We drove along the Alamein Road, which runs northwest out of Cairo toward the Mediterranean. A friend traveling through Egypt once asked me how hard it would be to drive to Libya from Cairo, and I answered: easy. Drive north and when you hit water turn left. There are so few roads through the Sahara that it is literally this simple. The Alamein Road is one of the prettiest and most surreal: it is surrounded by an empty wasteland, which continues uninterrupted until just south of the Med, where it becomes a stubbly plain of low brush and olive plantations. A portion of the road, the bit that runs through featureless desert, has an incongruous median of well-manicured baby palms and hibiscus. This two- or three-mile strip of civilized greenery is miles from the nearest town—not that there are really towns in that part of the Sahara, only dilapidated tea shops adjoining gas stations—and how it is maintained was long a mystery to me. As we drove to meet the sheikha, I found out: two men, barefoot and with long garden hoses attached to some unseen source of water, were out among the palms. There was no vehicle parked nearby, no obvious way they could arrive or leave. It was as if they’d sprung out of the earth when no one was looking. They stood straight and watched as we sped by. To me, the image was slightly unreal, but no one else in the car seemed to notice anything unusual. We drove on without comment and the men receded in the distance, another Egyptian incident seemingly without cause or consequence.
After driving too far along the coast road, drinking tea, and turning back, we arrived at the house of Sheikha Sanaa. It was a flaking plaster building painted in faded pastels. The dignified decay, along with a sloping view down to the pale shoreline of the Mediterranean, lent the house a kind of poetry. I stood considering it, half-asleep from the motion of the car, when a middle-aged woman dressed in a brown scarf and robe approached me with a knowing smile. She was, like so many Middle Easterners, indulgent of reverie.
“As-salaamu alaykum,” said the woman. “You are the writer?”
“Alaykum salaam—yes,” I responded.
“You wear hijab.”
“Yes.”
“Mash’allah.”
I smiled. Mash’allah literally means “by the grace of God,” but is used to signify admiration. The woman introduced herself: she was one of Sheikha Sanaa’s daughters—and, I gathered, the khalifa or presumptive heir to her mother’s leadership position within their order. She led me into the house, where a woman with clear unlined skin and simple black robes sat at a plastic-sheeted table: it was Sheikha Sanaa. Though her face was remarkably youthful, her hands, which were pale and lined, suggested she was much older than she looked; I guessed her to be in her sixties.
I’ve never met a spiritual leader by whom I felt overwhelmed—I can’t quite empathize with the stories other religious people tell about weeping at the feet of their sheikhs and pastors. I can’t imagine giving a single person that much power over me, and losing my ability to be skeptical. So I felt no aura of sainthood or especial blessedness around the sheikha, but through her immediate and welcoming smile, she did give the impression of earnest goodness.
She rose to greet me and we exchanged the traditional kiss on each cheek. As Laila and the other women greeted her, I realized I had made something of a faux pas. They all kissed the sheikha’s hand instead, as a sign of deference; she in turn protested and tried to pull her hand away, to show that she felt unworthy of the honor. It was a game of courtesy I’d seen many times, but only among men and male sheikhs. Never before had I been in a religious situation mediated entirely by women.
During rounds of tea, coffee, and sweet and salty snacks, Sheikha Sanaa talked with us. I had come with a few prepared questions but let the conversation evolve organically, changing course to pursue interesting topics Laila and the others brought up. We spoke in Arabic, with sporadic bouts of English, French, and parenthetical translations by her daughters when she said things too complex or abstract for me to understand. I focused on what I knew would be most informative to a western audience: the tradition of female leadership in Islam. I asked her why this tradition was declining in the modern age.
“There are as many women sheikhs in the East today as there were in the past,” she said. “In westernized countries like Egypt and Lebanon, people don’t accept female religious leaders. But in Syria it’s something natural.”
“Westernization has made it worse?” This was the first time I had heard the suggestion that the relaxed western attitude toward gender was having a negative impact on Muslim women.
“It’s true, in a way,” Lamya, one of the women from Laila’s Sufi order, chimed in. She was a cheerful, well-educated woman in her forties, and had led a spirited discussion about marriage on the drive up. “I used to live in Damascus. In Syria, men and women interact much less on a personal level. So if a woman wants spiritual knowledge, it makes more sense for her to seek it from a sheikha rather than a sheikh. She has better access to another woman. In westernized countries like this one, some people see female sheikhs as unnecessary, because it’s more acceptable for women and men to be socially intimate. In places like Syria, they need more female sheikhs because male sheikhs have less personal access to female students.”
I had learned by then that westernization is, at best, a game of unintended consequences: in the case of Islamic spiritual authority, it seemed to have eroded traditional opportunities for female leadership rather than created new ones. I questioned Sohair about this when we got back to Cairo and she confirmed what Sheikha Sanaa and Lamya suggested. “You used to hear about this sheikha and that sheikha all the time,” she said, with a bitter expression she reserved for discussions about a former, better Egypt. “It was common, very common. Now they are all gone.”
I wondered whether the decline in female sheikhs could have so pat an explanation—misogyny is an almost inevitable byproduct of political oppression, after all, as brutalized men turn around and brutalize the next most vulnerable population. The last fifty years of Egyptian history have been a steadily closing fist. It probably doesn’t help that the sheikhs who now have free access to female students are almost all Wahhabi, and unlikely to promote ambition and leadership among women because of their puritanical beliefs. Still, it was interesting to know that Sheikha Sanaa and Lamya saw gender desegregation as a two-sided coin, one face of which had the potential to undermine authority.
As Laila chatted with Sheikha Sanaa, I drifted, and thought about women. It struck me that wherever I went, the subject was under discussion—whether it was about juggling careers and family in the West or modesty and public persona in the East, there seemed a universal lack of normalcy and solid ground. I could understand, now, why so many women in the Middle East were suspicious of women’s rights movements and western feminism. Why push for rights when you have influence? A gutsy, intelligent woman in the Middle East can steer the fortunes of her entire family with a minimum of exposure and risk; giving her a full complement of western rights would limit the scope of her power by exposing her to the same public scrutiny as men. Rights would put the flaky and the idiotic on equal footing with the worthy and the able; what was the point? At a time of tremendous change and instability, why cause more disruption? You might end up with less than you started out with.
It was hot; there was a lull. The taste of tea—brackish here, where groundwater was drawn close to the sea—lingered on my tongue. Laila smiled at me.
“Do you think the best way for a woman to be a good Muslim is to take a traditional role—to be a typical wife and mother, and stay at home?” I asked Sheikha Sanaa, breaking the silence.
She shook her head. “Maryam umm Isa [Mary mother of Jesus] and Asia, wife of Pharaoh, were not typical,” she said. “Asia disobeyed her husband. Maryam had no husband. They both took on great responsibilities and hardships to walk the straight path. It is said that ‘one good woman is worth a thousand men.’”
I smiled ruefully—Sana’i, the twelfth-century poet to whom that saying is attributed, would be shouted down in most twen
ty-first-century mosques. I hesitated before asking my last question—it was not meant for a reading audience, but for myself.
“The world is so hostile now—there is so much anger between Muslims and non-Muslims and it’s hard to know what to do, how to make things a little better, for yourself or for anybody else.”
It didn’t come out like a question, but the sheikha knew what I was asking. She leaned forward and took my hand, looking suddenly more focused. I had the odd feeling she had been waiting for me to bring this up.
“The Prophet was once asked this question,” she said, “when the first Muslims were faced with many enemies and trials. He said ‘When chaos enters the world, stick to the walls of your house like a saddle to a horse’s back.’ This means take care of your family and your neighbors and raise your children to be good. If everyone takes care of his own house, all troubles will end.”
On some level, I knew she was right. It surprised me that after a single conversation, she could sense my need to communicate at all costs, and knew what that cost would be—perhaps better than I did. I loved being a wife; I felt I did more tangible good within my family and immediate community than I could do writing articles and books. Yet there was so much about Islam and the people who lived it that was left unsaid in the media and in public discussion, and I could do something about it. Staying silent when I saw news stories that were incomplete or religious issues that were poorly analyzed felt tantamount to lying. Beyond that, I had to relearn how to talk to my own people. The New York Times incident had left me shaken: I had lost touch with what people back home were thinking and feeling. I desperately wanted to get that connection back. I was still American, and I wanted to write for Americans.
That was the first time I started to think seriously about going home. Not for a few weeks or a month, but for years. The gap between the American experience and my experience was only going to get bigger. But I knew Omar had no desire to leave the Middle East. He was an idealist—better opportunities and a more comfortable life did not tempt him. His struggle was here, in Egypt, for an Islam that embraced intellect and art and spirituality. In Cairo, this war had only one front: the fight to regain control of the religious narrative by undermining fundamentalism. In the United States, there would be a second front. He would have to battle fundamentalism’s mirror image, Islamopho-bia. He did not see this as his fight. Even the Christians and Baha’is and Jews were Arab in Egypt; fellow heirs of the language and history he loved. Western hostility toward Islam, with its mingled racial and xenophobic overtones, was alien to him.
Late in 2005, Hind el Hinnawy, a young upper-crust Cairene, claimed to be pregnant by actor Ahmad Fishawy and filed a pater-nity suit. Unremarkable by American standards, the case was shock-ing in Egypt. According to Hin-nawy, she and Fishawy had an orfi or common-law marriage. Notoriously difficult to prove in court, these “marriages” are drawn up by private contract, and serve no other function than to legitimize mistresses and girlfriends in the eyes of Islamic law. When Hinnawy publicly announced plans to raise her daughter on her own and fight for the child’s right to take Fishawy as her last name, all Cairo buzzed with scandal.
Everyone had an opinion: the papers published articles about Hinnawy’s legal case in alternately tongue-in-cheek and outraged tones, while Fishawy’s loyal fan base decried her as a slut. Fishawy himself refused to take a paternity test and denied any involvement with Hinnawy. The mufti, in turn, publicly admonished Fishawy, challenging him to take responsibility for his actions. In our family, opinions were split: I was surprised to find that many of the girls were fiercely critical of Hinnawy, while the uncles agreed with the mufti and thought Fishawy was setting a bad example.
“Why are people treating her as if she’s a hero?” scolded Marwa, at whose wedding I had nearly tripped over Ali Gomaa’s robe. “She’s created fitnah [public controversy, unrest, or scandal] and had a child out of wedlock—”
“But it takes two people to make a baby,” I said, irritated, translating the oft-quoted public health maxim into Arabic. “She’s not the Virgin Mary.”
“Exactly!” said Marwa. I felt my point had been lost.
“This is what happens when young men and women are out until two and three in the morning, going who knows where and doing who knows what,” said Uncle Sherif, who had been listening. His expression was troubled. “This is what happens when the parents are too relaxed.”
I sighed, pulling at the spot where my head scarf hugged my chin; it was too tight. “But,” I struggled for the Arabic vocabulary to express what I wanted to say, “if he doesn’t become the girl’s father, men will think it is right to do as he has done.”
By now everyone was used to the Zen-like pronouncements to which I was limited in abstract conversation.
“This is true,” said Uncle Sherif, “and the way he is acting is wrong. But this situation should not have happened in the first place.”
Among the Progressive Muslims in the West, opinions were less mixed. One of several articles penned in Hin-nawy’s defense was by Ginan Rauf, a Harvard PhD and staunch secular humanist. She had achieved notoriety with an article titled “Beer for Ramadan.” Conservative Muslims loathed her; I admired her bravery if not her politics. But the article she wrote in response to a piece by Ahmad Fishawy’s mother surprised me: she exhorted the woman to “appreciate the deep visionary wisdom of an Egyptian father who has courageously sought to de-link sexuality and honor, to stand firmly as an opponent of female infanticide, to resist oppression and to combat moral hypocrisy. That is how an honorable man conducts himself in the modern world. Surely these are all ‘old’ barbaric customs which I for one will not lament their passing away.”
Alarm bells went off immediately in my head. She was setting up a misleading and dishonest straw man: no one, not even the most radical of cultural conservatives, had ever suggested Hinnawy’s infant daughter should be killed. Egyptians are not sociopaths. I think even the most honor obsessed of family patriarchs would have been shocked to have this implicit accusation laid at his feet. Female infanticide, once common in the Arabian Peninsula, was strictly outlawed by Islam; there was even a chilling line in the Quran that spoke of infant girls rising from their graves on the Day of Judgment to confront their murderers. And even during the Arabian Dark Ages, female infanticide had nothing to do with extramarital affairs: girls born in lawful wedlock were killed for being female, for being a burden to a male-dominated warrior culture. I had never come across a single instance of female infanticide in modern Egypt. Rauf was creating a monster that didn’t exist, and parading it in front of people too far removed from the real Egypt to question her.
Having seen what misinformation could do in this climate of fear, I was furious. It seemed so irresponsible, so unnecessary; there were other and better ways to make her point. In the discussion that ensued in the comments section following her online article, I said the worst thing you can say to a fellow Muslim, short of calling her a heretic: I called her an Orientalist.
To people unfamiliar with the last thirty years of post-colonial academics, this might seem a ridiculous word, without meaning or substance. They may be right. It’s a fancy word for racist, but implies much more: an Orientalist is someone who invents exotic fictions about the East to prove a point about western superiority. Orientalism is a very serious charge to lay at the doorstep of a left-leaning academic.
It was a gross overreaction, and a very stupid one: I was white, she was Arab, and in leftist circles it was an unwritten rule that a white person couldn’t criticize an Arab when it came to her depiction of the Middle East. It didn’t matter who was right; it was an issue of race, tied up in centuries of misused privilege. The Muslim left was still governed by the ethnic identity politics of the seventies. But in the seventies, Arab leftists were using their new political voice to defeat myths about the Middle East, not spread them. Rauf and I were in a paradoxical position: as an Arab her opinions about the Middle East were considered
more valid than mine, but she was promoting a false stereotype; as a white person my opinions were considered tainted by privilege, but I was trying to defeat that stereotype.
I had stumbled into the second war for the soul of Islam: the war being waged wholly within the West, where the Muslim community was struggling with problems arising from its unprecedented diversity. I had never set foot inside an American or British mosque and had no idea of the tensions that existed there: the deep-seated insecurities about race and religious legitimacy, the battles over tradition and identity. In public prayers, I had always been one of a tiny smattering of foreigners among uniformly Arab or Persian congregations. While the concept of for-eignness loomed large in my experience as a Muslim, the concept of race did not.
It was clear there was more tension surrounding Islam in the West than I realized. Maybe that tension should have been obvious, but at the time I was only reading and watching Arab press, which was far less antagonistic and fear-mongering than its American counterpart. I thought I lived in a world that was learning from and moving past 9/11. But the reaction to my women’s car essay and to the Hinnawy case—which proved not even Progressives were immune to propaganda—shook me out of my naïveté. I worried I would soon be forced to choose between two halves of myself. At one family gathering in Doqqi, my anxiety took on a particular clarity. After the stuffed grape leaves had been eaten and the tea had been poured, the talk turned to the war in Iraq.
“It’s an occupation, no better than any other occupation,” said one uncle. “You can’t blame the Iraqis for fighting back. It’s their land. You can’t give someone freedom by pointing a gun at his head. The Americans want Iraqi oil—it’s what they’ve always wanted. The Americans—”
I stayed silent, listening, thrown into fresh worry over this unusual use of “the Americans.” To speak about America in such bitter generalities was not typical in Egypt, except perhaps among hard-line fundamentalists. I had never heard it used this way within Omar’s family. I don’t think this discretion was for my benefit, either—there seemed no great effort to stifle debate or anger when I entered the family. To most people, America was a half-wonderful, half-threatening political puzzle, and until very recently most Egyptians were as willing to separate the American people from the American government as they were to separate themselves from their own. No, this bitterness was new—it was fear.