Sometimes I wonder what year it is.  2011, or 1911?

Item:  former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s legal team is about to spend at least half a million dollars trying to discredit the immigrant chambermaid who accused him of rape and sexual assault.  Presumably, they’ll try to use her sexual history against her.  After all, she’s a widow with a 15-year-old child.  That is, she’s no virgin.

Item:  the so-called virginity tests forced on women protestors in Cairo by the military.  In fact these were officially sanctioned rape, even if no penetration was involved.  They were a deliberately chosen means of intimidating, humiliating, and attempting to control women.  To say that virginity has nothing to do with political activism is to belabor the point.  It’s not as though those who “passed” the publicly administered “test” were released with the military blessing to go demonstrate in freedom.  It was yet another means of repression.

For those who might think this is a peculiarly Islamic thing, consider that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, with whom he lived monogamously for 19 years, was twice widowed by the time they married.  And that of the nine women he married after her death, only one was a virgin at marriage (the others were all divorced or widowed).  Since virginity was clearly a non-issue to Muhammad himself, any religious argument for it is hard to make.

As for those virgins in paradise, well, see my TEDx talk for that.

The same applies in Christianity.  Yes, of course I know about the Virgin Mary — I wrote a book about her.  But as I pointed out there, to reduce the concept of virginity to the existence of a biologically useless membrane called the hymen is worse than absurdly literal.  It totally misses out on the grand metaphor of virginity, which existed around the world at the time.  As with a virgin forest, it stood for incredible fecundity, for a surfeit of growth and reproduction, untamed and unfettered.  That is, virginity was the miracle of fertility, and in that respect, the Virgin Mary is the last in a long and once-powerful line of mother goddesses.

So let’s not blame religion.  That’s just the excuse.  Nor such a thing as a “Middle East mentality.”   Because…

Item: as late as the 1970s, British officials were administering virginity tests too.  And again, the purpose was to intimidate women — to deter them from entering the country as immigrant brides (if they weren’t virgins, it seemed, they had to be lying about their reasons for entering the U.K.).   And while we’re talking about Brits, by the way, how weird is it that at that same time, the early 1970s, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin for his enterprises?  Flying the friendly skies?

Perhaps all this means that in forty years’ time, the confusion of virginity with virtue will be as outmoded in Egypt as it now is (Branson excepted) in England.  But then of course it’s not about virtue, and never was.  It’s about the peculiar desire of some men (thank God not all) to control women — their sexuality, their behavior, their freedom of choice.  That is, it’s about not about women as people, but as possessions.

Item:  A commenter on this blog, fulminating against Islam with such blatant racism that I had to bar him as spam, summed up his argument this way:  “We know how to treat our women.”  That “we” evidently referred only to men, specifically to non-Muslim western men who think of women as possessions — “ours” — and as such, to be (mis)treated as “we” see fit.   He was, he made clear, a fundamentalist Christian.

So tell me, what year are we living in?  Scratch the years I gave at the top.  If you go see Werner Herzog’s new movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (about the prehistoric paintings on the walls of that cave), you might discover that even Neanderthals had more respect for women than this.  And they lived 35,000 years ago.

Occasionally – okay, rarely – the first time you meet someone is indelibly etched on your mind.  Meeting Tamam Kahn was like that.  It was a few years ago at the Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico (once the haunt of Georgia O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence) at the all-women AROHO – A Room of Her Own – writers conference, where I was teaching, taking a break from working on After the Prophet, and generally high on being in high desert.

That morning I was stretched out on a table, doing some Pilates exercises between sessions (on the table, because nobody was going to stumble over me that way, I guess;  stretching, because I’d hiked further than I’d intended before breakfast) when Tamam appeared, long blond Rasta locks and all.

She didn’t say hello.  She didn’t say her name.  She just stood there and began to chant, and I sat upright immediately.  This chant commanded attention.  It took me a moment to realize whose voice this had to be:   that of Khadija, Muhammad’s first wife, the woman to whom he fled in terror after his first encounter with the angel Gabriel, who held him and assured him that he was not crazy and that this really was a divine revelation, and to whom he stayed married in a monogamous and extraordinarily close relationship until her death.

“You wrote that poem?” I asked when Tamam fell silent.  And I mean silent:  all the buzz and chatter around us seemed to have fallen away.  She didn’t answer — just kind of half-smiled and began chanting another, this one in the voice of Aisha, the youngest and most controversial of the nine women Muhammad married after Khadija’s death.

It wasn’t just the rhythm.  These poems had a fierce, elegant energy, an urgency and passion that seemed to bring these women alive.  When I’d written my ‘flesh-and-blood biography‘ of Mary, many people had asked me if I’d felt like I was channeling her.  I’d said no way — I’m not into channeling or any of that New Agey kind of stuff.  But that morning at Ghost Ranch, it honestly felt as though Tamam was channeling these seventh-century women.  By the time Tamam/Aisha had finished, I was officially blown away.

Those poems have now been published in Untold: a History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad – just two of seventy poems in all, embedded in a prose narrative.  Here’s me on the back cover:

In a sustained act of spirited research and imagination, Tamam Kahn brings Muhammad’s wives out of the shadows and into the light.  The women of ‘Untold’ have at last found their perfect teller, in voices so gemlike and clear that one wants to chant them aloud, dance to them, celebrate with them.

And yippee, publication brings Tamam to Seattle for the next few days, doing readings and a Sufi retreat weekend.  So if you’re anywhere near, check her schedule here (I’ll be at the Thursday reading in the chapel of the U District’s United Methodist Church on 43rd between 15th and University), and prepare to be blown away.