The Butterfly Mosque (18 page)

I was stunned. This was not an idle statement; the mufti could no longer say anything idly. This was fatwa—a personal fatwa; a ruling meant for me alone, but policy nonetheless. Sitting across from me, Omar looked floored. In Egypt and most of the Arab world, the head scarf—a relatively minor point in Islamic law—had become a symbol for the entire religion. Its importance had become so inflated that many saw any compromise as akin to blasphemy. For someone in a position of religious power to make such a conciliatory gesture took great courage.

“Is there anything more?” asked the mufti. There was a line of people in the antechamber, growing impatient. Omar asked my third question. I could tell he was trying to make it sound less impertinent than it really was.

The mufti sighed, glancing wearily in my direction. “Of course the will of God is omnipotent. But there is a difference between what God wills and what God asks of us. Whether or not we obey and do what He asks is in our hands. When we do not, we are not straying outside of God's will—we are simply being disobedient.”

Having affirmed the existence of both fate and free will, the mufti smiled at Omar and handed me my list of American
mujtahids
with a polite nod. We took this as our cue to leave. We thanked him—Omar much more eloquently than I—and made our way out of the office into the crowded hall.

In a cab on the way home, Omar asked me what I thought of the whole thing. I hesitated before answering. “Part of me wanted to find a leader with a really sweeping, visionary agenda. And the mufti isn't that—but I think I'm glad he isn't. He can do a lot more good from the center than he can from any extreme. In order to create any kind of change at all, he has to be a canny politician. And he's certainly canny.”

“And he didn't remember you from the wedding.”

“Thank God for that.”

Al qitu cat'u, al far rat'u, al nahr river'u.

—early twentieth-century Arabic-English teaching song

A
S MY CONFIDENCE INCREASED
, I
BEGAN TO ASK FOR THE
things I needed and to find ways to make myself more independent. First among these was to get formal training in the colloquial Arabic I had been picking up haphazardly from sources like Mohammad and Namir. I began taking lessons with a tutor named Sameh twice a week at a language center in Maadi. It's ironic, or maybe appropriate, that one of the people who most helped me to thrive in Egypt was not only a man but a Christian.

Sameh would be my Arabic teacher for almost two years. Perhaps because he, too, was part of a minority in Egypt, he understood the mechanics of the place the way a minority or an outsider must. This didn't seem to dampen his enthusiasm for his country. Sameh, like Omar and the friends and family members I admired most, seemed to have his eyes trained permanently on the horizon, as if he could will it closer. It's a kind of idealism I have seen only in this part of the world, where there is urgency to all rebirth and reform, because everyone is aware that this very moment is the last and best chance to save a faltering civilization. Omar
and Sameh, each in their own ways, were architects of a Middle East that does not quite exist yet, but in which determined people could already begin to live. No one willing to participate in it would be a foreigner, and so Sameh insisted that I learn not to speak like one. The first afternoon I came into his classroom, I think I wanted to show off; while chatting with the student who had the lesson before mine, I doodled a sentence in Arabic on the board. When Sameh came in he paused for a moment to read it.

“Did you write this?” he asked. I said that I had. Without speaking, he carefully erased my diacritical marks and drew in the correct ones, then smiled in a way that suggested he had forgiven me this time but in the future would find such precociousness annoying. The tone of our lessons was set.

One evening, he asked me a strange question.

“Why did you come to Egypt?”

I looked up, surprised. Sameh had one hand under his chin, and the delicate blue colored tattoo of a cross that distinguished him as a Copt was visible on the inside of his wrist. The space of the table was between us: we never sat or stood side by side, and never ever touched, not even to shake hands. The garden door was open, even in the dead of winter; these were the things that we did to make our lessons proper. For a man and a woman who are unmarried to be alone together in private is a violation of Shari'a law; that tension is increased by social stigma when the man is a Christian and the woman is a Muslim. By leaving the door open, we made the classroom into a public place, technically speaking—though the language center itself was a public
place, half of the time there were no other classes in session. For good measure, we rarely spoke about anything personal, and this is why his question surprised me.

“I came because I wanted to see what it was like to live in a Muslim country,” I said, remembering too late that this was his country, too, and he was not a Muslim.

He wasn't offended. “Try it in Arabic,” he said.

“I went to Egypt because I want to live among the Surrendered,” I replied obediently.

“Is it a good/nice/pleasant country?” He switched to Arabic as well, using an all-purpose adjective that made his question sound cautious. I was meant to understand that he was really asking if I was happy.

“Egyptians are the best people.” I resorted to a polite idiom.

Sameh laughed.
“Beged,
” he said, “Seriously.”

I thought for a moment. “Egypt is a good/nice/pleasant country,” I said. “There's too much pollution, of course, and it's very crowded, but the people have . . .” I ran out of words and put one hand to my chest, in a gesture that can mean thank you; no, thank you; or I am deeply touched.

“Grace/charity,” said Sameh, “or kindness?”

“Yes,” I said. And for the first time, I realized that it was true; that in spite of the terrible stresses of life in Egypt, despite the chaos and suspicion that characterized public life, the Egyptians had preserved pieces of a better time and could be tender to strangers. I'd seen it only a few days earlier when I was stuck in a nasty patch of foot traffic and breathing car exhaust, trapped behind a pair of extremely
fat women. I had to catch a bus, and I found myself thinking,
Why would anyone ever want to live here?
It was too dirty, too difficult, too isolating. I began to run flat-out as the bus moved slowly away from the stop where it had been idling. Egyptian women, as a rule, never run; when necessary, they shuffle elegantly. I cared more about the bus than about propriety, and pelted through the rubbish that had blown against the sidewalk.

A car pulled up beside me—in it was a middle-aged couple. “Get in!” called the woman in the passenger's seat, opening the back door. I scrambled inside,
salaam alaykuming
as the man in the driver's seat smiled at me, half-laughing. He sped to catch the bus, beeping furiously. The bus driver contained his annoyance and stopped when he realized what was going on. I pressed my hand to my heart and thanked the couple as I got out of their car. “Hurry, hurry!” said the woman. I had never seen the couple before, and I would never see them again.

There were no seats left on the bus, so I leaned against a pole in the aisle, blushing under the cool amusement of the other passengers. A woman sitting nearby reached over to tug at the hem of my shirt. It had inched upward while I ran, revealing a ribbon of bare skin. “Better to wear a coat next time,” she said, and I thought,
Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?

“That's true,” said Sameh in English. “Sometimes I think about leaving, then I wonder whether I could be happy in another place, even if it was more organized and less of a pain.”

“And cleaner,” I said wistfully.

“Also cleaner. It's hard to make a good start in life here, but . . .” He trailed off and looked pensive.

“Someone has to stay,” I said. It was a phrase I would hear over and over from educated Egyptian friends, the ones who could have found work abroad, outlets for their talents, but who decided to stay here. Christian or Muslim, they were deeply religious, romantic, well-read; they had asked the question,
What is Egypt?
and found that it came to them to answer. This was something I could now understand. There were questions being asked of all of us that had no easy answers. But there were too many good things and good people at stake not to fight for those answers.

“Yes,” said Sameh. “Someone has to stay.”

I knew that this was the way Omar felt as well. No matter how many checkpoints we had to endure, no matter how loudly the extremists howled at the dawn, he was committed to his culture. His mind was constantly occupied by it. Every errand we ran was an opportunity for a history lesson, an oral essay on Islamic thought, a digression about Arab contributions to mathematics and astronomy. Coming from anyone else it might have gotten annoying, but love, if not blind, is certainly deaf. He had the intellectual enthusiasm of the self-taught, and it was infectious. I learned more wandering around with Omar than I had in four years of college.

“There is a legend,” he would say as we passed the yellowing walls of the Citadel, “that Murad Bey el Alfi once escaped assassination by—”

“Jumping out of that window on his horse.”

“I've told you this story before.”

“Yes, several times.”

“I'm sorry!” He would laugh, and I would console him, leaning my forehead against his shoulder as passersby stared.

It didn't take long for me to absorb Omar's dedication to the landscape. Cairo is so cluttered with monuments that many—like the butterfly mosque—have fallen out of common memory, walled up with a shrug. On the eastern outskirts of the city, toward the Suez road, there was a nameless ruined watchtower that I came to love. A low concrete wall between it and the road declared that this was military ground and thus inaccessible; I guessed about its history from the car window each time we passed.

“Saladin,” I said. “He must have built it to keep a lookout for crusaders.”

“Or Napoleon,” said Omar, “to keep a lookout for the British. Or the British, to keep a lookout for everybody else.”

I shook my head. “There's almost no mortar left between the stones. That kind of erosion takes time.”

“It could be Mamluk.”

“It was Saladin,” I repeated, raising my voice flirtatiously.

Omar grinned. “Okay.”

We would never know. A watchtower behind a wall, a mosque behind a wall; to most Cairenes taking an interest in these things was perverse. Walls are built for a reason, especially in a military dictatorship. Omar was one of the few people whose soul could stretch out in a city most found stifling. Through him, I was learning to be unbothered by walls—to accept them as part of the landscape instead of
struggling against them or pretending they didn't exist. Omar had a remarkable ability to remain free in a country full of barriers. As much as I admired this, I was uneasy about what it meant for me. There was nothing America could offer Omar that he did not already have. In empty moments, I began to wonder whether I would live in my own country again.

There is only one rule
on this wild playground,
for every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.

—Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

A
T THIS POINT
, I
REALIZED THAT IT WAS IN MY BEST INTER
est
TO
start thinking about the Middle East as a home. Whether it would be permanent or semipermanent remained to be seen, but either way, my future was firmly tied up in this place. I felt an urge to push further east, and see more. Maybe I could find a country so unfamiliar that Egypt would seem less so. Iran, being Persian and Shi'ite, seemed like a good place to start if I wanted to visit a part of the Middle East very different from the one in which I lived. I'd studied the Iranian revolution—I knew names, dates, and facts from which individual human experiences cannot be guessed. Similarly, I knew how Shi'a Islam developed as a movement, but when I looked at photographs of an Ashura procession or a Shi'i passion play, there were things I didn't understand.

“Who
does
understand Shi'a?” Omar asked philosophically when I brought it up. We were sitting in a café with his friend Mohammad, a blind musician.

“The Shi'i, we assume,” said Mohammad. “Otherwise there is no point in us trying to understand.” Mohammad had spent the first six months of our acquaintance speaking to me only in Arabic or French. He was won over by the fact that I had neither fled the country nor westernized his friend, and he had recently begun to use English—in which he was perfectly fluent—for my benefit when we spoke about complicated things.

“I think it's more like a political movement than a separate sect,” said Omar. “When you think about what happened after Karbala—”

“No, no, no,” said Mohammad. “They don't think of it this way. It's a completely different spiritual idea.”

“But in basic religious things, they're the same as us,” responded Omar. “They fast and pray.”

“They don't pray
juma'a
on Fridays. They're waiting to pray behind the Mahdi, you see.” (The Mahdi is the future savior in Islamic tradition.)

“What? No.”

“Well, now it's a question: you must find out, Willow, whether the Iranians pray on Fridays.”

It surprised me, as I was researching ways to get into Iran, how little contact the country had culturally with the bulk of the Arab world. Egyptians viewed Iran with almost as much fear and suspicion as Americans do, and were just as confused about the intricacies of its religious life. While there were hundreds of Arab satellite channels available all across the Middle East—including a dozen out of Iraq—Iran spoke only through the occasional televised passion play. Omar was dismayed by my desire to go there and resisted the idea at
first. Eventually my stubbornness prevailed, and he contented himself by learning some rudimentary Farsi so he could threaten the appropriate people if I got into trouble.