The Butterfly Mosque (8 page)

It began with the symbols I had etched into my skin.

“Ben told me you have an interesting tattoo,” Omar said one night not long after we were engaged. “Is it true?”

I knew which one he meant. “Yes. Does it bother you?”

Omar was smiling. “No. But can I see it?”

I turned away from him and lifted the hem of my shirt so that he could see the lower part of my back. I wondered if the tattoo would shock him, or whether he would be able to read my good intentions in the ink. He was silent for a moment.

“It's beautiful,” he said finally. I let out a breath. “Did an American do this? No.”

“Yes, actually.”

“But the style is very good. You didn't write it yourself?”

“No, no. I found it online.”

“Why
Al Haq?
” He touched the first line, the letter
alif,
where the skin was smooth but raised like a scar. I closed my eyes as he traced the word with his index finger.

“I like
Al Haq,
” I murmured. “Truth without untruth, truth without opposite. The real that encompasses even the unreal, the most-real. And it comes next to
Ash-Shahid,
the Witness, which I also like.” I opened one eye. “But
Ash-Shahid
has more letters so it would've hurt more.”

He smiled. “When you got this tattoo—were you a Muslim then?”

“No,” I answered. “This is over two years old. I got it when I knew I would convert someday. I wasn't ready then, but I had the tattoo done to remind me.”

“Amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “I had no idea such a story was possible in America.”

“Neither does anyone else back home, I'm sure. You were the first person I told.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

“Yes. People at home think I have a cultural or academic interest in Islam. I have six Qurans, not one of which I bought for myself, and at least as many books of Sufi poetry, which were also all gifts, but if I told the people who gave them to me that I've converted, they would all be horrified.”

Omar's face darkened. “Is it so unacceptable?”

“Oh, yes.”

He touched the back of my hand. “I hope you know that this is going to be very, very hard,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

*   *  *

A simple team-building exercise given to the staff at Language School showed us what we were up against. The principal was an Egyptian woman who had taught for years in the United States. It's safe to assume, then, that when she gave us this exercise she knew exactly what she was doing. We were given a handout with a short scenario: a woman whose husband is always away on business goes out at night to meet a lover. A known madman is on the loose. At the end of the evening the woman asks her lover to escort her home in case the madman appears. The lover refuses. The woman goes to a friend's house nearby and asks her friend to walk with her; hearing the reason why the woman is out so late, the friend refuses. The woman goes on alone. At the river separating her neighborhood from her lover's, she asks a ferryman to take her across. Because she has no money to pay him, the ferryman refuses. As a result, the woman is trapped on the wrong side of the river and killed by the madman.

“Who,” said the principal, her eyes twinkling, “is responsible for her death? Rank the characters by the order of their guilt.”

After a few moments of silence, like a communally gathered breath, the room erupted into shouting. The westerners all came down on the same side: obviously, the madman was number one, because he had committed the murder. After that, the friend, lover, ferryman, and wife came in various orders, and the husband, that gray absent figure, floated at the bottom of the list.

The Egyptians were aghast at this interpretation. Clearly, the wife was number one, as she was the one who decided to have an affair and leave her house late at night in the first place. The madman, they said, was insane, and could not be held fully accountable for his actions. Most of them put him at number six. Hearing this, all the Western women—including me—nearly went crazy ourselves. Our feminist principles had been insulted and we argued, patronized, and went red in the face to defend them. Some of the women looked shaken to the point of tears. Here was Arab culture, as chauvinist as everyone had warned us it was, staring us in the face after we had so generously assumed that beneath the differences in language and custom there were westerners waiting to emerge.

I looked at Omar; he held my eyes for a moment and then shook his head, as if to say,
The bridge you want to cross doesn't exist.
We could do no more than look; our engagement was not public knowledge. I felt it wouldn't be fair to my family if strangers knew about my engagement before they did. Here was another river that couldn't be crossed except by telling small lies.

I was pulled aside by Hanan, an Arabic teacher, who seemed eager to explain why the Egyptians thought as they did. The wife was the only one directly responsible for her actions, she said. No one forced her to have an affair, and emphatically, no one forced her to leave the house when she knew a madman was loose. Next to her in accountability was the husband. He had failed in his duty to his wife and should be ashamed of himself for neglecting her and, by doing so, indirectly causing her death. This startled me. It
was a common thread in the argument being made by my Egyptian colleagues, both men and women: most of them had ranked the husband at number two and spoke of him with as much disgust as if he had been a real person. The westerners, on the other hand, had no idea where to put him, and usually stuck him between four and six.

While the westerners were arguing literal responsibility—who wielded the knife and who could have helped the woman but didn't—the Egyptians were arguing moral responsibility. Morally, the madman was like a force of nature; he couldn't distinguish between right and wrong and his actions were indiscriminate. The woman could distinguish between right and wrong, and had chosen to put her own life in danger for an inadequate reason. If her husband, who was responsible for her physical and emotional happiness, had neglected her, then he was at fault for encouraging his wife to seek happiness elsewhere.

I realized why the Egyptian teachers were so bewildered by our western anger: in their eyes we were arguing that cheating on one's spouse is not wrong and that a husband has no emotional responsibility to his wife. But our argument was about personal rights, not social responsibilities. To us, both the husband and wife had the right to make their own decisions. If the husband decided his career took priority over his marriage, that was his prerogative; if the wife looked for emotional fulfillment elsewhere, that was hers. Spousal responsibility never entered the argument.

In the end we settled on a compromise. The madman was slotted at number one for wielding the knife, the wife at number two for knowingly endangering her own life, the
husband at number three for encouraging her to do so, the lover at number four for being a general bastard, the ferryman at number five for being uncharitable (a sin in Islam), and the friend, whose motives were questionable, at number six. We had argued as though the characters in question were waiting outside the door for our verdict. I was surprised that it took so little to divide a group of intelligent people straight down the middle, precisely along cultural lines, without exception. While everybody laughed about it afterward, and talked about the incident for weeks (“The ferryman! The ferryman!” was a standard greeting for a while), it was clear we were all unsettled. Everyone knew this compromise was not limited to the hypothetical.

This was not the last time Omar and I would look at each other from across a bewildering gap. It would open up suddenly, beneath our feet. Alone, our origins didn't seem to matter, but as soon as we found ourselves in a group he became an Egyptian and I became an American. It was automatic. Aside from love—which made us more sensitive to cultural differences, not less—there was nothing we could take for granted. When I talk about those early months, most people still make the optimistic assumption: surely there were things to build on. Surely at some point the expectations of two cultures must intersect. And I am forced to say: no. There was nothing. Violently, utterly nothing.

Jo was often the only one who understood what it was like to navigate this interworld, the little fissures between East and West where no clear common values held sway. As the weeks passed, we developed the shared rituals of outsiders. The most hallowed of these was Punch Fundie.
It was a game modeled on Punch Buggy—wherein you slug the person next to you if you spot a VW Bug while you're driving—but modified to fit the more common roadside appearance of a fundamentalist. According to the rules, a fundamentalist was anyone with the telltale beard but no mustache and a galibayya that stopped short of his ankles, or a woman who wore the all-encompassing black
niqab,
leaving only her eyes visible. All car rides were fair game. One smoggy day in a cab downtown, I felt two hard punches slam into my right arm just above the elbow.

“What the
hell?
” I turned to glare at Jo. Her eyes were wide. She pointed out my window.

“Punch Fundie
and
Punch Buggy,” she said in an awed voice. I looked: sure enough, cruising alongside us was a fundamentalist driving a yellow VW Bug. He frowned into the oncoming traffic, sporting a calloused prayer bruise and an unkempt beard that crept up his cheeks like Spanish moss. We gaped out the window, unable to speak. When the car pulled away we pressed our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing, tears rolling down our cheeks. The whole thing—the city, the great world, the conflicts we faced—could not be mortally serious as long as there were fundamentalists in hippie cars. Jo and I spent the rest of the night breaking into spontaneous grins, confident, for once, that things were going to turn out all right.

He gave me a bowl

and I saw:

the soul has
this
shape . . .

help me now,

being in the middle of being partly in my self,

and partly outside.

    —Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

O
N MY OWN, IN SMALL, QUIET INCREMENTS
, I
BEGAN TO
inhabit Islam. Once I wrestled my ego into obedience and faced Mecca, I began to understand the reason for “organized” worship, in which ritual innovation is discouraged. When you join an organized religion, you do not worship in isolation, even when you are alone. In Islam, prayer is a full-body experience: you stand, bow, stand, kneel with your forehead to the ground, and stand again, repeating a variation of this cycle several times. You become part of a mathematical algorithm linking earthly and heavenly bodies. Your calendar is based on the phases of the moon, your daily prayers on the movement of the sun across the sky. Mecca becomes an idea with a location. You orient yourself toward it not with a compass, but with a Great Circle, calculating the shortest distance between the spot where
you stand and the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca believed to be built by Abraham. In most parts of the United States, you face north, over the frozen pole.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night of Ramadan, drifts—its precise date is unknown. The iconoclasm laid down by Muhammad was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things—as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty—but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge.

There are hundreds of metaphors about the effect of religion on the religious. Religious experience is so abstract that drawing concrete parallels is often the only way to explain it. To me, religion was like a pill: once swallowed, it began to work in ways I could neither control nor anticipate, nor unswallow. If I left Islam tomorrow, I would remain chemically altered by it. Rituals that seem arbitrary to the irreligious—the precise wording and physical attitudes of prayer, the process of ablution—are carefully formulated tonics. Almost unconsciously, I was being changed by them.

The change manifested first in my dream life. Dreams have always been important to me—since childhood I've remembered mine almost every night. Together, they form a kind of parallel personal history or unconscious narrative. Dream symbols figured largely in the events leading up to my conversion. As more and more Muslim rituals became habit, the character and content of my dreams began to alter. There was less clutter, fewer indecipherable gibberish images. What was left came into focus.

A few weeks after Ramadan, I dreamed of a massive desert. Running through it was a highway, empty: no cars or trucks traveled along it, no people or animals. I walked along it alone, carrying a bowl of perfumed oil. I had to take the bowl to a Shi'ite friend in New York, and I was confident the highway would lead me there. I arrived to meet my friend at an ancient-looking stone building in a small park. When I offered her the bowl of oil, my friend refused, and asked me to keep it safe for awhile. Turning away, I dropped a lit match into the bowl. It burst into flame. In the fire I saw the face of Imam Husayn, the Prophet's warrior-poet grandson, who was martyred at Karbala in the seventh century. I don't know how I knew it was him—in Sunni Islam, we make no pictures of holy figures.