And then he woke up, alone, in a rover on the Great Escarpment.
• • •
Eventually he returned from this awful expedition of dreams. Back in the caravan he found it hard to talk. He was invited to Zeyk’s for coffee, and he swallowed a tablet of an opiate complex to relax himself in the company of men. In Zeyk’s rover he sat in his spot, and waited for Zeyk to pass around little cups of clove-dosed coffee. Unsi Al-Khal sat on his left, speaking at length about the Islam vision of history, and how it had begun in the Jahili or pre-Islam period. Al-Khal had never been friendly, and when Frank tried to pass him the cup that came his way in a standard gesture of politeness, Al-Khal curtly insisted that the honor was Frank’s, that Al-Khal would not be prevailed upon to usurp it. Typical insult by over-politeness, the hierarchy again— one could not do favors for one higher in the system, favors only went downward. Alpha males, pecking orders; really they might as well have been back on the savannah (or in Washington), it was nothing more than primate dominance tactics again.
Frank ground his teeth, and when Al-Khal began pontificating again he said, “What about your women?”
They were taken aback, and Al-Khal shrugged. “In Islam men and women have different roles. Just as in the West. It is biological in origin.”
Frank shook his head and felt the sensuous buzz of the tabs, the black weight of the past. The pressure on a permanent aquifer of disgust at the bottom of his thinking increased, and something gave, and suddenly he didn’t care about anything and was sick of pretending he did. Sick of all pretense everywhere, the glutinous oil that allowed society to run on in its gnashing horrid way.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s slavery, isn’t it?”
The men around him stiffened, shocked by the word.
“Isn’t it?” he said, helplessly feeling the words bubble up out of his throat. “Your wives and daughters are powerless, and that is slavery. You may keep them well, and they may be slaves with peculiar and intimate powers over their masters, but the master-slave relationship twists everything to it. So that all these relations are twisted, pressured to the bursting point.”
Zeyk’s nose was wrinkled. “This is not the lived experience of it, I can assure you. You should listen to our poetry.”
“But would your women assure me?”
“Yes,” Zeyk said with perfect confidence.
“Maybe. But look, the most successful women among you are modest and deferent at all times, they are scrupulous in honoring the system. Those are the ones that aid their husbands and sons to rise in the system. So to succeed, they must work to enforce the same system that subjugates them. This is poisonous in its effects. And the cycle repeats itself, generation after generation. Supported by both masters and slaves.”
“The use of the word slaves,” Al-Khal said slowly, and paused. “Is offensive, because it presumes judgment. Judgment of a culture you do not really know.”
“True. I only tell you what it looks like from the outside. This can only be of interest to a progressive Moslem. Is this the divine pattern you are struggling to actualize in history? The laws are there to read, and to watch in action, and to me it looks like a form of slavery. And, you know, we fought wars to end slavery. And we excluded South Africa from the community of nations for arranging its laws so that the blacks could never live as well as the whites. But you do this all the time. If any men in the world were treated like you treat your women, the U.N. would ostracize that nation. But because it is a matter of women, the men in power look away. They say it is a cultural matter, a religious matter, not to be interfered with. Or it is not called slavery because it is only an exaggeration of how women are treated elsewhere.”
“Or not even an exaggeration,” Zeyk suggested. “A variation.”
“No, it is an exaggeration. Western women choose much of what they do, they have their lives to live. Not so among you. But no human submits to being property, they hate it, and subvert it, and have what revenge they can against it. That’s how humans are. And in this case it is your mother, your wife, your sisters, your daughters.”
Now the men were glaring at him, still more shocked than offended; but Frank stared at his coffee cup, and went on regardless. “You must free your women.”
“How do you suggest we do this?” Zeyk said, looking at him curiously.
“Change your laws! Educate them in the same schools your sons go to. Make them the equal in rights to any Moslem of any kind anywhere. Remember, there is much in your laws that is not in the Koran, but was added in the time since Mohammed.”