Wedad’s Cavalry

Ahmed put the Sex and the Ummah section in a chastity belt. He then took off for Dubai and forgot to give me the keys. He probably did it to guard against the perverts of the Ox Brigade. Meanwhile Mohja was getting impatient. So here is her story in the Main section, till we get things sorted out.

Prudes, perverts and children stay out.

By Mohja Kahf

Wedad smoothed her cupped palms over her heart-shaped face, signaling the end of her post-prayer dua. She and Jowaher rose and lifted their right hands in salute to the beautiful Kaba.

Jowaher sighed contentedly. “I love visiting the House when it’s not Hajj season,” she said. “So peaceful and quiet at last.”

Indeed, the Black Lady looked serene, her gold-belted Dress no longer hitched up to her waist as in the days of heavy human traffic around her, but hanging down to the marble floor at her feet. Only the odd umra pilgrim circumambulated, and the occasional out-of-towner, minus pilgrim garb, performing a Greeting or Farewell Tawaf.

The two women pulled their niqabs* back to full coverage over their faces and padded softly out of the Holy Haram, across thick Persian carpets and wide marble tiles cool against the soles of their feet. A shrunken old man in a gray caftan snored at the base of a pillar. A knot of women whose shalvar-qamises peeked out from under black overgarments clustered around a teapot and little glasses full of the steaming liquid gold. A few men in long white caftans and white headdresses passed under the arches of columns lining Hajar’s run between Safa and Marwa, singly and in pairs. It was the duha hour, long after fajr and far too soon for duhr, and the Holy Sanctuary was an abode of sakina. Once out the Gate of Peace, Wedad and Jowaher slipped their shoes out of canvas shoe bags and put them on.

“I prayed for an orgasm,” Wedad murmured to her older sister, their heads bent close together over their sandal straps.

“Again?” Jowaher said, shaking her head as she did her straps with elegant henna’d hands.

“Well, that and for the Palestinians to be restored to their homeland,” Wedad said. Far be it from her to ever forget the poor Palestinians, even in her own hour of need.

Wedad straightened up and sighed, her niqab of fine black gauze fluttering in front of her nose and mouth. She and her sister walked at a leisurely pace toward Soug al-Haram, the covered marketplace across from the Kaba Sanctuary, their black silk abayas dusting the ground behind them in graceful arcs.

High above them, jutting out of the side of a small mountain that rose just behind the Sanctuary, loomed three monstrous palaces recently erected for the families of the king, the crown prince, and the next most powerful Saud brother, overlooking the Kaba from what some Saudis whispered were disrespectful heights. Seest thou not how thy Lord dealt with the people of Ad…Iram, of the Pillars…and the Thamud, who hewed rock in the valley…They who tyrannized the lands, and multiplied corruption therein…Therefore thy Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment… Thus did the qari of the Haram recite the Verses of the Book into the microphoned air.

“I don’t suppose things like this would help,” Jowaher said, running her hand over a rack of frilly lingerie in chintzy polyesters, see-through baby dolls and lace teddies and fire-engine red thongs in the first alley of the Soug al-Haram, a few hundred yards from the Kaba. The black cover of the soug offered relief from another day of hot Arabian sunshine.

Wedad waved a dismissive hand, showing a glint of filigreed gold jewelry. She had plenty of negligees, in far better quality than what was on the street stalls of this shabby market. She had drawers full of French silk nothings from exclusive department stores in high-rises in the heart of Mecca. She even had an authentic Egyptian bellydancer outfit with little jingling bells on the breasts and hips, an outrageous wedding gift from Jowaher’s outrageous, lusty friend Hamida. Besides, arousing Nimr was not the problem. The problem came after arousal.

“How long has it been, dear?” Jowaher asked, with concern. Wedad was the only child of their father’s junior wife, and Jowaher the youngest child of the senior wife. Wedad as a toddler had taken to following twelve-year-old Jowaher around the family compound bustling with ten children, two mothers, one father, three grandparents, one great-grandparent, a geriatric nurse, and a host of servants. From the junior wife’s white adobe villa to the senior wife’s beige adobe villa, from the tetherball court to the pink playhouse and the garage to the servants’ quarters, Wedad shadowed Jowaher. When Wedad’s mother died, tragically young, of an aggressive breast cancer undetected until the late stages, little Wedad became permanently attached to Jowaher’s hip. Now that Jowaher was forty and Wedad thirty, the ten years between them nearly melted away, and in addition to being big sister and little sister, they were the best of friends.

Wedad didn’t answer right away. Jowaher walked silently beside her. They exited the Soug, crossed the river of cars that was Haram Street, and entered the green granite lobby of a gleaming glass building where Jowaher lived in the two-story penthouse with her husband and five children. Chilled, heavily air conditioned air hit them at the threshold. The Egyptian doorman nodded at them over wire-rimmed glasses. The Malaysian chauffeurs playing cards in the back office didn’t glance up. They drove for the women of various families in the building.

“Saifullah is four years old,” Wedad finally said. “Not since he was born.” They were speaking in low, discreet tones, so that anyone unfamiliar with the cadence of their voices would not catch anything but the musical slivers of words. The fact that their faces were covered, so that one could not match what one heard to the movement of lips or the changes in facial expression, made their conversation that much more difficult for an interloper to follow.

“You haven’t had an orgasm since nineteen eighty-five?” Jowaher gasped, as the elevator doors closed. She threw her niqab up over her head once they were alone, showing anxious, clear brown eyes in a slender oval face. Wedad had confessed the problem before, but Jowaher had no idea things were this bad for her kid sister. Poor Wedad, she thought.

Wedad had a run of bad luck in husbands. Her first was a lush. Thabit’d leave her alone several nights of the week, come home sloshed in the early hours of morning, sleep till five or six p.m. the next day, and be impossible to talk to until he started drinking again. Then he’d be jovial for about five minutes until he started to get smashed and incoherent again, to the despair of his sweet, aged, ineffectual parents, whose home and property he was slowly destroying. The same sweet, aged parents had carefully kept Thabit’s addiction secret from Wedad’s father when he asked, prior to consenting to the match, about the boy’s character. Perhaps they thought Wedad could reform him.

There was no culture of drinking in Saudi Arabia. Drinking happened only in private, hidden ways. That the atmosphere discouraged drinking was a good thing, in general. It also meant that when someone did start drinking, especially someone with a tendency to excessive behavior like Thabit, there was little in the way of models for moderate drinking, nor was there anything in the way of support services to get alcoholics to stop ruining their lives and the lives of those around them.

It was not so much a marriage as a pit stop between his binges. Wedad couldn’t take the craziness. She was not equipped with the inner resources to nurse him out of drinking and had not signed on to be saddled with such a role at seventeen. She had no problem getting a divorce from him; the legal system was on her side, citing his drinking as ‘immoral and impious behavior.’

“Thank God we didn’t make a baby,” Wedad told Jowaher.

“Yes, how did you manage that?” Jowaher said, helping her move back into the family compound on a dismal day of winter winds and portentious clouds.

“Never mind,” Wedad said. Better left private that he mostly missed the target, just like he missed the garage gate and slammed his Mazerati into the wall, its engine spent for nothing. He was a big-shouldered, bulky man, with a good job of muscles that he was letting go to flab. He was big in many ways, all of them wasted. Wedad had often wondered, looking at him stretched out snoring, a thread of spittle drooling down the side of his open mouth, his massive legs splayed, how different their experiences in the bedroom might have been, had he put his full faculties to the job.

After that nightmare, Wedad was careful, in choosing the second husband, to find one with religious values, so she wouldn’t have to deal with a drunk ever again. “But I may have gone overboard with that requirement,” she told Jowaher, when her second husband, Obaidah, left for jihad in Afghanistan after only seven months of marriage, in a flush of fervor that swept through religious circles after the godless communists took over that sister Muslim country.
Even America praised these helpers of Afghanistan as ‘freedom fighters.’ Their guerilla insurgency was doing a good job of destabilizing the Soviet occupation. Joining them was still, now, in 1989, the high commitment ‘thing’ for men of the religious ‘in’ crowd to do, although Russian troops were in the process of withdrawing, having learned that even a superpower must pay a high price to occupy and mold in its image a country determined not to be occupied and molded.

Obaidah died there, three months after he left home. Not in jihad, sadly, but from complications following a bout of malaria in a camp outside Peshawar, Pakistan, before he even set foot in Afghanistan.

Oh, but Obaidah had been good to Wedad. Tall and lean and full-bearded, he presented a stern façade to the outside world, but at home alone in their high-rise Jeddah apartment, he was wreathed in smiles for his wife. “Khairukum khairukum li ahlihi,” he would quote the Prophet’s Farewell Sermon, “The best of you is the best to his family.”

Wedad’s second husband Obaidah took with rigorous seriousness the shariah requirement that a husband satisfy his wife sexually. In the bedroom, he would cite the Prophet’s hadith for foreplay. “I read it in Imam al-Ghazali,” Obaidah said, beaming. “Ghazali relates that the Prophet said, ‘Do not fall upon a woman like animals, but send messengers first.’ They said, ‘What messengers, oh Messenger of God?’ He said, ‘Kisses and words.’” Obaidah would come freshly showered to her, his hair anointed, smelling sweet, and always citing some hadith or other as he kissed her with the kisses of his wet mouth.

“Sex between a husband and wife is meritorious and earns reward in heaven,” he might say.

“Really truly?” Wedad murmured. She wondered why, then, so many people thought that God and sex were separate spheres that did not touch each other. Yet Obaidah began every lovemaking with the name of God. “Say ‘by the Lord of the Kaba,’” she demanded.

Instead Obaidah quoted the text in full. “According to Muslim, on the authority of Abu Dharr, may God be pleased with him, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, Truly every glorification of God is a sadaqa, every magnification of God is a sadaqa, every thanks given to God is a sadaqa, every ‘La ilaha ila Allah’ is a sadaqa, to enjoin a good deed is a sadaqa, to forbid an evil deed is a sadaqa, and in the sexual act of each of you there is a sadaqa.’” Obaidah accompanied each time he said ‘sadaqa’ with a sadaqa of sorts for Wedad. He went on, “Then his companions said—do you want to know what they said, Wedad?”

Wedad, being showered with sadaqas, said breathlessly, “What did they say?”

And Obaidah continued, “They said, O Messenger of God, when one of us fulfills his sexual desire, will he have reward for that? He said, Do you not think that were he to act upon it unlawfully, he would be sinning? Likewise, if he acts upon it lawfully he will have a reward.”

“It was a good and sound hadith,” she murmured joyfully, later.
It used to shock her that Obaidah recited hadiths in the buff and spoke the name of the Prophet in bed, but he said, “If we can mention the name of God naked—we are even urged to make dhikr of His Name, standing and sitting and lying on our sides, in love and in distress, in fear and in joy, whatever our physical condition, then what could be wrong with mentioning the name of His Prophet with my halal wife in our halal bed?” Obaidah had a strong love of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him. “If you love someone, the memory of something they said or did may come to you at any time,” he said. “Love links to love— one person I love is here, and one I love far more is absent, separated from us by hundreds of years, yet all love is related.” And Wedad was uplifted and awed.

Wedad and her husband Obaidah earned much heavenly reward. Obaidah taught her many hadiths, and she was an apt student. She learned the difference between ‘good’ and ‘sound’ gradations, and also ‘weak’ and ‘broken chain’ narrations, and those that reached their goal hanging by a single thread of transmission and those that reached their goal in multiple ways.

“Do you know, the Prophet called it ‘the sweetness of intercourse,’ Obaidah said to Wedad. They were in a certain position which shall remain private so as not to violate the sanctity of marital sex.
“Tell me the hadith,” she begged, making advantageous use of the position.

“According to Muwatta Imam Malik, the Prophet, peace and prayers be upon him—” her husband Obaidah began.

“Peace and prayers upon him,” Wedad echoed warmly.

“--when asked whether it was permissible for a man to marry again a wife he had divorced irrevocably, if she, after the divorce, married another man who divorced her before consummating the marriage, said, ‘Not until she has tasted the sweetness of intercourse.”

“Tell me who narrated it,” she urged softly.

And so her husband Obaidah began tracing the chain of narration along certain of her limbs which shall remain unnamed, moving from link to link in the transmission, joint to fleshly joint. “Sahnoun said that Yahya said to him that Malik said to him that Miswar son of Rifa’a al-Quradhi related—” and by this point in the isnad, Obaidah had gone a certain distance which shall remain unspecified.

“From whom? From whom?” Wedad pleaded helplessly. “Narrate, don’t stop—narrate!”

“From Zubayr son of Abdulrahman—”

“Abdulrahman—son—of—whom…”

“Son of Zubayr! Son of Zubayr!” The chain of transmission was reaching its heights now, and her husband Obaidah was on a roll, his mastery of the Islamic sciences obvious. “Who said that Rifa’a son of Simwai!—divorced his wife, Tamima daughter of Wahb, three times!— ”
“Then what, narrate, then what?”

“Then she, Tamima, married Abdulrahman son of Zubayr, and he turned away from her and could not consummate the marriage and so he parted from her. Rifa’a wanted to marry her again and it was mentioned to the Messenger of God—”

“Peace and blessings be upon him—”

“and he forbade him to marry her,” Obaidah continued, reaching the very crux of the matter now. “He said, ‘She is not halal for you until she has tasted—the sweetness—the sweetness—the sweetness—of—intercourse!’”

“By the Lord of the Kaba, it’s the truth!” Wedad, for her part, affirmed, her faith shining. “It’s the truth, it’s the truth, IT’S THE TRUTH!” she cried, and fairly shook and sobbed with joy.
“It was rated a good and sound hadith,” Obaidah murmured, before he fell asleep.

She didn’t mind that he wanted her to thicken her face cover from her usual two gauzy layers to three, and not to leave the house without his permission, and to reduce her visits to her father and Jowaher at their respective Mecca homes from weekly to monthly. It showed he cared. He cared about her and wanted to protect her.

They had high ideals, she and Obaidah. At least, he had them and she shared them, finding them good and sound. He was going to help orphans, and the poor in general. “That is what our nation should be doing with the treasure God has given us,” he said. But first he had to go and serve his Muslim brethren in Afghanistan. He would do his duty by them, and then return, and begin all the plans he and Wedad planned together, including having, inshallah, children of their own.
They planned, and God planned otherwise. Wedad mourned her second husband Obaidah long and hard. She pulled together the mahr she collected upon divorce from Thabit, with the inheritance from Obaidah, and decided to create a sadaqa jariya to earn herself reward in heaven. She endowed the Obaidah Ben Ghanmy Waqf, naming an orphanage in Somalia and a small neighborhood mosque in Bangladesh—of course she looked for charities in proper Sunni Muslim countries that preached sound aqeeda, enjoined the good and forbad the evil things—as beneficiaries in perpetuity. Rayhann set it up for Wedad. Rayhann’s family owned an investment firm, and Rayhann dealt with the female clientele in a secluded side office, while her father and brothers handled the men who formed the bulk of business. Wedad had met Rayhann at Sheikha Aziza’s.

“How do you bear it?” Hamida asked Rayhann. They were poolside at Sheikha Aziza’s sipping iced drinks under a green and yellow umbrella. Rayhann had been unmarried for years, after a disastrous, abusive early marriage from which her father and powerful uncle helped extricate her. “How do you bear simply living on and on without sex, having tasted the sweetness of intercourse before? I couldn’t,” Hamida said with a toss of her great black mane, not waiting for an answer. She was forty-one, or “in my sexual prime, if you please,” she corrected anyone tactless enough to reveal her numerical age and, without being completely indiscrete, made it clear that her husband, while he did not endear himself to her in many other aspects of life, endeared himself to her in one aspect very well, the one related to her sexual prime.

“A fat man is the best thing that could happen to you,” she said archly. She referred to their marriage as ‘Hamida and the Fat Man.’
Sheikha Aziza’s place was the private estate of a wealthy woman from a prominent Meccan family. The Sheikha was a widowed third wife who was devoted to two things in life: Her only child, a daughter (now long grown and with daughters of her own), and the cultivating of friendships. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays between the hours of asr and two a.m., Sheikha Aziza’s was an open house for women. Any woman was welcome there, as long as she was introduced by a friend already known to the house.

Ladies could drop in regardless whether the owner of the house was there to greet them personally, or away at her Taif villa, her Cairo flat, or her French chalet. In fact, one rarely saw the Sheikha, even if one was a regular. Wedad spied her once, from a distance, a tall grand woman in a long blue gown, her black hair streaked with silver and piled atop her head. By the time Wedad came close, she’d disappeared.

Children were not allowed, except nursing infants. The women in the social classes that frequented Sheikha Aziza’s had nannies at home, so this was easily accomplished. Wedad came once or twice a month, for a social life of a wider scope than her circuit of visits among family, in-laws, and friends offered, something that reminded her a little of the social life at college, the women’s branch of the University of Mecca, now called Um-al-Qura, where she had gone for three semesters between her first and second marriages.

The grounds at Sheikha Aziza’s featured a date palm orchard, tennis courts, a pool lined with umbrella’d café tables, a fitness room and dry sauna, a screening room, a video arcade, a library of Arabic and foreign books, a small mosque, and an adjoining courtyard lined with fuschia bougainvillea and other greenery, amid which stone benches had been placed at conversational intervals.

A small army of Indonesian servants, women only, of course, moved smoothly throughout, refreshing coffees and teas and iced drinks and bringing bowls of cashew and pistachio nuts, and platters of fruit, bananas and balah and cumquats and Mediterranean cucumber and papaya and persimmon. Sheikha Aziza’s great-great-grandfather had been Indonesian. Many Meccan families had foreign roots in this way, because their location in the Holy Precinct, the hub destination of Muslims worldwide, gave them ample berth for intermarriage, a fact for which the Meccans were often scorned as ‘pilgrim’s droppings’ by the more pure-bred (or perhaps inbred) families of Riyadh and the other heartland cities of the Arabian peninsula. The tree of Jowaher and Wedad’s old Meccan family had absorbed, in ages past, a Yoruba princess, an Indian begum, and several milkwhite (so the family lore described them) Albanian slave-girls.

Anyway, it was said that the Indonesian servants and the Saudi family of Sheikha Aziza for whom they worked were distant cousins, international branches of the same family tree. This did not change the precariousness of the employees’ status in the anti-labor land of their employers where they had lived now for two generations, although it disguised and tempered it somewhat. Not that Sheikha Aziza and her family, which was an honorable and benevolent one, didn’t do what was in their power to do to soften the reality of the master-servant relation without, of course, going so far as to change the relation itself.

“There are other things in life to think about besides sex, Hamida,” Wedad said. Hamida’s mother had opened the first beauty salon in Mecca, nineteen years ago, and now Hamida owned a small chain of three salons, which she supervised from time to time but mostly allowed her Pakistani manager, his accountant wife, and three Philipino head stylists to run. For a successful businesswoman, she talked little about business. “Honestly, Hamida can be so superficial,” Wedad added, turning to Jowaher, the color rising in her smooth, creamy brown face.

“Like what, darlings?” Hamida the unstoppable said, stirring her iced mango nectar. “What other things?”

“Politics,” Jowaher suggested, her hair in a sleek black chignon cupped in silver netting. Her niqab and abaya, like everyone else’s, came off at the door of the estate. Hers were folded neatly into her leather carry-all.

“Travel,” said Rayhann, a petite Saudi girl with a Syrian mother. Her fluffy curls, streaked with blonde highlights, fell over the padded shoulders and sequined yoke of her cream-colored blouse, an au courant look of the 1980s.

“Politics is a realm forbidden to all Saudis,” Hamida said in robotic monotone. “For we live in the best of all possible Kingdoms. Why would we want to meddle in politics when our wise rulers have everything in hand?” She winked and nodded toward a lawn chair by the pool where Zaeema Monem the Informer lay in a swimsuit and sarong under an enormous pair of sun shades. No one knew for sure, but it was said Zaeema had a direct phone line to the top Sauds in the national security forces. One had to be careful what one said around her. In fact, one had to be careful period. Some said that one of the Indonesian servants—but no one knew which one—had a high connection in the royal house. Some people whispered that there were bugs in the walls, maybe hidden cameras too, and that the helicopters that occasionally flew overhead took pictures of all who were assembled, not only at Sheikha Aziza’s but everywhere. It was not necessarily the Sheikha who was the source of all the alleged surveillance, but those who may have wanted to keep an eye on her.

“And Wedad’s never traveled anywhere, so how’m I supposed to talk to her about travel?” Hamida added. Hamida had toured Japan only last August.

“I have too traveled,” Wedad protested. “I’ve been to Yanbu, and all the way up to Aqaba, and clear across to Dammam.” Wedad was not among those Saudis who summered in Europe or in Southeast Asia, where the riyal went far. She liked to hunker down at home. Why not? From the lush Yanbu resort and the serene palm tree oasis of Medina to mountainous Taif, metropolitan Jeddah with its Red Sea corniche, and Riyadh of the classic desertscapes, it was a beautiful country, and spacious enough for the lifetime of two Wedads.

“I rest my case,” Hamida said. In the sunny distance behind her, two twenty-something women, dark olive skin gleaming in white shorts and polo shirts, started a vigorous tennis match.

“Books, then,” Jowaher urged. “Have you read any good books lately?” Hamida was being tiresome. Jowaher was impatient to discuss the stock market with Rayhann, for she was worried about some of her investments in South Asia. And she wanted to ask Hamida how her Egyptian aerobics instructor was working out, because she was looking to sign herself and her girls up for either karate or jazzercise with the same woman.

“Why yes, Abla Jowaher, as a matter of fact I have,” Hamida said with a straight face. “I’ve been dipping into that fabled classic of our heritage, The Thousand and One Nights. Which, as I’m sure a lady as cultured as yourself knows, is all about—sex.”

Jowaher shook her head. “You’re a hopeless case, ya sheikha.” She didn’t want Hamida putting salt on Wedad’s wound. If you have good sex in your life, the steady and sensible Jowaher firmly felt, sex retreats to its natural place as one of life’s many permissible pleasures. It was all good and fine for Hamida, who could go on merrily about ‘Hamida and the Fat Man.’ But for someone who had no proper outlet…. Jowaher worried about Wedad.

“I don’t mind, Jowaher,” Wedad said, laying her hand gently on her sister’s arm. “In fact, maybe Hamida can help.”

“Hamida is at your service, my lady,” Hamida said, getting up and bending at the waist with drama. She was tall and buxom, with an hourglass figure, and wore a long floral A-line skirt and a sleeveless blouse with a plunging neckline and luxuriant ruffles that fluttered nicely with her wide-armed flourish.

Wedad got up and linked arms with Hamida. “Come on then, let’s take a turn around the gardens,” she said. They passed a couple of nursing mothers reclining on chaise lounges, each with her infant at the breast. A sober-faced young woman was making ablution at the fountain in the courtyard of the tidy little mosque, her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. At the foot of a date palm, a gaggle of grandmothers, women with the gaunt cheeks and fierce eyes of the generation before the oil, sat cross-legged agreeing sharply that the new crop of Saudis was fat, lazy, spendthrift, and lacking in all hardy virtues that came from the old desert life.

“…and it’s not that he doesn’t try,” Wedad went on to Hamida as they rounded the tennis courts and entered the terraced garden leading into the library. “It’s just—well, I hate to say it, but I have been married twice before and I have some basis for comparison, so I know—and this is in the strictest confidence, Hamida, or I’ll never speak to you again, by the Lord of the House—because it’s—well, it’s a size issue, really. Ever since I had the baby, he tends to knock about in there without really filling me up, and—Now stop that, Hamida. I’m not going to walk with you if you’re going to laugh at my husband. He’s a good man.”

Hamida straightened up her face.

“And he’s the father of my son and I want to have more children with him and spend the rest of my life with him, this time, God willing. But I don’t want to go without for the rest of my life. Oh, dear God.”

Nimr was a good man. Genial, affectionate, a companionable husband, a tender father. Broadshouldered, as tall as Obaidah but thicker in build. Fair of face and figure. Understated masculine elegance, he had, in his fine black linen abaya over his long white robe. His red checkered shmagh or headscarf, impeccably ironed, hung regally to his shoulders and showcased his firm, square jaw, the carefully shaped outline of his geometrically precise beard. You would never know to look at him, Wedad thought, that there would be any problem in that department. Maybe the problem is me, she thought. Maybe it’s not that he’s too small, but I’m too big, stretched out by childbirth?

“…and you say the exercise the ob/gyn taught you…?” Hamida said in the sauna at Sheikha Aziza’s about a month later. Hamida had advised Wedad to see a specialist.

So Wedad had gone to see a Lebanese gynecologist—a woman, of course; there were women doctors to meet every need of women in the Kingdom, from podiatry to psychiatric therapy, so they nearly never needed to see a male doctor. She picked the Lebanese one because she couldn’t bear to explain the problem to her own Saudi gynecologist. Dr. Turkmany taught her the pelvic-floor tightening exercise—Kegels, she said they were called—and Wedad had been doing them religiously.
“—just isn’t enough,” Wedad said to Hamida, adjusting the towel around her waist as the steam rose from the rocks. “It’s still too—”
When she returned from the gynecologist that day, there was a fortyish man crossing the street in front of her, tall and lean and bearded, in a shining pure white caftan. The ends of his white men’s headcloth were thrown, with hip nonchalance, back behind his golden neck. The ghutra covered all his hair and was creased perfectly evenly down the middle of his forehead, like unto the symmetry her second husband Obaidah used to stand before the mirror to achieve. This tawny man reminded her of her second husband Obaidah. So much that the heat came to her cheeks and she was grateful that he couldn’t see her face under her niqab. He lifted up the hem of his white caftan so as not to dirty it in the runoff from someone washing the car next to his, and his legs were well-shaped columns, thick with curly black hair.

Obaidah would have worn long white men’s modesty pants under his caftan, Wedad thought, peering entranced at the thick muscled legs, and then she realized with a start that she was staring, and then she remembered that he couldn’t see her staring, ‘but that doesn’t mean I mustn’t avert my gaze,’ she said inwardly, ‘for the Seer of All sees me.’ Then she remembered a hadith Obaidah had taught her, that the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, told Ali, may God be pleased with him, or maybe it was Jafar, may God be pleased with him too at any rate, when the Prophet caught him staring at a beautiful maiden riding behind her father on the camel next to his, the Prophet did nothing but when he gazed at her again, the Prophet gently turned his face and said, The first gaze is for you, but the second gaze is against you. ‘All right, that was my first gaze, the one that belongs to me,’ she thought with a little private smile, which she was still glad that the man could not see.

But when, the next day, the same handsome tawny man got into the elevator of her building with her, and seemed to forget to turn his body slightly away from hers in a gesture of modesty and rejection, and seemed to hold the door open for her for a second too long—was it more than courtesy? could it have been the intimation of an invitation? Or the exploration of whether an invitation would be entertained? The range of interaction permitted strangers of opposite genders was so narrow that the range of possible interpretations was huge and wild.

Wedad had a moment of panic. What would she do, if the opportunity opened itself to her? Of course not, of course reject it, of course, she thought hurriedly. But it had been so long since she had felt that fullness of flower, those sky-filling fireworks. What if, just once…and if its secrecy could be guaranteed, never to come to light? No. I am a principled woman. Wedad braced herself with the words of the woman who was asked by Caliph Omar how long she could bear to be without a man, so that the Caliph could mandate the stint of service for soldiers in the army not more than the period she should specify, and she said, By God, if it were not for my faith, this bed would have rocked with love by now. And so the Caliph Omar set the limit at four months, or was it six? Or was it two years? She really couldn’t remember.

‘But oh, for me it has been four years,’ Wedad groaned inwardly, ‘and the Caliph Omar has not sent the cavalry in yet. Oh Lord of Muhammad, ya Fattah, no succour in sight, for how long how long how long how long?’

“Darling, at the very least you’ve got to stop faking it,” Hamida said briskly, a few weeks later. “You’ve got to let him know you’re not being satisfied. If he doesn’t know there’s a problem, how is he going to help you solve it?”

“Hamida! How can you suggest such a thing? You can’t tell a man that. Not one you want to stay with.”

“Darling, I never said tell him he’s small. I mean, tell him you need more work. More foreplay, maybe?”

Wedad blushed. She put her iced guava nectar against her flushed cheek to cool it. “He foreplays till he nearly has a heart attack, Hamida. It’s not before, it’s afterplay that I need. It’s torture, stopping just before you—”

“Ladies, have you heard?” Rayhann waved, her petite figure hurrying toward them from the courtyard. “They’re going to close down Sheikha Aziza’s.”

“No!” Hamida said.

“How can they close it down—it’s a private home,” Wedad said. Her friends could still visit her at home, of course, and she at theirs. But then who knew when her mother-in-law or sister-in-law would pop in and horn in on the conversation. And everybody’s children were always traipsing in and out. Sheikha Aziza’s was different.Wedad wouldn’t have met Rayhann without the venue of Sheikha Aziza. Or Hamida.

“Close it for visitors, except family. They say it’s illegal assembly.”

Wedad was upset but Hamida shrugged. “They do this all the time,” Hamida said. “As soon as there’s a hopping scene anywhere in the Kingdom, they crush it. Remember Dr. Khadija?” A few years ago, the lectures of a moderate Saudi Islamic scholar at the University of Mecca, Dr. Khadija Haneef, became popular. Students who weren’t enrolled in her classes started coming by to hear her. Her classroom became standing room only on Monday nights, crowded with women. Even a princess of the realm began attending and speaking highly of Dr. Khadija’s ideas on the necessity for women to participate in expansive ways in the building of a true Islamic society, one not based on blind loyalty to one man or family but on universal accountability to the commandments of God. The next semester, Dr. Khadija was ‘excused’ from teaching, given a sabbatical, and sent on a prestigious fellowship to Morocco. When she came back, there were no more Monday night lectures.

“Then there was the Ayyad salon,” Rayhann said morosely. Adila Ayyad, a Saudi journalist, hosted a very informal gathering of other women writers. It started out as a loose gathering of a few of her friends who wanted to critique each other’s work and share ideas. Soon it was a draw, attracting the cream of Saudi women writers, and visiting foreign novelists and poets who were in the know would express a hankering to attend. It was rumored that Nazek al-Malaika, the Iraqi woman who inaugurated Arabic free verse in her influential poetry book of 1948, paid a visit. Once it became a more or less famous venue, everyone who knew anything knew it was doomed. Sure enough, the government made a generous ‘offer’ (not the refuseable sort) to Adila Ayyad to endow a chair in her name at the university, and gave her expanded column space in the newspaper, and made her head of an editorial department—but the salon stopped.

“But why?” Wedad said. “Sheikha Aziza’s open house wasn’t hurting anyone. It’s not political or religious. Or intellectual. Or artistic. Or anything!”

“It’s something springing from people, something outside the government’s control. That’s enough for them,” Rayhann said.
“And God bless our government’s control!” Hamida said loudly, as Zaeema the Informer sauntered nearby, backgrounded by vermillion bougainvillea. “They know what they’re doing, and ours is not to question why, no, by the Lord of the Kaba. And God bless our friends and allies the Americans, and keep them over our heads!” she added, for good measure, and turned her face so Zaeema couldn’t see and made a wry grimace.

“So this is our last time at Sheikha Aziza’s,” Wedad said sadly, the following Tuesday.

“This is it,” Rayhann said, delicately peeling a perfect-sized cucumber.

Wedad, her eye passing over the cucumber absently, said suddenly, “If only polygamy worked the other way too, or the old custom of concubinage.”

Hamida laughed. “Not something we ever expected to hear from you, darling.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Jowaher said to Wedad.

Wedad blushed. “It’s not that I’m obsessed with sex.”

“Out with it,” Hamida commanded.

“You three know my problem. I was just fantasizing, you know, that, well, that if only I could keep Nimr, because I genuinely like him and don’t want to ever hurt or leave him. If I could keep him as the husband of my emotions, see, and then take another husband or a sort of, you know, concubine-man who could figure out how to make things work for me in bed. Whose job it would be to figure it out.” She stopped.

There was a short silence. Hamida looked at Jowaher. Rayhann looked at Hamida.

“By the Lord of the House, there’s your real problem, darling,” Hamida blurted.

“What?” Wedad said, looking from one to the other. Rayhann had stopped peeling her cucumber.

“Well—Wedad—it’s your job,” Hamida said, with ardor. “Even if you were to get a hundred men, it’d still be your job to figure out your body, and learn how to get your pleasure yourself—oh for the love of the Kaba’s Lord, you can’t rely on a man to do that!”

Wedad was bewildered, but Rayhann and Jowaher were nodding.
“You can’t just lay back and expect him to know, darling. That hardly ever works,” Hamida harrumphed.

“But—my second husband Obaidah—he—he always—”

“Dear,” Jowaher said gently, “you’re married to Nimr now. You have to put your second husband Obaidah away. May he rest in mercy. Say after me, ‘may he rest in mercy.’”

“May he rest in mercy,” Wedad repeated, a little defensively.
“Do you love Nimr?” Jowaher said. “Do you want him for keeps?”
“I—I do. Yes, I think I really do,” Wedad said. “But what about—well if we’re just plain the wrong size for each other,” she protested, “then I just don’t see how—”

“Big isn’t always good,” Rayhann said, looking closely at a cuticle. “Big and dumb is just a battering ram.”

“Ouch,” Hamida said, looking at Rayhann with sympathy.

“There’s nothing size can do for you that small can’t do too, dear,” Jowaher said, patting her sister on the gold-bangled arm. Wedad wondered how she knew that. “He just has to be more creative in how he goes about it. And you have to guide him.”

“Me?” Wedad said, turning from one friend to the other. Wherefrom had they come up with all this know-how overnight, and was she the only one left in the dark even at this late date, a thrice-married woman in her thirties? The Caliph Omar wasn’t sending the cavalry for her, after all? She was her own cavalry? “And what do you mean, ‘creative?’” Wedad added aloud, in a plaintive tone.

“There’s fingers and mouths and things, darling,” Hamida said. “There’s more to a man than one body part, for heaven’s sake. And then there’s technique to consider, and positions that can help you on your merry path.”

“And if all else fails, there’s fruit,” Rayhann the long unmarried said, her hand closing around the cucumber again. Wedad’s mouth fell open.

“I think technically that is a vegetable,” Hamida said. “Point being, take responsibility for your pleasure, ya sheikha. Take your orgasm into your own hands!”

“Verily God does not change the condition of a woman until she changes what is in her self,” Rayhann said, with gravity.
“And that, dear Wedad, is our consensus for you,” Jowaher said gently, “and it is good and sound.”

---***----

*’Niqab’ in Saudi speech refers to the piece of clothing that covers the full face (the same term in other locales refers to the cloth that covers just the lower half of the face).

With thanks to Liaquat Ali for reading, and constructively sharing his objections to, part of the story.