Now They Call Me Infidel Read online

  And, of course, fear of polygamy makes it impossible for a wife to form a bond of trust with her husband. When a husband starts earning more money, a warning bell starts ringing in a woman’s head, since he can now afford the second wife. I remember hearing conversations among Arab wives advising one another to “pluck up his feathers,” meaning spend his money as fast as possible before there is extra for another wife. Women relatives sometimes advise a woman to hide some money behind his back with her family, as a form of security in case of a second marriage. “Hiding money for a bad day” does not sound like a bad plan in such an insecure situation.

  Women’s financial insecurity can affect many areas of family life, such as the raising of children, since child support can be very difficult to collect when there are other wives and their children involved. That is why the first wife is often left in the dark about the second wife. However, usually the man’s own family and some of his close friends know of a second marriage and willingly cover up for him. I have heard numerous horror stories of women discovering the existence of a second wife and other children after the death of their husbands, with whom they now have to share the inheritance as equals. Some end up holding separate funeral services for the same man.

  A Muslim wife is threatened by single women in a way that no Christian wife can imagine. It is true that Christian husbands can and do cheat on their wives, but the threat of a mistress and the threat of a legal wife in the eyes of society and God are two very different things. Under Islamic law, a second wife—and third and fourth—are legally equal to the first in every way, including inheritance. This is very different from an affair in the West where a mistress has no rights and is discouraged by religion and society from making or accepting advances from a married man. If a Western man chooses to marry his mistress, he must first obtain a legal divorce from his first wife and settle any financial issues with her before he can marry a second time. That makes all the difference.

  I will always remember hearing the wife of a family member crying to her husband after an argument, “Go ahead and have affairs, but please, for the sake of the children, don’t take a second wife.” Her voice still rings in my ears after the passage of decades as a sad lesson on what was to come when it would be my turn to get married. She feared the existence of another wife and children would not only end her role as the sole wife, but also be an unfathomable blow to her stature and pride. The second wife would be regarded as equal by law and society.

  In order for Arab women to live and function around the social injustice and oppressive marriage laws, they had to develop elaborate manipulative behavior to get a modicum of respect and power. Arab fairy tales, such as those in the famous Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, reflect the impossible life of the main character, Shahrazad, a woman struggling to survive by telling tales to please the king. Every year, during the holy month of Ramadan, we listened on the radio to thirty shows featuring the tales of Shahrazad. Every evening, at the end of each story, my cousins, sisters, and I would be on the edge of our seats, worried and anxious about Shahrazad. Will the king like tonight’s story and spare her life? Or will she be killed like the rest of his harem? Shahrazad’s struggle was to keep the king amused and never fully satisfied; she always had to end on a note that kept him—and the listeners—eager to hear more. If she failed to amuse him or he became bored, then she would be killed. So we all hoped and prayed for an even better story the next day so her life would be saved. We heard Shahrazad nightly pour her talent, charm, deceit, distrust, fear, and female sexual manipulation into the effort to save her life. We girls were learning the lessons of manipulative survival from these stories, getting ready to shoulder the burden of Muslim women on how to survive in a cruel culture with few options and no loyalty expected from our life partner.

  Even as children we were aware that Shahrazad was not a wife but one of the king’s harem forced into sexual slavery. Even today, Islamic law allows men many choices to have sex. Beside the three types of marriage and the technical allowance of up to four wives, the Muslim concept of ma malakat aymanahum permits men to have sex outside of marriage with women he “owns,” such as slaves. In that case a woman has to tolerate sex against her will by a man who considers her his property. Of course many Muslims will say this concept is irrelevant because slavery is no longer practiced in the Muslim world. Yet its legacy lives on. For example, household help may be considered in the eyes of some men as “owned” and thus the concept of ma malakat aymanahum can apply. That is why we see an epidemic in rapes of maids in Muslim homes, a fate many Filipino maids in Saudi Arabia have endured. The Muslim north in Sudan does enslave the Christian south and thus Sudanese Christian women are frequently forced by Muslim men into having sex. Non-Muslim women living in majority-Muslim countries have very few laws to protect them.

  The same culture that allows Muslim men many outlets for sex—even forced sex—tacitly permits honor killing of women and, in some countries, death by stoning for women who have sex outside of marriage. Compare two cases: a man who forces sex on his maid and an unmarried woman caught sleeping with her lover. In both cases, sex outside of marriage has occurred, but one is not punished under Islamic law and the other is very severely punished. A review of the stoning cases in hard-line Muslim states will show that it is choice, not the sex act itself, that brings a death penalty. Choice is solely a man’s prerogative. A woman can be forced into a slave-master sexual relationship—that is not considered against the law. But should a woman exercise control over her body, should she choose to have sex, and, even worse, choose her partner, she has committed a sin punishable by death. Islamic laws by design give women very little control over their bodies and their sexual and marital relationships, perpetuating the epidemic of humiliation and degradation of Muslim women.

  The sense of powerlessness women feel can manifest in bizarre ways. Since blaming their men for misbehavior will get women nowhere, it is easier to blame it on the evil eye or the female victim of a man rather than the true male perpetrator. This is also often done to save face in front of friends and neighbors. For example, my sister’s neighbor caught her husband, a hajj who had just returned from the pilgrimage in Mecca, raping the young maid. After the scandal became known to the whole building, the wife denied the rape, blamed the maid, and kicked her out on the street. She later said that all of this was the result of the evil eye from neighbors who envied her husband’s successful business.

  At all levels of Islamic society, the sharia laws turn the relationship between husband and wife from that of partners to one of slave and master. Women of the lower, uneducated classes are especially vulnerable to polygamy’s effects. I heard many horror stories from our maids, sitting in our kitchen, listening to their stories and trying to comfort them after their husbands had abandoned them for a second wife. They would complain that their husband’s income now could not take care of two wives and two sets of children. And they now had to work very hard to provide for their own children. They had in essence become “single mothers.” The strength and resilience of some of these women amaze me to this today. The story of Om Ali was especially sad since she had breast cancer and needed extraordinary help and medical care. She would talk to me about her pride in her son Ali, who was now the man of the house and did not talk to his father anymore.

  Very often these maids would show me their bruises from beatings they were subjected to. A notorious verse in the Koran, Surah 4:34, advises Muslim husbands with regard to wives from whom they fear “rebellion,” to admonish them, abstain from laying with them, and beat them—wa-dribuwhunna. Because of that verse in the Koran, many Muslim men feel that it is within their legal and religious right to beat their wives.

  Physical abuse of women in Muslim culture is very common and occurs at all levels of the social ladder. Slapping women on the face and pushing them to the ground are common scenes in many Arabic TV shows and movies. Even educated Arab producers include wife beating as a normal pa
rt of arguments between husband and wife. I once heard an educated Egyptian man proudly say that when his wife asked him for a divorce after an argument in their first year of marriage, he slapped her on the face. He then added that she never asked him for a divorce again. He spoke about the incident with pride, as having fulfilled his obligation as a man in control of his woman. This same man was later discovered to have a second wife in secret. Wife beating, which is justified in Islam under certain conditions, can end up being used by Muslim men as a tool to silence the first wife into tolerating polygamy. Wife beating thus adds yet another layer and dimension to the built-in anger within the Muslim family.

  Even in the United States, I hear many complaints from Arab girls who are physically beaten by their brothers and fathers. A twenty-four-year-old Jordanian coworker, a U.S citizen who lived at home, once confided in me that she was beaten by her father and brother and showed me the scars on her body. My daughter had a Jordanian high school friend who was known by her close friends to be physically abused and not allowed to leave the house or invite girls from school to her home. Physical abuse in the Arab Muslim community in the West often goes unreported to the authorities.

  Polygamy wreaks havoc on the whole family and touches all classes. As a teenager in Egypt, I remember our neighbor came to us one day crying because she had discovered that her physician husband had been married for years to one of his attractive young patients and already had a little girl with her. The couple, both of them very distinguished physicians, had been married for twenty years and had two teenage sons. The husband, whom I called Uncle Maged, was very charming and an overall nice man whom I greatly respected. He was well traveled and liked by everybody. When our neighbor woman confronted Uncle Maged with her discovery, his response was “What do you want? I am within my rights.” She asked him to divorce the other woman. He refused. She told him, “Then you have to divorce me,” thinking he would back down. Maged called her bluff; the next day he divorced his wife of twenty years.

  Even a nice man like Uncle Maged was corrupted by his right to polygamy. The distinguished woman physician was reduced to a helpless woman because of a law that destroyed her beautiful family. Her marriage ended up not much different from the poor, uneducated maids I used to comfort in our kitchen.

  Divorce under Islamic law is very easy for a man and is accomplished by the husband repeating the phrase “I divorce you” three times. That’s it! A woman on the other hand may ask (or beg) the man to divorce her but cannot do it herself. Unless the husband grants the divorce, it simply cannot happen. While it was little consolation for our physician friend, she at least was granted a divorce. That, ironically, is more than many abandoned wives get.

  This area of sharia law does not differentiate between the most educated or sophisticated Arab women and their illiterate village sisters. Any Muslim woman can end up being one of two, three, or four women all married to one man with or without the knowledge of the first wife. And if the first wife objects to her husband marrying, she has no recourse in the legal system. Even though she has essentially been abandoned, she has no right to divorce him and still needs her husband’s permission for many activities, such as travel. While he has remarried and is having a normal married life and children with the new wife, she is forbidden from doing the same thing and cannot remarry until four months after he divorces her, if he ever does.

  One day a young woman friend and coworker in Egypt confided to me the details of her divorce horror story. She, like me and all other Egyptian young women, lived with her parents. Five years earlier, she had been married, but it was a very unhappy situation. When she asked her husband for a divorce, he refused. He sent her back to her family but kept her legally married to him in retaliation for his wounded pride. At the same time, he married another woman with whom he had a couple of children. He could have divorced my friend in a minute if he had wished, allowing her to resume her normal life and perhaps remarry. But he refused to give her a divorce even when her parents begged him for it. Here she was, an attractive young woman in her twenties, unable to have relationships with other men because that would be zina, meaning “having sex outside of marriage,” which is punishable by law. In Arab countries, the zina laws are usually used against women since men’s sexual freedom is regarded as part of their manhood and easily facilitated by their legal rights to have extramarital sex through urfi and mutaa marriages. You can’t take him to jail for that, but you can certainly take a Muslim woman to jail if she has premarital or outside-of-marriage sex. My friend ended up unable to remarry, become engaged, or have any kind of male relationship from age eighteen to twenty-four. She had to go through years of unsuccessful court procedures until finally her family convinced him to divorce her by bribing him with a hefty sum of money.

  But even beyond the divorce issue, sharia closes all doors for women who seek to live an independent lifestyle. Beit el taa, meaning “house of obedience,” is a law in Egypt that causes much fear in women. Under that law, a man can be given permission by the court to sequester his wife at home as punishment for disobedience. This controversial law has been the subject of many jokes and is poked fun at in many Arab comedy movies. But to the women who have suffered from it, there is nothing humorous about beit el taa.

  Another block on women’s freedom is their limited choice in marriage. Muslim men have the right to marry non-Muslim and foreign women. Muslim women have no such right and can marry only Muslim men. (When Egyptian men marry foreigners, their wives are automatically granted Egyptian citizenship. However, if Egyptian women marry foreigners, even if they convert to Islam, these husbands do not get citizenship.) This inequity gives men a larger range of women to choose from and causes a gap of availability of men to Muslim women. The end result is a large number of unmarried women who have a limited and much smaller population of Muslim men to choose from. In fact, Egypt has a large female population who have remained unmarried into their forties and fifties, usually living with elderly parents or other family. This is due in part to the losses in the wars with Israel in the 1960s and ’70s, creating more Muslim women in this age group than men, plus, the fact that Muslim men have the right under Islamic law to marry non-Muslim women, which also contributed to the shortage of available men.

  Foreign non-Muslim men find it hard to get to know, let alone marry, Muslim women because dating is prohibited in Muslim countries. Furthermore, a non-Muslim man who wants to marry a Muslim woman has to convert to Islam before the marriage can take place. On the other hand, there is a new trend of Muslim men marrying non-Muslim women for the purpose of spreading Islam. Many men also find it easier to marry a non-Muslim foreigner: he does not have to pay a dowry or follow strict family courtship rules, and the wife’s family isn’t likely to bother him by looking after her interests.

  Muslim women living in the West who marry a Western Christian man must hide that fact from the Muslim community, especially when they visit the old country. According to Islam, these women are no longer Muslims and could be punished harshly. Without the protection of Western society, these women could even be killed in their own countries for marrying non-Muslims. While Muslim men are rewarded for marrying Christian and foreign women for doing a good deed by spreading Islam, Muslim women are denied the same right. Muslim women must remain loyal to Muslim men and society even if at the expense of never finding a husband.

  Practicing Muslim women who live in Judeo-Christian societies are certainly happier living under Judeo-Christian laws that prohibit polygamy and wife beating and give them equal rights with their husbands. That is why we see many attempts by radical Muslims to bring their sharia civil law in marriage and family matters into the West. Canada has recently refused to enforce sharia family laws and in the process had to adjust many of its own laws pertaining to other groups and religions so as not to appear discriminatory.

  On the other hand, Western women who marry Muslim men and choose to live in the Muslim world are no longer protected by th
e Western legal system. They discover, when the marriage ends, after it is too late, the desperate situation in which they have become entrapped. They cannot bring their children back home to the West and are often prevented from seeing them at all. In Islam, the father has the right to keep the children after a certain age. Very often Muslim men residing in the United States will leave their American wives, take their children, and go back to their home country to be wed to a new wife without even having given their Western wife a divorce. We have all heard the horror stories of American women falling victims to sharia laws and never seeing their children again. These children, who end up living in Saudi Arabia or Iran, are taught that their mother is an American infidel and a loose woman because she does not cover her head.

  There may be unpleasant surprises ahead even for those American women who marry Muslims and stay in the West. They are often not prepared for the way in which their husbands might exercise control over every aspect of their lives. I once received an e-mail from an American woman who was married to a Muslim man in Texas. She told me how wrong I was in my views, that she is now a covered-up Muslim, happy to please her husband, and that Islam is the best thing that has happened to her. I congratulated her and wished her good luck. A few months later, the same woman wrote me another e-mail complaining about her husband and his family and desperately asking for advice. I reminded her of the e-mail she had written to me a few months earlier, in which she told a completely different story. She insisted she had had never before sent me an e-mail, but she remembered that after reading one of my articles a few months earlier her husband had reprimanded her for doing so. He angrily took the article away from her. The article had my e-mail address on it, and she realized he must have used her e-mail account to send me that e-mail himself. We developed a short Internet friendship, and she wrote to me a year later saying she had obtained a divorce and was back with her family and her church in Texas.