The Butterfly Mosque (11 page)

“Name?” he asked briskly. He spoke in slow, formal Arabic so that I would understand.

“Gwendolyn Wilson.”

“Where were you born?”

“New Jersey,
Al Willayet Al Mutaheda Al Amrikaya.
”

“Yoo Ess Ayy.” He abbreviated my sarcastic elongation and smiled, eyes twinkling. “Dowry?”

“One Egyptian pound.” Enough to buy tamarind juice when this is all over, I thought.

He nodded, jotting away on a series of forms. “One Egyptian pound now, two in case, God forbid, of divorce.”

Omar took a pound note out of his wallet and presented it to me with a grin.
“Itfaddali,
” he said,
You are welcome to it.

“How much cash do you have on you?” I said. “I should have asked for more.”

The notary, revealing a decent grasp of spoken English, laughed.

Omar and I signed all four marriage contracts—one for him, one for me, one for the government, and one for Allah knew who—and with a few official stamps, we were husband and wife in the eyes of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The contract laid out the terms of our marriage: I was entitled to a slew of things if Omar took a second wife (Egyptian men can legally marry the Islamic four), my dowry reverted to him if we broke things off before the wedding, et cetera. As the almost-wife of an Egyptian, I could be fast-tracked for a long-term resident visa or citizenship, if I liked. I suddenly had rights in Egypt, not as a member of the foreign elite, but as a demi-Egyptian.

Omar and I left the Ministry of Paperwork and walked into the street. Dust hung in the air and settled in layers on the buildings, blunting their outlines. Omar took my hand and kissed it—he could do that publicly now.

“We did it,
ya meraati,
” he said;
Oh, my wife.
I laughed. With that, Omar and I were technically married before we were publicly engaged. Today one of our running jokes is that we are
mitgowezeen awee—very
married. Adding together all the social and legal rituals, we have been married three or four separate times. This marked the first.

Eliza removed her husband as soon as possible for the interior, and some account must now be given of their adventures. Her pen is . . . curbed only by her fear of the Turkish Censor, and by her desire to conceal her forebodings from friends at home.

—E. M. Forster, “Eliza in Egypt”

O
MAR AND
I
LEFT THE CITY SHORTLY AFTERWARD ON OUR FIRST
trip together. We took a public bus—taped Quran blaring over tinny speakers, dust, solemn men spitting sunflower-seed husks on the floor—six hours southwest into the Sahara, to a small oasis called Farafra. When we arrived it was two in the morning and the surrounding plains were a startling blue-white: there was a moon, and it had turned the sand the color of ice. Feral dogs watched us uneasily as we, alarmed by the utter silence after the constant noise of Cairo and the road, walked from the bus stop toward our hotel.

In the sunlight of the following morning, Farafra took on a more earthly character. It was a series of dirt roads lined with one- and two-story buildings, punctuated by cultivated groves of date palms fed by cold-water springs. After wandering around the town—most tourists stayed in
locally-run hotels along its outskirts and didn't venture into the commercial and agricultural district, so we attracted some attention—Omar and I decided to take a jeep trip into the deep desert. This part of the Sahara, known as the White Desert, was crossable but not habitable, and had been left fairly pristine. We heard that there were limestone formations twenty or thirty kilometers toward the interior that were worth seeing. Saad, a famous local guide, was making a trip out to one of his camps in the area, and we hitched a ride with him. One of his sons, a boy of five or six, napped in my lap on the way out, oblivious to the spine-wracking jolts of off-roading over sand. Half an hour later, feeling limber, we arrived.

Away from the oasis, the landscape had changed—the sand was the color of cream, streaked here and there with drifts of darker matter. It rolled away in small dunes, dotted with arches and hills of white limestone that crumbled when touched. As I walked around, dazed, and stumbled on a darker drift, I discovered that what looked like patches of black sand were really the broken remnants of fossilized shells, left over from a time when the Sahara was a shallow sea, millions of years ago. This is what the limestone was made of. After that, every time I looked upward I had visions of long-extinct fish and huge Paleolithic sharks swarming in the air above my head.

We spent the afternoon scrambling over dunes and falling down, laughing as though drunk, and in the evening we joined Saad at his camp. There was a bonfire going and clustered around it were ten or twelve American tourists, half a dozen Cairo literati, and a few men from Saad's tribe,
all passing cans of beer back and forth. A hand drum and a reed flute were produced, and the Bedouin and a couple of the more politically-minded Cairenes began to sing Palestinian liberation songs. The tourists, blithely unaware of the content of the lyrics, clapped along. Omar and I looked at each other and smiled, our expressions ironic but without bitterness. We had already learned that as often as not, these oblivious collisions between westerners and nonwesterners were as comical as they were tragic. They must be comical; they betray a mutual impotence that is devastating if it cannot be comical. Omar took my hand.

We left the fireside and climbed up one of the limestone embankments to look at the stars. The bright earth below us threw blue half-light on our faces.

“When I was a child,” said Omar, “I used to imagine that I could travel through space in whatever room I was in. I imagined I could see stars like this out my window.”

I looked at him without remembering to be American, and for the first time did not see an Egyptian. I saw my partner. He had been a little boy, he had grown up, he had dappled the air with stars; he would one day be an old man—if I was lucky, and everything held together, I would grow old with him. To be trusted with the history of another person seemed like the best—the only—privilege there was. I understood the words God was said to have spoken to Amir Abdul Qadir, the Algerian scholar, while he was in exile in the nineteenth century: “Today, I lower your lineage and raise up Mine.” There was a divinity insensible of ethnic heritage, a truth hidden but not erased by geography. It demanded to be recognized and protected.

“I'm going to start wearing a scarf,” I said.

Omar was silent for a moment. We had never talked about the
hijab,
or head scarf; he had never expected or encouraged me to wear it. My comment must have startled him considerably. He leaned over and kissed my forehead, twice. “What made you decide this?” he asked.

“I want to do something to make this separate from everything else,” I said. “I want to give you something bigger than anything I've given anyone else.” It was an impulse more spiritual than religious;
hijab
lent itself to my purposes, rather than I to its. Having read the relevant verses of Quran and hadith, as well as the arguments of major scholars, I remain unconvinced that
hijab
is
fard,
or obligatory, as opposed to
sunnah,
preferred. My decision, made as it was in that particular moment, was almost defensive; it was a way to say that anyone who could not see Omar as he was would not see me as I was.

Over the past several years my relationship with the veil has shifted, yet persisted; it has become a way to define intimacy in a wider sense, and in the circle of men who have seen my hair I have included some of Omar's and my close friends. When I am in the United States, I still go bareheaded in some circumstances. In other words, I have never been a model
muhajeba,
but in a sense this has allowed me to maintain an appreciation for the veil that might otherwise have faded after the inconvenience that comes with wearing it settled in.

After I'd spoken, Omar was silent again. “Where did you come from?” he asked finally. “How did I find you?”

“I don't know, I don't know,” I said, laughing.

He called me
aziza,
the feminine of “precious,” a word that has none of the ironic implications of its English counterpart. A word used to describe an anxiously awaited infant, a beloved friend, a well in the desert.

I got an e-mail from Ben not long after this. He announced that he was leaving the States, and would be back in Cairo the following week. He intended to study Arabic to try to get a job in government intelligence when he went home. Omar and I were nervous about Ben's arrival. He was a mutual friend—it was through him that we knew one another—but though he was respectful of cultural differences he found Arab restrictions on personal freedom absurd, and had said as much to me. Omar and I worried that Ben wouldn't understand what we were doing—really, what I was doing. We decided to tell Ben we were dating. He wouldn't believe for long, since Omar didn't date, but it would give him time to get used to seeing us together. I also decided to postpone covering my head for a couple of weeks.

We met him at the airport. He was easy to find, wearing his signature newsie hat and black-rimmed glasses, like a latter-day Ernest Hemingway in the Cuban bush. There was a bit of old-school expatriate in him, I thought; the sort that had rejected the ruling race mentality but still carried the safari aura around with them wherever they went. He greeted us in heavily accented Arabic.

“It's good to see you,” said Omar, reaching out to hug him.

Ben gave a long sigh and shook his head. “I can't believe I'm back in Cairo,” he grinned. “What happened?”

“Are you glad to be back?” I asked.

“I'll tell you after I've had some
shisha,
” he said. “These are for you.” He handed me a stack of comic books. I suppressed squeals of delight and Omar gave me a funny look; he had yet to learn about my comics habit.

“Here such things are only for children,” he said.

“Not where we come from,” responded Ben. In a semi-prescient second, I knew how things would progress from there, and I was afraid.

Omar looked uncomfortable. By the standards of the Middle East, rules had already been stretched; Ben's gift to me in public made our relationship ambiguous. Was he my brother? Or perhaps Ben was the fiancé, and Omar a guide or chauffeur? But Ben didn't realize his transgression; he was only aware that something had gone wrong, and looked concerned. None of us knew how to proceed.

“What?” asked Ben.

“Nothing!” I assured him, smiling maniacally.

“We should go,” said Omar.

“What did I do?” said Ben.

“Nothing,” Omar repeated.

Ben looked at me with an expression that said,
So it's started already.
I could see that Omar also felt apprehensive—it was not that the simple act of gift giving bothered him, it was only that such a situation (man gets off plane, hands unrelated woman stack of comic books) would never have reason to occur in the Arab world. There was
no protocol for it. He didn't know how to react, and so he was nervous. Both of them needed reassurance, and needed it from me, but I could only stand there without speaking, sure that it was going to get worse.

The next day, I agreed to meet Ben for breakfast at an expat café in Maadi. I had to run an errand at Al-Azhar afterward—I didn't tell him I was going there to pick up the English translation of my “official” conversion documents.

“You've converted,” he said as we sat down at a booth. The wood floors, the ads for hamburgers and fries, and Ben in his glasses, all made me feel as though he and America had conspired to stage this breakfast as an intervention.

“Yes,” I said, surprised. “How did you guess?”

He sighed. “Why else would you need to go to Al-Azhar? There isn't much of a happening scene there aside from Islam.”

There was a pause. “Well?” I asked finally.

“I guess it's not shocking,” he responded, in the same tone he had once used to tell me I was drinking too much. “I mean, you did get that tattoo.”

“Ben,” I said, “half of the religious texts I own come from you. When you came home for Christmas the first year you lived here, you brought me, like, six Qurans.”

“Yeah, but I was under the impression that you were basically an atheist,” said Ben. “I didn't think—anyway. So you're a Muslim. Why?”

“I have a different answer for this every week.”

“Pick the best one then.”

“I like Islam.”

He smiled and seemed more like himself. “That's good. That's reassuring. I might not have believed you if you said anything else.”

My tea arrived and I took a long swallow; it was hot and hurt my throat.

“So no more drinking and lechery? Aren't you going to miss it?” asked Ben, looking melancholic.

I felt a twinge of sympathy. It was through Ben that I had gained a detailed appreciation for whiskey and Tom Waits, the combination of which had seen me through many mishaps. “Of course I'll miss them. The drinking, anyway.”

“Fair enough.” He paused. “What are you going to say to everyone back home?” Though he meant our college friends, the word
everyone
unsettled me: in my mind it expanded beyond the question, taking in people I knew from old internships and sublet apartments. Everyone. I let my head loll back against the booth. “I don't know. It's terrifying.”

“Do you think it'll be that bad?” he asked in a way that suggested he was no more optimistic than I was.

“I'll be lucky if it isn't worse. You've lived in a Muslim country and you haven't been jumping up and down with enthusiasm, so I can only imagine what the rest will be like.”

He looked hurt. “I just worry about you,” he said.