Mauritania struggles with love of fat women

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“I don’t like skinny women. I want to be able to grab her love handles,” said the 32-year-old. “I told her that if she loses a lot of weight, I’ll divorce her.”

Although Mauritania is the only culture known to force-feed girls, obesity is popular across much of the Arab world. Nomadic peoples struggling to survive the harsh desert came to prize fatness as a sign of health.

Fifty-two percent of women over 15 in Kuwait are obese, as are 46 percent in Egypt and approximately a third of women in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, according to the WHO. That contrasts sharply with most sub-Saharan countries, including Mauritania’s neighbors, Senegal and Mali, where only 9 and 6 percent of women are obese.

“A man’s goal is to marry a woman that fills his house. She needs to decorate it like an armoire or a TV set,” said Seif l’Islam, 48, curator of a library of ancient Islamic manuscripts, which include numerous love poems to plump women.

There are signs of change. In the dying desert light, chubby women in head-to-toe veils can be seen perspiring as they walk around the capital’s soccer stadium.

When she first started walking laps six years ago, 40-year-old Ramla Mint Ahmed said, she tightly veiled her face, hoping not to be recognized. Now she exercises openly and is dieting.

Her obese mother, who as a child was repeatedly woken at night and forced to drink camel’s milk, says she doesn’t object. But that doesn’t mean her notions of beauty have changed.

Ahmed is the eldest of three daughters and the only overweight one. Her 22- and 26-year-old sisters are no larger than a size 4. In America, they would be envied for their tiny waists, yet their mother sees them differently.

Asked which daughter is the prettiest, she waves her hand dismissively toward the model-thin sisters, saying, “Definitely those two are not beautiful.”

Her oldest daughter, like her, has garlands of fat on her belly and voluminous thighs.

“This one,” says the mother, “has the face of a queen.”

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