The Wives of Nasruddin Haji

I had a Muslim friend named Muhsin, who used to share his hookah with me. I realize now that I should have felt very honoured that he would share his hookah with me, because I am not a Muslim, and that meant that he had accepted me as a friend.

So I would go over to Muhsin's from time to time, and he would fill the bowl of his hookah with some exotic tobacco, and we would smoke it. If it was during the month of Ramadan, where all the Muslims fasted from sunrise until sunset, his wife, Sami, would cook an elaborate dinner for the evening meal, and invite me and her who was my wife, until she ran off with some other guy.

As he commiserated with me over my wife's scandalous departure, Muhsin said to me, "A woman is a sometime thing, my friend, as that old song goes. A woman thinks that a man mainly wants somebody to clean and cook for him, when what he really wants is sex. So a woman may not understand why her husband is suddenly unhappy that he isn't getting it every night. But a woman wants somebody to put food on the table and put a roof over her head, and be able to fix things when they need fixing. She's looking for a pay cheque, and she wants your pay cheque."

To all that, I replied, "A woman wants a man who can open jars, and a man wants a woman who can choose the right tie. My wife can open jars by herself, apparently, and I choose my own ties now."

Then I added, "You Muslims have it made. If your marriage doesn't work out, you can have a second wife without having to divorce the first one."

As Muhsin was filling the bowl of his hookah, he said to me of his tobacco mixture, which looked the grease used to pack ballbearings in, except that it was red: "This has anise in it. These are the dregs of Turkish raki. The Greeks and the Turks like to get drunk on licorice, basically, only they call it raki in Turkey and ouzo in Greece. The only difference is that the Greeks light a fire over the top of the glass to burn the dregs while the Turks let the dregs sink to the bottom."

Then, Muhsin said to me, "The Qu'ran allows Muslims to have up to four wives, but there's a reason why polygamy is discouraged rather than encouraged."

And then he told me a story:

There was a man from northern Lebanon who was a haji, because he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, or shaoums, at some point in his life. Though Nasruddin Haji was a pious man, he was also weak. He had a good job in America and a wife and three or four children when his wife, Zina, suffered a stroke at the age of thirty-five or forty.

Now, Nasruddin Haji loved his wife and tried to take care of her, but working full time and taking care of three or four children, as well as a invalid wife who couldn't even speak, soon proved to be too much for him. As well, his virile member lacked a means of expressing its virility.

His widowed mother in Lebanon feared that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so she came to America to help him take care of Zina, his wife, for a while. But when Nasruddin Haji picked up his mother at Pearson International Airport, she was with a distant cousin of hers named Layla, whom he knew but not very well.

As it turned out, Layla was thirty-five years, and a widow with three children because of the war in Lebanon. With the presence of Layla, Nasruddin Haji's virile member now had an outlet for its virility, and he and Layla fell in love— which is what Nasruddin Haji's mother had wanted, believe it or not.

So Nasruddin Haji and Layla were married before an imam at an Arab cultural centre in Montreal. Since polygamy is illegal in Canada, Nasruddin Haji had to divorce himself from Zina, the first wife, but not to worry: Nasruddin Haji's mother took care of Zina until she went back to Lebanon, and then Layla would take care of her afterward.

Now, Zina made amazing progress under Layla's care. That's because Layla was a nurse who had worked with stroke patients before. Soon, Zina was walking and talking normally, and able to do the simple things, like eating with a spoon, that she hadn't been able to do immediately after the stroke. Layla had worked a miracle! However, Zina took up all of Layla's time, so that Nasruddin Haji really didn't have any wife rather than having two.

While Layla was busy with Zina, Nasruddin Haji had taken up with a dancer that he had met on Papineau Street, whose name was Caroline. Together, they committed adultery, which is a sin in both the Muslim and Christian faiths. But they don't stone people for adultery in Canada, because Canadians consider themselves to be much civilized then Arabs, though a Canadian man may shoot his wife if he catches her in bed with another man, and he has a gun ready.

However, Canadians are much more blasé about things like adultery, and even homosexuality, than their cousins south of the border, and they have stricter gun laws than the US does.

While Nasruddin Haji was busy with Caroline, Zina and Layla became very close. In fact, the unthinkable happened: they fell in love. Though there were about seven children in the household, they all had to go to school, so Zina and Layla had plenty of occasions to be alone. It was simply a matter of taking the time to watch television in Zina or Layla's bedroom and cuddle in bed in front of the television set. It was easy.

As often happens with cuckholds, however, Nasruddin Haji came home from work early one day and found his two wives in bed together. He couldn't believe it! If he had a gun, he might have shot them, but fortunately, Canada has much stricter gun laws than the US does, and he wasn't armed.

Now, Layla had a way of explaining herself very articulately: "I love her. She makes me feel things that I have never felt before."

Zina merely nodded her head in agreement, though she had regained the gift of speech, which she had lost after the stroke.

There is a reason why Arabs like big houses: that's because the Arab family is, for the most part, an extended family. It is not unusual for several generations, even three or four, to be living under one roof, and Arabs tend to have lots of children. Remember, Nasruddin Haji was taking care of three or four children with Zina, and three stepchildren with Layla. As well, there might come a time where Layla might admit him to her bed, and she could end up having a child with him.

With him seeing Caroline, however, Nasruddin Haji was seriously thinking about divorcing himself from Layla. After all, he was a pious Muslim, and he couldn't have two lesbians living under his roof. What would his neighbours think?

Or could he?

While Nasruddin Haji was dealing with the scandal of having both of his wives involved in a lesbian affair, Caroline and her little daughter, a toddler named Chantal, were evicted from their apartment for nonpayment of rent, and they had nowhere else to go. So Nasruddin Haji did what he thought any compassionate Muslim would do under his circumstances: he invited Caroline to come live him and his family.

Now, you might think that a good Muslim family would have a problem with a ballerina living in their midst, but when they saw little Chantal, the women and the girls of the household fell in love with her immediately. With blond hair and blue eyes like her mother, Chantal was the most beautiful, most angelic baby that they had ever seen. As well, her mother, Caroline was just gorgeous, a blond-haired and blue-eyed goddess— what Hitler would have called a perfect Aryan.

I probably wouldn't be exaggerating very much if I said that Zina and Layla were taken by Caroline as well.

Zina, Layla, and Caroline all had one thing in common: they liked to dance. From Zina and Layla, and the older girls of the household, Caroline learned to do the belly dance. As she had been dancing her entire life, learning ballet as a child, and jazz dancing as an adolescent, Caroline soon caught on; she was soon as proficient at the belly dance as the other females of the household. What's more, she soon was able to speak Arabic with some fluency, because she and her little girl heard it all the time in the household.

However, in Nasruddin Haji's dirty little mind, the three women became associated with the Three Graces of classical Greek mythology, as he had fantasies of them dancing together in the living room au naturel with their arms around each other's shoulders and kicking their legs out like Rockettes. Whether they really did such a thing, of course, is beside the point: what's more important here is the perception of reality rather than the reality itself. So Nasruddin Haji became concerned that his wife, his de jure ex-wife, and his concubine were engaged in lesbian ménages à trois while he was at work.

Of course, Nasruddin Haji never thought to ask his women if they were actually doing such things, because what would they say? Nor did he pay any attention to what his children were saying, if indeed they had anything to say. Surely, if something was amiss, one of the little innocents would have said something, right?

Proverb: Children are the eyes of God— they see the things that God is too busy to pay attention to.

Then Caroline became pregnant. She insisted, with all sincerity, that the unborn child was Nasruddin Haji's. "I swear, my dear," she said, "I love nobody but you."

And then she kissed Nasruddin Haji on the lips.

For the first time, religion became an issue. Up until Caroline became pregnant, nobody had any problem with the fact that she still considered herself to be a Catholic, and that she wanted to raise little Chantal in the Catholic Church as well. In fact, Zina and Layla were charmed by how the little one knelt beside her little bed each night and said the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. How cute! they thought.

The problem with the unborn child was his religion, since Nasruddin Haji was considered the father: was he to be raised a Muslim or a Christian. For Nasruddin Haji (and Zina and Layla), the issue was already settled: the unborn child would be raised as a Muslim until he made the haditha, or confession of faith, for himself: "I believe that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is His Prophet." Then he would actually be a Muslim.

Well, for Caroline, the issue was also settled: there would be a christening soon after birth, and then the little one would go to Catholic school, along with his sister. On this issue, she was just as obstinate as Nasruddin Haji.

"So what happened?" I asked Muhsin. "Did either of them budge?"

Muhsin sadly shook his head and said, "No, this is a case of good loving gone bad. Caroline decided to make it easier for everybody. She moved out, and the Three Graces were no more. If there were ever any lesbian ménages à trois, they were a thing of the past now."

Then he concluded his story:

It could have gotten messy, however. When Caroline was moving out with little Chantal and the newborn, whose name was Joseph, Layla and Zina literally tried to snatch the baby out of her arms, possibly to spirit him to Lebanon, where he could be raised as a Muslim, but Zina's oldest daughter, Aysha, fired a pistol into the ceiling to shut everybody up and restore some sanity to the situation.

"We all know who the mother is," Aysha pointed out, "but the father could be anybody. Are we going to take the word of some ballerina just because she says that our beloved father is the father of this baby? If she wants to leave, we should just let her leave."

Adolescents can be so articulate!

According to rumour, after the birth of little Joe, who, they say, was in the spitting image of Nasruddin Haji, Caroline ran off to the Middle East and started a career as a belly dancer. On some nights, she made over $50,000, mostly at bachelor parties. After two years' time, dancing in all the sexual cauldrons between the Rock of Gibraltar and the Persian Gulf, she was a millionairess, because she saved her piastres. Then, during the Cannes Film Festival, she met a Christian business man from Lebanon on a nudist beach and married him.

"And what of Zina and Layla?" I asked. "I'm sure they continued to watch TV and cuddle together while the kids were in school, right?"

Muhsin slowly nodded his head and replied, "Yes, only Layla started working at a hospital full time as registered nurse, in case Nasruddin Haji filed for divorce and she had to support herself and Zina. However, Nasruddin Haji hasn't filed for divorce. Layla approached him and said, 'I want a child, or I will divorce myself from you. It wouldn't look good, my dear husband, if it became known that you fathered a child with a stripper out of wedlock but not with your own wife.'

"Nasruddin Haji has had not one but two children with Layla, a son and a daughter. So, you see, Layla and Zina have the best of both worlds. They can have each other in the daytime, and yet be respectable at the same time. As the Arab community sees it, both are good wives and loving mothers, because both of them have produced children for Nasruddin Haji. And if Nasruddin Haji divorced himself from Layla, he would have to pay alimony to support the children that he has had with her, because that's the law is in Canada. If there are any ménages à trois in that household now, they involve Nasruddin Haji— probably another reason why the Prophet discouraged polygamy."

"But isn't it true," I asked, "that a wife's testimony is only worth one-quarter of that of the husband?"

"Yes," Muhsin conceded, "but that's because a Muslim can have up to four wives at the same time, and can easily produce four witnesses against himself."

Then Muhsin told me another, much shorter story to illustrate his point about polygamy: "There was an old man who had two wives, one old and one young. Both wives loved him to distraction, but the first wife, who was old, would pluck her husband's dark hairs while he slept in her bed at night, because his dark hairs reminded her of her long-lost youth. Then the younger wife would pluck his grey hairs whenever he slept in her bed, because they made him look like an old man. Then, he woke up one morning to find that he had hair on neither his head nor his chin.

"So in conclusion, polygamy is a bad thing, because a Muslim man must love each wife equally."

Of course, I didn't say it, but if Nasruddin Haji really had three bisexual women living under the same roof, they could have broken off into pairs each night, and everybody would have been happy.

But I didn't say it.