I grew up in a world where women were asexual and men were sexual. Women were like flowers, they even dress like it. It would have been hilariously funny if it weren’t for my personal experience of marriage. It was hell, because I had no knowledge, no education, advice or support about the emotional or sexual or financial aspects of being in a marriage. None.
The only advice was from the very traditional set up, where the man is considered superior to the woman and the woman has to please the man in all ways.
I was too liberal to look up a treatise called, ‘Bahishti Zavar’ or eternal jewels –a book written a gazillion years ago to teach women to be obedient wives. There was no way I could be an obedient wife to the person I married in any case. I had married him because I wanted to rescue him. There were a lot of differences in our backgrounds. I felt sorry for him, he was incredibly smart, but hadn’t had a lot of chances in life.
Women, when they marry have no access to professional sexual or emotional counselling, other than through the social friend network and family. I went into a marriage with absolutely no knowledge, because knowledge was so frightening to my mother. I totally trusted my husband to take care of that end of things–being a man and all that. My parents were the quintessential good people for whom the thought of violence, domination or abuse in intimacy or anything perverted was just not in the radar.
I was brought up on lots of love, stories and crafts. I was truly Victorian. I hadn’t even flirted with anyone before I met my husband at 19 and we fell in love, because he used to read books and tell me stories. For me, he was the companion I didn’t have, and so very innocently, with absolutely no idea that this man had so much inner darkness, I married him. And that too, pretty much against my family’s wishes, who actually wanted me to go abroad and study some more and have more freedom before settling down. My husband was very persistent, and since they saw that I liked him, they agreed to getting us married.
My marriage was a rape of a soul, a body and a heart. Violated, empty and broken, I felt like Gollum in The Lord of The Rings who was stuck and obsessed with Precious even though it took all his light. I was stuck in darkness and addicted to it. But, thankfully, a miracle took me back into the light. And slowly, like an addict who vaguely remembers who he was, in flashes and moments of connection, I traced my steps back home. This healing was through meditation and the help of likely the best of the best therapists for depression in Vancouver. I think that God stepped in and the grace of the divine made me alive again. Every time I would give up, a miracle would save me. This kept happening until I got it, I am not Saima anymore and God has a purpose for what is remaining.
Over the next several years I became whole and strong and realized the reasons why this marriage affected me to the degree it did. I believe God personally intervened in my case and I believe I am divinely guided to do the work that I do now. Therefore I am not afraid. There is a higher power behind me.
The truth of this is known to a few people who stood by me through thick and thin over the last 30 years. People who loved me despite me unable to even look at myself, let alone love myself.
As I healed over the last 20 years, there were days when I remember the past, and I feel so angry about that Victorian society, where women are shackled, stifled and chained from inside to not only accept all kinds of emotional and physical abuse, but also to live in a state of body dysphoria–a disconnection from their body.
Women do not resist very often. Instead, they accept it.
One of my client’s stories, who asked me to write about her to share her story with the Muslim diaspora, affected me greatly. It isn’t that I haven’t heard about abuse. It is that this story hit me. A Chinese Malaysian, this woman married a much older Muslim malaysian and had two sons by him–as a second wife. He is a bit of a sexual obsessive, so he’d play with his son’s penis and encourage him to masturbate. He’d accuse his young second wife of flirting with her newborn son and he continued to accuse her of it to control her. Eventually the woman ran away and took refuge in Canada with her children and she lives in constant terror that this man will take her children. She does not want her sons to grow up becoming sexual perverts. She had been converted to Islam earlier, but she took up meditation and started to stand up to the man. Because of the problems in the marriage, they went to a religious marriage counsellor. But the husband told the counsellor that she is a pervert who meditates in the Hindu way, instead of her issue that he goes to prostitutes despite two wives and how his first wife treated her.
She reaches out to me for help, because she worries that Canadians will force her to give up her children to this man–she is a refugee. To me she is a classic case of an abused wife. She copes mainly through meditation.
There are many other examples of muslim women who are suffering greatly because of sexual abuse in their marriages. Men, often themselves perverted because of the way they are taught about sex, use the religious pretext to dominate and oppress women in loveless marriages. Hitting–a slap here and there is normal, some forced anal sex is endemic, and every now and then denial of spending money is also normal. Men often have Internet sex, watch porn and discuss other women as sexual objects. Sexist jokes aka wife jokes are very very common. It is in fact the culture to put women down and to talk about them as sexual objects. Men sexualize women. Women sexualize women also.
In feel blessed to be able to offer emotional support and meditation to countless women and men through all the tools I have from tarot cards to meditation to yoga to Reiki to clinical hypnotherapy. I had no idea what would happen when I actually started to connect back to the Muslim community both abroad or here. I was thrilled to realize that many were completely open to learn, but surprised to see that some people whom I thought were pretty open minded weren’t. Others came in their place.
For me, to work for the cause of healing the divine feminine and masculine, so that the two genders can live in peace in harmony and to write against abuse, oppression and injustice is service to god. I am serving Islam too. My work is Jehad and I am a warrior of the light. I have no shame in talking about this at all. Shame in speaking the truth is a false shame.
Why aren’t the religious ashamed when poor children are left on roadsides to fend for themselves? why is it not a shame when women beg on streets for 2 square meals?
I honestly believe that teaching men and women about sexuality–the science, the emotions and the mental concepts that will liberate them from seeing sex as a somewhat shameful biological instinct and realize that it is a mental and emotional connection as well, will heal society at a deep level. Knowledge about sexuality is about the health of humanity.
Behind The Veil 