In Islam, which encouraged conversion, there were words for what I believed. Tawhid, the absolute unity of God. Al Haq, the truth so true it had no corresponding opposite, truth that encompassed both good and evil. There were no intermediary steps in the act of creation, God simply said, Kun, fa yakun. “Be, so it is.” I began to have a feeling of déjà vu. It was as if my promise to become a Muslim was not a coincidence but a kind of inversion; a future self speaking through a former self.
It was a feeling that intensified as I stood in front of a vending machine in my Warren Towers dorm in the spring of my illness, on the verge of an epiphany. Another girl in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms stood in front of me with a deflated expression.
“Screw this,” she said, punching the glass that divided her from the Almond Joy stuck inside, dangling by its wrapper. She sighed and turned away, muttering “Good luck,” as she passed. Her T-shirt read, “Why does it always rain on me?” Apparently she had dressed for this moment of synchronicity.
I punched in the code for a Snickers. As it fell, it hit the trapped Almond Joy. When I pushed in the flap at the bottom of the machine I saw two candy bars, side by side. I looked around for the other girl, but she was gone.
“Kun,” I said to no one, and laughed. “Kun fa yakun.”
At that moment, the girl with the synchronous T-shirt was more upset about losing her candy bar than I was about having osteopenia, low bone mineral density. The moral microcosm of Warren Towers seemed profoundly balanced. What I had suffered was so slight compared to so many people; how appropriate that all I got for it was an Almond Joy.
I had just read a verse of the Quran about rizq, which translates as “sustenance,” but has threads of destiny and fortune running through it. “Oh you who believe, partake of the good things We have provided for you as sustenance, and give thanks to God, if it is truly Him that you worship.” With an infinitesimal shift in probability, an invisible wink, a little rizq had been redistributed. The world seemed without contradiction. It was called into being, kun, with pain and synchronicity and malfunctioning vending machines already written on it. I was abandoning my ability to distinguish between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.
At home in Colorado that summer, I got a new tattoo. An artist named Fish inked Al Haq across my lower back in Arabic calligraphy, talking to me as he worked to keep my mind off the pain. I had signed up to take Arabic in the fall; in the interim I taught myself part of the alphabet out of an old textbook, to make sure I knew what I was putting on my body. Al Haq joined another tattoo designed by a kabbalist from Rhode Island, who gave me my first ink at seventeen after I showed him a fake ID. He had told me that nobody gets two tattoos—they either get one or they get lots. I would get two more before I quit, making the first in a series of difficult negotiations between art and religious law. As it is in Judaism, tattooing is frowned upon in mainstream Islam. The body is God’s creation, and therefore perfect; any medically unnecessary alteration is seen as an affront. I’m glad I didn’t know that when I decided to get this tattoo, because I’m not sure it would have stopped me.
Al Haq was a note to myself that I could not erase. As I got healthier, it would be easy to forget this part of my life, to go back to thinking the world contained only me and whatever I wanted at any given moment. Now I had a permanent physical reminder. One day I would work up the courage to convert. I wasn’t ready yet—I still had chemical and social crutches, and it would take time to learn to live without them. When they were gone, though, I knew what I had to be.
The White Horse
Zuljanah walked forward a few steps and stopped. Husayn stroked the horse’s white neck and said, “My faithful horse, I know you are thirsty and tired. You have been carrying me since morning. My faithful horse, for the last time, take me to the battlefield.”
—Islamic folktale
BACK AT BU THREE WEEKS LATER, I WOKE UP TO A STRANGE piece of news on the BBC World Service: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghani resistance leader who kept the Taliban at bay in the north for almost two decades, had been shot by men posing as journalists. I had been following his life for a class, and knew how important he was in the Afghan struggle against the Taliban and its allies. I was surprised that more attention was not paid to the cleverly staged attack that brought about his death. In all probability, it had been carried out by his fundamentalist enemies. The fact that they could come up with a plan so canny and sophisticated was a little scary.
If working adults were graded on their knowledge of current events the way college juniors are, we would live in a very different world. I felt a kind of nausea that begins between your eyes, like vertigo; the experience you have when you see a car skid across the center line and can picture the crash that is about to take place. Massoud’s death was not the endgame; it couldn’t be. He had been eliminated in preparation for something else.
It was September 11, 2001, at about eight thirty in the morning.
Boston is rarely part of the conversation about the attacks, but guilt was palpable in the streets afterward. The terrorists who hit the South Tower flew out of Logan Airport, the terrorists had been in Boston not two hours earlier, the terrorists could have been stopped here—people spoke as though they had been personally negligent. Then there was the paranoia: it was rumored that another terrorist cell was still in the city. We were to be quarantined, cut off from bridges and rail routes until the cell could be found. A few hysterical BU students rushed to South Station to catch trains home “before they shut everything down.” There was no cell and no quarantine. But F-15s flew overhead, deafeningly low, and the sirens never stopped. My parents left a number of terrified messages on my phone, afraid I might have gone to New York to visit friends at NYU, as I sometimes did on weekends. I sent e-mails in return, begging them to obey the official request to stay off the phones.
With remarkable foresight, the chancellor of BU kept classes in session that day, becoming one of the first to argue that if we disrupted our way of life we would be helping the terrorists. And so, at three p.m., I went to the Arabic class I’d signed up for the previous spring, carrying a textbook whose title began with a big scarlet A.
The next evening I made dinner plans at the student union with Ben, another history major. I brought my Arabic homework, but lost interest as soon as I opened the book. I jumped when Ben tossed his bag on the chair opposite mine and sat down.
“I have a flask of gin in my coat,” he said. “I say we get hammered and go see Zoolander. Apparently the movie theaters are open. I can’t handle this anymore.”
I sighed with relief. “Yes. Sure. That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”
We ate in silence and left, walking down a balmy and subdued Commonwealth Avenue toward the Fenway.
“What do you think is going to happen?” Ben asked without preamble, passing me the gin. It was cool and piney, like pool water and Christmas trees.
“I’m glad it’s not my job to know,” I said. I didn’t want to think about it. My Arabic professor, a cheerful but permanently annoyed Egyptian man, had come to class looking exhausted. At that point, we assumed the retaliatory blow would fall on one of the countries whose citizens were responsible for the attacks.
“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 l
iving 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.
The Conqueress City
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 CAIRO 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.