Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks Page A

seemed that God, or at least her godly fiance, had other ideas. Their wedding, he decided, would be small and austere. “I suppose he is right,” Sahar said uncertainly. “At all those grand weddings,nobody ever says anything good about the bride or her family. If it isn’t fancy enough, they criticize her stinginess. If it is very fancy, they criticize her for showing off.” Her fiance had even appropriated the task of buying the wedding dress. “The dresses are much finer in Saudi Arabia,” Sahar said hopefully. That may have been so, but I couldn’t help wondering what kind of gown a fundamentalist would choose for his bride.
    None of my Egyptian friends seemed to have an easy time finding a mate. It became a race to see who would marry first: Sahar the fundamentalist, who had more or less arranged her own marriage, or my very unfundamentalist friend, who was having one arranged for her. She was named in Arabic for a beautiful flower, so I will call her Rose. She was unusual, even in the rarefied world of rich, Western-educated Cairenes. Like almost all unmarried Egyptians, she lived at home with her parents but, unlike almost all young women, she had a job that required her to travel abroad, alone.
    On one of these trips she’d fallen in love with a Paris-based American and was, when I met her, in the midst of a passionate affair. He had offered to marry her, but she had refused. Although the Sunni branch of Islam allows men to marry other monotheists such as Christians or Jews, it doesn’t offer the same liberty to women. Because Islam is passed through the paternal line, children of non-Muslim fathers are lost to the faith. Rose’s lover came from a Christian fundamentalist family and argued that his conversion would kill his mother. For her part, Rose believed that marrying a Christian would cause a complete rupture with her family. “I would be living in sin,” she explained. “And anyway, I want to marry a Muslim. I want my sons to be called Omar and Abdullah. I want to go to the sheik and have a wedding party with dancers and drums. I don’t want to slink off to some French bureaucrat for a sly little civil ceremony.”
    The religious impasse finally ended the affair. As well as a broken heart, Rose had the gnawing anxiety of an Egyptian woman who was over thirty and edging toward irreversible spinsterhood. “I went to my father and said, ‘All right. I give in. You’ve always wanted to arrange a marriage for me, so let’s see what you can do. Bring ‘em on.’ “
    Affluent, intelligent and beautiful, with the huge deerlike eyesextolled by Arabian poets, Rose had it all. Using their large network of extended family and business contacts, her parents soon compiled a long list of prospective suitors, and Rose worked her way through it as briskly as a pilot completing a preflight check. Her first meeting was with a young doctor, who came to her house with his father and sat down with Rose and most of her family for tea. “I asked him where he’d traveled and he said Alexandria and Ismailia. Alexandria and Ismailia! How can anyone get to the age of thirty-two and never have gone outside Egypt? His family’s rich; he could have gone anywhere. I could never be happy with someone so unadventurous.”
    After that she vetoed meetings at home. “In the first five minutes I could tell it was pointless, but I was stuck there, being polite, wasting a whole afternoon.” She insisted on meeting future prospects at their offices. “Usually they don’t get past the first half hour,” she reported after a few dismal encounters.
    The wealthy young son of a merchant family survived his first interview and seemed promising. Rose even went on a three-week, closely chaperoned holiday to Los Angeles with the family. “I fell in love—with America,” she reported on her return. But not with her suitor. “I had to want to do everything when he wanted,” she said. “It was a disaster if I didn’t like the