On Arabic: the language of the divine & the erotic
“A girl reciting Quran” by Turkish artist, Osman Hamdi Bey [1901]
“I decided to write for revenge...it began like that. It was something violent.”
Arabic.
The language of scissors. The language that reaches deep in you, touching hidden, precious corners of yourself that English could never reach. Spoken by the right person, it can heal you. Spoken by the wrong person, it can sever you into a lifelong journey of trying to collect fragments of yourself.
Arabic. The language once used for the erotic, and now used in war against it. This sensuous language stripped of its sensuality the same way so many Arab girls I was raised with were stripped of theirs. Killed but spared the outer shell of themselves, not because those who killed them cared to keep them alive, but because they cared just enough to disguise the killing.
This language, used against us, used to shame us and put out our fires. This language, used against god, in the name of god, in the name of all muslims.
Our job as artists is to reclaim this language as a language that belongs to the collective, to all Arabs. To make it the property of all.
Women as healers of the Arabic language
Have you ever heard the Quran recited by a woman? Have you heard god’s word coming through the body of a woman?
I have. And if I hadn’t I wouldn’t be here today writing this. I would have kept on with my journey of leaving god behind. But a voice in a small dark room by the Hudson River made me stop. It made me turn back. And years later, it led me here.
The feminine, my love, is not in contradiction with the divine. Maybe I can even say that there are parts of god that can only come through women. If you don’t believe me, listen to a woman reading the Quran. Tell me you don’t feel the difference. That’s why they’re made to stand behind the line of men in mosques, unseen and unheard. That’s why you will never see them in the pulpit unless a brave artist places them there. Because if you were to hear and experience god through them, you’d never again be convinced by the performance of men who carry false gods.
I have this vivid memory of myself as a 14 year old girl sitting on a chair beside a black veiled religious teacher. A pair of young, innocent breasts hungry with life pressed against a tight flannel…large earrings under godless curls and black-lined eyes begging the ghost under that veil to look at me. When it was my turn to recite what we were assigned to memorize, the teacher would always keep her head turned. Before I had a word for shame I felt it, and I felt it deeply. She was too disgusted to look at me. To see God’s word coming from the body of a woman who hadn’t learned yet that her sensuality was calling for war against herself. I knew only to be. And carrying god’s words, I came as myself. But this memory would burn in my mind forever: this teacher who I thought was part of god himself rejecting me. A lifetime would pass before I would bother trying to speak to him, and another lifetime trying to convince myself that he wasn’t looking away when I tried.
Their Arabic teaches you that the closer you are to god, the less he sees of you. We had to cover under so much fabric before we approached him, which now makes so much sense. They never meant for god to really see them. The belief that covering was permission to speak to god lands perfectly with the lie of their disguise. How else could they live this way if they believed that god was not an entity you chose to prepare when to approach, and when to leave.
“I am the product of the stiff religious education you gave me”
There was family, and I will talk about that another time. But today, I want to tell you about a school. A terrible, hell on earth, greying building called the Islamic Saudi Academy that now operates under the name “KSA.” They used Arabic for one purpose only: religion, a poisonous version of it. Ten years of Arabic classes. I was never shown an Arab film, never read an Arab book or introduced to an Arab artist. I was never told we had poets, artists, dancers, filmmakers and it wasn’t until I went to an American university at the age of 18 that I discovered we had any. We read the poems of a religious poet whose words never made any sense to me. We memorized and memorized, and that’s what Arabic was for, to fill your brain with and spill over an exam. There was no sense of beauty. It was this complicated, incredibly frustrating, coded language that held all of god’s messages, a message some of us were seen as too dirty to receive. It was the language of shame. The language they used to yell at us with. A language they used to single me out. And it was only in English class, with those sweet, old American teachers, that I ever felt safe. I learned to hate our people, to see only danger in them. With a desire for safety that was killing me, I dug myself a haven in English. I wanted America: this forbidden country we lived in but had no contact with. English class became the place I would fall asleep in because I felt safe enough to let go. It became the only place where I was allowed to speak the truth. Where I cried and discovered writing as the only place no one could touch. So I fell in love with English, and I hated Arabic. It’s what I studied in university, and what I held onto for years. It’s still where I feel safe. But ‘safe’ is not where power lies. And I was beginning to step into a chapter of my life where I really needed power to face the past, and to do something about all that pain.
And this is revenge. This quiet breath I take within a body that still stands, deeply wounded, but still standing, looking at them…just looking at them. I often used to think about what revenge would look like. I imagined going back to that school and confronting them in the hallways in front of all the other women that I fear are now vulnerable to the same pain I passed through. I imagine myself yelling, saying all the things I wanted to say then and couldn’t. But now, revenge feels quiet. It is knowing that someday, on god’s own time, they will have to face what they used their power and sense of superiority to avoid: that they are just like the rest of us. They are not above the crowd of flawed, sensuous, freedom-seeking humanity. They will have to accept their commonality on earth, and that they are no cleaner or more righteous or more deserving of god’s attention than the rest of us.
I can’t imagine a worse revenge than that. To confront the lie of your life and lose your illusions.
“They could not bear her eyes on their faces, knowing full well that she knew them one by one, for starting from the Imam down to the guards and sentinels and the lowest henchmen, at one time or another they had all come to her in the dark wearing a false face. But once in the House of Joy and in her bed, they took off their rubber faces and their trousers. So she alone of all people had seen them without their clothes...and they all looked the same, and smelt the same, and made the same movements...she stared into their faces, one by one, as they lowered their eyes to the ground, knowing that every one of them had two faces, a gentle handsome face with tears flowing from the eyes and another face dark as the devil with round bulging eyes and a nose sharp-pointed as a sword. ”
“Mihrab” by Turkish artist, Osman Hamdi Bey [1901]
“Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a sense with which we scrutinize our existence, forcing honesty...”
Pray in her direction
What is the erotic?
It is our Mihrab.* A compass within us that points in the direction of God.
And that’s why they go after it with so much madness. Women are the obsession of men who rewrite Islam.
A month ago, I did a meaningless interview speaking about how beautiful the Arabic language was to me. I say meaningless not because it isn’t beautiful, but because I left out the truth.
I didn’t talk about how Arabic is used as a weapon against so many little girls, shaming them until they migrate out of their bodies. I didn’t say how as a woman I decided that my only chances of migrating back into this vessel was through the same language that exiled me.
And if there is beauty to Arabic, it’s because of its ability to land so close to the truth. And real beauty, the kind of beauty you want to take home with you, is one that touches the realities of life, and I mean all of it, the parts we are comfortable sitting with and the parts we’d rather pretend do not exist.
But because Arabic is as expansive and as generous as nature itself, there is space for a lot of people to enter, each with their own pen. Their word becomes god’s, tucked into translations of a script that was meant to have as many meanings as there are readers. Arabic, that layered beauty, became one drying petal caught between the pages of a book that lost its life and lost its meaning.
To shame a woman away from her erotic source is to [knowingly] cut her off from her natural source of knowledge, her inner compass that naturally leans in the direction of justice. How could that bearded man in the pulpit lead his flock if he had to answer to that source? This interpretation of Islam leaves space for only one direction, one voice. The erotic source tells you there are many pathways to god, and yes, the body, that discarded item in political islam is one of them. In fact, it is the most important one.
The artist paints her in front of the mihrab, the direction Muslims face while praying. She is sitting over a stand meant to carry the Quran but instead carries her, her curved body, her open chest, her defiant pose. Within a mosque, too. Holy Arabic scripts scattered around her feet.Maybe the artist was fed up, fed up with the way Arabic was used to make women disappear. Maybe this is to say that all of this, these beautiful, holy words, mean nothing without the feminine presence. Make her disappear, and all of this goes with her too.
The erotic source that tells us what is deeply right, and what is deeply wrong. Audre Lorde calls it the “erotic demand” for life. It’s this uncompromising power that doesn’t submit to the alternative; it doesn’t accept . It says I want this and trusts that that demand is leading the body and the tribe in the right direction. It tells us of our desires, desires that are, as Rotana describes them, “deeply inconvenient.” Because while it moves us closer to what is right, there is so much to lose along the way.
And why have so many of us lost that source? Because it is unforgivingly honest, and demanding in its truth. It doesn’t shut up. It doesn’t yield. If you are connected to it as a woman, there’s absolutely no way you can be controlled, deceived, muted, played with. But also, if it is kept alive in you, it means the people around you will have to answer to it. They will have to face themselves, in you. The erotic source is a guide for us, a mirror for them, and, “when someone holds a mirror up to [us, we] smash the glass”* and the person holding it.
A woman in touch with her erotic source, her mihrab, walks as an deeply uncomfortable mirror in this world, and there are cruel consequences for women who reflect back onto you what you would rather never see, and never know.
*‘Mihrab’ — a niche in the wall of the mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca, the direction Muslims should face while praying.
*Rehal — a stand made to hold the Quran
*Nabil Ayouch in ‘Sex and lies’ by Laila Slimani
In tribute to the ancient Arab civilization in which desire came in many forms, even in architecture, where love was liberated from being sinful, in which both having and giving pleasure was one of the duties of the believer.”
The Almond by Nedjma
“Arab culture, a thousand years ago, produced works that were far more erotic and subversive than anything being written in the West then (or even perhaps now). How did we get from that early high point of liberty, of talking about sex so naturally, to our constipated present-day reality, I wonder? When did we start sliding down the hill of taboos? It is one of the questions that constantly haunts me.”
Qajar Erotic Art — From Al Hayya Magazine; Issue 2:
From “Al Hayya Magazine” —Issue 2
“We’re forgetting everything. We’re forgetting that it’s we Arabs, we Muslims, who shocked the West with our erotic texts in the fifteenth century. We invented the realm of the erotic. We’re suffering from collective amnesia.”
“Muslims can turn to a long written tradition, led by scholars, that saw no incompatibility between the needs of the body and the demands of the faith. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, when Islamic civilisation reached its apogee, literature and the erotic arts flourished.
From the nineteenth century onwards, the intellectual, political and economic decline of the Arab world seems to have proceeded in tandem with increasingly puritanical views about sex. With the advent of the twentieth century, colonisation was in any case set to impose very restrictive laws in this domain. The aim was to establish a barrier between immigrants from the West and the native women, and so to contain the ‘unbridled’ sensuality of the local population.”