keeping the blade sheathed

love, lust and sexuality are so unclear for muslim women.

in our best portrayal, we are serenely beautiful and sexless as a vase. we are unconditionally loving as a madonna. a muslim woman is most honorably portrayed as a mother. echoes of catholicism…

i've always wondered why it seems like we hobble our women.

my disclaimer - of course, there are exceptions and i am one. in my mind, so many things are cultural, not a fault of the faith but of the humans who practice it.

we keep our women uneducated. we marry them off young, cover their faces so they can barely see on the street. we teach them that their job is to support a man, not support themselves. we don't equip them for speed and strength. we limit their sensual world, we keep them confined to the home or behind curtains, we cut off their clitorises and cover their hair.

i once stood up and marched my daughters out of an eid khutbah (sermon) because the man speaking (not an imam, thank God for small mercies) said there are more women than men in hell. women are seduced by the material world, they can't control themselves, so they lead men astray, he explained. as an example, he told us that his daughter wanted to celebrate new year’s eve – what a sacrilege!

i muttered something about his deserving to go himself to test out his theories.

but i wondered if i was missing the subtext.

more recently, as i was involved in the building of a muslim community center, i listened to a muslim woman talk about why she wanted a physical wall built between the parallel men's and women's sections of the prayerspace.

she didn't like sitting so close to a man. she said could feel the heat of his presence, the scent of his clothes, his breath if he sat beside her. it was distracting.

perhaps, muslim women are more finely-tuned. perhaps our sensuality is so knife-blade sharp and sensitive, that even beneath our layers of fabric and behind our walls, we tremble with sensation. perhaps, unlike an ordinary person, the simplest physical interaction - the brush of shoulders or breath on our ears - is enough to shoot sparks through our spines.

there was a "modern love" essay in the nytimes in 2007 called “close enough to touch was too far apart.”
a young muslim woman went on a date with a young muslim man. as they sat in the cinema together, his hand creeped towards hers, and they, for a brief second, held hands.

we all know that morning after feeling. when one regrets the breach of one's honor or dignity with a slight nausea and a hollow in the stomach. feeling thus, she broke off with the young man.

in thinking back, i wonder if we muslim women aren't so perceptive that the warmth of the hand, the heat of the blood surging through its veins, the heightened sensitivity of the fingertips was too breathtakingly intimate in itself. it's too easy to dismiss her as prissy and over cautious. perhaps instead of being oversensitive, she was hypersensitive. her ordinary reaction was an overreaction.

i think of lush novels like “the almond” by nedjma. or my sheltered pakistani cousins who were addicted to jacqueline susann and v.c. andrews, books with torrid shiny covers.

even as a small child, i was frustratingly sensual. on a spring day, i liked to lie face down on the lawn and inhale the scent of the damp earth, occasionally chewing stems of grass. i loved the heat and the slight salt of sweat on the edge of my lips. i liked my body and the sensation of my skin. i can't imagine keeping my hair covered because i love the feel of sun in it, its softness and lushness. shiny bald during chemo, i loved running my fingers across my scalp. i loved the feeling of water pouring down on it.

i was fascinated by watching my body transform as I swelled rosy with pregnancy and equally fascinated watching the flesh fall away when I had cancer. i marveled at my strange sexless shape, pale blue like a francis bacon painting. preadolescent, my cousins and i sneaked into my uncles’ stash of playboy magazines and even then, i was enthralled by the shapeshifting beauty of the human form.

my poor mother tried constantly to keep a check on my intoxication with sensual pleasure. she found me in the backseat of the volkswagen enjoying the feel of the warm plastic against my skin. she warned me that touching the wrong parts of my body could make me very sick. that desire could be so overwhelming that if i didn’t learn to keep myself under control, i would come to a sad end. and i would most certainly go to hell. today, when i lie down on the pilates equipment that uses that old black volkswagen upholstery as a cover, i am still transported to a sense of contradiction. isn’t the body sacred too? i learned to respect its temple as i recovered from meningitis, liver disease and then cancer.

years ago, i went on a date, i think it was my second or third so we were not yet close enough to touch. we walked through central park and briefly sat on a bench. a ladybug landed perfectly on my friend’s hand. I laughed and he put his hand near mine, so the bug could dance from his fingertips to mine. as we touched, ever so gingerly, it felt like electricity bolted through my entire body. I lost my voice. my mouth went dry.

i sometimes wonder if my fellow muslimahs are as receptive. if the reason for the harsh seclusion is that we pulse with sensorial awareness. in the same way that native americans have a low tolerance for alcohol, we are innate hedonists.

are the limitations on us a way to guard the strength of our sensitivity? is the edge kept razor sharp and ready by staying sheathed?

is it that, if unleashed and acknowledged, our desire would rock the world?

wouldn't letting us loose would be better? releasing us to own our experience, to meld the material with the spiritual. would't the blade be of more value in use? as women, we are the closest to the divine in bringing forth life as well as living.

in my mind, our ability to fully live the body is what can take us to the soul.