Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online

Iranian exile who recognized her in the street had shouted an abusive remark about her father. “Of course, I don’t like anyone to insult my father, but he was always ready to forgive anything aimed at him personally. It was attacks on Islam that he couldn’t forgive.”
    In her chador, Zahra stood out on the streets of London. Many devout Iranian women didn’t wear their chadors in the West for that reason. One of the main objectives of hijab is to make a woman less eye-catching. In London, a chador drew many more stares than a scarf and coat would have. But for Zahra the chador was like a second skin that couldn’t be discarded.
    One reason she had invited me to the consulate was to show off the women diplomats working there. One handled international law, another studied the status of women in Britain. Their presence was something of a triumph for the Women’s Society, which had pushed to have women assigned abroad.
    These women were an entirely different group from the modern, middle-and upper-class minority who had thrived under the shah’s liberalizations, many of whom were destroyed by the revolution. One, Esfand Farrokhrou Parsa, the first woman in the Iranian cabinet, had been wrapped in a sack and machine-gunned for the crimes of “corruption on earth, expansion of prostitution and warring against God.” What she had done was direct schoolgirls not to veil and order textbooks revised to present a more modern vision of women. Hundreds of women had been imprisoned for refusing to follow revolutionary dictates; thousands fled into exile.
    But others, from poor, conservative, rural families, emerged for the first time from behind the high walls of the andarun —the women’s quarters of traditional homes where the vast majority of Iranian women used to live their entire lives. Khomeini encouragedthese women to come into the streets, where they had never been welcome, to demonstrate for the revolution. He even stated that they didn’t need their male guardian’s permission to leave the house for such a purpose. His views on the matter weren’t, he said, his views at all, but the literal laws of Islam. If Muhammad’s sunnah was that women could marry at nine, then of course they could marry at nine. If it said they couldn’t be judges, then of course they’d be banned from the bench. But if it said they could do other things—run a business, as the prophet Muhammad’s first wife had done, or tend the sick, or even ride into battle, as women of the prophet’s era had—then of course Iranian women must be permitted to do the same. Suddenly, because the imam had spoken, conservative fathers, husbands and brothers had to listen. To women who would have spent their lives in seclusion, wearing a head covering was a small price to pay in return for the new freedoms.
    Still, it intrigued me that, while public pressure and state laws could be brought to bear to force women into hijab, no one seemed to pay much attention to Islam’s dress code for men. The Koran urged men, as well as women, to be modest. Muhammad’s sunnah was unambiguous on the matter: as women must cover all but hands and face, men were obliged to cover the area of the body from navel to knee. The covering had to be opaque and loose-fitting enough to conceal the bulge of male genitals.
    But all over the Islamic world men flouted that code. Crotch-hugging jeans were the fashion among the youths of the Gulf. Soccer players—national heroes—competed in thigh-high shorts. Top-rating televised wrestling matches featured sweaty men in jockstraps. At the Caspian Sea, where Iranian women had to swim in chadors, no one insisted that the men wear swimsuits covering their navels.
    The hypocrisy was especially evident at Iranian soccer matches, where chador-wearing women couldn’t take their sons to see a game because the male players weren’t Islamically dressed. Meanwhile, the same matches were televised nightly on state TV that called itself the