Nine Parts of Desire

Geraldine Brooks. Doubleday Publishing, Inc., 1995, 255 pp. (paper). List: $12.95; AET: $9.00.

Reviewed by Geoff Lumetta

Non-Muslims writing on Islam tend to fall into two categories: those who attack the religion and denigrate its followers, and those who become apologists for Islam, glossing over repressive aspects of some Muslim communities. Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire, The Hidden World of Islamic Women at times does both of these things. But it is in the book's critical yet respectful look at Islam that the reader finds subjects for serious discussion and a measure of understanding that is all too rare in Western depictions of Islam.

Brooks is an Australian-born Wall Street Journal reporter who spent seven years living and working in the Middle East. She seems very much aware that, despite a recent explosion of books meant to shed light on the lives of Muslim women, the average Westerner has been exposed to little more than negative and one-dimensional views on the subject. Portrayals such as Not Without My Daughter, Betty Mahmoody's horrific memoir of an American woman who follows her Muslim husband to Iran only to find herself trapped in an abusive, discriminating environment, tend to be the extent of understanding of Islam.

To counter such portrayals, Brooks offers an example of an American woman who was very happy living in Iran with her Muslim husband. Far from being abused and held against her will, this Muslim convert was welcomed in Iran even after the Islamic revolution and was very much in control of her life and her family. Brooks is quick to point out, however, that "tales of domestic contentment didn't tell the whole story, any more than Betty Mahmoody's domestic nightmare had."

The author doesn't gloss over the fact that there are laws in contemporary Iran that prohibit a woman from leaving the country without her husband's permission. She also points to polygamy and child marriages. On the other hand, few Muslim men are abusive, take more than one wife, or marry young girls. Most of all, Brooks shows that few Iranian women live in the unsanitary, repressive and benighted conditions Americans associate with Third World countries. Instead, virtually all women are safe in their neighborhoods; most have access to good child care and many live lives that are enviable by American standards.

To Brooks, in fact, the very fundamentalist Iranian culture shows the best hope for changing the status of Muslim women. One of the strongest female figures in the book is Faezeh Hashemi, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani's 30-year-old daughter and the brains behind re-establishing women's sports in Iran. She led a campaign to reopen sporting facilities that were closed after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Many female athletes, including Olympic competitors, were forced out of sportswear and into hijab following Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power. But well-educated Hashemi, Brooks writes, "could speak the language of the radical mullahs" and she was able to justify women's sports based on examples from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. He is quoted as saying that all Muslims should have "strong bodies" and that "You shall excel in all respects if you are the believers." Hashemi argued that sports should be part of that search for excellence; and that women need the physical and mental benefits of sports to raise a healthy Islamic family.

With her father's support, Hashemi got Iran to sponsor the first-ever Islamic Women's Games in 1993. Hundreds of women athletes from 10 Muslim countries competed in everything from basketball to marksmanship. The athletes gathered in hijab for the opening ceremonies. When the games started, and after men left the arena, the athletes removed their veils and competed fiercely. When the Iranian basketball team captain sprinted past the Azerbaijanis to slam dunk the ball, Brooks wrote, the roar from the all-women audience would have drowned out an American crowd at a World Series baseball game. According to Brooks, Hashemi hopes to send a squad of hijab-wearing equestrians to the Atlanta Olympics this summer.

To Brooks, the Hashemis of the Muslim world are much more influential than some of the best women scholars on Islam, because they are a part of mainstream Muslim life. Scholars such as Fatima Mernissi, an accomplished Moroccan writer on Islamic and women's issues,have little effect on daily life in Muslim countries, Brooks writes. While Mernissi's books are widely read in American universities, they are not used in Moroccan mosques or Islamic schools elsewhere.

A woman who does not veil or show piety in other ways is not accepted by the male-dominated Islamic establishment, according to Brooks. "That is why I found the brightest hope for positive change camouflaged among the black chadors of devout Iranian women," she writes. Instead of calling for an end to polygamy or the hijab, they work within Islam to bring incremental changes: getting women a political voice, more equal job opportunities and the right to participate in sports. To women in Saudi Arabia and Sudan, these are giant steps forward. "They are our Superwomen," the 24-year-old wife of a Hezbollah sheikh in Lebanon told Brooks.

But this positive and even hopeful account of Muslim women turns bleak in the concluding chapters of Nine Parts of Desire, a title derived from a quotation by Ali ibn Abu Taleb, the fourth leader of the Islamic world after Muhammad himself: "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men."

Brooks found that most of the women who have tried to refute exclusionary and inequitable interpretations of Islam have met with harassment and exile. The author points out that Islam's original message actually gave women sweeping rights that were unheard of at the time. These rights included the right to inheritance and the right to divorce. "I looked everywhere for examples of women trying to reclaim Islam's positive messages," Brooks writes, but she met with frustration most of the time.

Brooks demonstrates respect for Islam and the Muslims she met as a reporter. Her scholarly work on Islam also appears to be extensive. But, in the end, Brooks does not reach the same conclusions reached by Mernissi and other writers that positive Islam has been buried under years of harsh laws and distorted interpretations created by self-serving misogynists. She questions whether it is possible to separate the pure belief from its result in society. At some point, she writes, a religion must be held accountable for the kind of life it offers its people.

She tells the story of a Sudanese woman in England who was murdered by her husband, also Sudanese, because he suspected her of adultery. Her life was as violent and miserable as her death. She was circumcised at a young age and married to a man she barely knew. He took her thousands of miles from home to a city whose language she did not speak. Her husband spent 10 months of the year in Saudi Arabia, leaving her with four children to care for. When she did start to come out of her home and make friends, one of them was a single male who was seen leaving her home at a late hour, a suspicious situation that eventually triggered the honor murder.

This chain of events, as well as the murder itself, was far from an isolated incident. Brooks cites a British study that women married to men of Muslim background were eight times more likely to be killed by their spouses than other women in Britain.

"It becomes insufficient to look at Islam on paper, or Islam in history, and dwell on the unarguable improvements it brought to women's lives in the seventh century," Brooks writes. "Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith has proved such fertile ground for almost every anti-woman custom it encountered in its great march out of Arabia." She maintains that Islam adopted the royal Persian custom of veils, accepted gender mutilation from Egypt, "and when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women's participation withered."

However, readers already inundated with negative portrayals of Islam shouldn't shy away from this book, which is much more than a rebuke of the religion. Brooks gives an account of a number of women who are proud to wear the hijab and proud of their Muslim culture. Despite her Western perspective, Brooks has not burdened the book with Western judgments. She doesn't measure Muslim society with a Western feminist yardstick, rather she uses basic principles of human rights.

If there is anything the book lacks it is more of this universal perspective. Only one real statistic is given comparing the fate of women in Islam to the fate of women in the West. And this figure applies to Britain, not the United States, where murder rates are vastly higher. How does America, where so many women are beaten and killed by their husbands, compare to Muslim countries? Brooks does not address this question. It also is worth noting that it has only been in the past 20 years that American men have started to receive harsh sentences for beating or killing their wives, and U.S. law still is limited in domestic violence disputes. Is it possible that Islamic cultures need more time to progress in this way as well? It may be left to another book to show that the social forces fighting against women in Islam are similar to those social and cultural forces that subjugate women here.

Particularly following the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing last year it is becoming clearer that women all over the world are linked in a struggle for equality, security and a greater political voice. By acknowledging this link, perhaps the subjugation of women will be seen less as an Islamic problem and more as a matter that concerns all developed and developing countries.