The Butterfly Mosque

  * * *

  At last my parents and sister arrived, along with Jo’s father. We distributed them between spare beds. Ben, who was out of town for the holidays, lent my family his apartment. Postponing our news as long as possible, we made plans to fly to Luxor for a few days to visit the old pharaonic temples after Christmas, and in the meantime wandered the alleys of Cairo, taking routes I had learned by trailing in Omar’s wake.

  “I’m amazed by how safe it is here,” said my father a few days into their visit. “There doesn’t seem to be any petty violence or theft.”

  I realized it was true; I had never felt physically unsafe in Cairo. The twin pressures of Islamic moral code and the government’s strict policy toward criminal behavior meant that there was almost no street violence and comparatively little theft. As Egypt moves deeper into the twenty-first century, there has been a dramatic downshift in the fortunes of the average citizen, so this is becoming less and less true; the elite get richer while the rest of the country slips further into poverty. The frustration and anger caused by this imbalance has bred violence. But in 2003, it was still possible to walk from one end of Cairo to the other without fear of mugging or physical assault. At the time, it was the safest place I had ever lived.

  Sohair invited all of us to dinner a couple of days before we were due to leave for Luxor. Omar and I would have to break our news there—otherwise my family would find out when we arrived in Upper Egypt and the two of us had to present our katb el kiteb papers at the hotel. I began to feel ill. I was less afraid of hysterics than I was of grudging tolerance. If there was trouble, if he was hurt or hurt my family, I wasn’t sure what I would do.

  On the night of the dinner party, Jo and I led our small troupe of relatives to Sohair’s flat. When we came through the door I was overwhelmed: there was a five-course meal sitting on the table, Ibrahim was wearing a tie and had recently gotten a haircut, and Omar, clean-shaven, hovered in the doorway clutching his oud. These were not uncon-fident people; they knew their own worth, and at some point it must have occurred to them that the situation into which they had been thrown by taking an American girl into their family was somewhat unfair. They were articulate, kind, and intelligent; they should not have been compelled to such efforts to prove they were civilized. The fact that they did so anyway, without complaint, put me at a loss for words. I wondered what I could give them that would equal what they had given me. I shook my head, recovering, and began the introductions.

  The dinner exceeded all of my expectations. Mutual goodwill was so apparent that people immediately began to respond to one another as individuals instead of ambassadors. I didn’t say much; I watched my mother talk to Omar’s mother about work and travel, observed Ibrahim’s enthusiastic monologue about his electric guitar—to which my father listened smiling—and took in the encouraging looks that Jo gave Omar when he spoke. I started to hope that kindness might be enough to get us where we needed to go.

  After dinner, Omar and I walked my parents and my sister back to Ben’s apartment.

  “Are you all right?” Omar asked me in Arabic as we climbed the stairs to the apartment.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  As we sat in the living room, Omar and I made small talk, but it sounded too much like nervous chatter to make me comfortable. I watched my parents in their strange surroundings and felt a stab of guilt. My father was smiling through his professorial beard, which was still more black than gray, unaware of what I was about to say. Despite applying sunblock every morning, the back of his neck had burned.

  “So you liked Sohair and Ibrahim?” I ventured.

  “Very much,” said my mother, “they’re really wonderful.” She was sitting cross-legged on a chair. She sat this way at our long farmhouse table at the house in Colorado when she read the paper. The normalcy that had been missing from my life, the normalcy I craved, suddenly irritated me; I didn’t want to have to explain good people to good people, protect good people from good people, yet again and again that is what I felt I was being asked to do. Adulthood came to me like that: a realization that no one else was going to fly this plane.

  “How would you feel about having them for in-laws?” I asked.

  There was a pause. I held my breath.

  “I would be honored,” said my mother cautiously.

  “Okay,” I said, with a little gasp. “Okay.”

  After that all of us hurried to reassure one another. My parents wanted to make sure Egyptian marriage law wouldn’t limit my human rights; we promised them it wouldn’t. Then they assured us that they thought Omar was wonderful, and so was Egypt, and so was Islam. It came out all at once, but it was obvious that they meant it. It came from a desire to trust and protect us. I felt the blood rush to my head and was only dimly aware that Omar had taken my hand and not let go.

  We ran back to my apartment to relay the news to Jo and her father. I think I was a little incoherent, but Jo guessed from my demeanor that it must have gone well, and flung herself into my arms.

  “We’re going to have a wedding!” she squealed.

  Jo’s father clapped Omar on the back. “Welcome to the family,” he said. Omar laughed, delighted. I had told him earlier that family in the American sense often refers to family and close friends.

  “You see,” I told him later, “we do have a culture in America.”

  “I never doubted it,” he said.

  After that, things happened quickly. When we returned from Luxor phone calls came from other members of Omar’s family, eager to meet mine. We decided to have a small engagement party. Jo and my mother and I threw one together in a hurry, moving all the furniture in our living room into the stairwell to make enough space. My father showed up to the party in a galibayya he had bought in Luxor, his head wrapped, with surprising facility, in a turban. Amu Fakhry, who wore a suit, was delighted, and didn’t stop laughing for five minutes.

  “He is a Saidi!” he exclaimed, meaning an Upper Egyptian. “Your father is a Saidi!”

  With that, the atmosphere was established; no one was quite an American or quite an Egyptian, and everyone spent at least part of the evening speaking in his second (or third) language. The date of the wedding was set for the following November.

  Everything I did from this point onward was in homage to that December. What happened was something so fragile and brave that it is difficult to put into words; my family and Omar’s family agreed to love one another for no other reason than that we had asked them to. Nothing else would ever be quite as important; it no longer deeply mattered to me whose rules I followed, Arab or American or eastern or western, and the words themselves faded in significance. I had caught hold, and seen others catch hold, of something that could not be touched by geography. Alan Moore calls it “the very last inch of us,” that immutable integrity. To live beyond the threshold of identity, to do so in the name of a peace that has not yet occurred but that is infinitely possible—this is exhilarating, necessary, and within reach.

  The Butterfly Mosque

  The Far Mosque is not built of earth

  and water and stone, but of intention and wisdom

  and mystical conversation and compassionate action.

  —Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

  DURING THE WINTER AND SPRING THAT FOLLOWED, OMAR and his family shepherded me as little as possible so that I could have a degree of the American independence I was used to. I consider that year my Arab childhood, because I was allowed to make the same social, practical, and religious mistakes a child is allowed to make, and afterward, though I had an unusual degree of leeway and support, I was expected to shoulder the responsibilities of a married Arab woman. Omar’s Uncle Ahmad, a successful businessman and head of the extended family, said after our engagement was announced that no one was to question my integrity—what is commonly called honor—and that anyone who did would fall under his displeasure, and that everyone was to be as patient and understanding as they knew how.

  I wan
ted to deserve that confidence. So I corrected and overcorrected when I was accidentally rude, which happened often during the first several months: I would wander into gatherings of the family chiefs (where I would be doted on with amusement and offered coffee until someone came to collect me), forget to help aunts and cousins with chairs and plates and food, and get into the wrong kind of political discussion with elders to whom I was expected to defer on all points.

  What I lacked in poise I tried to make up for in dedication. I would sit through a five-hour wake in near-silence, dance at a wedding until my feet ached, and listen to the stories my grandmother-in-law told with complete attention but without understanding more than one word in three. The joy that this brought my family-by-marriage made adjusting to middle-class Egyptian life seem like a light burden. To this day an auntie will occasionally grab me and gather me in her lap like an overgrown baby and tell me I am the beloved of her heart. In those moments I forget how exhausted I have been, and think there is nothing I would not be willing to do for the people—in Egypt and at home—who have loved and defended me.

  I would need them in the months that followed. At first, it seemed as though the break through that December was the sum total of what needed to happen to make everybody comfortable. But goodwill is not enough. Between my culture and Omar’s was a pit full of dangers: poverty, terrorism, wars of attrition, racism, colonialism, and malice. Egyptians were furious that their American “allies” preached democracy at gunpoint in Iraq, yet allowed democratic Egyptian reformers to rot in jail under the regime of President Mubarak. The sense of having been humiliated and deceived by the West was overpowering, and it had not very subtle effect on how Egyptians treated westerners. As a result, I have seen countless American expatriates come to the Middle East with what they thought were open minds and hearts, contracted to work in schools or NGOs and bright-eyed with the desire to heal the warring civilizations, only to be rejected and humiliated by the people they set out to help. They turn around and go home, adding first-hand experience to the ranks of anti-Arab cynics.

  They fail to realize that people who have lost dignity and opportunities to the “clash of civilizations” cannot be expected to welcome peacemakers who have lost nothing. That anger has to go somewhere. Pampered expatriates are convenient targets for spite. Had I not had a pressing reason to stay, I, too, might have become cynical and left. Omar’s family embraced me, and my colleagues accepted me, but the rest of Egypt would not be so charitable.

  Shortly after our parents’ Christmas visit, Jo and I moved out of our expensive apartment in Maadi and into a much smaller one in Tura. This way, Omar and I could live closer together, and Jo and I could save money. In describing Tura I have to remember that for many of its inhabitants, living there is an accomplishment. The real slums of Cairo are far worse. Omar’s family spent part of his early childhood in one of them. He describes having to cross rivers of sewage on his way to school, and going days without running water or electricity as the badly maintained—and often pirated—utility infrastructure blinked on and off. His family did not own a telephone until he was ten years old.

  Compared to this, Tura must have seemed like a breath of fresh air: planned, paved streets, regular and fairly solid buildings, reliable water and lights. Sohair worked with a diligence I can only envy and a courage I fear I will never have to buy the flat where she lived with her sons. Despite our differences, I admire the tenacity of the people who live in Tura; many of them have stories similar to Sohair’s, and have spent the better part of their lives pulling themselves up from poverty through very hard work.

  The area has improved a little since I lived there. Today there are small gardens around the military-owned apartment complex where we rented our flat, and in some buildings the stairs have been tiled and the elevators are maintained. When Jo and I moved there, though, the situation was more stark. On the outside, the neighborhood looked worse than the worst American slum I had ever seen. Garbage was strewn in heaps at the edge of potholed parking lots; the institutional apartment buildings were dark and filthy, and their crumbling cement stairs were dotted with cat excrement and bits of bone and gristle the animals had pulled from bags of refuse. The air was thick with industrial fumes and at times became almost unbreathable, causing lymph nodes under one’s ears, chin, and arms to swell painfully. Tura is sandwiched between three landmarks: an infamous political prison, a cement factory, and the Nile. Until it was immortalized in Alaa Al Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building, Tura was known only by its proximity to the factory, and is still commonly referred to as Tura El-Esment, Tura of the Cement.

  I remember it as a harrowing, sunless place, and whenever I say the name aloud a perfectly formed memory surfaces: I am trudging through the filthy dust outside the prison with a bag of fruit in my arms, and when I look up at the dun-colored, wire-topped walls, I am acutely conscious of the journalists, reformists, and dissidents being held inside. Then I see the mosque, a little jewel-like thing that looks far older than the prison itself. Its corniced minaret stretches above the wall like a plea for help; the mosque, like the prisoners, was trapped there for no other reason than that it was in the way.

  I never learned its name. In Cairo there is a mosque on almost every street corner, so only the largest and oldest are given memorable titles; the rest are most often called by their cross streets. Omar and his family had lived in the neighborhood for years and never learned the name of the mosque behind the prison wall. When I had been in Tura for several weeks, I began to call it the butterfly mosque, because it reminded me of a butterfly caught in a jar. I would fantasize about freeing it and imprisoning in its place the modern, ugly, loud mosque that was the focal point of Turan religious activity, and was visible (appropriately enough) from the bathroom window of the flat Jo and I shared.

  This mosque we quickly came to hate. Its muezzin announced the five daily prayer times in gravelly shrieks, broadcast at full volume over a set of speakers that were comically expensive and well-maintained when compared to the degree of poverty in which so many of the mosque’s attendees lived. To call this institution a fundamentalist mosque sounds almost tongue-in-cheek; it was rabidly conservative, and if it had been situated in a less neglected neighborhood, there’s a chance its leaders would now reside in the prison just a half-kilometer away. As it was, Tura was a convenient location for extremism to fester, and so we awoke promptly at four a.m. every morning to the screams of the muezzin, who rattled windows and set dogs to howling for a considerable radius. Few people ever complained. Most were too afraid of the extremists to speak up; the rest were too worn down by the brutality of daily life in a poor neighborhood in a police state to be bothered. And daily life was brutal. There is no kinder word for it.

  Tura was a neighborhood that required capitulation and assimilation. It was not enough to be good natured or attentive or even Muslim; to be accepted there we would have had to convert to the church of lower-middle-class Cairo, a badly educated, puritanical segment of society. The fundamentalists south of Tura at least had a measure of idealism; the conservatism of our neighbors arose from undiluted desperation. Theirs was a culture of suspicion, grasping and covetous, whose elaborate rules and limitations were the products of minds ever-conscious of the nearness of ruin, the very real possibility that one’s family could slip back into poverty. No one was comfortable, no one was safe, and so Jo and I, with our strange clothing and papery skin and alarming habits, were considered threatening.

  When Omar warned us that Tura was much more conservative than our old neighborhood, and said we should pay a little more attention, we readily agreed, but the fact of the matter is that we had no idea what to pay attention to. “More conservative” to us meant that we should both be home when male guests came over and avoid wearing T-shirts or tight pants. We didn’t know “more conservative” meant that two single women had no business living alone, and if by circumstance they were forced to do so, they should have no contact of any kind wi
th the opposite sex, make as little noise as possible, and not go out at night.

  I don’t think Omar realized this either. The Middle East is one place for men, and an entirely different place for women. He was almost as puzzled and alarmed as we were by the neighborhood’s summary rejection of its two palest residents. It would take me months to understand why we inspired so much fear, and to guess at the questions my neighbors must have been asking themselves. Would we cheat someone, lead someone’s son astray, or call down the wrath of our infamous embassy, and in doing so ruin a family? The place breathed panic, and we added to that panic, and so we were hated.

  I clung to politeness on principle. One Friday afternoon I was buying fruit from a local vendor—dusty oranges, which, when peeled, gave off a delicious scent at odds with the general odor of factory fumes—when the latest prayer session let out at the fundamentalist mosque and a column of men trickled through its doors into the hazy light. I kept my eyes downcast and tried to avoid them, but found myself caught between a man and his small son, who had wandered a few feet away from his father.

  “As-salaamu alaykum,” I said to the man, thinking it would be ruder to say nothing. He stared at me for a moment before wordlessly gathering his son in his arms. I flushed and looked around, hoping no one had overheard. Refusing to return this traditional greeting is one of the worst insults one can offer a fellow Muslim. I hurried home.

  When I described what had happened to Omar, he didn’t believe me.

  “He was probably just confused,” he said. “He doesn’t expect as-salaamu alaykum from a foreign woman.”

  “But I was wearing a head scarf.”

  “Perhaps he thought you were wearing it to be culturally sensitive.”

  “Omar, he looked right at me.”

  Omar reached over to play with the hem of my sleeve. “I get so worried about you,” he said. “If I had known—it’s not usual for people to behave this way. They don’t behave this way to one another.”