I spent three weeks regressing into adolescence—meeting old friends and going to old coffee shops, with no earthy potatoes to scrub and no fruit to sort through looking for the tiny holes that belied maggots. I told no one how exhausted I was, or how much it exhausted me to answer questions. I found it particularly hard to talk about Omar.
“What’s he like?”
I was sitting in a café called the Trident, where I had practically lived during high school, talking to a couple I knew who had been dating on and off for several years. With a white ceramic mug of tea in front of me—one of the un-namable and indistinguishable teas in which Boulder specializes, made from herbs that turn bright yellow in hot water—and the same jazz CD that had been playing for ten years wafting from speakers in the corner, it felt almost as though I had never left.
“He’s tall. Quiet. Quietly funny. Very smart, but not in a condescending way.”
When I didn’t go on, the male component of the couple, whose name was Josh, changed track. “What about Cairo? Do you go out? Are there things to do?”
“Sometimes. There are things to do, but they’re a little bit different than the things to do here. There’s less . . . subculture, I guess. People are kind of expected to do and think and wear similar things. You mostly visit people’s houses—sometimes you go to movies or concerts. But there’s no going out as in bar crawling or clubbing or partying, unless you’re from a very westernized social class. And even then, your responsibilities to other people are much greater than they are here, so there’s way less room to fuck up.”
“It sounds a little stifling.”
“It is a little stifling.”
“Are you happy?” He pursed his lips.
“Hmm. Yes, but it’s a different kind of happiness than the kind we’re taught to expect here.”
“In what way?”
I had never articulated it before. “I think . . . there’s a kind of sanity that comes from making most of your life about other people. You have less time to spend with your own neuroses. Even though there’s an awful lot of bullshit to deal with, in some ways people in Egypt seem mentally healthier than people here. There’s a greater willingness to—” I fought for the right words. “People are so comfortable with the word love. It’s okay to tell your friends that you love them—friends of your own gender anyway—really passionately love them. It’s not considered weird.”
They took a moment to digest this. Josh’s girlfriend, Katie, pursed her lips: it was an attitude I would encounter often, an earnest effort to comprehend a way of living that really had to be experienced to be understood.
“But I’m having trouble with—I don’t know how to put this,” she said. “You can’t go out with guys?”
“No. Not without Omar or someone from his family.”
“Can you go out by yourself?”
“You mean to a café or something? Yes, and I do some-times—but it’s unusual to see a woman sitting in a café by herself.”
“But you can’t be alone with a guy.”
“God, no.”
“And you can’t, like, go out dancing.”
“Nope.”
“Or to parties on your own.”
“It depends.”
“I’m sorry, that’s misogynist.”
She was surprised when I laughed.
“Come on,” I said, “you don’t see what’s wrong with that equation? There are only two genders here. Creating a rule for one necessarily creates the same rule for the other. You could just as easily have asked whether Omar could go out with another woman or be alone with her, and I would have given you the same answer: no. When he wants to see his female friends, he has to bring me. What? You thought there was some mysterious pool of women who are somehow exempt from the rules, and who appear out of nowhere to run around with guys for the sole purpose of creating a double standard? If girls can’t go out alone with guys, who’s left for the guys to break the rules with?”
“So guys can’t have serious girlfriends and stuff?”
“Not openly, not in the middle classes. It would make the whole family look bad—like they’d raised an irresponsible, irreligious son who isn’t a good candidate for marriage. The families of girls can be really, really picky about the social history of any guy their daughter might marry.”
“So there isn’t a double standard.” Josh leaned forward, interested.
“Oh, no, there is a double standard, but only because girls have hymens. If there was a way to check for male virginity, trust me, religious people would do it. Guys are expected to follow the same rules—it’s just anatomically easier for them to get away with breaking them.”
“But who are they breaking them with, if girls can’t be alone with guys?” Katie had followed my logic with admirable precision.
“Who do you think?” I asked. “The kind of girls who charge by the hour.”
“Is there a lot of that?”
“As I understand it, there’s less now that the fundies are on the rise. A couple can’t get a hotel room together unless they can prove they’re married. If I had to guess, I’d say most guys have only had a few—experiences—before they get married, and a lot are probably honest-to-God virgins.”
“Do you and Omar talk about—” Katie flushed, looking for my reaction to the question she was about to ask. “What—went on—before you were married?”
“No.” I did not elaborate or invite elaboration.
It would be years before I could have what I would call a normal conversation—that is, one that wasn’t half composed of dancing on cultural razor blades—with most of my friends from home. Most of the time, I was forced to adopt either an analytical attitude or a cavalier one about my new life. There seemed no other way to communicate; the molds for westerners who go abroad were cast long ago. If I was anthropological about my life in Egypt, I could break things down into easily digestible bites, none of which were ever the whole truth. If I was not the anthropologist, I could be the wayfarer in search of a spiritual homeland in the East—which was how many people cast my conversion. This seemed yet more dishonest. I didn’t believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque. My faith did not require beauty or belonging—the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.
The reason I had stayed in Egypt and invested myself in it so thoroughly was simple: this was the place I found myself in and the people I found myself among, and I wanted to do right by them. I had gone to Egypt to see what Islam was like as a practice and to find out whether the Arab world resembled the one portrayed in the media; I had stayed not to see, but to participate. I had discovered that both Islam and the Arab world were far from ideal—that the religion I loved was becoming steadily warped and was the source of many excuses for violence and ignorance and misanthropy. Yet I was not disappointed. This was what was so impossible to explain to the satisfaction of the people back home: I was not disappointed.
I doubt I could have explained why, at that point. The events of my recent life were too crowded together for me to digest them. My concern was not what had happened to me, but what would: what I needed to do next and who I needed to win over next in order to keep my fragile bicon-tinental existence viable. I didn’t stop to wonder why the howling and snarling of the fundamentalists, who woke me at five a.m. every morning, and who were forcing us all to live in smaller and smaller boxes, had not turned me off Islam. I was familiar with the apostasy industry: the Ayaan Hirsi Alis and Wafaa Sultans who had made their fortunes by rejecting Islam. In her book The Trouble with Islam, Irshad Manji smugly announces that after similar run-ins with extremists, it “was Islam’s job” to keep her from leaving the faith. I never thought it was Islam’s job to keep me. My faith was not a contract, not a deal; there were no clauses I expected God to abide by and which, if violated, would give me an excuse to back out. Irving Karchmar, a Sufi convert and friend, and the author of the novel Master of the Jinn, said it best: at
some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty. I passed into certainty very early. Though I couldn’t articulate it then, it was certainty that animated me; it was certainty that allowed me to watch the progress of the extremists and feel anger and disgust, but never disappointment. It was not my place to be approving or disappointed: I had submitted too completely for either. Through the bile and ignorance of the radical imams and self-righteous apostates, through the spin of the news networks and the pomposity of academics, I saw a straight, unwavering line. How could I be disappointed? I did not believe in Islam; I opened my eyes every morning and saw it.
I had a hard time communicating this to my friends, and I hesitated to even open the subject with my family. Eventually I would meet other Muslims, as well as Christians and Jews, who had gone through something similar and knew what it was to be astonished by faith. It’s a word that makes many people uneasy and embarrassed; like sex, we talk about it as if it performs some efficient, necessary but unmentionable function, and is somehow self-contained, affecting only a small part of daily life. But faith is in reality none of those things. I couldn’t explain what it was to kneel to the inexplicable and feel not debased but elevated, in more complete possession of myself than I had ever been. I reminded myself that a few years ago these were not things I would have wanted to hear from a friend, that hearing them would have frightened me. When questioned as to why—why on Earth—I was not disappointed by the faith I had chosen, I only shook my head, barely understanding the answer myself.
I spent a lot of time with Jo, around whom I felt I made sense. It had been less than two months since she left Cairo. I modeled for her as she patterned and pinned my wedding dress. In the evenings I sat over long dinners with my parents. On some days I could almost pretend nothing had happened—that lurking in the shadows was some other life, lived happily and unremarkably in some American city, in an apartment rented with a couple of friends. Part of me wanted that life, whatever it was. The familiarity of American soil was like a physical tonic.
The day of my flight back to Egypt came more quickly than I was prepared for. As I got into the car to go to the airport, I had to press my teeth together to keep from crying. I realized I had never really thought about love. Some unspoken part of me always assumed the Disney version of love was the truth, that falling in love removed all obstacles and patched up all broken things. Leaving my family behind, all of whom wore brave, anxious faces, I knew I was wrong. Love is not a benign thing. No corner of my life remained unaltered by the consequences of what I loved. The most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me brought me neither peace nor comfort. But it did bring me Omar. And that was more than enough.
Nile Wedding
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.
—James Henry Leigh Hunt, “A Thought of the Nile”
“WILLOW? GOD HELP US, IT’S RAINING—”
I sat up in bed, still half-dreaming, and tried to gather my thoughts.
“It can’t be raining,” I said.
“Look outside!” The voice on the other end of the telephone belonged to Nevine, our wedding planner. She was right: a chill was in the air and the sky beyond our salmon-colored shutters was a dark brooding color. The rose bush in the garden below danced under a stream of fat raindrops. It was my wedding day, and in one of the driest cities on earth, it was raining.
“Listen, I’ve ordered a bigger tent,” said Nevine. “A third again as big as the old one.”
“So everything is okay?” But Nevine had turned away from the phone to speak hurriedly to someone whose voice I couldn’t hear. I lifted my free hand to my face and breathed the herbal scent of henna and eucalyptus: my palms and feet were covered in flowers, stars, and peacocks, all meticulously drawn in heavy red-brown dye. Though Sohair had arranged a traditional Sudanese henna artist for the rest of the bridal party, it was Jo who had painted my hands and feet, in what might have been the most ambitious henna design project ever undertaken by a westerner.
There was a muffled scrape as Nevine returned to the phone. “God willing, everything will be fine,” she said.
“It’s raining.” Omar, half-shaven, stuck his head in the door, looking worried. I rubbed my forehead.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
It was my idea to have an outdoor ceremony. I wanted something airy and colorful. Ceremony is perhaps the wrong word; Islamic marriage is a social contract rather than a sacrament, so a Muslim wedding is really a party, the purpose of which is to announce a couple’s marriage to the public. There are no specific rituals as such, but over the years Egyptians have adopted many western customs, including elaborate wedding cakes, white wedding dresses, and even wedding singers. Rather than catering to two sets of traditions, Omar and I decided to ignore them both. Instead of white tulle, my wedding dress was blue-gray silk; Jo and my mother had hand stitched the entire garment, working from a design Jo created using a medieval Persian court dress as a template. A Japanese neighbor of my parents who had experience packing kimonos had undertaken the delicate task of folding and wrapping the dress to prepare it for its transcontinental flight from Denver to Cairo. The life of that dress, like my own, was the work of many hands.
For a venue, Omar and I chose the sloping, palm-lined garden of Villa Androws, a dignified old mansion on the west bank of the Nile, a mile or two upstream from Maadi. The garden ended in mossy stone steps leading straight into the river and could be approached by boat. It was an enchanting place, one of the last remnants of a very different Egypt, a country that was prosperous and secure enough to cultivate imagination. “My lost world,” Omar said with a smile when we first visited the garden. It had been sunset, the only time of day when Cairo seems forgiving, and gives her inhabitants short glimpses of another destiny. Nevine had watched us anxiously for our reaction, playing with the Coptic cross that hung around her neck.
“Wallahi gamila,” Omar told her. Really, it’s beautiful. She smiled, relieved.
“Yes,” she said. “I save this place for couples who want something different, something special.”
Together with Nevine, Sohair and I planned flowers, tables, and lights for an open-air celebration, assuming with total confidence that the weather would be good. In a wet year, Cairo gets half a dozen days of rain, always in late winter and spring. Outside of Alexandria, I have never met an Egyptian who owns an umbrella. After coordinating guests and clothing across nine time zones and three continents, all we wanted was an uneventful wedding day. The City Victorious had other plans.
The phone rang again as Omar and I rushed back and forth across our tiny apartment getting dressed. This time it was Ben, who sounded even more frantic than Nevine.
“They won’t let us leave,” he said, “so you guys stay put for now. We have to convince—”
“What do you mean they won’t let us leave? Who’s they?” A feeling like pins and needles ran up my neck and across my scalp. Nineteen Americans—plus one Frenchman, the fiancé of one of my college friends—were due to travel to the Villa Androws together in a minibus we reserved for the occasion. The driver was scheduled to pick them up at the hotel where most of our international guests were staying.
“The military police,” said Ben. “They’re saying we can’t leave without a police escort.”
My mouth went dry. It was a common scenario: Egypt is a police state, and over the course of recent decades its henchmen have decided that the greatest obstacle to their power is the very people they are meant to govern and protect. When a large group of tourists decides to mix freely with ordinary Egyptians the state panics. Escorts are ordered, cordons are put in place, everything possible is done to shield the foreign money from a population hated by its own government. I had slipped the net. There were no other foreigners in the circles I moved within, and since
I spoke Arabic (not well, at that point, but passably), I had remained remarkably unmolested by what one journalist termed Big Nanny. So unmolested, in fact, that I had forgotten about it, and failed to plan for state intervention in my wedding.
“What is it?” Omar looked at me, the muscles tense in his jaw.
“They’re not going to let the Americans leave,” I said, and realized with horror that I was going to cry. “They want to send soldiers.”
Omar began to curse in Arabic.
“We’re working on it,” Ben said on the phone. “I’ll call you back.”
The scene that followed is confused in my memory. Omar and I paced back and forth across the room, then sat silently, absurdly, as if we were actors dressed for some glittering play. I said several nasty things about Egypt; Omar, rather than arguing with me, listened with a kind of grim despair. No matter how hard we tried to patch over the gulf between us, it kept opening up, in ways and at times we couldn’t predict. It was never going to get easier. That was the fatal truth. But when Omar got up without speaking and pulled me into his arms, I knew I had found something that meant more to me than security, and so had he.
The phone rang again. “Good news,” said Ben, “we’re leaving now. Your dad threatened to call the embassy, and your mom yelled, but it was your friend Saraa who finally cracked them. I don’t know what she said, but it worked. She saved the day.”
Saraa is a poet, quiet and lovely and sad. It was only by chance that she happened to be at the hotel with the international guests; she didn’t have a ride to the wedding and had asked to take an extra seat on the minibus. Always prudent and graceful, she never told me what she said to the security officials that made them back down. I never prodded her about it. By then, having gotten into dozens of conversations that shocked and frustrated me, I’d learned not to ask for information that was not volunteered. In the moment, I was simply thankful.