Rule realties #2

So what is it like to live with the realities of "nose in the dirt," rule #2 in Kharabsheh (and also a tariqa-wide rule)?



Many of the rules, if not most of them, governed not only how women can dress, but also behave - in the z, in the house, in friends' homes, in the street. Again, I remind you that the rules for murids in Jordan are very different than the rules - or lack of them - for the murids everywhere else in the world. So if you are a murid from Chicago, and you read this and say "That's not what it's like," just remember - you're in Chicago.



So nose in the dirt.



Well, first of all, for a period of time, up until about summer of 2007, Um Khayr would give a dars on Tuesday mornings about marriage. These classes were for all women, married or unmarried, and there were, at one point, a few women who weren't murids but were Americans married to local men who would attend. She used non-Islamic books, exclusively. The two "bibles" of the women's group were Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin and The Surrendered Wife by Laura Doyle. If you didn't have a copy of these books, there were women who were very eager and happy to lend it to you. NK also allowed us to make copies of these books, saying that because they were unavailable in the bookstores in Jordan, then copyright - as conceived of in Shariah - didn't prevent us from reproducing them ourselves. UK also liked Dr. Laura books, as well as Michele Weiner Davis's books Divorce Busting, Change Your Life and Everyone in It, and the Sex Starved Marriage. Now, you were not supposed to read all of the chapters. For example, she didn't want unmarried women to read the sex starved marriage one and all of us were supposed to skip the chapter in FW about sex and religion, things like that. But overall, she thought these were good books that sort of fell in line with what she was teaching us.



Why? I think because they are mainly secular (FW is a Mormon book), and modern and would appeal to us in their tone of voice and writing in a way that a 800 year old book by a man from the Middle East wouldn't. However, even with the familiar names and modern haircuts, the message was basically the same - keep your nose in the dirt. Is your husband about to make a disastrous financial decision? You need to shut up and not "nag" him and question his manliness. Things like that. Week after week, UK taught us how our asking for things - even necessities, how our displeasure at things he may have done that is wrong, how our failure to dress up in sexy clothes and make up all of these things - but most of all, asking to go home to our home countries - were "nagging" and ugly and we would drive him away. "Remember," she would say "polygamy is not illegal in Jordan, and believe me, they do talk about all the problems they have at home and some of them tell each other 'Why not just take another wife and send her home?'"



Now, Laura Doyle says that you should never tolerate abuse, but that is not what we exactly learned. UK would say that if you or your husband, in your marriage, were inspiring one another to do wrong by Allah, to not be the best Muslim you could be, then you should divorce, but never, not once, did she tell us it was okay to leave when a man hit you.



This is because our dear shaykh had taught us that wife beating is part of the Shariah. I don't know if he knows what that means to some men. He lives an out of touch life. He doesn't visit people in their homes, except rarely. He does not go outside and mingle with the people. He only goes from his home to the masjid and back again. He does not look at people when he is walking up the hill, and does not talk even to most of his male murids. So how does he really know what he is giving permission to?



Yet US and UK know, because when some men are hitting them, they go to these wise women for counsel and help. I know, a lot of sisters want sh. Nuh to put their man straight. They think if he tells the husband, the husband will obey but does he tell them at all? Mostly, from the women I know who went to them for help, they told them, "Well, you need to work harder at pleasing him," and "You should bear this with sabr and your reward is in Jannah."



There were some women there who, as the months would go by, seemed to shrink and disappear. Some women you would only see on Eid, when SNK encouraged the men to let their wives gather with the other women to celebrate. Some women never talked or had anything to say, they would sit in the corner just watching. They looked so sad.



Shortly before the time that C lost his job, there was a mawlid. Maybe about 50 of us were there. All of a sudden, one woman who was very popular but whose physical and mental deterioration were noticeable, began speaking about her husband having sex with her against her will, when she was sick and also when it was haram (ie, her period). The whole room went silent and people turned their faces from her. "My mother has had to pull him off me a few times," she said. "He just can't stay away." She wasn't bragging. She just said it apropos of nothing. "Everyone thinks I am so lucky but I guess I'm not."



No one knew what to say, so after a moment, they began to talk about anything and everything else. Later, some of the sisters lectured her about speaking about "her husband's affair" and that she had to protect his reputation. She went to UK and US, and later SNK a number of times, and said that they told her to bear this with patience nad that a lot of wives wished their husbands found them "so desirable." Later, she told a few people he was also sodomizing her, and that UK told her to just "be patient and make duah."



There was two or three other women whose husbands were into pornography. US had told a small group of us on one occasion that she knew there were men "watching videos and these things" online, but never were men lectured about this the way that we were constantly lectured on clothing and laughing / talking too loud. I remember one woman was emailing murids asking "What am I supposed to do?" and no one would give her advice, but just "make duah that he is cured of this" and that sort of thing.



After I had left the tariqa, I was put in touch with a former murid whose husband was addicted to homosexual pornography. She had been to UK and US numerous times, as well as writing letters to NK, begging for help. They ignored her. When she divorced her husband, they said taht it was her fault that her husabnd had been "misled," even though it is probable that her husband had this issue long before the wifeyboo came along. However, as with most of us, the solution that they offer to men who have gay urges is to get married. The now ex-wife thinks that is what happened in her case.



There were men who would stand right up close to the women's doors or right up at the corner of streets, so that women had to brush past them or stop and ask them to move. Although they were told not to do this by one of the shaykh's students, they did it all the time, and this has gone on for years. Instead, the women are lecutred about talking and laughing too loud - not because of noise but because it apparently is alluring to men.



I wondered then, when will the men of Kharabsheh be told to take some responsibilities for their nufus? (I know now the answer is "When pigs fly.")



After that sister, the one who confessed in the mawlid, left her husband, people began to make duah against her, even though at that time, she was still trying to reconcile with him and get him to go to counseling so they could stay married. I attended a small tea party gathering and out of nowhere, one of the women raised her hands and said "Ya Rabb, please let Brother X find a righteous wife, a good murid," and other women said "Ameen."



It was women, who knew that she was suffering, who were her worst enemies. I remember UK told some of us that because she didn't have patience and sabr and iman, Allah could punish her, "even though she thinks she's doing something that is beneficial to her."



The bottom line, always, is that anything your husband does or asks for must be borne by you, even if it is against the religion or against your dignity. And for you to seek help or seek justice is a crime against men and against Allah. Many women have left their murid husbands and subsequently left the tariqa. I do not remember any of the women who were divorced in my time in the tariqa who were not labeled as rebellious or "mentally and spiritually unbalanced" later. In some cases, like the woman I told you about, we were told to stop talking to them. Very few stay in the tariqa because when you leave your husband and US and UK unleash their displeasure against you, you learn that the reason they say "Nose in the dirt" is because that is what you are - dirt. And who would want to seek spiritual enlightenment with people who tell you you're dirt and that you're crazy and a bad Muslim for trying to leave an abusive or just bad marriage?



I do want to say that I think there are many happy or normal marriages, even in Jordan. In Kharabsheh, I think the happy ones are outweighed by the messed up ones. Many of the women are in Jordan sort of against their will, they are very unhappy by their living situations, and things like that. Almost none of the men work, many of them either rely on savings or they rely on their parents and their wife's parents for money. I think this, as well as being foreigners who don't speak the language in most cases, creates unique pressures and has led to what is going on in Jordan now, where more than 25 couples - the last time I got an update - have been divorced in the past year.



They say that they are bringing forth a new age of Islam, a renwal of the golden age, and bringing people back to love and the sunnah. However, what they are doing is teaching women to be silent, even in the face of horrific abuses, and that our value is as sexual objects, brood mares, and cleaning girls. We must absolutely look at the track record of a group of leaders who have had 25 divorces or more just among their Kharabsheh group in the past year, as well as the many nasty divorces that have happened with the tariqa for many years now. Our bad marriages aren't a secret to anyone - except maybe Nuh Keller, who is, it would seem, blissfully unaware of anything.