Many of the things I recall here come from my personal journal that I was keeping when I lived in Jordan. I have been writing these out for a while, editing them, and putting them in some sort of chronological order. But I have a life outside of the computer, so it takes me a while.
I am telling this story not to shock or titillate you, but because it was an essential turning point for me and for other individuals, and because in reality, they are not the only family in the tariqa who was in this situation and who received similar counseling. If I did not think that this story wasn't an essential component of my story or if I thought that it would not provide some spiritual comfort to others out there, it wouldn't be here. I'm sure there are many things I know about Ktown that will never, ever be published on a blog. This, sadly, is not one of them.
So, once upon a time ---
I had come back to Ktown from traveling, and I expected to feel refreshed and invigorated, but I did not. I thought my time away from the z and the tariqa would leave me wanting to come to the hadra, the dars, the company of the murids and especially of NK, US, and UK. Instead, I felt more restless, things seemed sharper to me. This was after my alarm clock had been set off. I thought being away would give me a balanced perspective wherein it would be clear that the murids needed reform, but that the structure, the tariqa, and its leaders were sound. Instead, I felt more and more like the veils were being stripped away and reality was presenting its face. This was, I want you to know, not something I wanted to happen.
Like many people I was heavily invested in being a murid, in this man being my spiritual leader and in UK and US being my models for womanhood. I had spent a great deal of time and money coming to Jordan to study Arabic as well as take the companionship of the shaykh and gain tarbiya from him. I was apart from my family for a long time in what I thought was a holy pursuit. So I didn't want all of this to be for naught, for the blackballings and all of that to be the true face. "It must be a misunderstanding," I would think to myself. There was still some doubt there about it. But having taken a break and returned to the real world meant that when I returned to Ktown, I saw its problems more clearly than I could have ever imagined.
I was visited by a sister. I won't say where she was from or how long she was in Ktown, just that she was there. I had known her for a while, from traveling and internet forums and suhbas and things like that, and we had many mutual friends. When we met in Ktown, we immediately clicked. So shortly after I returned to Ktown, and I mean within days, the sister came to see me. Her face was drawn, she had black circles under her eyes. Her hands were fluttery, as if she was nervous. When she removed her outer coverings, her hair was a mess - a sloppy bun where it was normally neatly done. I did what we do in Jordan, which is to say that I prepared tea for her, and set out a plate of dry Turkish cookies.
I sat across from her and we were silent for some moments until she finally burst out. "I think my husband is gay." Immediately, tears began to pour down her face. I handed her a box of Fine and she sobbed for a few moments, and then gathered herself.
"Why do you think that?"
She took a deep, yet shaky breath, and told me. A few months before they came to Jordan, she needed to use his computer to check on a package that she'd been expecting. She found dirty photos he'd downloaded into a folder. Dirty pictures of men. That led her to find out that he'd subscribed to a pornography service using their credit card. And then, in tears, and with great shame, she told me he'd never consummated their marriage.
I am telling you, dear reader, I was in shock. I had seen her husband, of course, with his trim beard and healthy smile. She had always spoken fondly of him, and like most murids, did not make a show of romantic love or anything like that. Most murids who are married are extremely reserved in the way that they speak about their spouses or interact with them in front of others. So this was no signal to me of what she was saying.
I began to ask her the usual questions one would ask in this situation. Yes she had dressed up in all sorts of clothes, makeup, jewelry and elaborate hairstyles. Yes, she had asked him "what he likes." Yes she had made proficient dua to Allah for His help in this matter. And yet none was forthcoming. By her account, her husband was cheerful and fond of her, but in this one important matter, he was a failure. Although they had, in her words, "engaged in some romantic things", the marriage was, after all this time (I won't say how long) still not consummated. Of course, I asked her the questions that would come naturally to any murid.
"Did you talk to Sh Nuh, Um Sahl, or Um Khayr?"
In fact she had, and that is where her story took an even stranger turn. She had approached the women, being too humiliated to go to a man with this. She told them about the dirty pictures, about his inability to do more than some chaste hugging. This was a marriage that had taken place after her husband was a murid. I do not think she was a murid at the time.
"So what did they say?" I asked her.
Well, she said that they told her that his inability to consummate the marriage was clearly due to some failure on her part. While they did acknowledge that the photos indicated that he still had "unnatural desires" that were an "inevitable consequence" of living in the West, this was a desire that could be easily overcome when a man was joined in marriage to a woman who filled all of the Islamic requirements, including, of course, faith, sincerity, and taqwa. If she was a true woman of taqwa, a true woman of the tariqa, her husband would have no problem falling into bed with her.
That he was still downloading gay dirty photos, and refusing to come to her bed was a sign of her failures, not his. She was subjected to a checklist of sorts. Did she wear inviting clothing and makeup every day? Did she nag him? Did she keep the house clean? Did she cook delicious food? Did she do all of her wirds? Did she do all of her salats? And on and on it went.
She left the z apartments that day, she told me, more dejected than ever. No one knew about the state of her marital bed. She was deeply ashamed, and she told me that it felt as though they had dug out some deep and secret shame within her, for as a Muslim, she did believe that if she was just alluring enough, pretty enough, submissive enough, agreeable enough, and pious enough, her husband would be led to turn from his sins and his dunya desires and to lay down beside her in the conjugal bed. Why, she wept, was Allah testing her with this? Why didn't He make her good enough to bring her husband to tawba, repentance?
She plunged into a depression. She stopped doing her hair. She stopped wearing makeup. She began wearing stretchy pants and t-shirts in the home. She slept on the farshas in the living room instead of in the bed with him. (Farshas are mattresses with fancy covers that are on the floor and are the way traditional Jordanians furnished their sitting rooms). She began to see a future without children, without "her needs" being met, and felt hopeless.
And then it got worse, she told me. About a week before she came to see me, she'd been to another murid's home, for a tea party or some such gathering, she was approached by two older, more senior murids, who were known as the ablahs. These were women that most of us avoided by all means. They were harsh, mean women who had no time or patience for spoiled Westerners who hadn't lived in Egypt with the Um's or been murids of Hajji Baba. With stern faces, the murids warned her about "blabbing her intimate secrets around" and told her "there must be a problem with you as a woman." As my friend talked to them, it became clear that one or both of the Um's had told them that the marriage wasn't consummated and that it was due to the shortcomings of my friend as a wife. "AlhamduliLlah, they didn't tell them about the photos, about my husband's real problem," she told me. No, they just apparently told her most private business to women who were their buddies from the olden days, and then bad mouthed her on top of it.
She thought that perhaps, out of their desire to help her, the Um's had told the ablahs, who they must have known would scold her, out of a desire to see her "corrected" and help in her tarbiya. Sometimes as a murid, you are told stories of shaykhs subjecting their students to bizarre, painful and humiliating things as a means of wearing down their egos. So she thought, maybe this was a case like that.
I thought about this for a moment and then asked, "You mean that you think the Um's mistakenly thought that the ablahs would somehow prove a means of your tarbiya because you think that they sincerely believe that what is going on in your home is your fault?"
She thought about this, and her face turned bright red. It was like a light bulb switched on inside of her and was burning hot. "No. I don't think that they think this is my fault, not sincerely. I think they are just blaming me because it is embarrassing for the shaykh to have a murid who is gay. And because they don't want to deal with a man's sexual dysfunction." As she thought on it more and more, the expression on her face changed. She started to get angry. "Do you think it's possible they knew about him before we got married?"
"Allahu'alim," I told her. I didn't want to think on that. I was still thinking about my friend, married to a man who didn't and would never desire her. I pointed out that "even if the shaykh didn't know before you got married, he (the husband) did. He married you knowing he feels desire for men. Maybe he thought that having you there would switch him. He laid the burden of his sexuality on you, without telling you ahead of time what you were in for. So does it matter if the shaykh knew or didn't know?"
She stayed late talking to me that day, and returned the next. She turned over every possibility of the past and future in her mind. We looked at the consequences of every course of action she could take. She was already dealing with the ramifications of one - the ablahs knew about her sexless marriage, and no doubt before long most of the neighborhood's women would as well. And they did. In fact, I even heard about her from another person who didn't know that I already knew the real story. What I was told was that it was another case of a woman who wasn't ready to "stop being selfish" and give herself up on the wedding bed and that "if she didn't watch it" she would be divorced and her prize catch of a husband would move on to someone else. This was a constant theme of Um Khayr in the marriage class -- that most of the married murid women were sexually frigid and unavailable and that they were not pleasing their husbands and thus not pleasing Allah. And that we'd all better watch our steps or our husbands would move on to women who were happy to please, on top of Allah being displeased with us (ie, hell!)
My friend - she had it out with her husband. He admitted that he had a "problem," that he hoped marriage would "cure" him. Why he had not told her upon marrying her - well that was the advice of all the shaykhs whose counsel he had sought. It was a minor flaw that would be easily corrected upon marrige and she needn't ever know about it. That he might have exposed her to sexually transmitted diseases, let alone all of the psychological and spiritual distress she suffered never entered the minds of any of these men.
When it came down to it, they both left Jordan and the tariqa. They later divorced. I hear that he has left Islam and is semi-open about his sexuality. As for my friend, she is radically different as a Muslim now, as are, I am learning, many people who leave Ktown. They (we?) approach Islam very differently, perhaps in a way you would not recognize or understand, but it is a necessary thing after you live with Nuh Keller and his women. There are some murids who leave Islam altogether. I think we have yet to see the long term effect of the cult on people's spirituality, but I wonder how many will be driven away from Islam because of them.
Here was a woman who sought the advice of two women famed for their ability to understand marriage, particularly Um Khayr, and was instead blamed for the very real failures of the husband. Instead of compassion and real support, she was told that she was inadequate as a woman, as a sexual being, and as a Muslim. And then, in direct disobedience to the Quran and Sunnah, the Um's told her story to others.
If you think this story is made up, you clearly have not been to Ktown. What is even worse, I think, than this story being real - with real people who really had to live with this pain - is that they were not the first and probably will not be the last couple who are in the same problem. I know of at least one other murid couple where the husband had issues with same sex attraction, and a handful of other murid couples where the husband had a porno problem in general. I also know of several men and women whose "confidential" emails to NK, UK, and US about sexuality problems in marriage were shared with murids in the neighborhood. I even saw one that was forwarded to a friend of mine - "Please read this and understand the sickness of the West" was the message from UK. The murid's pain was used to slam our home countries. The murid's email and name weren't even blanked out. And those are just the ones that I know about.
I have spoken to other women who quit the tariqa and their marriages because of sexuality issues that the shaykh refuses to address. I haven't spoken to the men because really, after all that, this is not something I want to talk about with them.
In Kellerworld, men are perfect, and normal, with the sexual appetites that exactly match the prophet (pbuh) or that match the ascetics that he so worships - they are beyond needing sex. The women are virginal and pure, except when they aren't -- when they are needed by men for their needs or for baby making or when they are whores who drive men wild. This is why men are allowed to behave as they please, while women are subjected to ever more psychotic restrictions about dress, movement, behavior and speech -- all the while being told that everything about us is sexually alluring to the brother murids.
No man in Kellerworld is gay. No man in Kellerworld is addicted to pornography or into some strange bedroom behavior. No one ever stops to think to himself, "Hold on a second. I do not find that I get sexually out of control when I see a woman in hijab with blue embroidery on it. I find that I am able to keep my pants on when I see a hijabi woman with her face uncovered." Instead, the ones who come to Jordan begin to grow their split personalities - one for Jordan and one for everywhere else, where a woman who would be Mashallah, pious in America becomes a disobedient fitna in Jordan. It becomes a place where a woman in a blue raincoat is a sex symbol.
If everything else about the tariqa was authentic and in line with the sunnah, the monstrous nature of this issue alone would be enough to keep a sensible person away.
So please ponder this sister's story, and the other things I mentioned to you. Please think about what you know of Jordan's rules - everyone knows some of what the women are expected to do and everyone gossips about it, so you must know. My friend has let her story be told because she hopes it will help someone who is in her situation or help someone who needs to to see the truth. The least you can do is reflect upon it.
