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Islam and the Body: Female Fattening Among Arabs in Niger

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Islam and the Body: Female Fattening Among Arabs in Niger I S I M NEWSLETTER 4 / 9 9 General Issues 5 Anthroplogy of the body REBECCA POPENOE Islam and the Body: Is there a specifically Islamic vision of the body? Giv- en the nuanced nature of cultural understandings of the body and Islam’s own variable expressions, this question is probably unanswerable, and indeed Female Fattening poorly phrased. Phrased another way, however, the question of the relationship between Islam and the body becomes more interesting: how do bodily prac- tices in different Muslim societies articulate with dif- ferent versions of lived Islam? My research among among Arabs in Niger Arabs in remote northwestern Niger on the aesthetic of corpulent female bodies, and the practice of force- lam’, I want to distinguish their form of lived ory to the body that Islam upholds as pure feeding young girls to achieve it, speaks to this issue. goes through puberty, she slowly Islam from Islam as some essentialized cate- and virtuous. This, at least, seemed to be the ‘learns the value of fatness herself’ and gory. The Islam of the Arabs of the Azawagh way in which Azawagh Arabs ‘read’ Islam. The approximately 20,000 Arabs who today no longer needs an overseer, though if shares elements with Muslims everywhere, live in the Azawagh region in Niger arrived she has the good fortune to be married, but also has its own local particularities. ‘Openness’ and ‘Closedness’ there a century ago from what is now Mali, her mother-in-law may encourage her Although no one I spoke with ever con- This particular Islamic understanding of and before that lived further north in what is progress. Adult women continue to try nected the practice of fattening to Islam (as, the body played itself out in one of the most now Algeria. Resembling the Moors of Mau- to maintain their fat by ingesting large say, people in some societies mistakenly common tropes used by Azawagh Arabs to ritania in their use of Hassaniyya Arabic, a quantities of grain, washed down with claim for female circumcision), the practice analyse illness: ‘openness’ and ‘closedness’. nomadic way of life until recently, and the milk or water. nevertheless contributed to a life that was Sickness was widely considered to be due to fattening of girls, they call themselves sim- in keeping with Azawagh Arabs’ lived un- and to result in bodily ‘openness’, and an at- ply ‘Arabs’, but I have chosen to call them There are complex ethnotheories of nutri- derstanding of Islam. For heuristic purposes tractive and desirable woman should be ‘Azawagh Arabs’ after the region where they tion and fattening that prescribe what foods I divide these connections between Islam ‘closed’, as well as ‘hot’ (the two qualities in- reside. to eat when and what foods to avoid, all and fattening into two categories: ideas deed go together). Women, with their many closely bound up with the maintenance of about the sexes and reproduction, and natural openings (mouth, anus, and espe- Fattening among Arabs proper ‘heat’ in the body. Women with ideas about the body. cially vagina), needed to be particularly o f t h e A z a w a g h stretchmarks and folds of fat are celebrated careful to keep their bodies closed. Fatten- While a corpulent female aesthetic is com- in song as well as everyday conversation. Islam and Fattening ing contributes to the ‘closedness’ of the mon in societies around the world, the prac- When I asked men and women directly The three ‘simple’ answers I received to body in several ways: by closing off the tice of fattening is less so, though it too oc- why girls fattened and why women strove the question of why girls fattened were body’s openings amidst swelling flesh; by curs in many places, including among Tuar- for such corpulent forms, they answered me grounded on three unstated assumptions increasing the ‘heat’ of the body, which egs who are neighbours to Azawagh Arabs in one of three ways: ‘because it is good/at- about the sexes and reproduction which keeps the body from leaking; and by making and Moors, and in a number of sub-Saharan tractive (z a y n)’, ‘because men like it’, and found legitimation in a particular reading of it physically more difficult for women to African and Pacific societies. Many visitors ‘because it makes a girl grow into a woman Islamic scripture: (1) that men and women move about, thereby containing them in to the Sahel and Sahara have commented faster’. My own research, based on one and should be as different from one another as less danger-laden inner spaces of the tent or possible, because God decreed that it yard. should be so, and fattening enhanced this This trope not only made sense in light of difference; (2) that desire was born of this Islamic rules about the necessary state of difference and that desire was positive, if the body for prayer, but was also itself ap- acted upon appropriately, and fat was sexy plied to Islamic scripture. For example, the in its extreme difference from masculinity; body’s ‘openness’ and ‘closedness’ was a and (3) that a girl’s (and a boy’s) God-given central trope of the creation story as it was duties were to marry and produce children, related to me by an old woman. Both Adam and that fattening speeded up a girl’s ability and Eve bit into the apple, but for Adam it to reach this goal, by bringing her more stuck in his throat, creating the Adam’s ap- quickly to puberty. In these ways the self-ev- ple, while for Eve it flowed right through ident attractiveness of corpulent women her, creating her menstrual period. Eve’s was at least indirectly grounded in a vision punishment was, in a sense, that the female of the sexes and of the life course that Islam body became plagued with uncomfortable upholds. To fatten, therefore, is a way for a and impure secretions, while the male body girl to accede to a God-given order, for it was able to contain things and keep its constitutes an active embracing of sexual boundaries clear, enabling life in spirit- and difference, as well as an embracing of wom- wind-laden open, public spaces. an’s destiny and purpose as a Muslim. The struggle of women against their bodi- Islam also provides reinforcement, if you ly ‘openness’ emerged in another religious will, for a particular way of understanding context as well: how heaven was imagined. the human body. During one of my first In addition to flowing milk and the ever-pre- weeks in the field, an incident occurred that sent company of female relatives, women’s brought this home to me. While making a representations of heaven also included rest stop on a trip, I pricked myself on a bodily wholeness and containedness. In the thorn, and quickly sucked off the drop of words of one young woman, in heaven, ‘you blood that emerged. A teenage boy in the won’t defecate, or have mucous, or be sick.’ Young on the female aesthetic there previously. a half years in the Azawagh in the early pick-up truck we were travelling in turned In short, while Azawagh Arab women’s unmarried women Ibn Battuta had already remarked on it 1990s, found that behind these simple ut- and said to me immediately: ‘Muslims don’t bodily practices were in no way determined (some divorced) among Berbers in what is now Mali in 1356; terances lay a more complex story. This sto- do that. Things that come out of one’s body by Islam or even read explicitly as grounded at a baptism. in 1799 the Scottish explorer Mungo Park ry, though focused on notions of appropri- are not pure.’ in Islam, they fit with ways of understanding wrote poetically about ’a prevalent taste for ate male and female behaviour, sexuality, By requiring ablutions, the emptying of all the body that were also upheld by the Islam unwieldiness of bulk’ among Moor women; and health, was not unrelated to Islam. Be- bodily wastes, and the cleaning of all sexual of Azawagh Arabs. Even though fattening numerous European explorers and colonial- fore I explore these connections in more de- fluids from the body’s surfaces before every and notions of the body’s ‘openness’ and ists made passing reference to it; and, in the tail, however, I want to say something about prayer, Islam could be said to send a strong if ‘closedness’ almost certainly have their 1980s the French anthropologist Aline Tauz- ‘Islam’ in the context of Azawagh Arab life. unarticulated message: that the body as the roots in a pre-Islamic world, local expres- in finally put it in a more ethnographically physical icon of the person is most holy and sions and understandings of Islam, and local sensitive light in her writings on Mauritania. Islam for Azawagh Arabs most valued by Allah when uncontaminated ideas about the body, coincided with and The practice among Azawagh Arabs is, in Unlike many other nomadic Arab peoples, by the flows, accretions, and processes of reinforced one another. In this particular brief, as follows: for whom Islam has been described as regular physical life. By forbidding prayer context, it may not be inappropriate to something of a backdrop to more immedi- when there is any kind of discharge from speak of a n Islamic vision of the body. ♦ When a girl of the higher caste loses her ate tribal or ethnic concerns, the Azawagh women’s bodies, Islam portrays the uncon- first baby teeth, an older woman is Arabs, both men and women, asserted their tained, unbounded, leaking body as prob- charged with overseeing her fattening Muslim-ness above all other aspects of their lematic, and holds up the whole, ‘closed’ process ( a l - b l u u-h).
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