A God Who Hates Women: A Woman’s Journey Through Oppression

By Dr Rafizadeh

For a woman in a male-dominated society, choice' is an alien word. And inequality, violence, injustice, abuse, and discrimination a daily living reality. A God Who Hates Women is an emotional journey through a labyrinth of violence and civil war. It' s a journey through a battlefield riddled with archaic cultural demands and explosive emotions . . . where a mother and her son struggle to navigate through a cruel patriarchal society in an attempt to survive. To live. Will endurance and courage overcome daily abuse? Will a crumbling homeland deprive a young boy of his right to identity? Will it wipe away all dreams of a future? A myriad of memories and experiences are woven together in this riveting true tale of one family' s heartbreaking struggle through the mire of religion, politics, war and their unwavering hope for peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9788175993235

Book preview

We will call her Divah, my great-grandmother said. And so it was that my great-grandmother coined a new word in Arabic and bestowed upon her daughter, my own grandmother, a name which meant ‘female monster’ in the language of Old Damascus of the early 1900s.

The ancient city of Damascus, founded in the third millennium b.c., and in continuous habitation since then, its history a bewitching amalgam of people and divergent cultural practices, now normally finds itself described through the romanticised trope of the enigmatic Orient—she of narrow, baffling lanes, of crumbling ancient buildings, of bustling markets of chaos, colours, and secrets. The temptress, this cultural and religious capital of the Levant.

But, Damascus in the early decades of the twentieth century, when my great-grandmother called her daughter a female monster, was a different place, driven by different socio-cultural impulses, and bound by different realities for those who lived and experienced the city away from the eyes of the romantics.

Salma, my great-grandmother, was born in a world where she, like other Syrian women of her time, was a commodity with a set function—cook, clean, and produce as many sons as she could because large households meant more working hands brining more money in, and thus, were the only means of ensuring the survival of the primary family unit. She was, in fact, regularly pregnant through most of her child-bearing years, but, in spite of her trying every traditional means possible to keep them alive, seven of her children died before they even reached the age of five and only the eighth one, my grandmother, survived, and as the story goes, she survived because one day, sometime during the course of her mother’s eighth pregnancy, a Damascene seer landed at Salma’s doorstep and told her, Salma, you need to name your child after something evil.

Astonished, Salma asked her why.

Because your children are dying, and they are dying because the Angel of Death is watching them, the seer explained. But if you give your child an evil name, the Angel of Death will not touch it and take its soul because he loves the Devil. You should choose a name to push the Devil away. And the scarier the name, the better chance there is that Azrael, the Angel of Death, will let the child survive. Do you understand?

Salma nodded; she was desperate for a son, and more so for a son who would survive long enough to reach adulthood. Having already tried many different means to save her children, she was now more than eager to try this one as well, but she didn’t know what name to choose. The most evil name she could come up with, and that too after much thinking, was Div, which meant ‘monster’ in Arabic and which wasn’t especially evil enough. It was a male name—she didn’t even want to imagine that the baby might be a girl, leave alone think of a female name, because, given the culture of the time, girls weren’t desirable at all, and it was a boy she had always wished for, like everyone else around, and it was a boy she now prayed for.

But the child that was born to her was a girl, and Salma, terribly upset and distraught when she first set her eyes on the baby, cried out, I am disgraced! What am I going to do? What am I going to do with it? There was another problem: the name. I have chosen a boy’s name, Salma wailed. What evil name for a girl can I pick now?! Her options were few and none of them were as scary, as evil enough as Div. She thought over it for a few days, and then, wanting nothing more to do with the whole business, she declared, I will call her Divah.

Days passed and Baby Divah, my grandmother, turned one, and Azrael, the Angel of Death, spared her. She turned two—and again, she was spared—then three, then five, and then thirteen, and according to the custom of her people, she was now ready to be married off and start a family of her own.

The husband chosen for young Divah was a man named Ali Al Adal Hareb, a quiet unassuming sort of a man who worked as a vendor in the local souk (marketplace). Divah left her mother’s home and went to live in the Hareb family home in Haret al-Yahud, the Jewish Quarter, in what is now the historic quarter of Old Damascus. The Jewish Quarter is located right next to a predominantly Christian community called the Bab Tuma and living here, my grandmother would have experienced the true coexistence of three religious communities: the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, both Shi’a and Sunni—the mornings would have seen the men leave for work while the women stayed behind, cooking, cleaning, sitting outside their homes around mid-morning, sharing cups of coffee, talking, and sharing their lives and their woes, and come nightfall, the men would have returned from work and the socialisation would have extended to sharing hookahs and maybe a game or two of backgammon—but while some today might call this coexistence an example of early cosmopolitanism, in truth, these ethno-religious groups were highly mixed and had a very weak concept of ‘us against them’, if at all.

But to return to my grandmother, true to the customs of the time, she was pregnant almost immediately after the marriage and she felt especially blessed when Zein, her first child, was born—not only alive and healthy, but an alive and healthy boy. In all, she gave birth to five girls and three boys, and my mother was the sixth child born in the family.

My grandmother was, like her mother before her, entirely a product of her time, a time when patriarchal forces controlled all forms and expressions of culture and, in turn, forced women to act in a manner which would only further perpetuate the cycles of abuse, exploitation, and domination that drove patriarchy in the first place.

Divah’s attitude towards her daughters, for instance, could be best described as being cavalier. She named my mother after the daughter she’d had before her, a little girl who had died of a high fever at the age of five. She had, apparently, decided that the right way to treat the feverish little girl was to cover her with as many blankets as she had in the house. Whether this ‘treatment’ contributed to her death or not isn’t known, but what is known is that when they found the little girl dead the next morning, my grandmother appeared to view the girl’s death as a blessing rather than a loss to the family. In fact, she was known to have often said that of the eight children she gave birth to, there were three boys and five ‘burdens’. They are the most difficult of burdens and the most worthless of things, she would say of the girls, and, whenever she would get angry with my mother, she’d taunt her, saying, I wish your destiny was like that of your dead sister and that you had not passed the age of five like her. Her disregard for her daughters wasn’t something terribly rare back then—though the attitude was more prevalent among men who, as in most Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, dominated women and valued their sons for their potential of helping the family financially—but her disdain seemed particularly more passionate than most and she would claim, sometimes quite loudly, that girls were a stain on the family name and that one should get rid of them and ‘purify’ oneself as quickly as possible.

Divah was also a control freak, her need to dominate and manipulate those around her, extending from her children to, in a complete reversal of the traditional male-centric marriage structures in Syria at that time, her husband.

My grandfather was a quiet man, almost constantly overruled and overrun in his household by his wife. He would wake up at half past four each morning to go to work in the town souk, selling gum, cookies, bread, and eggs, and come back only at midnight. That he was a subdued man was attested to by Mr Ghasan, a local shopkeeper who told me, Once, during the time when the French and the Ottomans were fighting each other, a bomb, dropped from an airplane, exploded near your grandfather. Ever since then, he has been an especially quiet and calm person. He was submissive too, Mr Ghasan added, preferring to give in to the demands made of him. For instance, when the Ottoman soldiers ruling Syria, and later the French soldiers occupying Syria, ordered him to make them potato sandwiches, my grandfather, who wasn’t in the business of selling sandwiches, but who knew it wasn’t wise to annoy the soldiers because it was a very dangerous time for Syrians, and who was, ultimately, a survivor, would grab some potatoes and cook them and then serve the men the potato sandwiches they had demanded of him.

When my mother was six years old, she went up to him and said, I’ll prepare breakfast and dinner for you, Dad, from today.And she did. More than one reason probably brought her to this offer, at such a young age that too, but perhaps it was primarily pity. She had often heard ugly exchanges between her parents, with her mother shouting, cursing, and saying to her father, You are not a man; I did not marry a man. She would also call him offensive names, but he never responded, never fought back. He knew, and my mother also learned it quite early on in her life, that it was her mother who was in charge of every single thing that happened in their house.

The effects of my grandfather’s reluctance to stand up to his wife extended beyond the limits of his own life. For one, it hastened the end of my mother’s childhood dream of acquiring an education. She was in her fifth-grade year when it happened. Not having any inkling of what was about to happen, she came home from school one day at around three in the afternoon, full of plans to study after she was done with her daily chores, when her mother, by way of greeting her, simply stated, You will not go to school anymore.

My mother had no reason to disbelieve her mother; in fact, her abrupt announcement was much in keeping with her typical domineering treatment of the entire family. But she could not resist trying. Look at my grades, please! she begged. I want to learn.

The decision is made, don’t argue with me, my grandmother snapped back. And my grandfather, he didn’t say a word in his daughter’s defence. For that matter, no one did.

Over the next few weeks, though my mother tried to be obedient and do as her mother commanded her to, she missed going to school terribly and cried often. Whenever my grandmother caught her thus, she would shout angrily, Why should you keep studying if you are eventually only going to stay at home? You are only meant to wash the asses of your children, to clean, to cook, and to take care of your family. Girls are born to stay at home and please their men.

But my mother knew otherwise. She knew that there were women who worked outside their homes, like her teachers in school, and yet, she was aware that in their culture most women did end up just as her mother had described. These reminders only deepened her anguish and grief and the weeks of her mourning for the loss of her beloved schooling expanded and lingered for months. But, when at last she saw that there was no use in crying and pleading with her mother, she took on additional chores around the house to keep herself busy.

My mother’s family was never financially secure. Though both my grandparents worked hard—my grandmother took in sewing, but there was little work available—their combined income wasn’t enough to support their family of ten and food was often scarce. Aware of the constant financial strains the family faced, my mother wanted to help, but, still being a child, and a girl at that, she would have found it impossible to find work outside. So, to make the best of what she had been allotted in life, she tried to do the best she could by keeping the family home clean and tidy. She cleaned the floor of the house with a cloth and buckets of water almost throughout the day, because with so many people coming and going, the floor was perpetually dirty. She made coffee and prepared food for her brothers and their friends when they came over for visits, and she cleaned up after them. She was perpetually on call as far as meeting the needs and demands of her brothers was concerned. She washed dishes several times during the day. She took care of her father, she took care of all the guests who came in, and she took care of most other things in the house, and all this without even a penny being given to her as an allowance while her brothers were given weekly allowances. My aunts, her sisters, told me that she worked so hard that most days her hands ached, but what hurt her most was the fact that even they, her sisters, didn’t do all that she was doing for the house and for her family.

My grandmother became pregnant again when she was in her forties, and when she finally gave birth, it turned out to be one of the blackest days the family had seen because she gave birth to not one girl, but two. I do not want to have anything to do with them, she declared, and left the twins to my mother. And my mother’s selfless heart, my elder aunts told me, wouldn’t allow the babies to be abandoned. I am like your mother, she would whisper to them while she washed them, changed their clothes, fed them, and played with them. With time, almost everyone agreed that she had, in fact, become a true mother to them, and even when they were old enough to understand the actual relationship they shared with her, the twins often bypassed their actual mother and sought my mother out.

Your mother’s name, Amira, means ‘princess’ in Arabic, one of my mother’s elder sisters once said to me, but Amira’s life bore no resemblance to that of a princess . . . her life was difficult, far more difficult and miserable than that of any other women in our culture.

Whenever I spoke to my mother about her days in her mother’s house as a young girl, she had very few happy memories to share. One she recollected quite often was how she would stay awake on Friday nights so that she could wake up early on Sabbath day and go over to the house of a Jewish friend and watch them perform their Jewish customs. They would call me and ask me to start their fireplace for them, she would remember fondly. They were prohibited from doing it themselves on Sabbath. And to thank me, in return, they would offer me fruits and chocolate.

But even this one small moment of rare happiness was soon to become a distant memory.

Is your mother at home?

There were three women standing at the door of our house, covered from head to toe in burqas that made it impossible for me to discern which one of them had asked the question. From the confident way in which they asked the question, however, I assumed that they must know my mother, and so I called out for her. When she came to the door a minute later and invited them inside, the same voice said, We wanted to know if you have an unmarried virgin daughter in the house.

To my young ears, it felt as if they were asking for a particular vegetable at the souk, as if to look at it, smell it, touch it, and carefully inspect it before deciding whether to buy it or not. And as soon as they left our house—I saw them walk over to our neighbour’s house and knock on their door—my curiosity prompted me to ask my mother about what had just happened.

They are looking for a bride, she explained. They will go around for weeks, knocking on people’s doors and asking if they have girls of marriageable age in the house so they can see as many girls as possible before choosing the most suitable one.

As time went on, I learnt even more about this practise, which, I admit, will appear odd and desperate to those viewing it from the outside, but in that particular social milieu, it was an accepted ritual. Apparently, before the search for the bride starts, the seekers typically asks their sons or brothers about what kind of a girl they want—thin or chubby, long-haired or short-haired, big busted or with small breasts (or as people say of the latter, breasts the shape and size of lemons), white skinned or brunette—and then, with that list of desired traits and features memorised and stored in their minds, they start looking for a girl. My mother had fallen victim to this very practise.

One of my grandmother’s relatives had a thirty-nine-year-old son who needed to be married off, and the women in the man’s family had taken it upon themselves to find him a suitable wife. They had already knocked on many doors and had already been rejected everywhere because of their well-known stinginess and finicky behaviour when they heard that "Um-Zein¹ (my grandmother) has just the girl."

Being my grandmother’s relatives, they did indeed know that she had a daughter of marriageable age, and so they visited my grandmother and asked, Can we see your daughter?

My grandmother, immediately understanding the reason for their visit, said yes, and went in to instruct my mother: Wear the nicest thing you have and come out to the room. Look obedient and keep silent all the time. And bring coffee for the guests. The last was intended to show that my mother would be a good wife. My mother, unfortunately, didn’t know what was going on. Her only thought was that there were guests visiting her mother after a long time and that it would probably divert her mother’s attention away from her and that would mean a day marginally better than the others.

At fifteen, according to my relatives, my mother was thin, with shining eyes, impeccable skin, and long black hair. When she entered the room that day, holding the coffee tray in her hands, unaware of how her fate was to be sealed, the three women took one look at her and started poking each other excitedly with their elbows, all the while peering at her. That’s exactly what we want! She heard one of them exclaim, and thinking that the woman was talking about the coffee, she lowered the tray and offered the woman a cup. They lent forward and picked up a cup each, openly scrutinizing her face as they did so, making her feel suddenly uncomfortable, as if she were a mouse under a probing microscope in a lab somewhere.

What do you do? the one sitting in the centre asked.

Remembering her mother’s warning to be quiet and obedient, my mother said quietly, I help my mother around the house.

That’s the best thing to do, what you are doing, the woman replied approvingly. "You know, in the end, women have to be able to bring up their children, clean their homes, please their husbands, and look after them and their families. That’s all God meant us to do. But have you seen some of these new girls who go to the university and get a degree and then work like men? God doesn’t agree with that. Women were created to be housewives, to look after home and hearth. How can they work with men they don’t know? It is haram." When the woman couldn’t resist the aroma of the rich Arabica coffee anymore, she raised her cup to her nose and sniffed at it appreciatively before taking a sip.

Yes, every woman is destined for one man, the woman seated to her right now picked up the conversation, "and that man is her husband. A good girl should wear the best clothes for her husband. She should prepare for him the best food. And when he’s