-five Muslim women widowed, Muhammad had the revelation that endorsed the taking of up to four wives: "Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice [to so many] then one [only]." Needing to make alliances through marriage with defeated enemies, he had a further revelation exempting himself from the four-wife limit. Every time he took a new wife, a room for her was added to his apartments near Islam's first mosque. Gradually the rooms increased until they housed eight or nine women.Soon there was jealousy, intrigue and scandal. Relatives of lesser wives conspired to discredit the prophet's favorites. Enemies of the new religion hara.s.sed the prophet's wives. Any small incident was an occasion for gossip. One wife brushed the hand of a male dinner guest as she handed him a plate of food; another drew a rude comment as she made her way at night to an outdoor latrine; a third caused all kinds of controversy because her first husband had been Muhammad's adopted son Zaid.Just after these incidents, G.o.d sent his prophet a message telling him to seclude his wives. Some of the wives had been battlefield nurses; others had preached the new faith in the mosque. Now they were expected to stay hidden behind a curtain in their rooms, going out only when shrouded from head to foot.Gradually the rules meant to safeguard the prestige of the prophet's wives came to be applied to other Muslim women. As the Islamic message spread out of Arabia and into neighboring lands, the idea of seclusion found an easy audience. Unlike the Arabians, Persians had long segregated women: in ancient a.s.syria, wives of the n.o.bles veiled as a sign of status, while lower cla.s.ses were obliged to go uncovered. A slave caught veiling herself could be punished by having molten pitch poured over her head. These customs easily drifted back to Islam's Arabian heartland and endured there. In Saudi Arabia most women today still live curtained off from the world. A woman can't check herself into a modern Saudi hotel because, like the prophet's wives, she is supposed to be secluded in her home.But a few miles away, across an invisible desert border, those rules have ceased to apply. In Saudi Arabia's neighboring state, the United Arab Emirates, Muslim women soldiers, their hair tied back in Islamic veils, jump from helicopters and shoulder a.s.sault rifles. A little farther, across the Persian Gulf, the strict Muslims of Iran vote women into Parliament and send them abroad as diplomats. Pakistan was the first Islamic country to elect a woman prime minister; Turkey has had a female economist as its prime minister, while Bangladesh has had women both as prime minister and as leader of the opposition. Instead of adhering to the rules set down for the prophet's wives, these women cite other role models from the history of early Islam. The soldiers look to Nusaybah, who helped save Muhammad's life in battle, standing her ground at his side when the male soldiers fled. The politicians cite Fatima, Muhammad's shy daughter, who spearheaded a political power struggle after the prophet's death.Islam did not have to mean oppression of women. So why were so many Muslim women oppressed?I went to live among the women of Islam on a hot autumn night in 1987. I arrived as a Western reporter, living for each day's news. It took me almost a year to understand that I had arrived at a time when the events of the seventh century had begun to matter much more to the people I lived with than anything they read in the morning paper.It was a Muslim woman, Sahar, who gave me my first clue.Sahar had been The Wall Street Journal's The Wall Street Journal's bureau a.s.sistant in Cairo for two years when I arrived there as its Middle East correspondent. My first year in Egypt was set to the syncopated tattoo of her stilettos, clip-clipping their precarious way across Cairo's broken pavements. She was twenty-five years old, six years my junior, but about a decade ahead of me in poise and sophistication. Her English was formal and precise, and so was her grooming. No matter what story we were covering-a building collapse in a teetering slum, sewage seep at the Pyramids-Sahar always dressed for a soiree. Her makeup was so thick it would have required an archaeological excavation to determine what she really looked like. Her hairdos needed scaffolding. As I shuffled beside her in my sneakers, I felt like a sparrow keeping company with a peac.o.c.k. bureau a.s.sistant in Cairo for two years when I arrived there as its Middle East correspondent. My first year in Egypt was set to the syncopated tattoo of her stilettos, clip-clipping their precarious way across Cairo's broken pavements. She was twenty-five years old, six years my junior, but about a decade ahead of me in poise and sophistication. Her English was formal and precise, and so was her grooming. No matter what story we were covering-a building collapse in a teetering slum, sewage seep at the Pyramids-Sahar always dressed for a soiree. Her makeup was so thick it would have required an archaeological excavation to determine what she really looked like. Her hairdos needed scaffolding. As I shuffled beside her in my sneakers, I felt like a sparrow keeping company with a peac.o.c.k.Sahar's father worked for an American car company in Cairo. She had spent a year in America as a high school exchange student and graduated top of her cla.s.s at the American University in Cairo. She wanted to go to Harvard. Sahar was both rea.s.suringly familiar and depressingly unexotic. I had imagined the Middle East differently. White-robed emirs. Almond-eyed Persians. Camels marking the horizon like squiggles of Arabic calligraphy. An Egyptian yuppie hadn't been part of the picture.At work, as well, it was hard to find the Middle East I'd imagined. I found myself stuck on the flypaper of Arab officialdom, sitting in the gilded salons of deputy a.s.sistant second secretaries to ministers of information, sipping tiny cups of cardamom-scented coffee and listening to lies. These men-urbane, foreign-educated-had no problems talking to a Western woman. But out on the streets, among the ordinary people I really wanted to meet, most men only spoke to women to whom they were related. To them, being approached by a lone woman reporter was either an occasion for embarra.s.sment or an opportunity to test the widely held a.s.sumption that all Western women are wh.o.r.es. I hated the kind of reporting I was being forced to do: the head-of-state interviews, the windy think pieces on U.S. Middie East policy. I'd signed on as Middle East correspondent looking for risk and adventure. But it seemed the biggest danger I'd be facing was boring myself to death.Tony, my husband, who had given up his newspaper job to come with me as a freelancer, wasn't having that problem. A few weeks after our arrival, I looked over Sahara shoulder as she cut out my latest article-"Iraq-Syria Reconciliation Seems Tenuous"-and placed it in a folder alongside Tony's-"Egypt's Camel Corps Roams the Desert Tracking Smugglers." Tony had talked his way onto a patrol with the last Egyptian camel corps. The army wouldn't give approval for a woman to go. In the mine-strewn waters of the Persian Gulf, Tony crewed on a supply boat and came home with tales of turbaned Omani fishermen, Sindbad-style dhows and Persian carpet smugglers. I couldn't join him: the s.h.i.+pping agent wouldn't send a woman to sea.For almost a year I fretted and kicked at the Middle East's closed doors. Then, thanks to Sahar, I looked up and noticed the window that was open only to me.Sahar and I worked side by side in a big bright room of my Nileside apartment. When I wasn't traveling, we sat at desks just feet from each other. As I wrote my articles, Sahar translated items in the Arabic press, scheduled appointments or arranged my visas. After about a year of working alongside her, I felt we'd come to know each other well.Then, one morning at the beginning of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, I opened the door and faced a stranger. The elaborate curls were gone, wrapped away in a severe blue scarf. The makeup was scrubbed off and her shapely dress had been replaced by a dowdy sack. Sahar had adopted the uniform of a Muslim fundamentalist. It was like watching a nature film run in reverse: she had crumpled her bright wings and folded herself into a dull coc.o.o.n.It had been impossible to live for a year in the Middle East and not feel the rumbling of religious revival. All over the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, more women were covering their hair, more men growing beards and heading for the mosque. I'd a.s.sumed that the turn to Islam was the desperate choice of poor people searching for heavenly solace. But Sahar was neither desperate nor poor. She belonged somewhere near the stratosphere of Egypt's meticulously tiered society.On that Ramadan morning I stood at the door staring at her, stunned. Egyptian women had been the first in the Middle East to throw off throw off the veil. In 1923, on their return from a women's suffrage conference in Rome, the pioneer Arab feminists Huda Sharawi and Saiza Nabarawi threw away their coverings at the Cairo railway station, and many in the crowd of women who had come to greet them followed suit. Sahar's mother, growing up under the influence of Sharawi and her supporters, had never veiled. the veil. In 1923, on their return from a women's suffrage conference in Rome, the pioneer Arab feminists Huda Sharawi and Saiza Nabarawi threw away their coverings at the Cairo railway station, and many in the crowd of women who had come to greet them followed suit. Sahar's mother, growing up under the influence of Sharawi and her supporters, had never veiled.The Islamic dress-hi jab-that Sahar had opted to wear in Egypt's tormenting heat signified her acceptance of a legal code that valued her testimony at half the worth of a man's, an inheritance system that allotted her half the legacy of her brother, a future domestic life in which her husband could beat her if she disobeyed him, make her share his attentions with three more wives, divorce her at whim and get absolute custody of her children.During those weeks of Ramadan, I spent hours talking to Sahar about her decision. In reply, Sahar mouthed the slogan of Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood: "Islam Is the Answer." The question, certainly, was clear enough: how was her desperately poor country going to continue to feed, educate and employ a population that increased by a million every nine months? Flirtations with socialism and capitalism had failed to arrest Egypt's economic decline. The Islamic movement wanted to abandon these recently imported ideologies and follow the system set down so long ago in the Koran. If G.o.d had taken the trouble to reveal a complete code of laws, ethics and social organization, Sahar argued, why not follow that code?Sahar had joined a women's study group at a local mosque and had been influenced by the young, veiled, woman instructor. "I would sit there and read in the holy Koran that women should be covered, and then walk out into the street with bare arms," she said. "It just seemed to me that I was dressing that way because it was Western. Why imitate everything Western? Why not try something of our own?"That "something" took many forms. Extremists rampaged down the Pyramids road, torching tourist clubs that served alcohol. In rural Egypt a sheik urged a ban on the sale of zucchini and eggplants, because stuffing the long, fleshy vegetables might give women lewd thoughts. In Cairo a writer mocking that p.r.o.nouncement was gunned down and killed outside his office. Yet, when an earthquake convulsed the city, fundamentalists set up tent camps and soup kitchens, caring for the afflicted with a speed and compa.s.sion that had eluded the government.As the weeks pa.s.sed, Sahar drifted deeper into her new ident.i.ty. I began to adjust my secular life to accommodate her, giving up coffee on Ramadan mornings in case the aroma made it harder for her to get through her fast; treading softly as she made her midday devotions on a prayer mat spread out in our living room. There were minefields everywhere. "What is a maraschino cherry?" she asked, suspiciously eying the contents list on a box of chocolates. "I can't eat anything with alcohol inside." Slowly, I became familiar with the rhythms and taboos of her new life. The evocative names of her festivals started to make their way onto our calendar: the Night of Power; the Feast of Sacrifice, the Hajj.Sahar seemed comfortable with her new self. "I was up most of the night sewing," she said one morning when she'd arrived for work bleary-eyed. Now that she had adopted hijab, she'd given away most of her bright dresses. But she hadn't wanted to abandon the entire contents of her wardrobe. "Everything had something wrong with it-a slit in the back, a tight waistband-it's really a lot of work to salvage a few outfits."Hijab, she said, gave her security on Cairo's bustling streets. "You never hear about veiled girls being raped," she said. In fact, it was unusual to hear about anyone being raped in Cairo, where violent crimes of all kinds were rare by the standards of Western cities. But bottom-fondling and suggestive comments were a hazard, especially in crowded quarters, especially for women in Western dress.Sahar felt hijab also gave her access to an unusual women's network. Prying permits and appointments out of government departments became easier if she sought out other veiled women among the bureaucrats working there. Wanting to see an Islamic sister succeed in her job, they'd give her requests a preferential push. At the same time, she felt easier dealing with men. "They have to deal with my mind, not my body," she said.Dress was only the beginning, she said. The West's soaring crime rate, one-parent families and neglected elderly proved to Sahar the bankruptcy of our secular ways. At the root of it, to her, was Western feminism's insistence on an equality of the s.e.xes that she felt ignored women's essential nature. "Islam doesn't say women are inferior to men; it says they are different," she argued, trying to explain the ban on women judges in some Islamic courts. "Women are more emotional than men, because G.o.d has designed them to care for children. So, in court, a woman might show mercy where logic demands harshness."Talking to Sahar gave me a feeling of deja vu. When I was fourteen years old, a convent girl in a Sydney Catholic school, the deputy head nun called us to a.s.sembly and read us the riot act. Some of us had been seen in the streets wearing our school sweaters without blazers over them. Sweaters, she said, were indecent, since boys would be able to make out the shape of our b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The school uniform included a blazer, and if any of us ventured out of the grounds in a sweater without a blazer over it, she would know what kind of girls we were. That same nun insisted we wear hats in church. Quoting St. Paul, she told us that woman, as the instrument of man's downfall in Eden, wasn't fit to appear bareheaded in the house of the Lord.I thought the nun was a fossil. I stopped going to church as soon as I understood how Catholicism's ban on birth control and divorce could ruin women's lives. Sahar, a woman of my own generation, had made a choice exactly opposite to mine. Something was going on here, and I determined to try to understand it.I started with Arabic, the language of the Koran. Only one in five Muslims is an Arab; yet Arabic is the language in which the world's more than one billion Muslims-a fifth of the world's population-talk to G.o.d.The Arabic language is as tribal as the desert culture that created it. Each word trails a host of relatives with the same three-letter cl.u.s.ter of consonants as its root. Use almost any word in Arabic, and a host of uninvited meanings barge into the conversation. I learned that one of the words for woman, hormah, hormah, comes from the same root as the words for both "holy, sacrosanct," and "sinful, forbidden." The word for mother, comes from the same root as the words for both "holy, sacrosanct," and "sinful, forbidden." The word for mother, umm, umm, is the root of the words for "source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion." In the beginning was the word, and the word, in Arabic, was magnificently ambiguous. is the root of the words for "source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion." In the beginning was the word, and the word, in Arabic, was magnificently ambiguous.The nature of the Arabic language meant that a precise translation of the Koran was un.o.btainable. I found myself referring to two quite different English interpretations-George Sale's for a feel for the poetry of the work, and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's for a clearer sense of what the text actually said about s.e.x and marriage, work and holy war. But even when the language was clear the message was often mixed. "Respect women, who have borne you," the Koran says. But if wives are disobedient, "admonish them, send them to beds apart, and scourge them." To try to reconcile such conflicting instructions, I sat in on cla.s.ses at the new women's religious schools springing up throughout the region, and learned about the dozens of women who shaped the early history of Islam. Again, ambivalence. Women behind the curtain of seclusion; women at the forefront of Islamic holy war.Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Algeria and Sudan, Islamic fundamentalists were struggling into power. In Egypt and Jordan powerful minorities pushed their governments toward sharia sharia-literally, the road to the water hole, or the straight path of Islamic law. Muslims migrating to the West also were making demands: ban offensive books, let our daughters wear veils to school, give us s.e.x-segregated cla.s.srooms.Was it possible to reclaim the positive messages in the Koran and Islamic history, and devise some kind of Muslim feminism? Could Muslim fundamentalists live with Western liberals, or would accommodating each other cost both of us our principles?To find the answers, I did something so obvious I couldn't believe it had taken me a year to get around to it. I started talking to women.

Chapter 1.

THE H HOLY V VEIL"Tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent and to draw their veils over their bosoms."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE LIGHT.

As the bus full of women inched and squealed its slow way through Tehran traffic toward Khomeini's home, I was the only one aboard who wasn't weeping. We eased to a stop beside a black-bannered alley. The keening gained pitch, like a whistling kettle reaching the boil. At the end of the alley was Khomeini's house and the small adjoining husseinya husseinya where he'd prayed and preached until just before his death five weeks earlier. Drenched with sweat and trying not to trip on my chador, I filed off the bus and joined the tight black phalanx, making its way down the alley with sobbing chants of "O Khomeini! O Imam!" where he'd prayed and preached until just before his death five weeks earlier. Drenched with sweat and trying not to trip on my chador, I filed off the bus and joined the tight black phalanx, making its way down the alley with sobbing chants of "O Khomeini! O Imam!"

Ahead of us, a group of men entered the husseinya. They were factory workers from the city of Mashad, rubbing their tear-stained faces with callused fists. The balcony from which Khomeini used to speak had been hastily gla.s.sed in since his death because mourners had been s.h.i.+nnying up over the railing to kiss and fondle his chair. Our group turned aside from the husseinya to a curtained entrance flanked by female Revolutionary Guards. Under their chadors-the big black squares of fabric tossed over the head and falling to the ankles-the guards wore the same olive-drab uniform with its emblem of a rifle, Koran and clenched-fist as their male counterparts. Behind the curtain, Khomeini's widow waited to serve us tea.

In one corner of a cracked concrete courtyard, she sat flanked by her daughter and daughter-in-law. With chadors pulled tight around their squatting figures, they looked like a trio of ninepins waiting for a bowling ball. Khomeini's wife Khadija, at seventy-five, had the crinkly face of a kindly grandmother. She peered through wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, smiling as she reached up a gnarled hand to greet me. When she held my hand and patted it gently, her chador slid backward to reveal a half inch of silver roots topped by a tumble of carrot-colored curls. Until her husband's death, Khadija had dyed her hair.

Somehow, I'd never imagined that the stony-faced ayatollah had a wife-certainly not one with vamp-red hair. And I hadn't pictured him with the cute, giggling great-grandchildren who romped around us in the carpet-strewn courtyard. "I know that when you saw him he looked very serious, even angry," said Zahra Mostafavi, Khomeini's forty-seven-year-old daughter. "But he wasn't like that with us. With children he made so many jokes. He used to let us hide under his robes when we were playing hide-and-seek." According to Zahra, Khomeini had been quite the sensitive, New Age man, getting up in the night when his five children were infants to take turns giving them their bottles and never asking his wife to do anything for him-"not even to bring him so much as a gla.s.s of water." The family snapshots being pa.s.sed showed the ayatollah laughing merrily as a plump-fisted toddler tried to aim a spoonful of food at his greatgrandfather's mouth.

We squatted alongside the Khomeini womenfolk on red Persian rugs spread over the concrete. "The carpets are all borrowed. The family doesn't own anything this good," explained one of the Revolutionary Guards who had worked as household help as well as bodyguard to Khadija for six years. Handing us plastic plates with pictures of ducks on them, she offered dates and slices of watermelon. "I'm sorry we have received you so simply," Khadija said. "But all through his eighty-seven years of life my husband insisted on simplicity."

Ruhollah, an impoverished clerical student from the dusty village of Khomein, had been twenty-seven when he asked for the hand of fifteen-year-old Khadija Saqafi. Her father, a prominent ayatollah (the word, meaning "reflection of G.o.d," is applied to the most learned of the s.h.i.+te clergy), didn't think much of the match. But Khadija felt differently. She had glimpsed her suitor when, wrapped in a chador, she brought him a gla.s.s of tea. She convinced her father to agree to the match after relating a dream in which the prophets proclaimed Ruhollah from Khomein as destined to become a great religious leader.

She had been his only wife. Her public profile had been so low that most Iranians didn't even know her real name. "Someone made a mistake once and wrote that her name was Batul, which was actually the name of her servant," Zahra explained. "My mother hates hates the name Batul." Still, the name stuck, because the ayatollah would have frowned on calling attention to his wife by asking for a correction. Despite her public anonymity, insiders knew that Khadija's influence counted. Men who wanted Khomeini's ear, even on matters of state policy, would have their wives raise the issue with Khadija. the name Batul." Still, the name stuck, because the ayatollah would have frowned on calling attention to his wife by asking for a correction. Despite her public anonymity, insiders knew that Khadija's influence counted. Men who wanted Khomeini's ear, even on matters of state policy, would have their wives raise the issue with Khadija.

The Khomeinis' boxy, two-floor house contrasted sharply with the opulent green marble palace of the former shah, now open nearby as the Museum of Reversion and Admonition. In the Khomeinis' house, green paint peeled from the walls and a torn screen dangled from a window. In one bare room, the thin mats that served as beds were rolled up and piled in a corner. In the kitchen, an old-fas.h.i.+oned stove and an electric samovar were the only appliances. "Once, when the imam saw that two pomegranate seeds had fallen in the sink, he reminded me not to waste food," said the Revolutionary Guard who had been waiting on us. "He was always reminding us to turn the lights off when we left a room."

Every small reminiscence brought a new flood of tears from the other guests. One of the loudest weepers, a woman from Lebanon's Hezbollah-the Party of G.o.d-rose to her feet and launched into an emotional speech of thanks to the imam's widow for admitting us to the hallowed precincts of the imam's home. "O G.o.d, please send us patience," she sobbed. "We have come to this place where the great imam used to breathe. We have all gathered here in this holy place to show our allegiance to his way."

The call to sunset prayer, wafting over the courtyard wall from a nearby mosque, was our signal that the tea party was over. In the corner, Khadija was already on her feet, on her way to wash for prayers. As we filed back into the bus, which nosed back through the traffic, the Hezbollah woman was still declaiming. "We have to divide our lives into two parts-before and after Imam's death," she sobbed. "We haven't yet had time to understand the loss we've suffered."

I, for one, hadn't had time to understand it. After the U. S. Emba.s.sy occupation in 1979, Iran had been virtually closed to reporters from the American media. The rarely granted visas had usually allowed no more than thirty-six hours in the country to report on a specific event. Before Khomeini's death, I'd been allowed in only once, in 1988, to cover the funerals of the 290 Iranian civilians killed when the cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus on a scheduled flight across the Persian Gulf. shot down an Iranian Airbus on a scheduled flight across the Persian Gulf.

But I needed to understand. What was happening to Muslim women from Algeria to Afghanistan had its roots here, in that austere, boxy house in North Tehran. Somehow, Khomeini had persuaded women that the wearing of a medieval cloak was a revolutionary act. Something in his message had brought thousands of women into the streets to face the shah's army and risk their lives calling for the return of a code of laws that allowed child marriage, polygamy and wife beating.

Khomeini spoke with a voice that drew its authority from the earliest days of Islam. Khomeini was a s.h.i.+te, a member of the minority branch of Islam that had broken with the mainstream in the years following the prophet Muhammad's death. The majority of the early Muslims agreed that their leader should be appointed by consensus of the elders, as was the long tradition of the desert. Since the Arabic word for "tradition" is sunnah, they became known as the Sunni Muslims. A minority, however, felt that Muhammad's successor should come from within his own family, and chose his son-in-law and cousin, Ali. They were the s.h.i.+at Ali, or Partisans of Ali, known today as s.h.i.+tes. Because of their origins as dissenters, s.h.i.+tes hold it an obligation to question those in power, and revolt against them if necessary. And because their origins lay in the defeat of Ali and his sons, s.h.i.+tes' most profound identification is with the beaten and poor. Khomeini tapped all of those deep convictions when he launched the revolution against the shah in 1978.

When Khomeini died in June 1989, Iran opened its doors to any journalist who showed up. After the frantic funeral, Hashemi Raf-sanjani held a rare press conference for foreign reporters. I went, wearing a black chador. Because such events are always televised in Iran, I knew the press conference organizers wouldn't let me near a microphone with so much as a hair showing. But when I finally got to put my question about the shape of the post-Khomeini power structure, Rafsanjani gazed at me, a hint of a smile playing on his moon-shaped face. "I have a question for you," he said. "Why do you wear that heavy veil when a simple scarf would do?"

The huge, old-fas.h.i.+oned cameras of Iranian TV swung in my direction. What was I to say? That the chador was great camouflage for getting into places I wasn't supposed to go? That I found its billowing folds less appallingly hot than the scarf-and-coat alternative? That just a day earlier the same dress had been deemed inadequate by one of the functionaries from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance? (I'd been running to board a helicopter to get to Khomeini's graveside, and the gust from the rotor had momentarily blown the chador aside, revealing my trousers and s.h.i.+rt beneath. "Cover yourself!" the official yelled, his face full of loathing.) Rafsanjani's question was disingenuous. It took more than a simple scarf to escape the eighty-lash penalty with which Iran threatened women, even foreigners, who flouted the Islamic dress code. Along with hair, all skin except face and hands and all curves of the body had to be concealed. For a second, I wondered if I should do as the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had done, in an interview with Khomeini, and rip off the garment she'd dubbed a "filthy medieval rag."

"I'm wearing it," I said, "in a spirit of mutual respect."

Rafsanjani looked taken aback. The two other Western women reporters at the press conference rolled their eyes. Later, I wished I'd spelled out more clearly what I'd meant to convey: that if I were prepared to respect Iranian society's requirements, Iran should be prepared to respect mine. But to most Iranians, watching by the millions at home on TV for a hint about what their lives would be like after Khomeini, what I had said wasn't important. What mattered was that Rafsanjani had sent them a signal of moderation. In the bazaar, the riyal surged against the dollar, as word went round that Rafsanjani had told a woman reporter she could take off her chador. To the traders, any signal of liberalism meant good news for business.

To one or two people, what I had said did did matter. That night a member of Iran's small Christian community called on me at my hotel, berating me for missing a chance to speak out against hijab on behalf of all the women who hated being forced to wear it. And a few days later Khomeini's daughter Zahra invited me to a conference sponsored by the Women's Society of the Islamic Republic of Iran t.i.tled "Aspects of His Highness Imam Khomeini's Personality." I studied the t.i.tle with bemus.e.m.e.nt. The only aspects of His Highness Imam Khomeini's personality I was familiar with were his penchants for condemning novelists to death, dispatching young boys to the war front as human minesweepers and permitting little girls to be married off at the age of nine. matter. That night a member of Iran's small Christian community called on me at my hotel, berating me for missing a chance to speak out against hijab on behalf of all the women who hated being forced to wear it. And a few days later Khomeini's daughter Zahra invited me to a conference sponsored by the Women's Society of the Islamic Republic of Iran t.i.tled "Aspects of His Highness Imam Khomeini's Personality." I studied the t.i.tle with bemus.e.m.e.nt. The only aspects of His Highness Imam Khomeini's personality I was familiar with were his penchants for condemning novelists to death, dispatching young boys to the war front as human minesweepers and permitting little girls to be married off at the age of nine.

The venue for the conference was Tehran's Revolution Hotel. A prerevolutionary gla.s.s-walled elevator, designed to give a view of the swimming pool, had been newspapered over for the duration of the conference, so that religious women wouldn't be offended by the sight of glistening male torsos. Since the revolution, only men are allowed to swim in public.

It took about five minutes at the first evening's ice-breaking c.o.c.ktail party-fruit-juice c.o.c.ktails only; no un-Islamic alcohol-to realize that I was odd woman out amid a female Who's Who of Iran's exported revolution. The delegates from Lebanon included wives of the men most often named as heads of the hostage takers. The Turkish contingent included a student who had become famous after being expelled from architecture school for insisting on wearing an Islamic scarf to cla.s.s. There were, as well, Muslim militants from Pakistan, Sudan, Guinea, Tanzania, India and South Africa. It was a group with a lot of enemies, and the hotel was surrounded by a cordon of armed Revolutionary Guards. No one went in or out without permission.

The party dress code was basic black-layers of it. Chadors were only the finis.h.i.+ng touch over long pants, socks, calf-length tunics and hoods called magnehs magnehs-a circle of fabric like a nun's wimple that falls over head and shoulders, leaving just a hole for the face. As the black-cloaked figures milled around me, I began to feel I'd been locked up by mistake in some kind of convent from h.e.l.l.

The party chat left me a little at a loss. "Of course, Hong Kong people are brainwashed by colonialist-Zionists and don't feel any grief at the pa.s.sing away of the imam," said a diminutive Chinese woman named Khatima Ma, who introduced herself as a fellow reporter, working for the Hong Kong Muslim Herald. Muslim Herald. "The enemies of Islam, led by the Americans, want to see the Iranian nation without a leader. Everybody expected turmoil here but, thanks be to G.o.d, we don't see it. Even though Hong Kong media is completely under the control of the Zionists, they haven't been able to create any story about trouble in Iran." "The enemies of Islam, led by the Americans, want to see the Iranian nation without a leader. Everybody expected turmoil here but, thanks be to G.o.d, we don't see it. Even though Hong Kong media is completely under the control of the Zionists, they haven't been able to create any story about trouble in Iran."

I asked the Turkish architecture student, now veiled except for her eyes and nose, why a Muslim country like Turkey was so insistent about secular dress. "You know, of course, that there are two kinds of Islam-American Islam and Muhammad's Islam-and in Turkey we have American Islam. In American Islam, religion is separate from politics, because it suits the superpower interests. Our government is very much afraid of Islamic revolution, because it wants to grovel to the West."

I had been a.s.signed an interpreter for the conference, a tall, pale young woman named Hamideh Marefat. When I complimented her on her excellent English, she told me she had perfected it during her time "in the nest."

"Excuse me?"

"In the nest. The nest of spies-the American Emba.s.sy," she said. Hamideh had been part of the black-veiled horde that occupied the emba.s.sy and held its personnel captive for 444 days. Her job had been to translate the hostages' mail. I asked her if she'd ever felt sympathy for them. "Sometimes," she said, when she read the letters from American schoolchildren, sent to cheer up the hostages. "But I knew they were spies who had tried to ruin this country. I was disappointed when we released them. Personally, I thought they should be executed."

A South African student from the University of Cape Town nodded in wistful agreement. Then she brightened. "At least, we will certainly execute Rushdie." She had helped found a mosque in Cape Town dedicated to teaching "the line of the Imam." But there had been a recent setback when two of the mosque's leading lights were put on trial for treason.

The South African kept glancing uncomfortably at her Islamic sister from Guinea. This tall, stately woman would have stood out in any crowd, but in this one she was particularly eye-catching. Instead of shapeless black, she wore a length of lilac fabric wrapped closely around her sinuous curves. An end of the fabric draped loosely over her head, leaving most of one smooth coppery shoulder bare. Naked toes peeped from under the hem of her lovely robe. Over the next few days I would notice one or another of the Islamic sisters standing on tippy-toe, trying to tug the robe up over that shoulder or to wrap the end piece more closely around her hair. Guineans and Iranians clearly had a different definition of hijab.

The word "hijab" literally means "curtain," and it is used in the Koran as an instruction to believers of Muhammad's day on how they should deal with the prophet's wives: "If you ask his wives for anything, speak to them from behind a curtain. This is purer for your hearts and their hearts." The revelation on hijab came to Muhammad on one of his wedding nights, just as he was about to bed Zeinab, the most controversial of his brides.

Islamic scholars generally agree that the marriage to Zeinab caused the most serious of several scandals surrounding the prophet's ever growing number of wives. Visiting the house of his adopted son, Muhammad had glimpsed the young man's wife only partially dressed. The woman was beautiful, and Muhammad quickly turned away, muttering a prayer against temptation. Believing Muhammad desired his wife, the young man divorced her. Muhammad's subsequent marriage to Zeinab provoked uproar in the community, since it violated the rules of incest already set down in the Koran. The uproar subsided only when Muhammad had a new revelation proclaiming all adoptions invalid, and therefore exempting himself from the rule that barred a father from marrying the wife of his son.

The revelation of hijab put the prophet's wives, including Zeinab, into seclusion where they would be safer from scandal. The Koran's instructions for women outside the prophet's household weren't as severe: 'Tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms."

In Cairo, when Sahar began wearing hijab, I dug out this quote and argued with her that it made no reference at all to covering hair. What it seemed to me to be asking was that women conform to conservative norms of dress-in our day, to shun see-through blouses and skimpy miniskirts. But Sahar replied that it was necessary to go beyond the Koran for guidance on such matters. She said that the sunnah, the "trodden path" of Muhammad-those things which he had said, done or permitted to be done in his presence-made it clear that "that which is apparent" meant only a woman's face and hands. The rest of her "adornment"-including ankles, wrists, neck-should be hidden from all men except her husband and a carefully specified list of close male relatives to whom the Koran forbids marriage. That is, her father, brothers, father-in-law, nephews, sons and stepsons. She can also be unveiled, the Koran says, before prep.u.b.escent boys and "male attendants who lack vigor," which in Muhammad's era probably meant eunuchs or old slaves.

But Sahar's interpretation wasn't universal. Some Muslim women believed, as I did, that the religion only required them to dress within contemporary limits of modesty. Others insisted on going beyond a covered head to gloved hands and veiled faces, arguing that the corruption of the modern world made more extreme measures necessary now than in the prophet's day.

At Cairo airport, the great crossroads of the Islamic world, it was possible to see almost every interpretation of Islamic dress. Women from Pakistan, on their way to jobs in the Gulf, floated by in their deliciously comfortable salivar kameez salivar kameez-silky tunics drifting low over billowing pants with long shawls of matching fabric tossed loosely over their heads. Saudi women trod carefully behind their husbands, peering from behind gauzy face veils and 360-degree black cloaks that made them look, as Guy de Maupa.s.sant once wrote, "like death out for a walk." Afghani women also wore 360-degree coverings, called chadris chadris-colorful crinkly shrouds with an oblong of embroidered lattice work over the eyes. Women from Dubai wore stiff, birdlike masks of black and gold that beaked over the nose but left their luminous, treacle-colored eyes exposed. Some Palestinians and Egyptians wore dull-colored, floor-length b.u.t.ton-through coats and white head-scarves; others wore bright calf-length skirts with matching scarves held in place by headbands of seed pearls.

The oddest interpretation of Islamic dress I encountered was in the arid expanse of the Algerian Sahara, where the nomadic tribes known as Tuareg hold to the tradition that it is men who should veil their faces after p.u.b.erty, while women go barefaced. As soon as they are old enough to shave their beards and keep the Ramadan fast, the men must cover all but their eyes in a veil made of yards of indigo cloth. "We warriors veil our faces so that the enemy may not know what is in our minds, peace or war, but women have nothing to hide," is how one Tuareg man explained the custom. The Tuareg are Muslims, but their interpretation of the faith gives women considerable s.e.xual freedom before marriage and allows close platonic friends.h.i.+ps with men after they wed. A Tuareg proverb says: "Men and women toward each other are for the eyes, and for the heart, and not only for the bed." Other Muslims find Tuareg customs close to heresy. In fact, the word "Tuareg" comes from the Arabic for "The Abandoned of G.o.d."

Where women wore the veil, there was money to be made in Islamic fas.h.i.+on. Cairo had the Salam Shopping Center for Veiled Women, a three-floor clothing emporium that stocked nothing but Islamically correct outfits. Most of the store was devoted to what the management thought of as "training hijab"-color-coordinated long skirts and scarves, long jackets studded with rhinestones and bulging with oversized shoulder pads-that covered the Islamic minimum. Ideally, explained one manager, customers who started wearing such clothes, would gradually become more enlightened and graduate to dowdier colors and longer, more shapeless garments, ending up completely swathed in black cloaks, gloves and face veils. But these plain outfits, which cost around ten dollars, were hard to find amid the racks of more profitable "high-fas.h.i.+on" hijab, where the cost for an Islamically correct evening outfit could run to three or four times a civil servant's monthly salary.

In Beirut, in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Great Prophet Mosque, Hezbollah established an Islamic-fas.h.i.+on factory to cash in on the growing worldwide demand for hijab. "My Islam isn't a bunch of fighters. It's a revolution of culture, of ideas," enthused the factory manager, a rotund woman who introduced herself as Hajjia Zahra. Flipping through a German couture catalog, she showed me how the latest styles in pockets, zips and sleeves could be grafted onto the long, figure-hiding dresses the factory turned out by the hundreds. Around us, bolts of cloth soared to the ceiling. She explained that the bright bales, the reds and yellows, would be used for Hezbollah's hot-selling line of children's clothes. The muted browns, grays and mossy greens were for the women's fas.h.i.+ons. "These are calm colors," she explained. "Part of the philosophy of Islamic dress is for a woman to project an aura of calm and tranquillity."

Hijab was the most obvious sign of the Islamic revival that had swept up Sahar and so many other young women. It began in 1967, after Egypt's catastrophic loss to Israel in the Six-Day War. To explain the humiliation, Muslim philosophers pointed to the secularism of Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser's government, and urged Egyptians to return to the Islamic laws they had abandoned. Slowly, the number of veiled women began to increase.

But the real surge came with Iran's theocratic revolution, when donning hijab became a political as well as a religious act. In 1935 the shah's father had banned the chador. Reza Shah wanted his country to look modern and he thought the ancient black cloak didn't. But devout women, especially the elderly, couldn't suddenly make so drastic a change. In her memoir, Daughter of Persia, Daughter of Persia, Sattareh Farman Farmaian writes of her mother's desolation. "When my mother had learned that she was to lose the age-old modesty of her veil, she was beside herself. She and all traditional people regarded Reza's order as the worst thing he had yet done-worse than his attacking the rights of the clergy; worse even than his confiscations and murders." Fearing the shah's displeasure, her husband ordered her to go out in public unveiled. "The next day, weeping with rage and humiliation, she sequestered herself in her bedroom.... As she wept she struggled futilely to hide her beautiful ma.s.ses of waist-length black hair under the inadequate protection of a small French cloche." Sattareh Farman Farmaian writes of her mother's desolation. "When my mother had learned that she was to lose the age-old modesty of her veil, she was beside herself. She and all traditional people regarded Reza's order as the worst thing he had yet done-worse than his attacking the rights of the clergy; worse even than his confiscations and murders." Fearing the shah's displeasure, her husband ordered her to go out in public unveiled. "The next day, weeping with rage and humiliation, she sequestered herself in her bedroom.... As she wept she struggled futilely to hide her beautiful ma.s.ses of waist-length black hair under the inadequate protection of a small French cloche."

For others, the so-called liberating edict became a form of imprisonment. Men who had just begun allowing their daughters to attend school revoked their permission when it meant girls walking to cla.s.s uncovered. Women who disobeyed the shah's order and ventured into the streets veiled risked having their coverings ripped off and scissored by soldiers. Chador-wearing women were forbidden to use public transportation and denied entry to many stores. Rather than risk such humiliation, many women simply stayed inside. Khomeini's wife Khadija, for one, didn't leave her house at all. Such confinement was a particular hards.h.i.+p at a time when most homes didn't have bathrooms and women gathered to bathe and socialize during the women's hours at local bathhouses-hamams. The ban was compulsory from 1935 until 1941, when draconian enforcement eased, but unveiling continued to be encouraged and women who wished to veil were derided as backward. The ban was compulsory from 1935 until 1941, when draconian enforcement eased, but unveiling continued to be encouraged and women who wished to veil were derided as backward.

As revolutionary pressure mounted in the late 1970s, wearing the chador became a symbol of protest against the shah and his Western backers. Some clerics advocated it for predictable reasons. If all women wore it, reasoned the Iranian cleric Ibrahim Amini, wives "could rest a.s.sured that their husbands, when not at home, would not encounter a lewd woman who might draw his attention away." In Britain, the Muslim scholar Shabbir Akhtar came up with an alternative rationale. The aim of the veil, he wrote, "is to create a truly erotic culture in which one dispenses with the need for the artificial excitement that p.o.r.nography provides." In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male s.e.xuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male s.e.x urge.

Neither of these arguments carried much weight with young intellectuals such as my Iranian interpreter, Hamideh Marefat. For her, wearing the chador was, first and foremost, a political act. Growing up in a middle-cla.s.s home, she had never thought of veiling until she started attending clandestine lectures by a charismatic young intellectual named Ali Shariati. Shariati, Iranian-born and Sorbonne-educated, married his knowledge of Marxism to his own Iranian s.h.i.+te Islam, with its roots in rebellion against the status quo after Muhammad's death-and came up with a revolutionary creed designed to uplift the ma.s.ses and challenge despots. Western dress, he said, was a form of imperialism, turning women's beauty into a product of capitalism to be bought and sold, at the same time as it made third-world women dependent consumers of fast-obsolete fas.h.i.+ons. Muslim women, he urged, should a.s.sert their freedom by adopting Islamic dress. To young women such as Hamideh Marefat, the chador served much the same purpose as the denim overalls worn by the militant American feminist Andrea Dworkin. To Hamideh, the chador symbolized liberation. She put it on a year before the Iranian revolution of 1978, and when she occupied the U. S. Emba.s.sy, she wore it like a flag.

But by the time I met her, ten years later, the revolutionary thrill had started to wear off. Every time we got out of the sight of men, she'd shrug off the big black cloth with relief. "I wish I'd never put it on," she confided one day. "In the beginning, it was important, to prove your revolutionary views. But now we don't have to prove that. You can be a revolutionary with just a scarf and coat."

When I went to visit her at home, Hamideh looked preppy in pleated skirts, silk blouses and discreet gold jewelry. But when she went out, she donned the full uniform of revolutionary Islam. For me, it was easier to deal with Hamideh in her chador. The things she said somehow seemed less jolting coming out of that anonymous darkness. In her family's tastefully furnished living room, as we chatted about neutral subjects like Persian poetry or the difficulty of meeting eligible men, it was easy to begin to see her as just another smart woman my own age with whom I had a lot in common. Then she would run a hand through her bobbed chestnut hair and deliver an opinion devastating in its extremism. "Israel has to be obliterated," she would say, reaching for her teacup and taking a delicate sip. "I'm looking forward to taking part in the war for its destruction."

While Sunni Muslims a.s.sume a direct relations.h.i.+p between believers and G.o.d, s.h.i.+tes believe in the mediation of a highly trained clergy. Usually, each s.h.i.+te chooses a high-ranking clerical thinker and follows any religious ruling, or fatwa, fatwa, from that person. Hamideh had chosen Khomeini, which meant that she ordered every detail of her life according to the opinions he set out in his eighteen volumes of religious interpretation. "Some ayatollahs say women must wear gloves," she explained, "but Imam Khomeini says that the lower part of the hand can be uncovered." 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, citing the prophet's meetings with mixed groups of men and women, had no problems with the female speaking voice. from that person. Hamideh had chosen Khomeini, which meant that she ordered every detail of her life according to the opinions he set out in his eighteen volumes of religious interpretation. "Some ayatollahs say women must wear gloves," she explained, "but Imam Khomeini says that the lower part of the hand can be uncovered." 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, citing the prophet's meetings with mixed groups of men and women, had no problems with the female speaking voice.

I asked Hamideh if Khomeini could ever be wrong in a religious ruling. "For sure," she said. "We don't believe any human being is infallible. But if I follow his fatwa, and it's wrong-say I kill someone he orders me to, and the person is innocent-the person I killed will go to paradise, and the sin of the killing is on the one who issued the fatwa, not on me."

Now that Khomeini was dead, Hamideh felt she couldn't abandon the chador. To suddenly stop wearing it after his death might look as if her commitment to his line had weakened. Articles in newspapers constantly reminded women that the chador was a "trench against Western values." And men in positions of power believed it. One friend had gone to an interview for a government job covering her hair and curves with an Islamically impeccable coat and scarf. "You're naked," the interviewer snarled, and declined to hire her.

At first, I'd naively a.s.sumed that hijab would at least free women from the tyranny of the beauty industry. But at the Iranian Women's Conference, locked up day and night with a hotelful of Muslim radicals, I soon learned I'd been mistaken.

I'd asked Hamideh to arrange a meeting for me with the women of Lebanon's Hezbollah. The group's strongholds were the Bekaa Valley and Beirut's southern suburbs-no-go areas for Western journalists since the kidnapping of the a.s.sociated Press bureau chief, Terry Anderson. I wanted to ask about Anderson, who was spending his days chained to a radiator in a lightless Beirut bas.e.m.e.nt. To meet the women said to be married to his captors seemed like the best chance I'd ever have to get information for his desperate family.

In the end, I learned nothing about his plight, but meeting the women was instructive in other ways. They invited me to join them that evening for tea in their suite, provided that I promised not to name them in any articles I wrote. When the door opened to my knock, I thought I had the wrong room. The woman in front of me had frosted blond hair streaming to her waist. She wore a silk negligee with a deep plunge neckline. On the bed behind her, another woman lay languidly in a bust-hugging, slit-sided scarlet satin nightgown. Through the filmy fabrics, it was obvious that their bodies were completely hairless, like Barbie dolls. It was, they explained, sunnat, sunnat, or Islamically recommended, for married women to remove all body hair every twenty days. The traditional depilatory was a paste of sugar and lemon that tugged the hairs out by the roots. Muslim men, they said, also should remove their body hair. For men, the recommended time between depilation is forty days. or Islamically recommended, for married women to remove all body hair every twenty days. The traditional depilatory was a paste of sugar and lemon that tugged the hairs out by the roots. Muslim men, they said, also should remove their body hair. For men, the recommended time between depilation is forty days.

It took a few minutes to recognize the bleached blonde as the same woman who had wailed the emotional eulogy at the Khomeini house. When I mentioned my surprise at the way she looked, she laughed. "This is how we are at home," she said, striking a seductive pose. "Islam encourages us to be beautiful for our husbands." I suddenly understood why Khadija, Khomeini's widow, had hennaed her hair to carrot-orange, and why an inch of gray had grown in since she stopped doing it on her husband's death.

Her daughter Zahra somehow didn't seem like the carrot-curl type, or the plunge-neck negligee type, for that matter. Under her chador, she wore matronly twin sets and tweedy skirts-donnish clothes for a donnish woman who taught philosophy at the University of Tehran.

It took me three years and many meetings before she relaxed enough to allow me to see her in anything but her chador. Even in a room full of women, she rarely let the chador fall from a clenched-fist grip that kept it pulled down past her brows and up over her lips. The style led to confusing graphics in the Women's Society literature. The Society liked to promote its prominent women-its members of Parliament, artists and authors. But in photographs everyone came out looking exactly the same: a little white triangle, apex down, inside a big black triangle, apex up.

Once, during the Tehran conference, Zahra momentarily let go of her chador, revealing some lip and chin. Someone's flash bulb popped. Consternation. Could whoever had taken the picture please hand over the film? The Women's Society would develop it, excise the offending picture and send back the rest of the shots on the roll, along with an appropriate picture of Mrs. Mostafavi. All eyes in the room turned to me. As a journalist, I was the prime suspect. Flapping my chador to prove there was nothing up my sleeve, I explained that I didn't have a camera with me. A sheepi