Nine Parts of Desire Part 8

Across the border in Saudi Arabia, even the notion of a debate is anathema. Saudi Arabia has virtually no political culture. "We don't need democracy, we have our own 'desert democracy,' " explained Nabila al-Ba.s.sam, a Saudi woman who ran her own clothing and gift store in Dhahran. What she was referring to was an ancient desert tradition known as the majlis, majlis, weekly gatherings hosted by members of the ruling family, where any of their subjects were free to present pet.i.tions or air grievances. 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. weekly gatherings hosted by members of the ruling family, where any of their subjects were free to present pet.i.tions or air grievances. 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.

Nabila told me of a friend who had recently pet.i.tioned King Fahd's wife to allow the legal import of hair-salon equipment. Technically, hairdressing salons were banned in Saudi Arabia, where the religious establishment frowned on anything that drew women from their houses. In fact, thriving salons owned by prominent Saudis and staffed by Filipina or Syrian beauticians did a roaring trade. "My friend is tired of having to run her business in secret," Nabila said. But so far she had received no response to her pet.i.tion. "Pet.i.tions do do work," said Nabila. "But in this society you have to do things on a friendly basis, like a family. You can ask for things, but you can't just reach out and take things as if it's your right." A rejected pet.i.tioner had no choice but to accept the al-Sauds' decision. With no free press and no way to mobilize public opinion, the al-Sauds ruled as they liked. work," said Nabila. "But in this society you have to do things on a friendly basis, like a family. You can ask for things, but you can't just reach out and take things as if it's your right." A rejected pet.i.tioner had no choice but to accept the al-Sauds' decision. With no free press and no way to mobilize public opinion, the al-Sauds ruled as they liked.

If there was one thing that Saudi women were prepared to criticize about their lot, it was the ban that prevented them from driving. During the Gulf War the sight of pony-tailed American ser-vicewomen driving trucks and Humvees on Saudi Arabian roads invigorated a long-simmering debate on the issue. The Americans weren't the only women drivers the war had brought. Many Kuwaiti women, fleeing the Iraqi invasion, had arrived in Saudi Arabia unveiled, at the wheel of the family Mercedes.

By October 1990, articles about Saudi women seeking the right to drive had begun appearing in the heavily censored press. Women quoted in these articles said they'd been alarmed to realize that they wouldn't have been able to transport their children to safety as the Kuwaiti women had done. Some raised economic issues, calculating that twenty percent of average Saudi family income was spent on drivers, who had to be fed and housed as well as paid a salary. Saudi Arabia had 300,000 full-time private chauffeurs-a staggering number, but still far short of providing a driver for every Saudi woman who needed mobility. Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some proponents of allowing women to drive played the Islam card, pointing out how undesirable it was for a woman to be forced to have a strange man as part of her household, and to drive around alone with him.

On a Tuesday afternoon in early November, forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, converged on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, they dismissed their drivers. About a quarter then slid into the drivers' seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as pa.s.sengers. They drove off in convoy down the busy thoroughfare. A few blocks later, the cane-wielding mutawain mutawain of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at intersections, ordering the women out of the drivers' seats. Soon, regular police arrived, and the women asked them to see that they weren't taken off to the mutawain headquarters. There was a scuffle between the mutawain, who yelled that the women had committed a religious crime, and the traffic police, who said the matter was their affair. In the end, the police drove the women's cars to police headquarters with a mutawa in the pa.s.senger seat and the women in the back. of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at intersections, ordering the women out of the drivers' seats. Soon, regular police arrived, and the women asked them to see that they weren't taken off to the mutawain headquarters. There was a scuffle between the mutawain, who yelled that the women had committed a religious crime, and the traffic police, who said the matter was their affair. In the end, the police drove the women's cars to police headquarters with a mutawa in the pa.s.senger seat and the women in the back.

The women who had taken part in the demonstration were all from what Saudis call "good families"-wealthy, prominent clans with close ties to the ruling al-Saud dynasty. All the women who actually drove were mature professionals who had international drivers' licenses they'd acquired overseas. Many of them were from the faculty of the women's branch of Riyadh's university, such as Fatin al-Zamil, a professor of medicine. Others were women of achievement such as Aisha al-Mana, who had a doctorate in sociology from the University of Colorado and headed a consortium of women-owned businesses from fas.h.i.+on to computer-training centers. Even though some of these women didn't normally veil their faces, for the demonstration all wore the covering that leaves only eyes exposed.

Before the demonstration, the women had sent a pet.i.tion to the governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, who was thought to be a fairly progressive member of the ruling family. The pet.i.tion begged King Fahd to open his "paternal heart" to what they termed their "humane demand" to drive. They argued that women of the prophet's era had ridden camels, the main mode of transportation of their day. The evidence, they wrote in their pet.i.tion, was there in Islam, "such is the greatness of the teacher of humanity and the master of men in leaving lessons that are as clear as the sunlight to dispel the darkness of ignorance."

While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent religious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violations had occurred, since the women all had international drivers' licenses recognized by Saudi law. The religious representatives found that no moral issues were at stake, since the women were veiled and the Koran says nothing that could be construed as forbidding an act such as driving. The women were released.

In Jeddah and Dhahran, women gathered to plan parallel demonstrations, encouraged by what they saw as tacit support from the ruling family. But then came the backlash.

Word of the demonstration spread quickly, despite a total blackout of coverage in the Saudi media. When the women who had taken part arrived for work the next day at the university, they expected to be greeted as heroines by their all-women students. Instead, some found their office doors daubed with graffiti, criticizing them as un-Islamic. Others found their cla.s.ses boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets. Under a heading "Names of the Promoters of Vice and Lasciviousness," the demonstration partic.i.p.ants were listed, along with their phone numbers, and a designation of either "American secularist," or "communist" after each name. "These Are the Roots of Calamity," the leaflets shrieked. "Uproot them! Uproot them! Uproot them! Purify the Land of Monotheism." Predictably, the women's phones began ringing off the hook with abusive calls. If their husbands answered, they were told to divorce their whorish wives, or berated for being unable to control them.

The royal family immediately caved in to the extremists' pressures. Prince Salman's committee's findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their pa.s.sports. The security police also arrested a prominent, well-connected Saudi man accused of leaking word of the protest to a British film crew. He was given a grueling interrogation, including a beating, and thrown in jail for several weeks.

The ruling family could have stood by the women on Islamic grounds. What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman's reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.

But a week after the demonstration Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstration as "a stupid act" and said some of the women involved were raised outside Saudi Arabia and "not brought up in an Islamic home." He then read out a new fatwa, fatwa, or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia's leading sheik, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, stating that women driving contradicted "Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens." If driving hadn't been illegal before, it was now. Naif's remarks got front-page coverage, the first mention of the driving demonstration that had appeared in the Saudi press. or ruling with the force of law, from Saudi Arabia's leading sheik, Abdul Aziz bin Baz, stating that women driving contradicted "Islamic traditions followed by Saudi citizens." If driving hadn't been illegal before, it was now. Naif's remarks got front-page coverage, the first mention of the driving demonstration that had appeared in the Saudi press.

Although I had been in touch with some of the women drivers before the demonstration, none of them would take my calls afterward. They all had been warned that any contact with foreign media would lead to rearrest. All were sure that their phones were tapped and their homes watched. I did get a sad letter, signed simply "A proud Saudi woman" detailing the "witch hunt" under way. "Fanatics," she wrote, "are forcing students to sign pet.i.tions denouncing the women." They were "using this incident to demonstrate their strength and foment antiliberal, antigovernment and anti-American feelings." Another woman sent me a simple message: "I did it because I want my granddaughters to be able to say I was there."

I also talked to a relative of one of the women who'd taken part. "I encouraged her," he said sadly. "I thought the time was right. Now the cause has been set back ten years-buried under twenty tons of concrete. It's so easy for people like me"-a diplomat's son raised abroad and educated in America-"to be totally off base about this country and what it is ready to accept."

Chapter 11.

MUSLIM W WOMEN'S G GAMES"O true believers, forbid not the good things which G.o.d has allowed you, but transgress not, for G.o.d loveth not the transgressors."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE TABLE.

As the torchbearer at the opening ceremony of the first Islamic Women's Games entered the arena, ten thousand spectators burst into a deafening cheer. Her stride long and rhythmic, the athlete loped around the track as the torch flames licked the air above her hooded head.

High in the stands, among the crowd, her father almost burst with pride. The torchbearer, eighteen-year-old Padideh Bolourizadeh, had been an Iranian track star since she was seven. But this was the first time her father had ever seen her run.

He was able to watch because Padideh was wearing the world's first track suit-hijab. The suit's white hood concealed every wisp of hair, and a black, ankle-length tunic slid under a long jersey and flapped around the ankles of her sweatpants.

At the center of the arena, all-women sports teams from ten Muslim countries lined up behind their national flags. Every now and then, among the contingents from Syria and Turkmenistan, it was possible to notice a surrept.i.tious hand fiddling with an unfamiliar headscarf.

The next day, when the contests began in earnest, the athletes stripped down to their more familiar Lycra shorts and skimpy singlets. At the basketball stadium, as the captain of the Iranian team sprinted down the court past the Azerbaijanis to slamdunk the ball, ecstatic women spectators packing the stands raised a roar that would have drowned out a Metrodome crowd at a Twins' World Series game. Outside the stadium door, armed policemen paced the sidewalk, to make sure no men entered. Inside, high on the stadium wall, a larger-than-life-sized portrait of Khomeini gazed down on the sweaty, shorts-clad women athletes. In art, if not in life, his craggy countenance gave just the merest hint of a smile.

I had heard about the first Islamic Women's Games in early February 1993, when Mary Glen Haig, a British representative of the International Olympic Committee, phoned me at home in London to get advice about what a Western woman should pack for a trip to Tehran. The International Olympic Committee, she said, had been invited to observe the games and she-a former Olympic fencing champion-was to be the observer.

A few days later, having w.a.n.gled an invitation of my own, I went looking for her among the contestants and spectators at the track and field stadium, to see what she was making of the events so far. Someone pointed me to an official table, where a black-hooded woman sat alongside a sporty, svelte figure with bobbed blond hair, a denim jacket over a Liberty-print s.h.i.+rt, blue jeans and Asics athletic shoes. I'd explained on the phone that it wasn't necessary to wear hijab at all-women gatherings, but I was surprised that she'd dressed so casually. I wandered over and introduced myself. The blonde smiled and held out her hand. "Faezeh Hashemi," she said. "Vice-president of the Iranian Iranian Olympic Committee. This," she said, indicating the woman in the black hood, "is our British guest from the International Committee." Olympic Committee. This," she said, indicating the woman in the black hood, "is our British guest from the International Committee."

Faezeh Hashemi was President Hashemi Rafsanjani's thirty-year-old daughter and the brains behind the first Islamic Women's Games. Women's sports had practically disappeared after the Islamic revolution, when the mullahs put an abrupt end to the mixed training and compet.i.tion that had taken place under the shah. The idea of girls, in revealing athletic gear, training alongside boys had turned many religious Iranians against sports, especially for women.

"There is no fun in Islam." Khomeini had told his flock in a radio sermon in 1979. During his lifetime the city of Tehran reflected his opinion. A combination of an economically ruinous war with Iraq and the eagle eyes of Islamic zealots turned the city into a gray place of sandbagged buildings and circ.u.mspect citizens. All the old prerevo-lutionary night spots were gone. Even the Hiltons and the Kentucky Fried Chicken joints were changed utterly. Terrible hybrids had been born, such as the former Intercontinental Hotel on the former Los Angeles Boulevard, which had become the Flower of Martyrdom Hotel on Hijab Street, where mold bloomed in the bathrooms and a sign saying "Down With U.S.A." loomed in the lobby.

And yet even Khomeini hadn't been entirely oblivious to the need for bodily fitness. His own daily routine included a walk-round and round the courtyard of his house.

The wealthy, landowning Rafsanjani clan had taken a much more freewheeling approach to exercise, even having a little unmul-lah-like fun. In the privacy of their own family compound, Raf-sanjani's two daughters and three sons swam, bicycled, played table tennis and volley ball. Before the duties of the presidency took up all his time, Rafsanjani himself often joined his kids in the pool or at table tennis.

After the 1979 revolution most of Iran's sports facilities had simply been handed over to men. The government set up an important-sounding "Directorate of Women's Sports Affairs" in 1980, but it remained nothing but a name until 1985, when an odd alliance of Iranian women began a patient campaign to get women's sports back on the agenda. Some of the activists were Iran's former women athletes-a few of them Olympic-cla.s.s compet.i.tors-who had been forced out of sportswear and into hijab. Athletes who hadn't gone into exile eventually adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," philosophy, and reached out to women's groups within the religious establishment for help. It was Faezeh Hashemi, who could speak the language of the radical mullahs, who proved their best ally. Faezeh had many a.s.sets, including her father's backing. As a master's degree student in management at the University of Tehran, she knew a lot about manipulating organizations.

Like most religious women who wanted to get something done, she built the foundations of her case on the prophet's hadith. Muhammad is on the record as recommending that Muslims have "strong bodies." He also said: "You shall excel in all respects if you are the believers." Faezeh argued that sports should be part of the search for excellence, and that these recommendations applied equally to women and men. Women, as the lynchpins of the Islamic family, needed the physical and mental benefits that sports could provide. Fine, the conservatives responded; let them follow a program of exercise in the privacy of their homes. Faezeh responded that women and girls shouldn't be robbed of the social benefits of teamwork and compet.i.tion.

The prophet is said to have praised three sports in particular: swimming, archery and horseback riding. Since the hadith, "Teach your children swimming and archery," used the Arabic word awalaad, awalaad, which may be translated either as "sons" or "children," and not the more specific which may be translated either as "sons" or "children," and not the more specific awalaad wa binaat awalaad wa binaat-sons and daughters-some strict parents argued that only sons were meant to take part in such pursuits. But archery's modern equivalent, pistol or rifle shooting, was a useful skill in a revolutionary country recently at war and was one of the few sports that could be done in a chador. So shooting ranges were among the first sports facilities to welcome women, at first as members of civil defense militias, and later just as women looking for a hobby that would get them out of the house.

Faezeh argued that Iran's Islamic government could differentiate itself from the old shah regime by demonstrating that it was interested in "sports for all women," rather than the elite squad of topflight athletes the shah had encouraged to show off amid the "corruption" of mixed international compet.i.tions. Her arguments led to the handing back of sports facilities for certain "women's hours" each week, and more emphasis on sports in girls' schools. Eventually Tehran's woodsy "Runners' Park" banned men three days a week, between eight and four, so women could jog without hijab.

Then Faezeh began to tackle the much more difficult question of international compet.i.tion. Many Islamic countries kept their women out of international arenas: sometimes because of considerations of modesty, sometimes because of lack of money, and sometimes both. With tight sports budgets, countries such as Pakistan that had many Olympic-cla.s.s women compet.i.tors sent none of them to the Barcelona Olympics. "The men, basically, are better than we, and the government selects those who are in with a chance," said Firhana Ayaz, a sports writer with the Pakistan Observer. Pakistan Observer. But she also saw a growing Islamic influence behind such decisions. In Pakistan most women athletes played in modest costumes of loose, long T-s.h.i.+rts over long pants, but that was no longer seen as adequate in some circles. "Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And during the Olympics, none of the women's events were televised, because of pressure from the mullahs." But she also saw a growing Islamic influence behind such decisions. In Pakistan most women athletes played in modest costumes of loose, long T-s.h.i.+rts over long pants, but that was no longer seen as adequate in some circles. "Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And during the Olympics, none of the women's events were televised, because of pressure from the mullahs."

When Ha.s.siba Boulmerka, the Algerian runner, won a gold medal for her country at the Barcelona Olympics, she made a moving speech about her victory, saying she was glad to show that a Muslim woman could achieve such things. But not all of the Islamic world cheered her triumph. In Algeria the main Muslim political party, the Islamic Salvation Front, denounced her from the mosques for running "half naked" in shorts and a vest, and forced her to leave the country to avoid hara.s.sment while she trained.

While some Iranians joined in branding Ha.s.siba "a phony Muslim," Faezeh Hashemi saw the danger in such denunciations from Islamists who weren't offering any positive alternatives. Muslims, she said, should be happy if any Muslim sportswoman excelled. All Muslim countries had different traditions, she said, and it was up to Iran to demonstrate the superiority of a truly Islamic system. She argued that the "oppressors," meaning Western countries, used Muslim women's absence from the sports field as an example of women's inferior position in Islamic countries. "If Islamic countries can't come up with their own principles for women's compet.i.tion," she said in one widely reported speech, "then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on us." Iran sent men's teams to international contests. Why not, she said, let those women who excelled in any of the five sports that could be done in hijab go too?

In September 1990 she won her point, and when the Iranian team joined the march at the opening of the Asian Games in Beijing, six chador-clad women-the Iranian shooting team-led the way. One of them, an eighteen-year-old student named Elham Hashemi, managed to break the Iranian men's record.

By the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Faezeh hoped to be able to send a squad of hijab-wearing equestrians as well. I doubted she'd win that one. It's quite possible to show-jump wearing a neck-hiding wimple under a riding helmet and a tunic covering the legs down to the tops of riding boots, but what if a rider fell off her horse and was photographed with limbs sprawled and, heaven forfend, scarf askew? Conservatives were already arguing against women archers being allowed to compete in front of men, because the motion of pulling back the bowstring was too revealing, even in a chador.

For most of Iran's women athletes-runners, swimmers, high jumpers-competing in hijab wasn't even a remote possibility. It was for them that Faezeh had come up with the notion of an alternative Olympics, the Islamic Women's Games, where women athletes from Muslim countries would gather in hijab for an opening ceremony that both men and women could attend. Afterward, the athletes would toss off their coverings and compete against each other with only women watching.

The paradox of her scheme was that the strict Muslim countries whose women could have benefited from the games' women-only environment had no women athletes to send. In Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf States, there were no women's sporting organizations of any kind. Women's compet.i.tion, even strictly segregated, didn't exist. Wealthy women who wanted to keep fit maintained well-equipped gyms in their homes and hired personal trainers. The rest led completely sedentary lives.

The countries that jumped at Iran's invitation were the former Soviet Muslim republics, whose women athletes had been trained in the Soviet sports juggernaut. None of them had ever veiled; few had cracked the binding on a Koran. But, with the collapse of the Soviet system, nominally Muslim republics such as Azerbaijan were strapped for cash for luxuries such as sports. "Our entire budget for this year is enough to send one athlete to one compet.i.tion-so long as it's in Europe," sighed Alyev Mouslim, the Azerbaijani team manager. For him, an all-expenses-paid trip for a hundred and twenty women athletes-even if they had to veil and sit on a bus for the twenty-six-hour bus ride from Baku-was an offer too good to refuse.

As always with Iran, politics played a part. Iran was prepared to pay for big teams from the former Soviet republics because it was anxious to extend its influence there. But it balked at footing the bill for countries such as Sudan, that were already firmly in its...o...b..t. So the cash-strapped Sudanese didn't send women to the games. Nor did countries such as Egypt, which had sour relations with the Iranian government. Others sent tiny teams as a good-will gesture. "We are here to say 'yes' to the Iranian system," said a diminutive table-tennis player from the five-woman Maldives squad. "But from a sports point of view, it's pointless for us," she said, s.h.i.+vering as a light snow fell outside Tehran's underheated table-tennis center. "We're from the equator. It's impossible to get warmed up in this place."

In the end, the former Soviet republics had the biggest teams, in every sense. Altogether, four republics sent 332 athletes, most of them tall, big-boned blondes who towered over the 51 women from the small squads sent by Malaysia, Syria, Pakistan, Maldive and Bangladesh.

Some of the women were national champions; one or two were Olympians. But for all but the shooting team in the 122-member Iranian squad, this chance at international compet.i.tion was a first. Under their chadors, their faces shone as they marched into the 12,000-seat Azadi stadium.

During the games men were banished from the stands at all but the shooting range. At the swimming complex, schoolgirls filled the spectators' benches, peering down at the unfamiliar sight of Iranian lane judges uniformed in fetching purple miniskirts and acid-green T-s.h.i.+rts.

At the track stadium Padideh, the torchbearer, had shaken off her hijab in favor of black Lycra shorts and had literally risen to the occasion by adding nine centimeters to her personal best in the high jump. Her jump, at 1.67 meters, wasn't good enough to beat the Kyrgyzistan champion, but it broke the Iranian record, set before the revolution. That afternoon, back at the athletes' hotel, Padideh was ebullient. At heats for the 400-meter race, she had made the final four and was beginning to allow herself to hope that the next day might bring her a medal.

Although Padideh's mother had been a sportswoman during the days of the shah, Padideh had grown up knowing nothing but segregated sports. "This is nice for us," she said, waving a hand at the foyer full of women athletes. "Our way of thinking, our culture is this way," said Padideh. "It would be hard for us, now, to compete in front of men."

Official translators milled among the athletes, facilitating conversations. Each of them wore the usual Iranian attire-black hood and long tunic-but with a vivid, color-coded athletes' warmup jacket pulled incongruously on top. Indigo and acid green meant the translator spoke English; pink and chrome yellow, Russian; lime and sky blue, Arabic. As conversations bounced from Farsi to Urdu to English, the hotel lobby filled with a pleasant, feminine buzz. It reminded me of sports day at my all-girl high school.

But in one corner a group of men sat self-consciously, murmuring together in Russian, without the aid of the young women translators. Alyev Mouslim, the Azerbaijani team's administrator, sighed as he leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator marked "Special for Men." He was finding it hard to manage athletes who disappeared early in the morning on women-only buses, bound for arenas he wasn't allowed to enter. "Actually," he said, "I don't have it so bad; I don't have to coach." The Kyrgyzistan volleyball coach had had to wait outside during his team's matches for one of the women to grab a scarf and come out to tell him what was happening so he could make decisions on tactics. Alyev shrugged. "If we can play chess without seeing the board, why not this, too?"

I wondered if he was bored, being unable to go to the matches. "Not at all," he said. "I have my hands full with all the problems my team is having acclimating to these regulations." Some of the women had fallen foul of the Iranians because their big floral scarves kept slipping off. "It seems like the biggest fault here is if anybody sees your hair. But if G.o.d doesn't like this, why did he give you eyes?" Others resented the rule against women going out alone to tour the city between their events. The Iranian officials were taking a hyper-protective att.i.tude toward their women guests, insisting that they travel only on official buses, and only with an official translator along. As someone who had wandered the streets of Tehran at all hours unmolested, I thought the rule silly, and likely to give the wrong impression. For a woman alone, Tehran was one of the safest cities in the world.

Murs.h.i.+da Mustakim thought the rule was pretty stupid, too. She had stunned one of the gun-toting male Revolutionary Guards who had tried to block her exit from the hotel. "I told him I was a retired superintendent of the Malaysian police force, and that I'd spent an entire career giving orders to boys like him," she said. "Then I told him to get out of my way." Murs.h.i.+da, a towering woman with the shoulders of a longsh.o.r.eman, had come to Tehran as coach of the shooting team, who were all policewomen on the Malaysian force.

For her, trips to countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, which she'd visited as a pilgrim to Mecca, were like visits to the past. In her lifetime Malaysia had moved away from a doctrinaire approach to Islam. "When I was growing up, there was a lot of difficulty about girls being uncovered for sports," she said. While Malaysians' figure-hugging sarongs wouldn't have pa.s.sed muster as hijab in Tehran, conservative Malays believed that their ankle length provided an essential degree of Muslim modesty. Murs.h.i.+da had been a hurdle racer. "I used to unwrap my sarong just before the starter's pistol, run the race in shorts, and then quickly retie the sarong at the finish line." These days, she said, most Malaysian Muslims were relaxed about their faith and accepted women's right to dress as they pleased and partic.i.p.ate in society alongside men. But even her distant country hadn't been entirely immune to the Islamic revival, and many young women had started wearing long veils that covered the head and upper body. In one state, Kelantan, local voters had recently ushered in a fundamentalist mini-state, complete with "morals patrols" to catch unmarried couples dating.

I sat beside Murs.h.i.+da on the bus to one of the Iranians' official outings: a trip to the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Most of the excursions had followed a similar theme: a visit to the Museum of Reversion and Admonition, a.k.a. the former shah's palace; a tour of an exhibition ent.i.tled "The Dignity and Prestige of Women in the Islamic System." Before the buses set off for the long drive to Khomeini's gold-domed shrine on the southern edge of the city, chador-wearing Iranian officials boarded, carrying boxes of Kleenex. At first I had the bizarre thought that they were arming us against the onrush of emotion we would no doubt feel at the sight of Khomeini's grave. But then I realized that what they were worried about was the lipstick that some of the non-Iranian athletes were wearing. Murs.h.i.+da politely took a proffered tissue and swiped at her glossy red lips. "Well," she said, "there'd be one good thing about staying here: I could save a fortune on makeup."

Not necessarily. At the final day of track events, makeup-less athletes and officials filed off the buses and past the guards at the stadium door. Inside, they shook off their hijab and raced for the women's changing room to powder noses and apply mascara. Everyone wanted to look her best for the videotaped record of the games that a camerawoman was making for later screening at women's gatherings all over Iran.

Padideh, the Iranian runner, sat by herself, nervously fingering worry beads as she waited for her shot at a medal in the 400 meters final. The night before, I'd commiserated with a Pakistani runner who had blown her heat and missed a chance at the final of her best event. It was a disaster for her, but by the next day she was already looking forward to another chance at the Asian Games, or the Pan-Pacifies, or one of half a dozen international contests she would attend in the following year or two.

For Padideh, everything rested on this one brief race. It would be four years before she had another chance at international compet.i.tion. As she crouched at the starting line, her leggy, foallike figure looked frail alongside the muscular athletes from Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzistan and Azerbaijan. At the crack of the starter's pistol, she sped away, her long, loping stride keeping pace with that of her meatier compet.i.tors.

But it was a brief illusion of parity. A third of the way through the race, she had already fallen behind, and the strain of her initial effort showed in her face. For Padideh, training had to fit in between university cla.s.ses, in the brief women's hours allowed at her nearby stadium. She had never worked out with weights or been trained by a professional coach. She fell across the finish line more than three seconds behind the winner and almost two seconds shy of the third-place runner. Collapsing on the ground, she grasped at her chest and gulped for air between sobs of pain and disappointment.

It was impossible to say whether Padideh could have been a champion in a different time and place, in a system that cared less for modesty and more for methodical training. But her time in the 400 meters, though nowhere near good enough to beat the compet.i.tion, had shaved a remarkable eight seconds from her previous personal best.

At the farewell dinner after the games' closing ceremony, Padideh had regained her composure and spoke proudly of the bronze medal she'd helped win for the Iranian relay team. "Of course, I would have liked a medal of my own," she said, "and now I'll never get one." I reminded her that Pakistan and Azerbaijan had both talked of hosting an Islamic Women's Games in four years' time. Perhaps she would win her medal then.

She shook her head and gave a swift, sad smile. "No," she said, looking away. "Someone else maybe. For me, I think, it's just too late."

Chapter 12.

A DIFFERENT D DRUMMER"O true believers, turn unto G.o.d with a sincere repentance: peradventure your G.o.d will do away from you your evil deeds, and will admit you into gardens, through which rivers flow."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF BANNING.

Soheir el-Babli, the doyen of the Cairo stage, seemed to have it all. One of the biggest box-office draws in a city that has always loved its performers, her starring role as "Attiya, the Terrorist Woman," had been packing them in for a year at the 700-seat Misr Art Theater.

Then, suddenly, as the play was about to begin its second season in July 1993, she quit. She was, she said, renouncing show business for good and adopting the Islamic veil.

Soheir's retirement was part of a wave of resignations by women artists that had begun with Cairo's belly dancers back in the late 1980s. Soon, dozens of singers and actresses also were hanging up their spangles, wiping off their makeup, donning hijab and haranguing their former audiences about the evils of the artists' world. By the spring of 1992 the unthinkable had happened: the musicals with dancing that had enlivened the nightly celebrations of Ramadan were banned as un-Islamic, depriving hundreds of artists of work.

But when Soheir resigned, the artists' world fought back. The play's producer-director had already reworked the script for the second season to include references to the recent wave of terrorist bombings by Islamic extremists. To replace Soheir, he chose his own twenty-two-year-old daughter, a student at American University in Cairo, whose only theatrical experience had been student productions.

At the play's reopening night, a who's who of the Egyptian artistic world turned out to show their support. It was the beginning of a backlash: for the first time, artists had stood up together in criticism of religiously motivated retirements and fundamentalist pressure on entertainment. A joke began making the rounds of Cairo: Who are the second-best-paid women in Egypt? The belly dancers, of course, because the Saudi tourists throw hundred-dollar bills beneath their feet when they dance. Who are the best paid? The dancers who've retired for Allah, of course, because the Saudi sheiks throw thousand-dollar bills into their bank accounts when they stop dancing.

The sudden veil-takings all tended to follow the same pattern. A famous woman performer would appear on the popular television program of Sheik Mohamed Sharawi, Egypt's equivalent of a televangelist. There she would denounce her former career as un-Islamic, take a veil from the aged sheik and put it on, with his blessing.

Cynical Egyptians believed the Saudis funded a special expense account for Sharawi to buy up women artists. "If it isn't for the money, why do it on television? Why not do it in private, with Allah for their witness?" asked Nawal Saadawi, Egypt's most outspoken feminist.

The newly veiled women certainly seemed to have plenty of cash. One of the first to veil, Shams al-Barudi, had spent a fortune buying the copyright to films in which she had appeared scantily dressed, including one particularly daring bathtub scene in which she'd appeared almost nude. She was determined, she said, that the films should never be shown again. She declined to comment on the source of the money she was using to buy the rights to her old films, but gossip in the Cairo movie business said it had been provided by a prominent clergyman.

Nawal Saadawi cynically pointed out that many of the women were past their prime as actresses or dancers anyway. "They know they're soon going to have to retire, so why not go out in a blaze of publicity? You've heard the joke on the streets: people are saying that these dancers were happy to make their fortune from sin in their youth. Now, in their old age, they want to share the pleasure of paradise with the poor."

But Nawal's own predicament provided another explanation for the rush to get behind the veil. As a psychiatrist and senior government health official in the 1960s, she had seen the physical and emotional effects of genital mutilation on Egyptian women. Her first book, Women and s.e.x, Women and s.e.x, published in 1970, had been a condemnation of the distorted Islamic teaching she felt was responsible for ruining women's lives. Despite losing her job and spending three months in prison, she continued to write about taboo subjects in more than thirty books. She described the childhood trauma of her own c.l.i.to-ridectomy and how it had left her incapable of o.r.g.a.s.m, wrote about the demand for prewedding hymen replacement in the surgical wards of Cairo, and exposed an epidemic of incest in Egyptian families. published in 1970, had been a condemnation of the distorted Islamic teaching she felt was responsible for ruining women's lives. Despite losing her job and spending three months in prison, she continued to write about taboo subjects in more than thirty books. She described the childhood trauma of her own c.l.i.to-ridectomy and how it had left her incapable of o.r.g.a.s.m, wrote about the demand for prewedding hymen replacement in the surgical wards of Cairo, and exposed an epidemic of incest in Egyptian families.

In newspapers and public meetings she attacked powerful sheiks. On one of his television programs, Sheik Sharawi excoriated those who chose to lull themselves to sleep with Western cla.s.sical music instead of the melodic drone of a Koran reading. A few days later extremist youths in Upper Egypt were arrested for storming a concert and breaking musical instruments. Nawal wrote a newspaper article asking why the government arrested the youths, and not Sharawi, whose ideas had inflamed them.

In the summer of 1992, Islamic Jihad put Nawal Saadawi on its death list, along with the writer Farag Foda. When Farag was shot dead outside his office, the Egyptian government that had often persecuted Nawal suddenly provided her with a round-the-clock military guard. Mindful that Sadat's a.s.sa.s.sin had been part of an extremist Islamic cell within the Egyptian army, Nawal found the presence outside her door of army conscripts rather less than rea.s.suring. "I'm more afraid of them than I am of anyone else," she confided. In 1993 she went into exile, taking a post as a visiting professor at Duke University in America.

If authors were already targets, Nawal reasoned, it was only a matter of time before less political artists would come under direct attack. The dancers who renounced their profession often talked about the anxiety and fear that had been replaced by calm once they resigned from the stage. One famous dancer, Halah al-Safi, talked of a dream she'd had of walking by a mosque and feeling dread because she wasn't wearing the proper clothing. Suddenly, she said, a man in her dream took off his cloak and covered her. Nawal pointed out that it wasn't necessary to be a psychiatrist to interpret the fear in Halah's dream as a subconscious response to the pressure from religious extremists.

In 1993, Nawal's prediction was proved correct. When Farida Seif el Nasr decided to return to show business after having announced her retirement, an unknown a.s.sailant attempted to murder her with a volley of gunshots.

At my office, Sahar gloated over each new story of an artist's return to the veil. One morning she looked up from one of the local papers to read me an item about a famous dancer who had wanted to make the Hajj. The religious authorities had refused to give the woman the necessary papers unless she quit dancing. Sahar approved of their decision. "Why should she be able to go, spending money she earned sinning, and stand on the Plain of Arafat as though she's a good Muslim?" Sahar said.

But I was sorry to see Egypt's beautiful traditional dance being denigrated and threatened. I'd watched my first Egyptian dancer through a jet-lagged haze just after we arrived in Cairo, when a friend invited us to dinner at the Nile Hilton's nightclub. Egyptians keep late hours, and I struggled through dinner to keep my face from falling into my plate of stuffed pigeon. But once the dancing started I forgot all about fatigue.

Souhair Zaki swirled onto the stage along a pathway of sound. The slow rise and fall of the flute undulated in waves through her body. For the first time, the atonal Arabic music made sense to me. I could see see it, weaving through s.p.a.ce in elaborate arabesques. And I could see something else: the beauty of a woman's body that was neither young nor thin. Souhair Zaki was the most celebrated dancer in Cairo, but she hadn't seen thirty in a while. Flesh clung heavily to her hips. Her abdomen bulged like a ripe pear. I had never seen traditional oriental dance before, but I recognized every movement. What she was doing with her body was what a woman's body it, weaving through s.p.a.ce in elaborate arabesques. And I could see something else: the beauty of a woman's body that was neither young nor thin. Souhair Zaki was the most celebrated dancer in Cairo, but she hadn't seen thirty in a while. Flesh clung heavily to her hips. Her abdomen bulged like a ripe pear. I had never seen traditional oriental dance before, but I recognized every movement. What she was doing with her body was what a woman's body did did-the natural movements of s.e.x and childbirth. The dance drew the eye to the hips and abdomen; the very center of the female body's womanliness.

As a girl I'd learned the profoundly unnatural movements of Western ballet, whose aim was to make the body seem as insubstantial as air. With its stress on elongation and fluttering extremities, ballet denied womanliness, requiring adult dancers to retain the shape of prep.u.b.escent girls. By the time I was fourteen the studio where I did my cla.s.ses was a miserable place, full of students who knew they'd never be ballerinas. Their bodies had betrayed them by becoming too tall, too round, too womanly. I decided that, before I left Egypt, I'd try to learn this other more ancient dance, whose every movement celebrated a woman's body as it actually was.

Religious pressure had already forced Cairo's dancers to wear one-piece costumes that didn't expose their bare midriffs. Anything too revealing warranted a visit from a special squad known as the "politeness police." Occasional items in the newspapers doc.u.mented raids on nightclubs where dancers' acts were too erotic or their costumes too revealing. One dancer in particular, Sahar Hamdi, was always being hauled to jail. Going through the newspapers, Sahar would read me these items about her namesake, shaking her veiled head in disapproval. Sahar Hamdi was the darling of the rich Saudi tourists. Some nights she would dance on a stage covered by banknotes and have her dance-weary feet bathed by the Saudis' champagne. But by 1993 she too had supposedly seen the light and was talking of retirement for the sake of religion.

Fundamentalists, impatient with the pace of artists' resignations, wanted the government to ban belly dance at once, and for good. But belly dancing was a big draw for the rich Arabs from the Persian Gulf who poured into Cairo every summer. To accommodate both sides, the government came up with one of its famous half measures: it stopped issuing permits to new performers other than cla.s.sical folk artists but didn't ban the dance outright. When I decided to write a story about the controversy, Sahar looked at the floor and said nothing. "Do you want me to find someone else to translate?" I asked. She nodded. She didn't want to visit Cairo nightclubs or talk to dancers. She had told me once that Souhair Zaki had danced at her parents' wedding. Now, Sahar felt that the way Souhair displayed her body was sinful.

But even Sahar wasn't all that comfortable with demands on the government to ban this and ban that. She felt religion was a personal matter that shouldn't be turned into political compulsion. The Islamic revolution she wanted would come through the gradual persuasion of people, not through force. That att.i.tude had prevailed in Egypt and seemed to have served the country well. It was easy to buy alcohol in Cairo, but none of my Egyptian friends drank. Where Saudis had to be herded to prayers by religious police, Egyptians poured voluntarily into their mosques. Many had the dark, permanent bruise of the devout on their foreheads, acquired by a lifetime of touching the head to the ground in prayer.

If belly dance were banned, it would set a disturbing precedent and lead to increased clamor for further Islamic restrictions. To see how serious the new rules were, I went to visit Mahmoud Ramadan, an official with the Department of Artistic Inspection. Mahmoud had been the chief inspector of dancers, issuing permits to performers whose costumes and ch.o.r.eography weren't too risque. "I had a wonderful job in those days," he sighed. He had seen performances by all of Egypt's leading artists. To him, the real stars had shone in the 1950s, when every Egyptian movie included a belly-dance sequence. The dancers had been idolized and paid up to three thousand pounds a night to perform onstage and at fancy weddings.

Now, Mahmoud was watching those women grow old, with no newcomers rising to replace them. "The next generation isn't as good, and after them, well ..." His voice trailed off as he gestured at the empty desk in front of him.

The restrictions also threatened the band of women artisans who sewed the dancers' elaborate costumes. The most famous costumier in Egypt inhabited a tiny cubicle in the midst of the vast Khan el Khalili bazaar. Inside, a glittering profusion of gla.s.s beads and glossy fabrics spilled out of boxes stacked to the ceiling. Customers could leaf through a book of photographs showing possible designs-skirts embroidered with sunbursts in blazes of orange and gold or peac.o.c.ks in indigo and aqua. An aged seamstress took the orders and the clients' measurements. "No Egyptians anymore," she lamented. That day her customers had been a Finn and a German. As I fingered beads and tried on belts, another woman entered. She spoke to the seamstress in heavily accented Arabic, full of guttural "ch" sounds. "Excuse me," I said in English. "Are you Israeli?"

"Yes," she said. "I came on the bus from Jerusalem today." Before the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, she had to send European friends to buy her costumes for her. "They never fitted properly," she said. "Peace has been very good for my act." Not so good was the attention she was receiving back in Israel from fundamentalist Jews. Like their Muslim counterparts, they wanted belly dance banned. They were threatening to withdraw the kashrut certificate-the proof that food was prepared in accordance with Jewish law-from the hotels in which she performed. The daughter of Orthodox Jews herself, she had little patience with the rabbis. "This dance is part of our heritage," she said. "Moses's mother probably knew how to do it. We can't let these old men tell us we have to give it up."

Back home I unwrapped my purchase: a cheap practice outfit of skirt, belt and bra. As I looked at the costume, Sahar wandered out of the office and into the sitting room. I waited for the disapproving frown. Instead, she rubbed the transparent fabric of the skirt through her fingertips.

"How much did it cost?" she asked. I told her.

"Can you draw me a map of how to get to the store?"

"Why?" I asked, worried that she might be planning to have her fundamentalist friends picket the place, or worse.

"I want to buy a costume like this," she said. "I'm a wonderful dancer. I'll dance for my husband after we're married."

My own quest to become a wonderful dancer wasn't going so well. Egyptian girls acquired the ability to dance as naturally as the ability to walk, watching their mothers, sisters and aunts. At my friend Sayed's house, the three-year-old could already do fluid hip drops and scissor steps. Sayed's sisters tried their best with me, but it was hard for them to teach something that they had never actually learned.

"You need a maalimah," maalimah," they said. The they said. The awalim awalim were the learned women of Egyptian arts, who danced, sang, played instruments and pa.s.sed on the traditions to their apprentices. Finding a maalimah would have been easy enough a few decades ago. For centuries, clans of entertainers from the Nile villages handed the purest form of Egypt's ancient dance from generation to generation. When these families settled in Cairo, they cl.u.s.tered in an artists' quarter. Their remnants are still there, along Mohamed Ali Street, in little shops pungent with the glue and wood shavings of lute carvers and the stinky, drying fishskins of drum makers. From the open doorways, the wail of flutes or the thump-tap-tap of drums signaled a craftsman testing his wares. were the learned women of Egyptian arts, who danced, sang, played instruments and pa.s.sed on the traditions to their apprentices. Finding a maalimah would have been easy enough a few decades ago. For centuries, clans of entertainers from the Nile villages handed the purest form of Egypt's ancient dance from generation to generation. When these families settled in Cairo, they cl.u.s.tered in an artists' quarter. Their remnants are still there, along Mohamed Ali Street, in little shops pungent with the glue and wood shavings of lute carvers and the stinky, drying fishskins of drum makers. From the open doorways, the wail of flutes or the thump-tap-tap of drums signaled a craftsman testing his wares.

But the dancers had gone. "They became tired of the police bothering them," an elderly craftsman explained. "The police treated them like prost.i.tutes, always busting into their apartments to see if there were men there." Right now, he said, no one was encouraging a daughter to seek a career in dance. "The pressure is too much. But it will pa.s.s. They'll be back one day." The old man looked almost ancient enough to have been around when it all happened before. When Gustave Flaubert visited Cairo in 1850, he found that all the famous dancers had been banned from the city because the governor thought they encouraged prost.i.tution. He had to travel up the Nile to find the performers. His diaries record dancers so erotic that the accompanying musicians had to cover their eyes with a fold of their turbans so they wouldn't become too aroused to play.