Islam: Submission to God

            A Muslim is one who submits to God in all things. Muslims believe that Islam started in God’s mind, and it was then that He created Adam and Eve. The history of Islam and Judaism coincide until the birth of Ishmail, the first born son of Abraham who is the father of the Arabs.  The second born son, Isaac, became the father of the Jews.  Later, Ishmail and his mother Hagar left Abraham’s camp because of jealousy with the principal wife, Sarah, and they traveled to Mecca.  When Abraham visited his son Ishmail in Mecca, he built the Qa’aba as a house of God.  Over time the Arabs forgot their religious origins, and a time of ignorance settled over the land until the life of Muhammad, the prophet who once again brought the word of God to the Arabs.
Islam is an Arabic word that means "submission to God," and a Muslim is "a person who submits" to God, no matter what his or her ethnic, racial, or national origin.   The universalism of Islam has made it a popular world religion.  It has generated a distinctive social system, art and architecture, and literature, and it is one of the dominant economic, political, and intellectual forces in the world. The word Islam comes from the Arabic root SLM, which is the same root for salaam, or peace.
The practice of Islam focuses on the oneness and indivisibility of God, and the Quran records the words of God as spoken by Muhammad.  God requires absolute devotion and loyalty.  The believer’s cultural, personal, and spiritual identity have a unitary focus: the oneness of God.   The life of the Muslim is submission to this total immersion in the unity of life and reality around God, and Muslims believe that Allah will provide if one completely submits to Him.  Muslims use the word “Allah” rather than the word “God” because the latter in Arabic implies a plural meaning.  Since God is one, Muslims prefer “Allah” which refers to the oneness of the Divine.
The Quranic account of creation illustrates the centrality of Allah in Islam as the creator and possessor of all knowledge.  The belief in this relationship between God and humans in the beginning defines how Muslims see their relationship with God in their own lives.   The Quran says:
30.  When your Lord said to the angels:  ‘I am placing on the earth one that shall rule as My deputy,’ they replied:  ‘Will You put there one that will do evil and shed blood, when we have for so long sung Your praises and sanctified Your name?’
            He said:  ‘I know what you know not.’
            He taught Adam the names of all things and then set them before the angels, saying:  ‘Tell Me the names of these, if what you say be true.’
            ‘Glory be to You,’ they replied, ‘we have no knowledge except that which You have given us.  You alone are all-knowing and wise.’
            Then said He: ‘Adam, tell them their names.’  And when Adam had named them, He said:  ‘Did I not tell you that I know the secrets of the heavens and the earth, and know all that you reveal and all that you conceal?’
            And when We said to the angels:  ‘Prostrate yourselves before Adam,’ they all prostrated themselves except Satan, who in his pride refused and became an unbeliever.
            We said: ‘Adam, dwell with you wife in Paradise and eat of its fruits to your hearts’ content wherever you will.  But never approach this tree or you shall both become transgressors.’
            But Satan lured them thence and brought about their banishment.  ‘Get you down,’ We said, ‘and be enemies to each other.  The earth will for a while provide your dwelling and your sustenance.’
            Then Adam received commandments from his Lord, and his Lord relented towards him.  He is the Relenting One, the Merciful.
            ‘Get you down hence, all,’ We said.  ‘When My guidance is revealed to you, those that follow My guidance shall have nothing to fear or to regret; but those that deny and reject Our revelations shall be the inmates of the Fire, and there shall they abide for ever.’

The creation account in the Quran affirms the omnipresence and omniscience of the one God who is central to all life and all existence.  This affirmation of the centrality of God to all of life is the guiding principle for Muslim behavior. 
Muhammad and Early Islam
In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries C.E. the Middle East was dominated by the Byzantine (Christian) and Sassanid (Zoroastrian) Empires.  Since Zoroastrianism and Christianity along with Judaism were ethical, monotheistic religions, monotheism became the dominant current of religious thought in the Middle East.  It was in this religious environment that the Arab experience of ethical monotheism developed under Muhammad.  In the examples of the Sassanids and the Byzantines, the Arabs saw the use of religion as an instrument of politics, and later they would also fuse religion and politics in creating their own Muslim empire.
The Arab population was divided into northern and southern groups who had quite different lifestyles.   The central part of the Arabia Peninsula is called the Al-Rab' Al-Khali, or the vacant quarter, because it is an uninhabited desert waste land.  To the north there are desert lands that are interspersed with inhabited oases and valleys.  The northern Arabs were divided between the farmers who settled in the oases and others who lived a Bedouin lifestyle herding camels, sheep, goats, and horses from grassland to grassland.  The southern Arabs lived along the Arabian Sea from Yemen to Oman.  This was a well watered area of cities and cosmopolitanism set apart from the rest of Arabia.  It was a wealthy area because of the spice trade with India, and the Greeks and Romans called it Arabia Felix (or Pleasant Arabia) in contrast to the harsh desert interior of that land. 
Mecca and the Quraysh Clan.  However, it was a third area of Arabia that was to become important in the rise of Islam, the zone along the Red Sea between Yemen in the south and the deserts of the north.  This was the land of Mecca and Medina, an area divided between town based merchants and Bedouins.  The merchants of Mecca and lesser towns organized caravans to carry the spices and other trade goods from Yemen to the trade centers of Syria and the Mediterranean. 
A nomadic clan, the Quraysh, settled in Mecca in the fifth century and eventually gained control of this caravan trade.  As the prominent family in Mecca, the Quraysh also became responsible for the Kabah, the most sacred shrine in the Arabian Peninsula, and other sacred places around the town.  In addition to caring for the Kabah, the Quraysh were responsible for selling food and water to the pilgrims.  Muhammad was born into the Quraysh clan, but he was orphaned early in life and perhaps because of that remained marginal to the management of the Kabah and the established religion of Mecca.
The religious tradition that dominated Mecca and the desert tribes of Arabs was the Semitic polytheism that traced its roots to the original Mesopotamian cultures, especially the worship of natural forces and celestial bodies.  It included animistic elements, such as the worship of sacred stones.  Many Arabs were well aware of the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, including Muhammad.  During caravan trips to Palestine and Syria he came into close contact with Jewish and Christian thought and came to know the Bible.  Later, Muhammad traced the origins of Islam from Abraham, and the Quran gives parallel accounts of many of the same events recorded in the Bible.  For example, in Muslim sacred history the cube-shaped Kabah (the House of God) in Mecca was originally built by Adam and later destroyed in the great flood.  Abraham re-built the Kabah while on a visit to his son Ishmael, and he encrusted the famous black stone (a meteorite) into one corner. 
Muhammad the Man and Prophet.  Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570 and since he was orphaned early, he grew up under the care of an uncle.   He spent much of his childhood in the desert with a nomadic branch of the family, and like all Bedouin children he tended sheep.  At the age of twelve he began working with his uncle in the caravan trade.  At the age of twenty-five he headed a caravan to Syria for a rich widow, Khadija, also of the Quraysh clan, and he became close to her.  Although she was fifteen years older, they were eventually married which brought stability and leisure to Muhammad.  She became Muhammad’s closest confidant and supporter as he later matured into the great prophet.  During this period, Muhammad developed interests in broad religious issues, such as the Last Judgment and the prohibition of polytheism by the existing monotheistic religions. 
When he was forty years old, he began the practice of meditating in the mountains around Mecca.  One night (known as "The Night of Power and Excellence") while he was meditating on Mount Hira, the archangel Gabriel, the Messenger of God, appeared to him and said,
Recite in the name of your Lord who created – created man from clots of blood
Recite!  Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, who by the pen taught man what he did not know...
Allah had called Muhammad to recite his words to the world.  Allah was the creator god worshiped by the Quraysh clan who Muhammad understood to be the same God of the Jews and Christians.  Initially, he feared the vision and went home to confide in Khadija what had happened.  She reassured him that he should trust the vision, and her cousin Warakah also predicted that God would speak through him as he had with Moses.  Warakah was a wise, old blind man who was an important source of instruction on faith and ethical conduct for the Prophet.  After several months of self-questioning and hesitation he saw another vision of Gabriel sitting on a throne between heaven and earth, and Gabriel told Muhammad that he was to be the prophet of God.  Gabriel then took Muhammad to Jerusalem where he stood on the rock on the temple mount where Abraham had offered to sacrifice his son to God.  From there he ascended to Heaven to stand before God, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus and received the charge to carry the word of God.  With that Muhammad knew that he had been chosen as "Messenger of God." 
Muhammad began to recite his rhymed revelations to family members and friends, and many believed that he was inspired.  Khadija his wife, Ali Talib his cousin, Abu Bakr his friend, and others believed that the one and only God was speaking through him.  His early revelations were about God creating the universe, and the final judgment where people would be judged for the good and evil in their lives.  People would go to Paradise or Hell depending on their actions.  Some of his followers began writing down the verses that he pronounced, and after his death they were organized into the Quran.
Building the Muslim Community.  Muhammad began to preach to the people of Mecca to give up polytheism and idols to accept the one invisible God, but there was considerable opposition from those who believed in the traditional religion.  Others saw this as a threat to Mecca's role as a pilgrimage center and the economic and social importance that resulted from it.  Some tried to disrupt his gatherings and put pressure on Muhammad's followers to disavow him.  The biggest blow to him, however, in this period was the death of his wife, Khadija, who had encouraged and supported him.  Shortly afterwards his uncle and protector Abu Talib also died, leaving Muhammad doubly bereaved over the loss of the two people most important to him.  
At that time of personal loss and opposition from Meccan groups, Muhammad was approached by a delegation from Medina that invited him and his community of Muslims to come and live there and take the leadership of the town.  In 622, Muhammad and two hundred followers left Mecca and moved to Medina.  That was the hijra (or flight), and it marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar and the official start of Muslim history.  In Medina, Muhammad built the first mosque, continued his teachings, and worked on building the umma or community of believers.
Although the Arab community in Medina accepted Muhammad's teachings the Jewish community did not.  Some of the Jews in Mecca initially thought that Muhammad might be the messiah for whom they were waiting, but after a couple of years of theological discussions, they concluded that he was not.   Muslims had originally prayed toward Jerusalem, but when the Jews did not accept Muhammad, the decision was made to change the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to the Kabah in Mecca.  Later, the Jews were expelled from Medina.  The Muslims gradually gained acceptance among the nomadic groups in the area and wore down the Meccans by raiding their caravans.  During this period he married a young woman, Aisha, who was the daughter of one of his earliest followers, Abu Bakr.  He also took other wives, but Aisha was his favorite.  In 630 the Meccans surrendered to Muhammad, and the Muslims made the first pilgrimage to the Kabah which was to become the center of the new faith. 
Although Muhammad does not seem to have intended to set up a worldly empire initially, the nomadic groups and Meccans pledged themselves to him politically as they accepted the new faith, making him a political leader as well as a military and religious one.  Within ten years of his flight to Medina, the hijra, most Arab groups from Yemen to the Euphrates River had pledge loyalty to Muhammad and Islam, and the new religion had also become a political power.  Then in 632 after a brief illness Muhammad died, and a crisis of leadership emerged in the new movement because he did not have any male heirs.  Abu Bakr, his father-in-law and close friend, was named as his successor.  The caliph, or successor, was to lead the community of Muslims on earth, the umma, but he was not expected to be a messenger of God like Muhammad.
Over the next twenty-four years there were three different caliphs, or successors to Muhammad.   Abu Bakr was caliph for only two years before he died, but during that time he collected all of the revelations of Muhammad that people had written down and began their organization into a book.  He also consolidated control over Arabia.  Under the second caliph, Umar (634 to 644), the Muslims gained control of Syria (636) and Egypt (639), and under the third caliph, Uthman (644 to 656) they gained control of Iraq and Persia (651) when they defeated the Sassanid shah (or king).  Uthman completed the preparation of the Quran in its final form before his assassination in 656.  The other non-inspired sayings of Muhammad, called the Hadith, were also compiled. 
Islam grew dramatically in the seventh century C.E. from a religion to a political and economic power that linked many widely disparate cultural groups from Africa to Asia.  Understanding this pluralistic foundation of Muslim society and civilization is critical to understanding its essential character.  The major populations of the Middle East include Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Egyptians among others.  At different periods historically each of these groups has been dominant in the area.  However, Muhammad was Arab, and the initial spread of Islam occurred under the Arabs.  Today, Arabic continues to be the primary language of the Muslim world.  Although these issues give a strong Arabic cultural influence to Islam, most Middle Eastern people and most Muslims are not Arabs. 
The Division of Islam into Sunni and Shi'ite Groups.  The choosing of the fourth caliph led to a division in Islam into Sunnis and Shi’ites which has continued to shape Muslim history up to the present day. The tradition of tribal feuding which characterized the Arabian Peninsula threatened the early Muslim community as conflicting groups assassinated opposition leaders and tried to install their own.  After the assassination of Uthman, Ali Talib became the fourth caliph.  Since he was the cousin of Muhammad and the husband of Fatima, the only surviving daughter of Muhammad and Khadija, many felt that he was the rightful heir as caliph.  Shortly after he accepted the caliphate, he was challenged by a group led by Aisha, the later wife of Muhammad and daughter of the first caliph, Abu Bakr.  Since Muhammad did not have a son, the succession focused on the surviving women closest to him, Fatima, his daughter and Aisha, his last wife.  The two groups went to war, and Ali defeated Aisha and her followers in battle, but he was assassinated shortly afterwards.  His followers felt that one of his two sons, Hasan or Husayn, Muhammad’s grandsons, should have been elected as caliph, but in a compromise solution, a relative of Uthman, Mu'awiya, was named the next caliph.  Mu’awaya’s descendants kept control of the caliphate for the next century, forming the Umayyad Dynasty. 
With the assassination of Ali, Islam divided into two camps.  Those who believe that the first three caliphs were correctly chosen are called Sunnis, and they are known as the "people of tradition and community".   Muslims who believed that Ali was the rightful heir to Muhammad and that the leader of the Muslims should be one of his descendants are called Shi'ites, and they constitute the other important branch of Islam.  The conflict between these two groups continues until today in the heartland of the Middle East with Saudi Arabia and Syria being Sunni, Iran Shi’ite, and Iraq divided between the two.  In Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority in central Iraq, but the Shi’ites are the majority in the south and east, the area of old Sumer.  They also have close contacts with the Shi’ites who are the majority in neighboring Iran.  Contemporary politics in Iraq are organized around these competing Shi’ite and Sunni groups.
There have also been other groups in Islam throughout its history that have taken on independent identities for one reason or the other.  The Sufis are one of the most important of these.  They approach God through mysticism.  Sufis are known for using altered states of consciousness and achieve a unity with the supernatural, and one such technique is a spinning meditative dance which they use to create a spiritual focus on God.  The name Sufi means a person who wears wool, and it refers to rough spun woolen robes they wore in the eighth century when they first appeared.  They were ascetics who adopted an austere lifestyle as did many of the early Christians and Hindus. They adopted the simple woolen robe, practiced celibacy, and meditated for long uninterrupted periods.  They had few if any belongings, avoiding the materialism of this world in order to achieve union with God in life rather than waiting for the afterlife.  Sufis may repeat the “beautiful names of God” endlessly or engage in other ecstatic activities to make possible the mystical union with Allah.  Poetry has also been important among Sufis, especially Persian poetry.  One of the early Persian Sufi poets, al-Hallaj, was crucified as a heretic by orthodox Muslims in the early 900's, and he became an important martyr for the group.  The most famous of the Sufi poets was the Persian Jalal-uddin Rumi who worked in the 1200's, and his poetry about his love for God has a classical quality that has rarely been matched in its intensity and beauty.  His appeal is cross-cultural and seems to be timeless.  As the twentieth-first century began, Rumi was one of the top selling poets in the United States.
The Prophets.  Although the Islamic calendar is traced from the days of Muhammad, Muslims believe that Islam was founded originally by Abraham.  Allah chose Abraham, then Moses and Jesus as messengers to bring His word to humanity.   The Quran has long narratives explaining the lives of each, as well as the words they brought from God.  Muslims believe that the messages from each of the first three prophets were corrupted by later people, and that is the reason that God had to send a new prophet each time to correct the errors that people had introduced into the teachings of the last one.  Muhammad was the last prophet with the corrected teachings from God.  By tracing its roots back to Abraham, Islam claims the history of Judeo-Christian monotheism as its own.  That God has sent four major prophets to humanity shows His patience and repeated efforts to reach all people.
Family and Community in Islam
Since the Muslim people come from a mosaic of cultures from Africa to Asia, there are many traditions of family organization and gender behavior.  However, the Arab model has greatest influence throughout the Middle East and North Africa and to some extent in other Muslim areas.  The Arab family has ideally been a multi-generation extended family with patriarchal authority.  The men work together, and the role of women is primarily in the household.  Members of the family are expected to be completely loyal, and family ties are valued above all other.  Social life is family based and is segregated by gender.  Men and women live in separate but contiguous subcultures that only interact in the home. The sense of community is important in Islam. Family and community are at the heart of close-knit Muslim societies, and an expression of Islam itself.
Most Muslim marriages are monogamous, but there were exceptions, and a husband can marry additional wives if the first is barren.  Divorce is also possible if the wife is compensated, but adultery is forbidden.  Marriage is frequently arranged by the parents, but love marriages are also made.  Although the purpose of marriage is to produce children, especially sons, there are love poems and songs showing the importance of romance.  Parents are affectionate with their sons and daughters and family ties are very close.  Muslim societies are patriarchal, and although the husband is the head of the family, women have authority in administering the house and educating the children.  Within this paternalism men are instructed to love and care for their wives, guaranteeing them good food, clothing, and other needs.  Men are also told to make their wives happy. 
            The seclusion of women is an Arab cultural practice that has been incorporated into Islam and has taken on religious significance.  Traditionally, women were confined to the house so that they would not have contact with men outside of their family who might look on them inappropriately.  But, of course, women do eventually have to leave the house for some activities, and the practice of veiling has been to insure their seclusion even when outside the home.  During the post-World War II period, women in many countries gained more freedom to work outside of the home and to stop veiling themselves.  However, the growth of the Islamist movement in the 1980’s and 90’s has led to many women wearing the hijab, or head scarf, as a religious statement.  In the resurgence of Islamist sentiment after the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, many religious Muslim women returned to the practice of veiling.
Twenty-First Century Islam
During the twentieth century the Muslim world came into close contact with the influences of Western civilization, and many adopted cultural practices from that world as a way of modernizing.  Others reacted against the materialistic focus of European/American capitalism and developed Muslim renewal movements to emphasize traditional Muslim life.  As we enter the twenty-first century, the Muslim nations are poised to take their place as a distinctive part of the world, an alternative to the materialism of international capitalism.  For African, Middle Eastern, and Asian peoples who experienced the European colonialism of the 1850's to the 1950's, Islam offers a model for life that emphasizes brotherhood rather than the racial discrimination and economic exploitation of colonialism.  Islam offers an understanding of family and life that is attractive to many, and even in the predominantly Christian United States, Islam is growing rapidly with mosque membership increasing by 300 percent between 1994 and 2000.   Believers in Islam understand Islamic culture as completing the cycle of the peoples of Abraham, and Muslim fundamentalists see themselves as reclaiming cultural values in face of the emerging power of secularism and materialism today.
The contrast in wealth today between the Muslim world and the West signals the sharp conflict between the two civilizations.
Table 2.1

The Muslim World and the West

Along with wealth goes literacy,  so that the poorer the country,  lower literacy rates,  and the greater the discrepancy between men’s and women’s literacy. The Clash of Civilizations envisioned by Huntington is also a clash of economic groups with the corresponding differences in lifestyles and well-being. World conflicts over the next few decades will be clothed in cultural differences, but much of the conflict will be fueled by differences in wealth and well-being.
Islam is growing rapidly in the West, as people migrate from Muslim to Western countries to work, study, and join relatives.  Numbers are not large, but Europe now has fifteen million Muslim residents and the United States five million.  Maintaining a Muslim lifestyle in the context of culturally Christian nations is not easy.  Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss based, Muslim philosopher, has emerged as one of the leading spokespersons for this group.   He is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the champion of Islamist values who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in1928.  In early Islam, religious leaders ruled that Muslims should not live in areas not under Islamic rule, yet, in the global world of today that is not always possible.  Although militant Muslims are getting the headlines for the use of violence against Western interests, Ramadan argues that Muslims living in the West are creating a new kind of Islam, not in opposition to the West, but an Islam rooted in traditional religious precepts and clothed in new cultures and languages.  He says that the values of Islam are universal and can be expressed in Western terms.  Ramadan is in the forefront of moderate Islamists who believe that there is no fundamental conflict between Muslim and Western civilizations.
Conclusions: Monotheism and Culture
Monotheism has been the greatest religious legacy that the Middle Eastern cultures have given to the world.  Along with India, the Middle East stands out as a source of religious contributions to the world.  In contrast to the pluralism of Hindu polytheism, the monotheistic legacy of the Middle East tends to put more strict demands on its followers, requiring exclusivity and loyalty to the one God.  Much of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim history is dedicated to protecting the faithful and admonishing them against the temptations of assimilation with competing belief systems.  In the extreme these admonishments for loyalty have let to institutions such as the Inquisition in Europe. 
The command for divine exclusivity is clear to both Muslims and Jews.  The Quran says:  And your God is One God: There is no god but He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.   This command is also found in the first of the Ten Commandments in the Hebrew Bible:  “God spoke all these words, saying: I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.  You shall have no other gods besides Me.”
The exclusivity of monotheism is one of its defining principles.  It was difficult for the early Hebrews to adjust to this exclusivity with one god, and they repeatedly slipped into worshiping other gods.  For many Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and others it is equally difficult to understand the exclusion of other religious practices that is demanded by the monotheistic religions, especially when their traditions are based on the practice of multiple parallel religions.  Although the purity of the abstraction of one God is the firm faith and guiding light for almost half of the world’s people today, the belief in monotheism is an unfathomable mystery for the other half of the world’s people.

Boxed Insert One. Rumi the Muslim Poet
Islam has produced great literature in praise of God, and the greatest was Rumi (1207 to 1273), the classical poet of the Muslim world.  He was born in Afghanistan but lived most of his live in Persia.  Rumi was a Sufi and much of his poetry is about the ecstatic experience of life, especially of God, friendship, and love.

The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Boxed Insert Two. Women and Harems
In this vignette, Fatima Mernissi is remembering how her grandmother Yasmina had explained to her what “harem” means to women. 
The word ‘harem,’ she said, was a slight variation of the word haram, the forbidden, the proscribed.  It was the opposite of halal, the permissible.  Harem was the place where a man sheltered his family, his wife or wives, and children and relatives...One thing that helped me see this more clearly was when Yasmina explained that Mecca, the holy city, was also called Haram.  Mecca was a space where behavior was strictly codified.  The moment you stepped inside, you were bound by many laws and regulations.  People who entered Mecca had to be pure: they had to perform purification rituals, and refrain from lying, cheating, and doing harmful deeds.  The city belonged to Allah and you had to obey his shar’a, or sacred law, if you entered his territory.  The same thing applied to a harem when it was a house belonging to a man.  Once you knew what was forbidden, you carried the harem within.  You had it in your head, ‘inscribed under your forehead and under your skin.’...This business of going around with a frontier inside the head disturbed me...But then, Yasmina’s explanations got even more alarming, because the next thing she said was that any space you entered had its own invisible rules, and you needed to figure them out...  ‘Wherever there are human beings, there is a qa’ida, or invisible rule.  If you stick to the qa’ida, nothing bad can happen to you.’...Then she added something which really scared me: ‘Unfortunately, most of the time, the qa’ida is against women.’ 
‘Why?’ I asked...’The world’, Yasmina said, ‘was not concerned about being fair to women.  Rules were made in such a manner as to deprive them in some way or another.  For example’, she said,’ both men and women worked from dawn until very late at night.  But men made money and women did not.  That was one of the invisible rules.  And when a woman worked hard, and was not making money, she was stuck in a harem, even though she could not see its walls. Maybe the rules are ruthless because they are not made by women,’ was Yasmina’s final comment.
One of the trade-offs for the secluded lifestyle of women is that they may have incredibly elaborate gold jewelry and clothing under their robes.  Women wear the long robes in the presence of men not of the family, but when they are alone they can remove them.  Under the robes women can be wearing the latest French fashions in dress, and of course, the elaborate jewelry.  The amount and quality of the jewelry reflects the wealth and dedication of the husband to his wife, and women proudly display to each other these evidences of their husbands' appreciation.  Their hands and feet were visible coming out of their clothing painted in henna with densely drawn swirls and organic patterns that turned their hands and feet into art works.  Between the henna-art hands and feet, the ornate jewelry, and fashionable dresses women create their beauty which they share with each other and their husbands.