KUWAIT — At a well-appointed wedding hall in Kuwait City, all the young women were busy dancing and singing and exchanging congratulations, but one woman in all-over black sat quietly by the door watching the others dance. An old woman approached her and said it was quite acceptable now to take off the niqab and abaya since there were no men around. The veiled stranger raised her arm, seemingly in horror. But as the sleeve slid back, it revealed a strong forearm so hairy that the older woman’s suspicions were aroused.
“A man, a man is among us,” she cried, and slowly the other women in the hall started converging on the impostor.
When the man finally stumbled out of the hall, his clothes were torn to shreds and nothing but his underwear remained, his eyes were black and blue, and he was walking with a noticeable limp. He was welcomed outside by as group of men who took him next door, not to look after his injuries but to continue the beating he had received at the hands of his “sisters”. It took the arrival of the police to put an end to the transgressor’s suffering.
Under interrogation the man claimed he could not remember anything. “All I know,” police reported him as saying, “ was that I woke up and suddenly there were all these women beating me. I must have been drunk. I’m glad I made it out in my underwear,” he added.
He explained his presence at the party by saying he had been asked by a woman friend to attend the wedding but had blacked out under the influence. “It’s all a mystery to me,” he said.
But Fatima (not her real name), a witness, said: “I was at the wedding when I heard a man shouting and saw a group of women savagely beating him. He was wearing strange clothes. I mean, gloves! At the height of summer! I don’t know how he made it inside. It just goes to show,” she added.
A court has given the man a reduced sentence of three months in prison.
- Arab News Features 31 August 2003