B. Not religious, but not liberated, either. This woman is less strict than the extremely religious woman but more observant than the more liberal one. A woman from this group tends to resist sinning because of her morals and principles rather than her actual religious belief. She often has a strong personality, so she might mistakenly be listed as a liberal because she doesn’t submit to all the rules of the more zealous groups.
3. The Wild Type (or “Escapee”)
A. Wild before marriage. This woman normally reforms after marriage. She might turn into a very committed woman (or at least one of moderate commitment). That depends on her husband. If she marries someone who isn’t right for her, she remains in the wild category even after her marriage.
B. Wild after marriage. This woman is usually a member of one of the sheltered groups, but she goes “bad” after marriage because she can’t acclimatize to the demands of a liberated husband, or because of a rocky marriage or an unfaithful husband.
These were some of the complicated sets of categories that Sadeem took down while Um Nuwayyir dictated. Even months after writing it all down, Sadeem was still trying to absorb everything. The soundness of the whole complicated scheme became clearer and clearer with the passing of every day that Sadeem lived in the school of life. After all, that was the school where Um Nuwayyir had gotten her information and formulated her theory.
Sadeem’s thoughts about Um Nuwayyir reminded her of the evening gatherings at home with her three friends. She could almost taste the Kuwaiti desserts—the syrupy sweetness of the zalabya and the smooth powdered darabeel—that Um Nuwayyir used to ply them with, together with hot tea. Her memories flew her home to Riyadh, all the way to the metallic gate with its gilt-edged bars, where she had so often stood after the evening prayer time waiting for Waleed to arrive. She saw in her mind’s eye the swing by the swimming pool where she had spent evenings with his arm around her; the formal living room where guests were received, and where she had seen him for the first time; the television in the family living room where together they had watched all of those films; and the room that witnessed the birth of their love as well as its death. Had her love for Waleed truly died?
She got up to turn on the cassette player. She picked up a tape from among the many that were scattered across the floor. She pushed it into the machine, crept back to her bed and rolled into a ball like a fetus in its mother’s womb. She listened woefully to Abdul Haleem’s* mournful voice:
Rid yourself of woe and tears
Instead of crying years and years
Oh you who’ve wept the traitor man
Weep on today, if you well can.
But watch that no one sees tears fall
For such will please the traitors all.
Sadeem cried and cried, and cried, alone in her London flat, wishing and hoping to rid herself of woes and tears, instead of crying years and years. Instead of crying spring and fall, bringing joy to traitors all.
12.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: April 30, 2004
Subject: A Life That…“Could Be Worse”
I asked Aisha “Prophet Mohammed’s wife,” What did the Prophet—peace be upon him—do in his home? She said, He was occupied in the vocation and service of his family…—The hadith collection of Al-Bukhari, verse 676
Frankly, I did not anticipate all of this flurry, all of this back-and-forth, around my modest little e-mails!
A number of you ask how I conceived of this project.
It all started in my mind about five years ago in 1999, that is, around the time when the story of my friends, as I am writing it to you and for you now, started. I didn’t do anything to turn this idea into a reality until very recently, however. What got me going was that I saw my brain’s capacity to hold anything reaching DISK FULL. The time had come to squeeze out the sponge of my mind and my heart, to really wring out that sponge so that I could absorb something new.
The marital relationship between Rashid and Gamrah was not exactly the cinematic ideal. However, it wasn’t so utterly miserable, either. Preoccupied with his studies, Rashid left the responsibility for taking care of things at home to Gamrah after he realized how completely unenthusiastic she was about enrolling at the university. Even though it was difficult in the beginning to shoulder all of the household-related tasks, gradually Gamrah learned how to depend on herself. She began to find the courage to ask people on the street where an address was, or to ask salespeople in shops how much this or that cost.
She didn’t actually see Rashid very much, but she got the money she needed whenever she asked for it, and most of the time without even asking. Even her own private needs—those “miscellaneous” needs—he gave her enough cash to meet, from time to time, anyway.
Gamrah wasn’t able to compare what Rashid was giving her with what other men would offer their wives. What she did obtain, though, seemed satisfactory enough. The only needs she wasn’t attending to were her emotional ones, and if that was all that was left out, she figured that she ought to consider herself a lot luckier than many women of her age and circumstances.
Once she had lived with Rashid for a while, Gamrah began to see his good side revealed, even though this goodness never emerged openly in his dealings with her. She could glimpse it in his treatment of others: his mother, his sisters, people out there in the street, and children. Rashid would become a happy little child himself in the presence of children. He would play with them fondly and very gently.
She became convinced that with time, Rashid would come to love her. After all, at the very start of their married life, he had always been remote and even a little rough with her, but as time passed he seemed more accepting of her and less severe, although he still sometimes blew up at her for reasons that seemed to Gamrah trivial. But aren’t all men from Najd like that? If she thought about her father or brothers or uncles and their sons, she did not think that her husband was any different. This was his nature—and that was what gave her patience with him.
What bothered her most in Rashid was that he never sought her advice or consulted with her about anything having to do with their home. When he decided to put in a receiver for cable TV channels, he chose the bundle that included his favorites, without considering the fact that HBO, which ran her very favorite show, Sex and the City, wasn’t among them. Gamrah followed that show avidly, even though she could only understand a little of what the characters were saying to each other. So what Rashid did, not taking her into account, as if she didn’t even exist, really angered her, especially when he made it clear that her irritation didn’t give him a moment’s pause. He might as well have said that she had nothing to do with any of the important and basic household decisions, as though this were his apartment alone!
It went on like that. Every day, he would get her worked up about things of this sort. And yet she would be in for a terrible time if she were to forget in the evening to prepare his clothes or to iron them first thing in the morning before he was even awake. Furthermore, she had no right to ask him for help in tidying up or preparing meals or washing dishes, even though he had been accustomed to living the bachelor life all those years of studying in America. As for her, in her family’s home in Riyadh there had always been servants around to do her bidding, furnishing whatever she and her siblings might request from moment to moment.