Free Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks

pillars meant to represent Satan. Witnesses say the woman being executed somehow becomes as dehumanized as those pillars—an outlet, perhaps, for the men’s guilt at their own uncontrollable sexuality. Yet the stones in this case hit soft flesh. Because of the way she is buried, each impact snaps her neck backward in a series of excruciating whiplashes. Death often comes when her head is knocked completely off.
    It is hard to imagine a worse way to die. Yet the punishments set down for homosexual sodomy are designed to be even more cruel. If the partners are married men, they may be burned to death or thrown to their deaths from a height. If they are unmarried, the sodomized partner, unless he is a minor, is executed, the sodomizer lashed a hundred times. The variation in the penalty reflects the Muslim loathing of the idea of a man taking the feminine role of the penetrated partner. Lesbian sex, if the women are single, draws a hundred lashes. Married lesbians may be stoned.
    “Why is Islam so severe in matters of adultery, homosexuality and lesbianism?” asks Mohammed Rizvi, a cleric with the Vancouver Islamic Educational Foundation, who writes on Islam and sex. “If theIslamic system had not allowed the gratification of sexual urge by lawful means without associating guilt with it, then it would be right to say that Islam is very severe. But since it has allowed the fulfillment of sexual instincts by lawful means, it is not prepared to tolerate any perverted behavior.”
    But “perverted” behavior went on, even among the most sanctimonious Muslims. In the fall of 1990, when American troops were pouring in to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein, I went to report on how the Saudis were reacting. On my first night in the country I interviewed an influential oil company executive. Educated at Georgetown University and the Wharton School, I expected him to give me a Western-influenced, liberal view. Instead, he told me he hoped the Americans would stay sequestered on their bases to prevent “unholy ramifications” from contaminants such as alcohol and women drivers. He said he thought it was “obnoxious” that CNN had sent a woman reporter, the veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour, to cover the troop deployment. For him, America’s obsession with sexual equality was nothing but a front for immorality. “In any corporation, tell me the boss isn’t looking at his secretary and figuring out a way to have her. If it doesn’t happen, it’s only because of self-interest—too much to lose if they get caught.”
    His glass-walled study looked out on a floodlit swimming pool and a flower-filled courtyard. If the wall were not glass, he explained, he wouldn’t be able to sit with me. “If a man and a woman are alone together, the third person present is Satan,” he said. After about an hour I closed my notebook and thanked him for the interview. Showing me to the door, he paused, as an afterthought, and asked if I’d like to meet a few of his friends. Of course, I said.
    Stepping across the hall, he opened a door on a dimly lit room full of blaring rock music and entangled bodies. A gorgeous Filipina in a black Spandex mini-dress was dancing, rubbing herself rhythmically against her white-robed partner. Another man sat cross-legged on the floor, flashing a colored light at her legs. On sunken couches, a beautiful blond-maned Turk caressed an Egyptian woman for the benefit of a smiling male voyeur. At a bar in the corner, guests helped themselvesto Johnnie Walker whiskey—$135 a bottle on the black market and its consumption punishable by flogging in the city square.
    Swirling a glass of ice splashed with Scotch, the host seemed oblivious to the contradiction between what he’d just finished saying and what he was now showing me. After his second drink, he began to tell me about his failed marriage, to an American. “She insisted on riding around in my Rolls without covering her face. Of course, everyone