BY MONA ELTAHAWY
In "Distant View of a Minaret,"
the late and much-neglected Egyptian writer
Alifa Rifaat begins her short story with a woman so unmoved by sex with
her husband that as he focuses solely on his pleasure, she notices a
spider web she must sweep off the ceiling and has time to ruminate on
her husband's repeated refusal to prolong intercourse until she too
climaxes, "as though purposely to deprive her."
Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts
his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer
-- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer --
and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her
reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap.
Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers,
she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor.
"She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself.
She was surprised at how calm she was," Rifaat writes. In a crisp three-and-a-half pages, Rifaat lays out a trifecta of sex,
death, and religion, a bulldozer
that crushes denial and defensiveness to get at the pulsating heart of
misogyny in the Middle East. There is no sugarcoating it. They don't
hate us because of our freedoms, as the tired, post-9/11 American cliché
had it. We have no freedoms because they hate us, as this Arab woman so
powerfully says...Continue reading...
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