Muhammad, according to many detailed physical descriptions, was a handsome irtan, of medium height with wavy black hair, a full beard, thick-lashed dark eyes and a radiant smile that revealed a gap between his front teeth. He was meticulous about his grooming, perfuming his beard and brushing his teeth at least five times a day. His only unattractive features were a tendency to bloodshot eyes and a protruding vein in his temple that is said to have become more p.r.o.nounced when he became angry.

In the year or two after Aisha moved in, Muhammad married three more women, all war widows: Hafsah, the twenty-year-old daughter of his close friend Omar; an older woman, Zeinab, whose generosity had earned her the name "Mother of the Poor," and who died just eight months later; and Umm Salamah, a famous beauty whose arrival caused Aisha the first pangs of the jealousy that would blight the rest of her life. When Aisha learned about the marriage to Umm Salamah, "I was exceedingly sad," she said, "having heard much of her beauty." She called on the new wife and found her "twice as beautiful and graceful as she was reputed to be."

Muhammad tried to keep to the Koran's instruction that a man must treat all his wives equally. His practice was to see each of them, every afternoon, in a brief private meeting, but to have his dinner and spend the night with one at a time, in strict rotation. Aisha found the arrangement unsatisfying. 'Tell me," she asked him one day, "if you were to come upon two camels, the one already pastured and the other not, which would you feed?" Muhammad answered that of course it would be the one not pastured. "I am not like the rest of your wives," Aisha replied. "Every one of them has been married before, except me."

Occasionally, if Muhammad wanted to spend time with a wife out of her turn, he would ask permission of the wife whose "day" it was. He soon learned better than to ask Aisha to give up her day. "For my part," she said, "I always refused him" and insisted on her scheduled visit. Sensitive to the young girl's needs and, perhaps, to the prophet's desires, the aging Sawda permanently relinquished her "day" to Aisha. But soon the arrival of several more wives spread the prophet's attentions even thinner.

Muslims argue that the many marriages of Muhammad's last ten years reflected the fast expansion of Islam, and his need to build alliances with diverse clans. At other times, they say, his choices reflected compa.s.sion for needy widows. Since women will always outnumber men in societies at war, they argue, surely it is better that women share a husband than have no man in their lives at all. Muhammad, they say, was setting an example by taking widows into his care.

Non-Muslims, particularly Islam's hostile critics, have taken a different view. Muhammad, they say, was a sensualist, whose increasing power and prestige gave him means to indulge his l.u.s.ts after the death of the first wife who had been his patron.

These critics seem to overlook the austerity of the prophet's household. The mudbrick rooms of the mosque were hardly the quarters of a sensualist. Even as the Muslim community became rich on the spoils of military victories, Muhammad continued to live simply and to insist that his wives do the same. The poverty that he enforced in his own household became the source of much bickering between Muhammad and his wives.

Yet the devout view, of Muhammad as husband c.u.m social worker for needy widows, isn't entirely convincing either. At least one hadith indicates that Muhammad knew polygamy was damaging for women. When his son-in-law Ali considered taking a second wife, the prophet expressed concern for the feelings of his daughter Fatima. "What harms her harms me," he told Ali, who abandoned the idea of a further marriage. (Shiites, who venerate Ali and Fatima, discount this hadith. They argue that Muhammad would never have criticized a practice that the Koran had declared lawful.) Not all Muhammad's wives were pathetic cases or politically expedient matches. The beautiful Umm Salamah certainly wasn't needy. She had loved her first husband and, reluctant to remarry, had rejected a slew of eligible suitors when Muhammad began his dogged pursuit. She turned the prophet down at least three times. "I am a woman of an exceedingly jealous disposition, and you, O Messenger of G.o.d, acquire many women," she said, as one excuse for rejecting his suit. Muhammad replied: "I shall pray G.o.d to uproot jealousy from your heart."

Despite his attempts at fairness, the whole community seems to have become aware that Aisha was his favorite wife. Muslims who wanted to send him a gift of food began timing their presents for the days they knew he would be spending in Aisha's apartment. Since Muhammad lived so humbly, these gifts often provided his household's only luxuries. Umm Salamah, for one, bitterly resented the preference shown to Aisha. "I see that the rest of us are as nothing," she said when yet another basket of goodies arrived on Aisha's day. Enraged, she flounced off to complain to Fatima, Muhammad's daughter.

Muhammad's marriage to a child just a year or two younger than herself must have been difficult for Fatima in the wake of her mother's death. Her own marriage, to Muhammad's nephew Ali, was arranged soon after Aisha moved in. Whether it had its seeds in unrecorded childhood squabbles, or in the rivalry between Fatima's husband Ali and Aisha's father Abu Bakr for the role of Muhammad's chief lieutenant, a bitter enmity developed between Aisha and Fatima. Eventually it expressed itself in the Shiite-Sunni schism that was to sunder Islam. The temperaments of the two young women could hardly have been more different. Fatima was self-effacing and shy; Aisha was quick-witted and outspoken.

In any case, Umm Salamah knew where to look for an ally against Aisha. Fatima promised Umm Salamah to speak to her father about his favoritism. Muhammad's reply must have stung. "Dear little daughter, don't you love who I love?" he asked her. "Yes, surely," she replied. When she continued to put her case, Muhammad cut her off. "Aisha," he said, "is your father's best beloved." This brought Ali into the argument, chiding Muhammad for slighting his daughter by saying he loved Aisha best. The bitterness of the argument must have lingered, because soon afterward Muhammad ordered the door sealed between his wives' apartments and the apartment of Ali and Fatima. (Shiites deny this exchange ever took place: in their version, Muhammad extolled Fatima as "a human houri," or near-divine being.) Aisha tried to undermine her complaining rivals with childish pranks. One day she noticed that Muhammad had lingered longer than usual on his evening visit with one of her rivals, enjoying a drink made with honey, his favorite delicacy. Aisha gathered some of the other wives together and concocted a practical joke. As he stopped by each woman's apartment, all of them pretended to be offended by his breath. Muhammad, fastidious about his person, was worried and confused. "All I ate was honey!" he exclaimed. The women muttered that the bees who made the honey must have fed on the nectar of a foul-smelling plant. Afterward, Muhammad refused honey when it was offered to him, until the more mature Sawda counseled Aisha that the joke had gone far enough, and that the poor prophet was depriving himself of one of his few pleasures.

Once Aisha and her coconspirators actually thwarted one of the prophet's attempts to add another wife to his growing harem. Aisha was distraught when Asma, the beautiful daughter of a prince, arrived with an elaborate escort for her marriage to Muhammad. Aisha and Hafsa, pretending to be helpful, volunteered to a.s.sist the young woman dress for her wedding. As they fussed around her, they shared "confidences" about the prophet's likes and dislikes. He would be inflamed with pa.s.sion, they advised, if she pretended unwillingness. When it came time to consummate the marriage, they advised her to back away from the prophet's embrace and say, "I take refuge with Allah from thee."

The prophet, appalled at the thought of inflicting himself on an unwilling woman, immediately told Asma not to worry, that he would call for her escort and see her safely home. Asma went, devastated, and complaining bitterly that she had been the victim of deceit.

The multiple marriages fed such petty rivalries and added to the growing feud between Ali and Abu Bakr that was to threaten Islam's political future. They also began to shape the rules of the emerging faith. Muhammad's increasing number of divine revelations on women seemed more and more influenced by the need to achieve tranquillity in his own household. Aisha, for one, wasn't afraid to point out the coincidence. "It seems to me," she said tartly, "your Lord makes haste to satisfy your desires."

One such coincidence was the revelation that adopted children weren't to be considered as blood kin. This followed Muhammad's glimpse of the partially unclad Zeinab, wife of Zaid, the freed slave whom Muhammad had adopted and raised as a son. The community had been shocked by Zaid's divorce and Muhammad's intention to marry Zeinab, which flouted the ban on a father's marriage to the wife of a son. Muhammad was with Aisha when he had the revelation saying that it was a mistake by Muslims to consider adoption as creating the same ties as blood kin. From that point, the Koran says, Muslims were to proclaim the true parentage of any children they raised. G.o.d, the revelation disclosed, had arranged Muhammad's marriage with Zeinab to disclose to Muslims the error of their previous beliefs. When Zeinab moved into the mosque, she was able to taunt Aisha by claiming that her marriage to the prophet had been arranged by G.o.d.

The revelation on the seclusion of the prophet's wives came on Zeinab's wedding night. Sensitive to the ill feelings that the match had inspired, Muhammad had invited many guests to his wedding feast. Three of them lingered long after the meal, engrossed in conversation and seemingly oblivious to the prophet's impatience to be alone with his new bride. As Zeinab sat quietly in a corner, waiting for the guests to leave, Muhammad strode out of the room and wandered the mosque courtyard. He dropped in on Aisha, who politely inquired how he liked his new companion. Muhammad confided that he hadn't yet had a chance to enjoy her company, and wandered off to look in on each of his wives before returning to the room of the wedding feast. To his intense annoyance, the guests were still there. Irritable, he went back to Aisha's room and sat with her until finally someone came to tell him that the boorish guests had left.

Anas ibn Malik, a companion who had witnessed the whole scene, accompanied Muhammad back to the nuptial chamber. Muhammad had one foot in the room when he let fall a curtain between himself and Anas, and, as he did so, began reciting in the voice he used for revelations: "O ye who believe! Enter not the dwellings of the prophet for a meal without waiting for the proper time, unless permission be granted you. But if ye are invited, enter, and, when your meal is ended, then disperse. Linger not for conversation. Lo! that would cause annoyance to the Prophet, and he would be shy of asking you to go; but Allah is not shy of the truth. And when you ask his wives for anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain (hijab). (hijab). That is purer for your hearts and for their hearts." That is purer for your hearts and for their hearts."

These words now are inscribed in the Koran as the word of G.o.d. Obviously, such a verse is read very differently by a believing Muslim and a nonbelieving outsider. To a nonbeliever, it is hard to envision G.o.d troubling to micromanage matters of etiquette, like some kind of heavenly Miss Manners. To Muslims, though, there is nothing very extraordinary in G.o.d dealing with a situation that obviously left his prophet uncomfortable and unsure of how to act. In these latter years of Muhammad's life, with the community expanding rapidly, many new issues, large and small, had to be resolved. The Medina revelations are almost always far less poetic and more specific than the elegant reflections of the earlier verses revealed in Mecca. Often they came in direct response to new dilemmas facing the community.

What is so puzzling is why the revelation of seclusion, so clearly packaged here with instructions that apply only to the prophet, should ever have come to be seen as a rule that should apply to all Muslim women.

In Muhammad's lifetime the rule almost certainly was limited to his wives. It completely changed their lives. Muhammad had au thorized Aisha, in his absence, to give religious advice, telling Muslims to "take half your religion from this woman." But after the revelation of seclusion, she no longer mingled freely with the visitors to the mosque. Some wives, like Sawda, famed for her fine leathercraft, had worked to contribute to the household's budget. The wives had even gone into battle alongside Muhammad, tucking up their robes and carrying water, or caring for the injured. Even Fatima had attended the battlefield, once cauterizing a bleeding head wound of her father's by applying ashes, a folk remedy that signified her skill as a nurse.

After the seclusion, Muhammad took one or two wives on campaign only as his s.e.xual partners, drawing lots among them for the privilege. It was after one such battle that Aisha found herself facing the biggest trial of her married life.

As camp broke before dawn, Aisha walked off into the desert to urinate before the march. Returning to camp, she realized she'd dropped an agate necklace and retraced her steps looking for it. By the time she found it the men had led off the camel carrying her curtained litter, believing her to be already inside. She sat patiently on the sand, waiting for someone to miss her. A few hours later, a young soldier named Safwan found her waiting alone and carried her back to the city on his camel.

Her arrival with this young and handsome man created a scandal. Ali, Fatima's husband, took the opportunity to feed Muhammad's growing doubts of Aisha's virtue. As the scandal mounted, Aisha left her apartment at the mosque and returned in disgrace to her parents, who seemed just as ready to accuse her as everyone else. The gossip raged for over a month.

Finally Muhammad had a revelation clearing her name.

"Good tidings, O Aisha!" he cried out. "G.o.d most high has exonerated you."

"Rise and come to Muhammad," her parents urged.

"I shall neither come to him nor thank him," said the strong-minded young woman. "Nor will I thank both of you who listened to the slander and did not deny it. I shall rise to give thanks to G.o.d alone."

What became known as "the affair of the slander" made its way into the Koran. Why, G.o.d asks the believers, when they heard the allegations about Aisha, "did not the believing men and believing women form in their minds a good opinion and say, This is a lie manifest'? Why have they not brought four witnesses regarding it?" Since then, Islamic law has required four witnesses to sustain a charge of adultery: "The wh.o.r.e, and the wh.o.r.emaster, shall ye scourge with an hundred stripes.... But as to those who accuse women of reputation of wh.o.r.edom, and produce not four witnesses of the fact, scourge them with fourscore stripes, and receive not their testimony forever."

In the two years following his controversial marriage to Zeinab, Muhammad acquired five new women, including two Jews and a Coptic Christian. (There is a difference of opinion about whether he married all three of these women or simply kept one or two of them as concubines.) Mary, the Christian, became the focus of the harem's intense jealousy when she bore Muhammad a son. (The boy died in infancy.) Aisha, who hadn't been able to conceive, was particularly heartbroken. At one point she had complained to Muhammad about her lack of a kunya, or mother designation, since all the other widows had the kunyas of sons they'd borne to their previous husbands. Like the present-day Palestinian, Rehab, Aisha felt the lack of distinction keenly. Muhammad told her to call herself Umm Abdullah, after the son of her sister, to whom she was very close.

Aisha must have perceived Mary and her son as dangerous rivals for Muhammad's attention. Certainly an uproar followed the discovery of Muhammad having intercourse with Mary in Hafsa's room on Aisha's "day." The fallout from that upset, coupled with nagging from the women about the grinding poverty of their lives, caused Muhammad to withdraw from the harem and keep to himself for almost a month. The community worried that he might divorce all his wives, throwing into turmoil the alliances he'd so carefully crafted.

Finally he returned from his retreat and offered each of his wives a divinely inspired ultimatum: they could divorce him and have a rich settlement of worldly goods, or they could stay with him, on G.o.d's terms, which included never marrying again after his death. In return, they would be known forever as Mothers of the Believers, and reap a rich reward in heaven. All the women chose to stay.

It would be wrong to portray Muhammad's domestic life as nothing but jealousy and scandal. The hadith also record moments of great tenderness in the little rooms around the mosque. One day, as Aisha and Muhammad sat together companionably, she at her spinning, he mending a sandal, Aisha suddenly became aware that he was gazing at her with a radiant expression on his face. Suddenly, he rose and kissed her on the forehead. 'Oh, Aisha," he said, "may Allah reward you well. I am not the source of joy to you that you are to me."

Another hadith recounts an incident when several of Muhammad's wives were arguing with him over household finances. While the argument was in progress, Omar, Muhammad's stern lieutenant and the father of Hafsa, entered the room. The women, fearful of Omar's violent temper, immediately fell silent and hurried away. Omar yelled after the women that it was shameful that they should be more respectful of him than of the prophet of G.o.d. One replied, from a safe distance, that the prophet of G.o.d was known to be much gentler to women than his overbearing friend.

When Muhammad became ill and was dying, he at first kept to his habit of fairness among wives, moving his sickbed from one room to another depending on whose turn it was to have his company. But one day he began asking whose room he was to go to the next day, and the day after, and the day after that. The wives perceived that he was trying to calculate how long it would be until he was with his beloved Aisha. All decided to give up their turns to allow him to spend his last weeks with Aisha. He died in her arms and was buried in her room.

She was just nineteen years old. A lonely future stretched before her: childless, and banned from remarriage. All she had left was influence. Because she had spent so much time at Muhammad's side, she became a leading religious authority. Originally, 2,210 hadith were attributed to her: ninth-century scholars, dismissing the word of a mere woman, threw out all but 174.

On Muhammad's death, Aisha became a wealthy woman. She inherited nothing from Muhammad, who left all his own property to charity. But the community paid her for the use of part of her room-where she continued to live-as the prophet's tomb. The sum, 200,000 dirhams, was so vast that five camels were needed to transport it. The payment may have been extra generous because Muhammad's successor, or caliph, turned out to be Aisha's father, Abu Bakr.

Muhammad's death caused the boil-over of the long-simmering power struggle between Ali and Abu Bakr. Fatima, who had lived very quietly, raising four children, burst briefly into public life to fight for Ali's right to be caliph. By that time all her sisters had died childless, leaving her and her sons and daughters as Muhammad's only descendants. She argued powerfully that Ali had been Muhammad's choice. It was she who proclaimed that her father's command had been that the leadership of Islam should remain with his blood relatives. The Shiat Ali, or Partisans of Ali, rallied to support her. But she failed to convince the majority of the community. While Ali was prepared to mend the rift by accepting Abu Bakr's leadership, Fatima held out with the courageous stubbornness that continues to characterize modern Shiites. Convinced that her father's will had been flouted, she refused to offer allegiance to Abu Bakr. Perhaps as a result of the stress of that losing struggle, she fell ill and died just six months after her father.

Not everyone mourned the pa.s.sing of Islam's prophet. In the southern Arabian region of Hadramaut, six women decorated their hands with henna, as if for a wedding, and took to the streets beating tambourines in joyful celebration of Muhammad's death. Soon, about twenty others joined the merry gathering. When word of the celebration reached Abu Bakr, he sent out the cavalry to deal with "the wh.o.r.es of Hadramaut." When his warriors arrived, the men of the settlement came to their women's defense but were defeated. As punishment, the women had their henna-painted, tambourine-playing hands severed at the wrists.

Who knows what motivated the women to make their rousing and reckless celebration? To them, at least, it must have seemed that Muhammad's new religion had made their lives more burdensome, less free. And much worse was coming. Repression of women was about to be legislated into the religion on a large scale by Abu Bakr's successor as caliph, the violent misogynist Omar.

That Aisha supported Omar's bid for leadership shows the depth of her loathing for Fatima's husband, Ali. Her opinion of Omar was not high. Kno his cruelty to the women of his household, she had cleverly helped foil a match between him and her sister.

Omar cracked down on women in ways that he must have known flouted Muhammad's traditions. He made stoning the official punishment for adultery and pressed to extend the seclusion of women beyond the prophet's wives. He tried to prevent women from praying in the mosque, and when that failed, he ordered separate prayer leaders for men and women. He also prevented women from making the Hajj, a ban that was lifted only in the last year of his life.

On Omar's death, Aisha supported Othman as his successor. When Othman was murdered by members of a rebellious faction, Ali, who had had to wait twenty-four long years since Muhammad's death, finally got his chance to lead. When he became the Muslims' fourth caliph, Aisha's well-known enmity soon made her a lightning rod for dissidents. She spoke out stridently against Ali's failure to punish Othman's killers.

As opposition to Ali's rule mounted, Aisha made a brave and reckless move that might have changed forever the balance of power between Muslim men and women.

She led the dissidents into battle against Ali in a red pavilion set atop a camel. Riding ahead of her troops, she loudly exhorted them to fight bravely. Ali, realizing the effect this was having on his men's morale, ordered her camel cut down under her. He then routed her forces. Hundreds of her partisans were killed, including her dearest friends and relatives.

The defeat proved disastrous for Muslim women. Her opponents were able to argue that the first battle of Muslim against Muslim would never have happened if Aisha had kept out of public life as G.o.d had commanded. After the battle, one of Muhammad's freed slaves reported a hadith that has been particularly damaging to Muslim women. The man said he had been saved from joining Aisha's army by recalling Muhammad's remark on the news that the Persians had appointed a princess as ruler: "No people who place a woman over their affairs will prosper." Whether or not the former slave's con venient recollection was genuine, that hadith has been used against every Muslim woman who has achieved political influence. In Pakistan it was frequently cited by opponents of Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto.

After the rout, Aisha finally made her peace with Ali. She retreated from politics but remained an eminent religious authority. Most accounts describe her in later life as a sad and self-effacing woman whose one wish was to be forgotten by history.

It is said that she wept whenever she recited the Koranic verses: "O wives of the prophet... remain in your houses."

Chapter 5.

CONVERTS"Marry not women who are idolaters, until they believe: verily a maid-servant who believeth is better than an idolatress, although she please you more."THE K KORAN THE CHAPTER OF THE COW.

At sunrise, before the heat slams down and the air becomes heavy with diesel fumes, Tehran smells of fresh-baked bread. At neighborhood bakeries women wait in line with their flowery household chadors draped casually around their waists. Their faces seem less lined than they will look later, as they struggle through the crowded city burdened with parcels and children and the countless worries of women in poor countries. During this pause they have the brief luxury of watching someone else's labor.

Sometimes, when I tired of the stares and questions I got as the lone woman registered at the Laleh Hotel, I would head for the northern suburbs to stay with a family who had become good friends. They lived on a winding road of mosques, shops and every kind of housing from villas to hovels. In the mornings I would find my way to the local bakery by following my nose. The air carried both the sweetness of seared crusts and the tang of woodsmoke from ovens sunk into the bakery floor. Inside, a four-man a.s.sembly line blurred in a heat shimmer of deft hands and flying dough. The bakers made lavosh lavosh-thin, flat sheets of bread soft as tissue. They worked like jugglers: one bov weighing dough, another rolling it flat, a third flinging it from stick to stick to stretch it thin, a fourth slapping the wafer against the oven wall. Watching the other women, I learned to reach for the hot bread with my hands wrapped in a fold of chador. I would carry it home that way to the Mamoudzadehs' breakfast table.

Like houses everywhere in the Islamic world, the Mamoudzadehs' gave nothing away from the street. Its huge iron gate shut out the world completely, securing the family's privacy within. The gate opened to a courtyard with flower gardens, children's bikes and a shady mulberry tree from which Janet Mamoudzadeh made the jam that spread deliciously over the steaming lavosh. I kicked off my shoes into the pile by the front door and stepped onto the softness of handmade rugs and kilims. Just inside, I flicked my chador onto a rack that contained two or three of the coats and scarves that Janet wore for ordinary use; the more concealing, nunlike magneh she wore to her job as an English teacher at her daughter's grade school, and the chador she kept for religious occasions.

Janet's husband Mohamed was a trader at the Bazaar-e-Bazorg-the Grand Bazaar-dealing in Persian carpets and foreign currencies. She had met him at college in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he was studying engineering and she was taking computer science. She fell in love, converted to Islam, and traveled home with him to Iran.

Janet married Mohamed before the revolution, when it was possible for non-Muslims to live in Iran with their Muslim spouses. These days, conversion is obligatory, in line with the Shiite view that permanent marriage (as opposed to sigheh) can take place only between Muslims. The prophet's sunnah on this matter doesn't really help to clarify the Koranic verses.

The prophet had relationships with at least two Jewish women and one Christian, but Islamic sources differ as to whether the women converted or, if they kept their own faith, whether they became full-fledged wives. Safiyah, the wife of the leader of the Jews of Khaiber who died in battle with the Muslims, converted to Islam and is mentioned in all the sources as a full-fledged wife of the prophet. The status of the other two women isn't so clear. Some sources say that the other Jew, Raihanah, decided to remain as a slave/concubine in the harem, so that she could keep her faith and remain free of the restrictions of seclusion. Mary, the Coptic Christian, who never changed her religion, is described as a concubine in all but Egyptian sources.

Janet converted to Islam because her husband wanted his children raised as Muslims and she believed that having the same religion would make her household more harmonious. She looked upon her conversion in a matter-of-fact way. "Allah, G.o.d-it's the same guy, isn't it? And if you read the Koran, Mary is in there, and Jesus-it's just that they're called Maryam and Isa."

Janet's conversion had been a simple matter. In her family's living room in Kansas, in front of two witnesses, she had simply proclaimed the shehada, shehada, the Muslim profession of faith: "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d and Muhammad is the Messenger of G.o.d." Because her husband is Shiite, she also added the additional, optional sentence: "Ali is the friend of G.o.d." Once she said the simple formula, she was a Muslim. To be a the Muslim profession of faith: "There is no G.o.d but G.o.d and Muhammad is the Messenger of G.o.d." Because her husband is Shiite, she also added the additional, optional sentence: "Ali is the friend of G.o.d." Once she said the simple formula, she was a Muslim. To be a good good Muslim, she also had to live by the other four of the faith's Five Pillars: praying five times a day; fasting in Ramadan; giving alms to the poor-usually set at 2.5% of a person's net worth, not mere income-per year; and making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in her life, if she could afford it. Muslim, she also had to live by the other four of the faith's Five Pillars: praying five times a day; fasting in Ramadan; giving alms to the poor-usually set at 2.5% of a person's net worth, not mere income-per year; and making the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in her life, if she could afford it.

I was intrigued by Janet's decision. Early one morning in the winter of 1984, I had made a similar choice. I'd gone to a dank room in a Cleveland suburb, submerged my body in a tiled pool of rainwater, and come up p.r.o.nouncing the words: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord Our G.o.d, the Lord Is One." Later, I celebrated with my rabbi and my fiance over matzo-ball soup and potato latkes at a nearby Jewish deli.

My conversion had more to do with history than faith. If I were going to marry a Jew, it seemed important to throw in my lot with his often threatened people. I didn't know then that I would spend the best part of the next decade in the Middle East, where being on my husband's side made me an automatic enemy to many of those we lived among.

Janet, too, wanted to be on her husband's side. But in Iran in the late 1970s, her nationality was an obstacle that her new faith couldn't entirely overcome. "It wasn't a great time for a bride from Kansas City to be setting up house in Tehran," she recalled with a wry grin. Within a couple of months of her arrival the city was paralyzed by demonstrations, fires, gun battles. When Khomeini returned from exile in 1979, Mohamed was exultant. Like many young, well-educated Iranians, he despised the corruption of the old order and admired the way Khomeini thumbed his nose at the great powers who had vied with each other to exploit the wealth of his homeland.

Janet had to sit through family gatherings listening to Mohamed's relatives pillory her country. As her Farsi improved, she began to challenge them. "They would say, 'Oh, Janet, you know we like American people, it's just the government we hate.' I would say, 'Yeah? Well, in my country, buddy, the government is is the people.' " the people.' "

When Iranian students occupied the U. S. Emba.s.sy in Tehran in 1979, the State Department told all United States citizens to leave. Janet watched as an exodus emptied the city of the thousands of American expatriates who had once made fortunes there. Soon only a handful of Americans remained, most of them wives of Iranians too financially or ideologically committed to their country to leave. "The State Department said we'd be on our own if we stayed here. And we have been. But if you love your husband, you stay."

Janet also gradually found herself coming to love many aspects of her life in Iran. She found that Iranians lavished affection on the few Americans who stayed. Some Iranians had warm memories of American teachers or technicians who had helped the country, while even those who saw Americans only as rapacious exploiters felt that Janet, by staying, had aligned herself with Iran. Instead of being greeted with hostility, she found herself welcomed everywhere-pushed to the front of food lines, given the best meat, and helped in every possible way. "They treat me like a queen here," she said.

But convincing her parents back in Kansas City took some doing, especially after Betty Mahmoody published her memoir, Not Without My Daughter. Not Without My Daughter. The book is a nightmare tale of an American wife who agrees to visit her husband's family in Tehran only to find herself trapped there by Iranian laws that forbid women to leave the country without their husbands' permission. It gives an unremittingly bleak picture of life in Iran, describing wife beatings, filthy houses and vermin-infested food. The book is a nightmare tale of an American wife who agrees to visit her husband's family in Tehran only to find herself trapped there by Iranian laws that forbid women to leave the country without their husbands' permission. It gives an unremittingly bleak picture of life in Iran, describing wife beatings, filthy houses and vermin-infested food.

"My father would get on the phone and say, I know Mohamed is beating you,' and I'd say, 'Dad, he'd no more beat me than you would.' I even took pictures of my freezer to show how much food we have." She tried to describe the split-level luxuries of her s.p.a.cious villa, the leisure provided by her regular cleaner and her easy access to good child care for her three children. It was a life that many Americans would have found enviable. But her parents weren't rea.s.sured. So she agreed to see me in the hope that her parents might believe a report by an outsider. She invited a friend, a Californian also married to an Iranian, to meet me as well.

Janet gaped as she opened the door to her friend. It was the week of Khomeini's funeral, and the whole of Tehran was shrouded in black. Black crepe decked public buildings, men wore black shirts, women packed away their colorful scarves for the forty days of official mourning and donned their black chadors. Amid all this gloom, Janet's friend stood out like a clown in a convent. Six feet tall and seven months pregnant, she wore a huge cotton caftan splashed with pink and red roses, and a pink silk scarf that barely covered her sun-bleached hair.

"Good grief, I hope Hajji Yousefi didn't see you!" gasped Janet, referring to her next-door neighbor, a member of the local Komiteh responsible for enforcing Islamic discipline. The woman, whom I will call Margaret, just shrugged and flopped into an armchair. "Who cares?" she said. "I got abuse on the way over here, with some old bag in a chador coming up to me and saying, 'How can you dress like that? Don't you know the imam is dead?' I said, 'What's it to me? I'm an American.' I told her I knew better than she did what the Koran says women should wear, and it doesn't say anywhere that it has to be a big old black rag."

Margaret knew what the Koran said because she spent every morning sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her mother-in-law, studying the holy book line by line. Margaret had wed a scion of the Islamic Republic's aristocracy: the son of a long line of eminent ayatollahs. The family tolerated a lot from their son's odd choice of bride because she had done two things to earn their approval: converted to Islam and quickly become pregnant. Her mother-in-law fervently believed that winning a convert was a pa.s.sport to paradise and, as none of her children had yet given her a grandson, she had high hopes for Margaret's pregnancy.

Margaret also spoke frankly about the s.e.xual power she believed she wielded over her husband. Growing up in California's hedonistic beach culture, she had acquired a s.e.xual repertoire undreamed of by an Iranian boy closeted among clerics. "He runs after me like a puppy," she giggled. All this, she believed, protected her from conforming to the iron disciplines of Iranian society that Janet barely questioned. In Tehran, all government buildings have female guards who strictly enforce Islamic dress codes, and Margaret had recently been turned back at the door of a post office for wearing lipstick. "I asked for a Kleenex, and she said, 'Here's your Kleenex,' and slapped me across the face." Margaret complained to her family and they had the guard sacked.

A few days after our meeting at Janet's house, I invited both women to join me for lunch in town. Margaret chose her favorite place, a once grand French restaurant with linen tablecloths and red banquettes. The restaurant waiters greeted her like a long-lost sister. Complimenting her on her colorful dress, one of them asked why her two friends were wearing such dowdy black hijab. Margaret replied with a quick Farsi crack. The waiter looked startled, then laughed. "I told him you were a.s.s kissers," she grinned.

But even Margaret had learned that there were limits. Once, her irreverence had almost gone too far. She had been annoyed for days by some anti-American graffiti scrawled on a wall at the end of her street. One night she'd taken a can of paint and altered the lettering to turn the insult back against the Iranian government. At daybreak the new message caused a furor and a witch hunt. Margaret, delighted by the frenzy she'd created, confided to her husband, thinking he'd enjoy the joke. "I never knew he could be so angry," she said. Furious, he screamed at her, calling her a madwoman: "Do you want to be killed? There are some things even I can't save you from." In the end, no one managed to identify her as the culprit.

For me, Janet's friendship offered a window into women's lives in Iran. Mohamed's huge extended family included the poor and the affluent, the religiously convinced and the skeptical. Whenever I was in town it became understood that I was included in all family events.

For me, being Jewish had remained an abstraction: something that had defined the kind of wedding I'd had, and afterward meant a once-a-year family feast at Pa.s.sover, a fast at Yom Kippur, a certain awkwardness at Christmastime and a label, often an inconvenient one, that I had to write on visa forms when I visited Middle Eastern countries. But, for Janet, religion shaped every day's routine.

No one in the Mamoudzadeh family lived a secular life. Mohamed's mother rose every morning before dawn to ready herself for the first of the five prayers she would offer each day. Mohamed and Janet were less meticulous, but even Janet said she enjoyed the moments when she joined her mother-in-law at prayer. "It's just such a peaceful few minutes in your day," she said. "If the kids call for you, or someone comes to the door, you just raise your voice and intone 'Allah' to signal that you're praying, and no one can interrupt you."

To prepare for prayers, Janet and her mother-in-law would wash carefully, scrubbing the face, feet and hands, rinsing the mouth, and rubbing damp hands over the hair. Women can't wear nail polish in Iran because of the law that hands have to be clean for prayer, and a coating of polish is considered polluting. At the airport, even foreign women are handed petrol-soaked rags to wipe varnished nails. But perfume is encouraged at prayer time, so Janet and her mother-in-law would sprinkle themselves with scent, enfold themselves in their prettiest floral chadors, roll out a special prayer rug, and begin the series of bows, kneeling and prostration that accompany the Muslims' melodious poem of devotion: "Praise be to G.o.d, lord of the creation, the compa.s.sionate, the merciful, king of the last judgment... You alone we worship, and to you alone we pray for help.... Guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have incurred your wrath...." Men must recite the prayers audibly enough for someone nearby to distinguish the words. Women whose voices are considered s.e.xually arousing, are supposed to whisper.

Every year Mohamed put his name down for the lottery which selected the pilgrims who would make the annual Hajj. The month of Hajj follows immediately after the purifying month of Ramadan. These days, about two million Muslims from all over the world descend on Mecca annually, ritually dressed in simple white garments.

Because the Iranians' politicized view of religion doesn't sit well with the Saudis, Saudi Arabia imposes a tight quota on the number of Iranian pilgrims it admits each year. Finally, in 1993, Mohamed's name was drawn. He planned to take his mother and Janet on the month-long journey. But Janet, after studying the obligations of the pilgrimage, decided not to go. "There is so much more to it than circling the Kaaba and praying for forgiveness on the Plain of Arafat," she said. Pilgrims not only had to refrain from having s.e.x, she learned. "Even thinking about s.e.x can destroy the value of your Hajj." As well, there could be no irritable words or malicious thoughts. "I don't think I'm spiritual enough to do it properly." Instead, she offered her place to Mohamed's sister, who delightedly embarked on a special Hajj course of study to prepare herself.

Almost every week of the Mamoudzadehs' life contained some religious observance bound up in the rituals surrounding births, betrothals, marriages and funerals. During one week-long visit to the family, I learned a lot about Iranian life from two very different deaths.

Mohamed had lost a great-aunt-a ninety-year-old matriarch. Together, we set off for her Shabba Haft-Seventh Night-an evening of ritual grieving that takes place one week after a death. The woman's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were so numerous that the gathering spilled from her own large house into a neighbor's. Both homes were decked with black crepe, their courtyards filled with carpets and cushions and strung with fluorescent lights. Mohamed parked the car and we split up, he heading with the other men to the neighbor's house-neighbors generally lend their homes for the men's gathering, since women often come enc.u.mbered with toddlers who might make a mess. Janet and I joined the women and children crowding into the reception room of the dead woman's home.

Next door, among the men, a mullah read from the Koran, his voice piped through to the women's gathering via loudspeakers. Mullahs who do such readings are chosen for their fine voices, and after the Koran chant he began to sing a low, mournful song extolling thei rtues of mothers. Around the crowded room, women sobbed gently. Then, with the end of his song, the mood changed abruptly. Servants spread huge sheets of plastic over the carpets and laid out mountainous trays of lamb, chicken, rice and vegetables.

Such gatherings bring families together, but this Shabba Haft also revealed how ten years of war and revolution had torn this Iranian family apart. A picture of the dead woman's grandson, a "martyr" in the war with Iraq, hung in the center of the living-room wall. Underneath the portrait sat the young man's sister, who had recently been released from prison after serving a seven-year sentence for shouting "Death to Khomeini." Her brother, the martyr, had denounced her to the Revolutionary Guards.

"You will find something like this in almost every middle-cla.s.s Iranian family, if you can get them to talk about it," Janet said. "The revolution really divided people here-pa.s.sionate believers and pa.s.sionate disbelievers all under the same roof." We were sitting next to the young woman's aunt. The aunt had lost all three of her own children-two fighting for the regime, the third struggling against it. A daughter died in training for the volunteer women's militia. At her first practice on the rifle range, she was so startled by the burst of automatic weapons fire that she stood up in her trench and was shot in the head. One son went to the Iran-Iraq front and was listed missing in action. I didn't tell his mother that I had been to the battle lines where her son had fought. I'd gone from the Iraqi side, since Iran didn't take women reporters to the front. I arrived the afternoon of a major Iraqi victory, and the Iranian dead lay sprawled and flyblown in their trenches like ragged sacks of rotting meat. The Iraqis had already set to work reinforcing the few meters of desert they'd captured. Giant earth-moving equipment rumbled right over the corpses, leaving the sand smeared with a paste of mashed flesh. There would be no identification for such bodies. Hundreds, maybe thousands of young men will always be "missing" in those sands.

The hardest death had been her second son's. He had been executed by the Islamic Republic for membership in a militant opposition group named the People's Mujahedin. He was, she said, a confused young man who had been preyed on by a well-organized group that lived off Iraqi handouts and brainwashed its recruits. I wanted to ask her if she blamed the Iranian government for not showing her son some mercy, but Janet, who was translating, shook her head slightly and didn't put the question. Instead, I asked gently if she felt that all her sacrifices had been worth it. She nodded without hesitation. "Our village was the first to tear down the Shah's statue," she said, "and we haven't wavered from that path, no matter what you Westerners think." We talked about her work as a teacher in the village school. After all her losses, she said, she tried now to think of her pupils as her children.

A few days earlier, Janet and Mohamed had attended another Shabba Haft. Unlike the death of the ninety-year-old matriarch, who had gone to her G.o.d gently and in good time, this other death had been sudden and shocking.

Annahita was just thirteen years old. In the weeks before her death she had come under enormous pressure from a teacher who was vice-princ.i.p.al of her school. First the teacher had chided her over the way she wore her magneh, telling her the cowl-like hood was pushed too far back, letting her hair spill out provocatively. Another day the teacher took exception to her shoes, saying they were too fashionable for a modest schoolgirl. Then the teacher found a group of girls looking out a particular schoolroom window that had views of an area frequented by young men. Annahita later told her parents that she was sitting nearby, innocently doing her knitting, when the irate teacher pounced on the pupils and marched them all off for a reprimand, then singled her out to stand, humiliated, outside the cla.s.sroom. It was Ramadan, and Annahita had been fasting, without even a sip of water, since dawn. She stood there, in the hot sun, for the rest of the long schoolday. That evening she confided her misery to an older brother, a medical student. "Every day they hara.s.s me. If it's going to be like this every day I don't want to go on." Her brother had no idea how deeply she meant what she said.

At school the next day the vice-princ.i.p.al excoriated Annahita's mother over her daughter's behavior. Annahita, the vice-princ.i.p.al said, was well on the way to expulsion. She would, in all probability, grow up to be a wh.o.r.e. Her mother bitterly refuted the teacher's claims, saying that Annahita hadn't yet realized there was such a thing as the opposite s.e.x: "She's still a little girl," she told the teacher. "I have to hold her on my lap like a baby and force her to have her hair brushed, she's so uninterested in how she looks." The argument was still going on when Annahita, distraught, left the school, walked home, climbed to the roof of her house and threw herself off.

A few days later another young girl, also complaining about pressures over hijab and s.e.xuality, killed herself the same way. In her pocket was a picture of Annahita torn from a newspaper account of the earlier suicide. The two cases prompted weeks of soul searching in the Iranian media. "We are sending our kids to school with thousands of hopes for their future," read the headline on an article about the suicides in a magazine named Today's Woman. Today's Woman. Where, asked the article, are we going so wrong? Like most articles on the subject, this one laid the blame on an overly disciplinarian teacher, calling for more teacher training in child psychology. No one questioned whether the Islamic burden was being laid too soon, and too heavily, on the frail shoulders of little girls. Where, asked the article, are we going so wrong? Like most articles on the subject, this one laid the blame on an overly disciplinarian teacher, calling for more teacher training in child psychology. No one questioned whether the Islamic burden was being laid too soon, and too heavily, on the frail shoulders of little girls.

When I met Janet's daughter Leila, she had just turned nine, the age when girls a.s.sume all the responsibilities of their religion. In Iran, a nine-year-old girl is required to wear full hijab, to rise for dawn prayers and to fast during the daylight hours of Ramadan. Boys, considered less mature, aren't required to fast or pray until they turn fifteen. On his return to Iran, Khomeini threw out the Shah's 1975 Family Protection Law, which had banned child brides and polygamy. Now, in Iran, a nine-year-old girl is legally old enough to marry.

Leila had grown up in Iran but vacationed every other summer with her grandparents in Missouri. In Kansas City she enjoyed the freewheeling games of her American pals. But back home the walls of the courtyard closed in on her. When a car-repair shop opened across the street, she had to put away her bike. "There are always young men there, talking about their cars," Janet explained. "If she rides around in the street with her brothers, she'll be stared at."

The conversion of a house to a mechanic's shop hadn't pleased Janet, but she felt powerless to fight it. For one thing, the young proprietor had been a prisoner of war in Iraq and had opened his business on the proceeds of a government grant to help veterans. "And anyway," Janet sighed, "the local authorities wouldn't have any sympathy for me saying I wanted my daughter to be free to play outside. In their eyes, she belongs inside, whether there's an auto shop across the street or not."

Leila already had her first chador, cut down to size and lace-embroidered on the hem. She loved to wear it. "It makes her feel grown up, I guess," Janet said. "I suppose I'm lucky that she isn't rebellious against it." Janet worried about how her own decision to embrace Islam would ultimately affect her daughter and watched anxiously for signs of a rebellion that would make Leila's life difficult outside the home.

But, as Leila grew from cute kid to lovely young teenager, religion became one of her favorite school subjects. At prayer time she enjoyed needling her fourteen-year-old brother, who hadn't yet begun to do his daily prayers.

"Moma, why isn't Yusef praying?" she would call, loud enough for her brother to hear over the TV show that was engrossing him. "He's not fifteen, he doesn't have to," Janet would sigh wearily. "But, Moma, our teacher says if he knows the prayers and understands them, then he should pray, no matter how old he is, and you know Yusef knows the prayers."

Janet stopped worrying about rebellion and began to dread the onset of a narrow fanaticism that would raise tensions within the family. Janet had one American friend whose daughter had become so intensely devout that she refused to accompany her mother on visits to the "spiritually polluted" United States.

Leila's schoolday started with prayers followed by a ritual chant: "Marg bar Amrika "Marg bar Amrika [Death to America]!" Her school, the Martyr of Knowledge, was a reasonably progressive inst.i.tution within the Iranian spectrum and didn't require its pupils to wear chadors. Chador-wearing for schoolgirls had become controversial following several serious car accidents when drivers at dusk hadn't seen the black-veiled little figures trying to cross busy streets. Instead, Leila's school uniform was a dove-gray tunic worn over pants and topped with a magneh. The girls kept their hoods on as they ran and laughed in the playground, even though the school was off limits to all men-even the pupils' fathers. Pupils pa.s.sed into the high-walled compound through a curtained entrance zealously guarded by an elderly security man. [Death to America]!" Her school, the Martyr of Knowledge, was a reasonably progressive inst.i.tution within the Iranian spectrum and didn't require its pupils to wear chadors. Chador-wearing for schoolgirls had become controversial following several serious car accidents when drivers at dusk hadn't seen the black-veiled little figures trying to cross busy streets. Instead, Leila's school uniform was a dove-gray tunic worn over pants and topped with a magneh. The girls kept their hoods on as they ran and laughed in the playground, even though the school was off limits to all men-even the pupils' fathers. Pupils pa.s.sed into the high-walled compound through a curtained entrance zealously guarded by an elderly security man.

Inside, the usual grade school decorations of cut-out animals and nature collections shared s.p.a.ce with banners declaring "Death to America." But the school's official anti-American fervor was belied by the scramble to get into Janet's English cla.s.s. Teaching English fell from favor in government schools during the first decade of the revolution, but after Khomeini's death it began to creep slowly back. Leila's school had two English teachers, but it was Janet's cla.s.s that was constantly oversubscribed by parents pressing for their children to learn the language with a Midwestern accent.

"This is a pen! This is a desk! I am a girl!" Twenty-three bright little six-year-old faces, framed in their gray magnehs, chanted in unison. One by one, Janet called on the girls to recite the ABC, or to write the unfamiliar Latin alphabet on a board usually covered with the curvaceous script of Farsi. For those who knew their work, the reward was a candy and a round of applause.