Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

As far as a comprehensive look on women living under Islam I have found no better. From the most restrictive (Saudi Arabia) to the most liberal (Egypt) one is presented with a fascinating glimpse of what it must be like to be female and to live in a Middle Eastern world. In Chapter 7 A Queen the author even writes of how an American woman (the former Lisa Halaby now Queen Noor) marries the King of Jordan, converts to Islam then having to face her own challenges adjusting to a slow-to-accept Islamic society. The author also writes of other American women married to Middle Eastern men and living in their respective countries subject to the same type of restrictions other Islamic women have had to face.Already in the Preface of the book I was shocked to learn that the wearing of the Islamic hijab (the veiled attire) for one of the author's colleague's signified "acceptance of a legal code that valued her testimony at half the worth of a man's, an inheritance system that allowed her half the legacy of her brother, a future domestic life in which her husband could beat her if she disobeyed him, make her share her attentions with three more wives, divorce her at whim and get absolute custody of her children." I could not imagine any intelligent, well educated American woman born and raised in a democratic society ever learning to tolerate such injustice. Betty Mahmoody who later wrote her book  Not Without My Daughter  certainly lived to experience her nightmare "of an American wife who agrees to visit her husband's family in Tehran only to find herself trapped there by Iranian laws that forbid women to leave the country without their husband's permission." Mahmoody's book does indeed "give an unremittingly bleak picture of life in Iran, describing wife beatings, filthy houses and vermin-infested food."In contrast the author writes in Chapter 5 of a certain Janet from Kansas City who "gradually found herself coming to love many aspects of her life in Iran. She found that Iranians lavished affection on the few Americans who stayed. Some Iranians had warm memories of American teachers or technicians who had helped the country while even those who saw Americans only as rapacious exploiters felt that Janet, by staying, had aligned herself with Iran. Instead of being greeted with hostility, she found herself welcomed everywhere--pushed to the front of food lines, given the best meat and helped in every possible way." Yet at the end of this same chapter the story of Margaret, another American born Islamic wife, is highlighted. Her husband accustomed to going on long business trips to America had, instead of taking her for a visit to her parents, chose to leave her behind to do the chores for his mother and sister: " 'My mom's not too pleased' she said. 'She calls up and says, 'You waiting on his relatives again? ' She knows they're working me to death. She wants me to come home.'" Yet, when asked by the author why she had not taken up her mother's advice and go home for a while Margaret "straightened her hunched shoulders and kneaded the small of her back with a clenched fist. 'I can't' she said "My husband doesn't want me to." It was up to him to sign the papers that would allow her to leave the country." How truly sad a scenario!Some Islamic countries, however, seemed to have a more open mind when it came to military service. In Chapter 6 Jihad Is For Women Too the author wrote of how the Emirates' president Sheik Zayed's wife, Sheika Fatima, offered the radical solution of recruiting women to deal with the manpower shortage. Hessa al-Khaledi, a friend of the sheika's, and the first woman civil engineer in that country was delegated to solve the problems of recruiting the Emirates' first women soldiers and "reconciling the religous establishment to their existence." A major problem came up with who would train these women. The Emirates only qualified instructors were men and that was unthinkable. "The answer was obvious to anyone who had watched the U.S. military descend on nearby Saudi Arabia. There, U.S. Army women were flying troop transports, maintaining missile batteries, trucking munitions to the front lines, The Emirates asked the U.S. Army if it could spare a few of its senior speciailists whose average length of service was fourteen years. Their commander, Major Janis Karpinski, was already serving in Saudi Arabia." Major Kapinksi, who years later was promoted to Brigadier General Karpinski wrote of this in her book  One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story .This is all well in good up until you read Chapter 10 Politics, With and Without a Vote. Out of everything I read in this book the story of what happened to a group of university educated, high achieving women from what Saudis call "good families" was the MOST shocking. The author described how in November 1990 forty-seven women, driven by their chauffeurs, met on the parking lot of the Al Tamimi supermarket in downtown Riyadh. There, dismissing their drivers, about a quarter of them slid into the drivers' seats of their cars, the rest taking their places as passengers. A few blocks later members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice stopped the cars at the intersections ordering the women out of the drivers' seats. Soon regular police arrived, the women were yelled at that they had committed a religious crime and the police drove the women's cars to police headquarters with the woman in the back. The author goes on: "While the women were held at the police station, Prince Salman summoned a group of prominent relgious and legal experts to discuss what they had done. The legal scholars concluded that no civil violation 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." One would think that when the women who had taken part in the demonstration returned to work the next day at the university they "would have been 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 classes boycotted by large numbers of conservative students. Soon denunciations spewed from the mosques. Leaflets flooded the streets...Predictably the womens' 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." This was NOT the WORST part of this however. These women ended up being BETRAYED by the ruling family who instead of standing by them on Islamic grounds, proclaiming that what the EXTREMISTS were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, caved to THEIR pressure: "Prince Salman's committee's findings were quickly buried. Instead, the government suspended the women from their jobs and confiscated their passports." To add insult to injury a week after the demonstration: "Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the interior minister, joined the slanderers. At a meeting in Mecca he denounced the demonstrations 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, 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. "Although some sixteen years old now, this is still an OUTSTANDING book about life for Islamic women in their respective countries. As a Lithuanian-American who was encouraged to seek as much higher education as I could, never treated as property by either my father OR my husband I feel extremely fortunate to be living in the United States free of such restrictions. The Islamic faith does appear to have some real problems in its interpretation and application of the teachings of the Koran. I had previously read Irshad Manji's book  The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith  which describes this in great detail. I would highly recommend Manji's book in addition to  Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women .

This is the third book that I've read that outlines the plight of Muslim women as a whole. Yes I'm sure, there must be plenty exceptions to the brutality and inhumanity that is outlined in these books and the stories that are depicted are most likely, the worst cases the authors came across but what comes through with disturbing clarity, is a systemic, religious, abusive, misogynistic undercurrent against all women of Islam, which varies in intensity from country to country (infidel women don't even count).Nine Parts of Desire is written by prizewinning Wall Street Journal correspondent, Geraldine Brooks and is based upon her experiences during the seven years she was stationed in the Middle East. She gets the title for her book from an old Muslim proverb "God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men."Brooks does try to provide a more balanced view of Islam than previous authors have presented, however the bottom line remains the same - that Muslim women, in most Muslim countries, live at the whim and total dependence of their husbands or their male relatives. Brooks tries to explain and I do believe her, that this untenable situation is not sanctioned by the Muslim Holy book, the Quran. In fact she maintains that the Quran and Hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) of Islam's original message actually gave women sweeping rights that were unheard of in the Seventh Century. These rights included the right of inheritance and the right of divorce.Brooks claims that the rights of women started to erode early on as Islamic armies spread the word of the one true God in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries, by borrowing and adopting those anti-woman customs to which they were exposed. Islam adopted the royal Persian custom of veils, accepted gender mutilation from Egypt and when it found societies in which women had little or no voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women's participation withered. Women in the time of Muhammad rode camels and horses, ran businesses and even fought with the armies, yet woman of today are generally timid, fearful and backward, especially in the less progressive countries or the more primitive areas of large progressive countries.Nine Parts of Desire tends to concentrate on those countries where the author spent the most time and had Muslim women friends, namely Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and even Palestine.CONCLUSIONNine Parts of Desire is a laconic, well written book of 289 pages. Though it is a relatively short book, Brooks manages to disseminate a torrent of information. There is also a useful glossary of Arabic terms in the back as well.Though Brooks does not make excuses for the troubling situation Muslim women find themselves, she does point out that those who condemn these practices in the West, tend to overlook parallel though less overt treatment of women around the world, including in the West. I agree that there are wife beatings, even killings in America but at least it is against the law. A woman could be stoned to death in Saudi Arabia if she has been found to have had sex out of wedlock. This requires testimony of four male witnesses, who in one case, I read about in another book, were the girl's accusers but were in realitly her rapists. Brooks on one hand show how Muslim women are discriminated against but also points out that many women claim to like their present status and point out the advantages of being anonymously cloaked. These tend to be older women who are afraid of change.A by product of Brook's writing, though most likely inadvertently was the appearance that Islamic society appears to be grossly inefficient. Prohibitions against the full integration of women in most of these countries make some of the simplest tasks virtual impossibilities. As an example she tells of a surveyors inability to conduct a poll in Saudi Arabia for laundry detergent. Saudi women are forbidden from talking to males outside of the family and females if allowed to work at all are restricted to jobs such as medicine or teaching.I think Nine Parts of Desire would be a good place to start for any reader that is interested in getting a balanced view of how women of Islam fair in various countries and the outlook for more liberal women's rights.Final Rating 3.9 Stars

I have a long history of enjoying Geraldine Brooks' writing. Her detailed research and her excellent wordsmith skills have made her novels both engrosing and informative. This book was a complete departure from her novels. Her research remains thorough and relevant to the material she shares in this book. The book is disturbing, however, as it demonstrates the powerful forces that are unleashed in a society that is considered to be a theocracy. In particular, the powerful forces are directed towards women and their inherent rights.If nothing else, this book serves as a warning to those who think that separation of Church and State is not a desirable thing. Please read it and consider its warnings!Thank you for this amazing if not disturbing work, Geraldine Brooks.

This book is more than 20 years old but helped me to get an understanding of women in Islamic culture. Well written.

Another superb book by Geraldine. I was a primary teacher for eleven years in the Middle East, Qatar, Kuwait, and Dubai and have seen first hand how Muslim women live. I was not one of those expats who only socialised with other expats; I had long, but careful, exchanges with many Muslim women. This seems to me to be a fair interpretation of anything I saw. As usual, the research is outstanding!

Il ya a des choses intéressantes à apprendre.C'est un peu général - pour les informations plus exhaustives, il faut regarder ailleurs.Ce que j'aimais le plus, c'est que ce n'est pas tout blanc/tout noir - enfin, beaucoup de noir, mais quelques points positifs, afin d'eviter que ce soit TROP ... biased (désolée, il me manque le mot en français.

The title is puzzling and is never really explained fully. The book is not very out of date in that many things have happened in the Muslim world since it was written. The author spent time with women in many countries and had good access to them as part of her career in journalism. It's an interesting book and could do with being longer and more up to date.