Al-Ahram Weekly | Features | All the help they can get

		Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 June 2000 Issue No. 485
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

All the help they can get
By Fayza Hassan
When Zeinab did not make the expected announcement that she was pregnant three months into her marriage, her mother-in-law visited the young woman's mother. "Have you been advising your daughter on the use of contraceptives?" she asked forthrightly. "No," said Zeinab's mother. "Who can advise their children today? They don't listen anyway, but I certainly said nothing about contraceptives, nor was I asked." Within the year, unable to produce the anticipated heir, Zeinab had been dragged to every gynaecologist in town and then made to visit various saints' shrines reputed to help infertile women conceive. She was also taken to a number of "pious" women, usually located in far-away places, who performed esoteric rites and instructed her on certain rituals that Zeinab declined to describe. On the verge of serious depression, she was rather happy when her husband, at his wits' end, informed her that he was divorcing her. She knew, however, that with the reputation of infertility hanging over her head, she was unlikely to remarry any time soon.
Visiting the temple of Pasht or Speos Artemidos (the Grotto of Artemis), known to Egyptians as the stable of Antar, with his companion Amr, writer Anthony Sattin was given a chance to witness first hand a ritual probably similar to one of those Zeinab had been loathe to talk about, and which he traces back in his latest book The Pharaoh's Shadow to practices used by the Ancient Egyptians: "I looked behind the [two] men and saw a woman in the little chamber. She was dressed in black and merged into the gloom, so it was impossible to see clearly, but she was certainly alone, down on the ground, and she appeared to be rolling across the sand and rock, moving from side to side. I heard her talking, confiding, softly pleading.
"The woman," as Sattin later discovers, "was from a nearby village, had had difficulty in becoming pregnant and had visited her sheikh and the doctor. Pills, potions and prayers but still nothing had happened. So now she was placing her faith in the old stones and had come to pray Pasht to bless her with a child."

Abydos: The Osireion, where fertility rites are sometimes conducted

Egyptian women have always known that the failure to produce an heir will put them in an untenable position in their marriage. Alternatively, those who are blessed with a boy can relax -- at least until their son has reached the age at which he can be legally claimed by the father, in case of divorce. Although, according to the law, divorced women are often obliged to relinquish the custody of their grown children, few brides who found themselves in a troubled marriage will dare to remain childless voluntarily and renounce motherhood, which is considered a woman's sacred -- and maybe only -- duty.
Studying the fellahin of Upper Egypt, anthropologist Winifred Susan Blackman wrote that "the failure to produce offspring involved the weakening of the tribe, which in early times depended on its numerical strength for its defence against hostile neighbours... Muslim law permits a man to put away his wife if she has no children, and a woman divorced for this cause has small chance of obtaining another husband once the reason for her divorce has become known. Hence the prospect of childlessness is a very real terror to a wife, and the methods to which women resort in order to prevent such a catastrophe are numerous."
Having received from her brother copies of some ancient blue glazed pendants representing gods, goddesses, sacred animals and scarabs he had brought back from Egypt, Blackman showed them to a sheikh residing in Oxford at the time. He told her that "a man travelling about Upper Egypt with such charms in his possession would be besieged... by crowds of women begging to be allowed to step over these amulets," since they were believed to cure sterility in women.
Joining her brother in 1920 on an archeological dig in Assiut, Blackman was approached by a number of childless women who wanted to know if she would allow them to pick up a few of the bones scattered around the camp. According to Blackman, they wanted to step or jump over them, believing that they would in that way ensure the production of offspring. When she let it be known that she had fertility charms in her possession, the women flocked to her. "The ritual was as follows," she wrote. "The women first repaired to one of the ancient decorated tomb-chapels, conducted thither by one of our servants, who had the key. On entering they each stepped seven times backward and forward over what they supposed to be the mouth of the shaft admitting to the subterranean burial chamber. When this performance was over they returned to the undecorated tomb-chapel in which I lived. Here I produced the charms, two of which were placed on the ground at a time. Then each woman solemnly stepped over them backward and forward seven times. Four charms in all were used representing the head of Isis, a mummified divinity, a scarab and a cat.. When this was accomplished the lower jaw-bone of an ancient Egyptian skull was placed on the ground. The same ceremony was yet again performed, being repeated with two complete ancient Egyptian heads, one a well preserved mummified head, the other a skull. A glass of water was then brought, into which the blue glazed charms were dropped. Each woman drank some of the water, and then picked up the charms and sucked them, and some rubbed their bodies with these magical objects, and also applied the water to their persons."
In 1989, Marina, a friend of Sattin's living in Cairo, related to him similar fertility rites in which she had once participated. Guided by Karima, a woman she knew who lived near the Pyramids, Marina made her way early one morning to a village in the area where she met an albina sheikha rumoured to treat infertility successfully. Marina was made to sit on the floor in a bedroom. A little girl brought a tin covered with clam shells, a bowl and a bar of red soap. "The sheikha motioned for me to lie down," she recalled. "Karima told me not to be afraid. The sheikha started muttering the obligatory be izn Illahs, then uncovered my stomach and washed it heartily with red suds, taking handfuls of flesh and kneading my belly. My womb, she said, was mish mafrusha, unfurnished. Stranger things were to follow."
The sheikha made her sit up and bend over her outstretched legs and chanted strange incantations while pushing her in the back. She then repeated her chants over the contents of the tin. She extracted from the tin a tiny sachet of herbs, which Marina was advised to apply internally. She was furthermore told not to ride horses and to remove the sachet the next day at Karima's house, disposing of it by the Pyramids on her way to see the sheikha. Finally, she was not to drink or have breakfast until she met the sheikha again.
Marina went through the same rituals for three consecutive days. On the last day, she was instructed on how to behave with her husband that night. Two days later she went to see the sheikha. This time, the old woman brought a little doll out of the tin, placed the doll on the ground in the courtyard and told Marina to step over it seven times, after which a pitcher of water was brought in which the doll was dipped and Marina ordered to drink seven times. The rest of the water was stored in a jar and was to be used for washing at sundown. Until then, she was not to talk to a man.
Like alternative medicine, fertility rites are practiced every day in Egypt, but few participants are ready to speak freely about them. In her book on Al-Sayed Al-Badawi, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen remarks that, although it is well known that he is the saint par excellence who can cure infertility -- isn't this what attracts the women who flock in such great numbers to his moulid? -- this trait is rarely, if at all, mentioned in his biographies or in any existing record of his miracles.
Sattin postulates that part of the reluctance to speak about fertility rites is due to the fact that they are connected in some obscure way to ancient religion and the invocation of pre-Islamic gods and idols. He cites the numerous women who secretly spend the night in the upper chamber of the Great Pyramid in order to beget a child, and the anecdote Richard Critchfield recounts in his 1978 book, Shahhat. "Critchfield described how the woman slunk through the darkness to the temple's sacred lake, circled around it seven times, 'now begging Allah to forgive her, now fervently calling upon Ammon-Ra, the Unknown, to help her conceive a son.' Eventually, after collapsing in a panting, trembling heap, she drank some water. A year later, her son was born. Critchfield reports that she told no one what she had done. She named her son Mohamed, but to protect him from the Evil Eye she called him by another name: Shahhat, the beggar."
It may be argued, however, that women are simply disinclined to broach an intimate topic that may cast a shadow of doubt on their socially indispensable productiveness, or, even worse, on their men's virility. After all, few educated women would volunteer the information to casual acquaintances that they have been experimenting with in vitro fertilisation.
Sources:
Winifred S Blackman: The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, The American University in Cairo Press, 2000
Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Al-Sayyid Al-Badawi, un grand saint de l'islam égyptien, IFAO, 1994
Anthony Sattin: The Pharaoh's Shadow, Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt, Victor Gollancz, 2000



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