“Al-Baqara” (The Cow),Qur’an 2:256 MECCA—That night we returned to the Sacred Mosque for my mother’s and Safiyyah’s first entry. Sheikh Alshareef, our guide, led us through more stretching exercises. “C’mon, Mom! Stretch!” I yelled at my mother. “Oh, Asra! I can’t,” she answered. She didn’t consider it appropriate to be bending over, touching her nose to her knee, especially in this country that so controlled women’s movement. I had spent my entire life doing stretching exercises like the kind we were doing to prepare ourselves for another circling of the Ka’bah. I grew up as an athlete with a real sense of ownership over my body. What I felt in societies such as this puritanical Muslim culture was that men had more control over women’s bodies than the women themselves did. Men set rules and laws that defined women’s reproductive rights, women’s sexual rights, and, in a way that had proven deadly just the year before, women’s right to free movement.
