Mirrors (20 page)

“She’ll go off with anybody,” they said, to denigrate her freedom.

“She is not like a woman,” they said, to praise her intelligence.

But numerous professors, magistrates, philosophers, and politicians came from afar to the School of Alexandria to hear her words.

Hypatia studied the enigmas that defied Euclid and Archimedes, and she spoke out against blind faith unworthy of divine love or human love. She taught people to doubt and to question. And she counseled:

“Defend your right to think. Thinking wrongly is better than not thinking at all.”

What was that heretical woman doing giving classes in a city run by Christian men?

They called her a witch and a sorcerer. They threatened her with death.

And one March day in the year 415, a crowd set upon her at noon. And she was pulled from her carriage and stripped naked and dragged through the streets and beaten and stabbed. And in the public square a bonfire disposed of whatever was left of her.

“It will be investigated,” said the prefect of the city.

THEODORA

The city of Ravenna owed allegiance to Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora, but the city’s sharp tongues delighted in digging up the empress’s murky past: dancing in the slums of Constantinople as the geese pecked grains of barley off her nude body, her moans of pleasure, the roars of the audience . . .

But the sins which puritan Ravenna could not forgive were others, the ones she committed after her coronation. Theodora was the reason why the Christian empire of Byzantium became the first place in the world where abortion was a right,

adultery was not punished by death,

women had the right to inherit,

widows and illegitimate children were protected,

a woman’s divorce was not an impossibility,

and the marriage of Christian nobles to women of lower class or different religion was no longer prohibited.

Fifteen hundred years later, the portrait of Theodora in the Church of Saint Vitale is the most famous mosaic in the world.

This masterpiece of stonework is also the symbol of the city that loathed her and now lives from her.

URRACA

She was the first queen of Spain.

Urraca ruled for seventeen years, though Church records say her reign lasted no more than four.

Fed up with insults and beatings, she divorced the husband of a forced marriage, booting him out of her bed and her palace, though Church records say he left her.

To show the Church who was in charge and teach it to respect the female throne, Queen Urraca locked up the archbishop of Santiago de Compostela and seized his castles, something unheard of in such a Christian land, though Church records say that was but “an explosion of womanly spirit, easily unhinged, and of womanly mind, filled as it is with pestiferous poison.”

She had dalliances, affairs, lovers, and she flaunted them cheerfully, though Church records say they were “behaviors that would make one blush to speak of.”

AYESHA

Six centuries after the death of Jesus, Mohammed died.

The founder of Islam, who by Allah’s permission had twelve wives nearly all at the same time, left nine widows. By Allah’s prohibition, none of them remarried.

Ayesha, the youngest, had been the favorite.

Some time later, she led an armed uprising against the caliph, Imam Ali.

In our times, many mosques refuse entry to women, but back then mosques were where Ayesha’s fiery speeches roused people to anger. Mounted on her camel, she attacked the city of Basra. The lengthy battle caused fifteen thousand casualties.

That bloodletting launched the enmity between Sunnis and Shiites, which to this day takes lives. And certain theologians decreed it irrefutable proof that women make a mess of things when they escape the bedroom and the kitchen.

MOHAMMED

When Ayesha was defeated, someone suddenly recalled what Mohammed had suggested twenty-eight years earlier:

“Hang up your lash where your woman can see it.”

And other disciples of the Prophet, also given to timely recollections, remembered that he had said paradise is filled with the poor and hell filled with women.

Time passed, and by a few centuries after Mohammed’s death the sayings attributed to him by Islam’s theocracy numbered over six hundred. A good many of those phrases, especially the ones that curse women, have become religious truths received from heaven and untouchable by human doubt.

Yet the Koran, the holy book dictated by Allah, says that man and woman were created equal and that Eve had no art or part in Adam’s seduction by the serpent.

MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER

He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university.

He studied at Princeton, taught in New York.

He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States.

He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded.

That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare.

He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read.

He died in New York in 1859.

His name was George Bush.

SUKAINA

For women in some Muslim nations, the veil is a jail: a peripatetic prison that travels wherever they go.

But Mohammed’s women did not cover their faces, and the Koran never mentions the word “veil,” though it does recommend that women cover their hair with a shawl outside the home. Catholic nuns, who do not follow the Koran, cover their hair, and in many places in the world non-Muslim women wear shawls or wraps or kerchiefs on their heads.

But a shawl worn by choice is one thing, and a veil worn by male dictum, obliging women to hide their faces, is something else.

One of the most implacable enemies of face-covering was Sukaina, Mohammed’s great-granddaughter, who not only refused to wear one, but denounced it at the top of her lungs.

Sukaina married five times, and in each of her five marriage contracts she refused to pledge obedience to her husband.

MOTHER OF ALL STORYTELLERS

To avenge a woman who betrayed him, a king killed them all.

At dusk he married and at dawn he widowed.

One after another, the virgins lost their virginity and their heads.

Scheherazade was the only one to survive the first night, and then she continued trading a story for each new day of life.

Stories she heard, read, or imagined saved her from decapitation. She told them in a low voice, in the darkness of the bedroom, with no light but that of the moon. In the telling she felt pleasure and gave pleasure, but she tread carefully. Sometimes, in the middle of a tale, she felt the king’s eyes studying her neck.

If he got bored, she was lost.

From fear of dying sprang the knack of narrating.

BAGHDAD