I was wearing nothing but a gold chain around my neck as the fully dressed, saffron-headed woman shuffled toward me. She pulled me by the hand through a maze of underground passageways while I skated behind her on a slimy stone floor, past mountains of shaved hair, into the main steam room. “Sit!” she commanded, and began to scrub this infidel’s body with inflamed religious fervor and a steel-wool pad.

In San`a, the capital of Yemen, Islamic tradition prevails. For three days a week, women are permitted to use the public baths (hammam) to wash and purify themselves. In times past, visits to the bathhouse gave women a chance to escape from their secluded dwellings. In the hammam, they could shed their veils and remove the yards of swathing fabric from their bodies.

This tradition of women’s all-day rituals has continued undisturbed. Today, however, the bolts of discarded cloth reveal slinky silk dresses and startlingly sexy underwear.

After hours of scouring, steaming and kneading, Saffron’s beauty treatment left me limp and pliable. I was touched by the bath aide’s willingness to share her beauty secrets with a stranger. However, we arrived at an impasse when she tried to pull the hair off my legs. Glaring ferociously, she dumped gallons of water over my head and marched me off down a sultry, sloping tunnel to an adjoining chamber.

Murmuring women leaned against stone troughs ladling water on each other. Others were busily examining their bodies for ungodly hair. Islam determines even the details of personal hygiene. It is considered a sin to have hair on one’s private parts. Numerous depilatory concoctions have been invented over the ages, and some women were applying the current favorite, a candy like paste of lemon juice, water and sugar.

Naked women and children drifted out of the mist from an adjoining subterranean passageway and kissed my hands in the traditional Yemeni greeting. I became the center of attention, and the source of much amusement, when the women discovered my lamentably hirsute condition.

The one-woman battalion of the hammam flapped her arms up and down, shooing away the women around me. Like a magician, she produced a bowl of hair-eating paste from under her many petticoats, intent on performing my last purification. My hysterical and pathetic Arabic stopped her. She threw her hands up in disgusted resignation and disappeared into a foggy tunnel.

A series of domed rooms led into a vestibule, where the women rinsed, relaxed, discussed personal issues and world affairs.

With a lot of laughter and cackling, we exchanged cosmetics and perfumes. After covering their faces and bodies with yards of black fabric, one woman was indistinguishable from another. I followed the dark figures up a musty granite corridor to the vaulted stone entrance of the hammam, and we stepped back into the outside world.

On the street, women become ghosts again. Heads are bandaged in cloth to the eyebrows. Dark, stretchy gauze covers them from neck to nose. Others wear all-enveloping enormous black cloaks with matching scarves through which they can see without being seen.

To hard-core feminists, Yemen resembles a throwback to the Neanderthal ages. Yet there have been notable exceptions to the general rule of female anonymity and subservience. The queen of Sheba set out from Yemen on her legendary journey to visit King Solomon. In 1091, Malika Arwa became head of state and ruled for 47 years. She held the royal title, Al Sayyida Al-Hurra, meaning “the lady who is free.” Historians claim that Arwa never made an important decision without first visiting the bathhouse.

In 1990, with a stroke of a pen rather than a streak of bullets, the former North Yemen and the Marxist-Leninist South Yemen unified.

Aneesa Ghanem, herself something of an anomaly as a Yemeni feminist writer, activist, and the only female journalist for the Yemen Times (English newspaper) observed, “The unification of the two Yemenis has been good for the country. But, previously achieved gains for women in their former south have been compromised. The new Family Law has set women back centuries. Now, I must get the written permission of my husband, father or close male relative in order to travel,” explained Ghanem. ”When it all gets too much, I run to Hammam Ali for a good steam,” she said.

No one can determine how many wars have rolled over the country’s volcanic terrain and desert dunes, but the periods of warfare exceed the passages of peace. Remarkably, life in the bathhouses remains unchanged and untouched by war.

Travel in Yemen has to be undertaken on Yemeni terms. Socializing with the locals in the underworld of San`a is one way to bridge the cultural gap. The 17 bathhouses are modeled after the Roman baths, and are 400 to 1,000 years old.

Not all of these establishments welcome foreigners. At the baths near the Taj Talah Hotel, in the old city, I was met by a vigilant community elder. He wore typical Yemeni garb – sports jacket over a long skirt, a 10-inch dagger around his waist, a cartridge belt over one shoulder and a K47 over the other. He was tall, his face profoundly wrinkled and the color of obsidian. He told my Iraqi companion, “No Westerners! First they bomb Iraq, and now they have come to destroy our hammams.” A crowd gathered and everyone took sides in the argument. I walked away, unnoticed.

One Yemeni defended the display of weapons. “It is part of our attire,” he said. “A Yemeni without his jambia [dagger] is like an Oxford man without his tie.” Commenting on the shrouded women, he said, “The restrictive clothing of our women has nothing to do with religion. This is tradition, and tradition is our identity.”

To flout tradition is no small thing. This year, for the first time, the female table tennis champion of the Arab and Asian worlds showed up for a tournament unveiled and wearing shorts. The two males on the podium presented her with the trophy in stony silence. But life in Yemen has its consolations; the table tennis champ and about a hundred women rented a hammam for the day, to celebrate.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed in 1717 that the baths are truly the women’s coffeehouse. For today’s Yemeni women the hammam is not only a convivial social center, but also a forum for ideas that might otherwise find no expression here in the shadow of the patriarchs.

Written by: Christina Henning