The Butterfly Mosque (3 page)

“There will be a war,” said Ben, in a curt voice he reserved for political predictions. “You were smart to start taking Arabic,” he continued. “You could totally go into government intelligence.”

“That's not why I'm taking it,” I said with an involuntary twitch. “It's beautiful.”

“It's useful.”

“Well, why don't you learn it then?”

“I might.” Ben was quiet for a moment and put his hands in his pockets. “I wish I understood what just happened,” he said. “I woke up today and forgot what was wrong. It was just a feeling, a terrible feeling. It took me five minutes to attach the feeling to the event.”

It didn't make any sense to anyone at that point. All we knew was that we were no longer living in a world divided into America, where things like this didn't happen, and Everywhere Else, where they did. The force of that realization brought people together. In line at the movie theater, people smiled at each other and started spontaneous conversations with strangers. I was struck by this—at such a time and in such a situation, our first instinct was tenderness.

I could not become a Muslim. Not after that. It would be a betrayal of the people I loved and an insult to what my country had suffered. When videos of angry men in beards flooded the airwaves, claiming their religion was incompatible with the decadent West, I believed them. It was my civilization they were insulting. Consciously and unconsciously, I began to resist Islam. I went back to the regular college diet of jello shots and wine in a box. I ate in front of my Muslim friends during the fasting month of Ramadan. In a logical backflip, I reasoned that becoming a Muslim would be anti-Islamic, because it would mean submitting to an institution rather than to God. About the religion itself I was aggressive and sarcastic. In arguments I defended Muslims in order to look liberal, but that defense was a
kind of domination: it allowed me to monopolize the subject, and cloaked in me the same sort of self-satisfied anger of those who hated Islam more openly and more honestly.

I was desperate for the secular truth that seemed so self-evident to other people. Fortunately, critics of Islam and their books were in plentiful supply. I had high hopes that
The Satanic Verses
would cure my religiosity, but I found the book dense and unpalatable. On the other hand, I loved Hanif Kureishi's urbane, subversive novels.
The Black Album
is still one of my favorite books, but even it did not touch my belief in God. Nothing felt as right as what I had seen in the Quran. I waited to be shaken by the great argument, the rejection of spiritual authority that had inspired so many people to leave organized religion. No matter how many iterations I read, I could not make it feel true. To me, it seemed like the philosophers who argued that there is no light had simply covered up the light switch.

Resisting the temptation to say the
shaheda
—there is no God but God, and Muhammad is His prophet—became a daily exercise. My dreams were suddenly cluttered with the Old Testament images that are shared between all three Abrahamic religions. In one, I saw Jacob's ladder. Instead of running from Earth to Heaven, it ran between them, rung after rung, cutting a swath parallel to the horizon. In another, I saw a wasteland of dry bones and felt a presence behind me, like the shadow of a great bird, asking me questions. Upon waking, I couldn't identify it. Later that same day, a professor read the story of Ezekiel and the valley of bones in class, leaving me shaken and disturbed. Most often, though, I dreamed of a white horse. It appeared in
nightmares, when I was threatened or hurt; I would climb on its back and without any prompting it would carry me out of danger.

Ben graduated the year before I did. At the same time, one of his professors retired and announced plans to return to her native Cairo to help run an English-language high school. Ben was at loose ends in an indifferent economy, so when she offered him a job, he accepted. He'd get his chance to learn Arabic after all. Our friends assumed I would follow suit once I was out of school. Inexpensive opportunities for Life Experience did not come along every day. When I came back, I'd have two of the most coveted job qualifications in post-9/11 America: Arabic language skills and knowledge of the Middle East. I could find no good reason not to go. With a history degree and no high ambitions, I had little reason to stay.

Still, I hedged and considered other options. I knew I would not go to Egypt to study and come back with a few good stories. I would go and convert. If I stayed in the United States, ordinary life would win out and help me forget about the Quran. I could move somewhere with a few friends, get a regular job, become fluent in car insurance and summer sublets. The idea of having a life I could plan—a life built on events I could predict, with people I knew—was attractive. For months I considered two very different futures.

The winter before my graduation, I came across a pack of Tarot cards on a friend's desk. I liked Tarot; as fortune-telling games go it was accurate enough. During high school I played regularly. While waiting for my friend to arrive, I
shuffled the pack and laid out a standard seven-card cross. In the “past” position I drew the Queen of Wands—a very sensible and unsurprising card. In the future, though, was the Knight of Wands: a young man riding through the desert, past a group of pyramids. A young man on a white horse.

“No.”

I looked at the ceiling, addressing empty space. It was the first time I had spoken to God verbally, without embarrassment or internal preamble.

“I won't do it,” I said. “I'm not going.”

It was the last time I would ever touch a Tarot deck. As a Muslim you waive your right to peek at the future. The people who tipped the scales were my parents, who thought I was crazy to turn down such an exciting opportunity abroad. If I had told them I was trying to save myself from a religious conversion, they might have felt differently. Resisting religion is a noble goal among secular liberals. But I didn't tell them—I didn't tell anyone.

On a warm August day in 2003, two weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I boarded a plane. It would take me to Frankfurt, and from there to Cairo. With me was Jo, a high school friend who was studying to be an artist. Restless in her degree program and looking for inspiration, she decided to take a year off and come with me to Egypt. We went with two suitcases of our most grandmotherly clothes, possessing no more sophisticated concept of modest dress. I also brought a box of Tampax. Ben's female roommate
had warned me that there was none to be had in Egypt. I'm embarrassed to admit I believed this—if I had spared half a minute to think, I would have realized that even oppressed foreign women got their periods. Cairo, one of the largest cities on Earth, must accomodate them. Despite my supposed education, I was naive when it came to the Middle East. Being on the verge of a conversion to Islam did not give me any insight into the people who practiced it. I was, in many ways, as unprepared to live in Egypt as someone with no religious affinity for it.

I left my courage on the runway in Denver. Adrenaline buzzed in my head as soon as the plane was airborne. By the time we reached Frankfurt my palms were sweating, and when we took off for Cairo I panicked. When people ask me about the moment I converted, I usually find a way to dodge the question. I tell them I decided to convert during college, which is true. In another sense I feel I have always been Muslim, since I discovered in the Quran what I already believed. But if conversion is entering into the service of an ideal, then I converted on that plane. In the darkness over the Mediterranean, in no country, under no law, I made peace with God. I called Him Allah. I didn't know what waited for me in Egypt. I didn't know whether the clash of civilizations was real, or whether being an American Muslim was a contradiction. But for the first time in my life, I felt unified—that had to mean something. Cultural and political differences go bone deep, but there is something even deeper. I believed that. I had to believe it.

On the path between death and life, within view of the watchful stars and within earshot of beautiful, obscure anthems, a voice told of the trials and joys promised.

—Naguib Mahfouz,
The Harafish

I
HAD BEEN IN
C
AIRO FOR LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS WHEN
a man on the street asked me for a blow job. He was in his thirties, skinny, with a mustache that drooped at the edges. From the window of a taxi, I had asked him for directions—Jo and I were lost in Maadi, the fashionable district where the apartment we inherited from Ben was located. After pointing vaguely over one shoulder toward the street we were looking for, he spat out his proposition, in an accent so heavy that “blow job” sounded like bastardized French.

“Did he just—?” I looked at Jo, barely comprehending.

Jo's pretty, aquiline features were twisted into a nauseated expression.

“Okay, just go,” I said to the taxi driver, and slumped back in my seat. My face felt hot. The driver looked over his shoulder at me, frowning. To him, the address we gave was an obscure jum-ble of numbers. Like most Cairene
taxi drivers, he navigated by landmarks—pass the white mosque, turn when you see a shop-keeper with a face like an angry rooster sitting in the shade. If we could not describe the landscape, he could not take us where we wanted to go.

“We can go,” I said again, motioning with one hand. The taxi jerked forward.

We had arrived to find a city in a state of moral and financial collapse. Almost every man we encountered, from the taxi drivers who called to us in the airport parking lot to the umber-robed doorman who met us at our apartment, watched us with an expression of repressed sexual anger. Women were indifferent. The air was thick with the metallic smell of dust, a scent that invaded clothing and hair like perfume. This was the most pervasive quality of Cairo, I thought, this dust; even the palm and banana trees that rose from little walled gardens were more gray than green.

In the heart of the city, ancient mosques were crammed into the shadows of slapdash high-rises, some of which tilted precariously on their foundations. The crush of human traffic and the noise of machines were constant. Down the center of this metropolis snaked the Nile, coffee-dark and wide. From every direction, desert threatened to erode what was left of the river's rich floodplain; its seasonal glut of silt was bottled up behind a dam in Aswan. An ecologist might look at Cairo and see an omen of the future: a flat, burned, airless plain, the wreckage of too much civilization.

I loved it. I loved it obsessively, starting the minute I stepped out of the airport and into the fetid August heat. Confronted with this city, my anxieties seemed
self-indulgent. The calm of some long-dormant survival instinct kicked in.

Meanwhile, I was a Muslim. Alone in my room, behind wooden-shuttered windows that looked out at a fringe of palms, I prayed. Prayer was difficult at first. I had never been taught to bow toward anything, or recite words when no one was around to hear them. The first time I prayed, I did not face Mecca—instead I faced west, toward home. It was there that I had first spoken to God. Mecca, on the other hand, was a place I had never seen, full of people I had never met. For a convert, I was unusually obstinate. Bowing—putting my forehead on the ground—felt embarrassing. At that time, if you had asked me what religion was, I would have answered that it was the expression of one's love for God. Years later, a Bohra Muslim friend would suggest something very different: God, he said, is the love between you and religion. Today, this makes profound sense to me. I quickly discovered that religion is an act of will. I assumed prayer would flow naturally from belief, but it didn't—it took practice. So I practiced, privately, without telling Jo or anyone else what had occurred.

For a week, Jo and I barely ate. We didn't understand how or where to buy real food. The apartment previously inhabited by Ben and his roommate sat on a side street lined with straggling hibiscus bushes. There was a series of little shops at the end of our block, but they made no sense to us. One
sold finches and lovebirds in cages, another sold cell phones, a third displayed unmarked piles of computer parts on wooden tables. When we finally came across a tiny general store—a
duken,
we later learned to call it—we bought olives and bread. A donkey cart supplied us with mangoes. Programmed for supermarkets, we were bewildered that we couldn't buy meat or fish from the same place we bought milk.

One afternoon during this first proteinless week, the phone rang. Jo and I stared at it in dismay. The only other call we'd gotten was from the director of Language School, welcoming us to Cairo. Too late, I realized I had no idea how Egyptians greeted each other on the phone.

“You answer it,” said Jo.

“Why?” I asked wildly.

“Because it might be someone speaking Arabic,” she said. “Pick up, quick.”

I did.

“Hello?”

“Is this Willow?” The voice was male and spoke in a pleasant Anglo-Egyptian accent. He introduced himself as Omar, whom I remembered from Ben's e-mails—he was a physics teacher at LS, as we called it, and one of Ben's closest friends in Egypt. Worried about all the trouble a couple of American girls could find in Cairo, Ben had asked him to keep an eye on us.

“I remembered today that you arrived on the fifteenth,” he said. “I wanted to make sure everything was okay. Ben said you brought someone with you?”

“A friend,” I said. “She's going to be working at LS as well.”

“Oh good,” he said politely. “Is there anything you need?”

I decided not to tell him about our state of enforced veganism. He apologized for not having called sooner—he had been in Sinai for the past few days.

“Can we invite you over for some tea?” I asked, grateful for his concern. “I have a book that Ben asked me to bring you.”