The day of the lunch, I spent half an hour trying to decide what to wear. I was still getting ready when Omar arrived to pick me up.
“I feel like we’re doing something wrong,” I fretted as I put on my shoes. “I don’t like just showing up like this. ‘Hi, I’m your white American in-the-closet-convert future daughter-in-law. I’ve brought you some flowers and a catastrophe.’”
Omar shook his head. “We’re not doing anything wrong. This is our decision.” He smiled. “Everyone is going to like you.”
“Everyone?” I looked up at him flirtatiously.
“Yes, everyone.” He squeezed my hand. “I love you.”
When we arrived at their apartment, I paid closer attention than I had the other time I’d visited. It was a snug space: two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen leading off of a main room that served as the living and dining area. Spread throughout the apartment was a great quantity of books. On almost every wall there were shelves lined with philosophies and histories in Arabic, novels in English and French. They competed for space with a few houseplants and a framed picture of Gamal Abdel Nasser, leader of the Egyptian revolution. On a wide couch in the main room lay two of Omar’s ouds—ancestors of the lute—and an electric guitar.
Omar’s mother, Sohair, came out to greet us. I let out a breath when I saw she was smiling.
“Hello, my dear,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. “Come sit down, please. Will you take tea?”
Another head poked around the corner from the hall: it was Ibrahim, Omar’s younger brother. He came into the room with bright, wide eyes, holding out his hand. He was fairer than either Sohair or Omar—as a child he had been red-headed, a characteristic of his father’s family, who hailed from the Nile Delta. He was six years younger than Omar, a year older than me.
“Ahlan,” he said, shaking my hand. “Do you know ahlan? It means welcome.”
“I know ahlan,” I said, feeling suddenly shy.
“She took Arabic in college,” Omar chimed in. “She knows a lot of words.”
“Not really. I’ve found out everything I know is useless. I can tell you the new secretary is Lebanese, but I can’t ask for directions.”
Ibrahim laughed. “That’s all right. We will teach you whatever you want to know.”
As the four of us sat together and talked, I began to relax. Sohair and Ibrahim asked about my history and expectations, always kindly and without judgment. Despite the unorthodoxy of our sudden announcement, it was clear they were happy and a little relieved that Omar had found someone he wanted to marry. He had, I gathered, been fussy about potential mates in the past. It was unusual for a pious person to have interests as diverse and artistic as Omar’s, which made looking for a wife more than usually difficult. When Omar insisted he would only marry a woman who was both religious and intellectually independent, his mother told him to be realistic. He was in his late twenties, an age when Egyptian men are expected to choose a wife and leave the family home. It was time, she thought, for him to make a decision.
Sohair was a revolutionary. Though Nasser’s dream of a democratic, industrial Egypt had never come to pass, she held on to hope. Her energy and idealism were formidable: at my age she socialized with leftist politicos, earning her translator’s diploma while pregnant with Omar. She and her sons’ father divorced when Omar was in high school. Afterward, she had educated and provided for her children on her own, refusing help from relatives and friends. In recent years her job as a translator had taken her across Europe and West Africa; in a few more years she would travel to the source of the Nile with a group of backpackers half her age. The hardships she had faced as a young woman seemed barely to register—she had boundless optimism, and was more fearless at fifty than I was at twenty-one.
“Do you have a good relationship with your parents?” she asked me at one point during that first lunch together.
“I do,” I said, running one finger nervously around the rim of my teacup. “And I don’t want to keep secrets from them. I just think it makes more sense to tell them in person, after they’ve had a chance to meet Omar.”
“When are they coming?”
“December, for Christmas. It’s just another couple of months, so—” I trailed off and fiddled with my teacup again. A couple of months was not a long time, but it was long enough to make me feel guilty for concealing something so important.
“It’s your choice,” said Sohair, patting my hand. “If you think this way is best, then this is what we will do.”
We sat down to a traditional meal of ground meat baked in filo dough, with rice and cucumber salad. Ibrahim talked about ’70s power ballads and his fear of scorpions. I laughed when he and Omar argued over heavy metal bands. Ibrahim would later tell their extended family, “My heart is open to her,” calming the fears they might have had about Omar’s American fiancée. I felt safe sitting in the bright living room with Omar and the people who knew him best. At the same time, I wondered if Sohair’s confidence in me was misplaced —I wondered if I knew what was best. I wondered if I knew what I was doing at all.
Omar’s father was an artist and lived alone on another floor of that same apartment building in Tura, in a flat littered comfortably with evidence of his craft: brushes in jars of turpentine, palettes left drying on newspapers, canvases leaning against the walls.
“My dear Willow,” he said when Omar introduced us, enunciating each word. “For so you must become: precious.” His name was Fakhry, but to me he was always Amu Fakhry, the word for uncle conveying my respect for him as an elder. He was in his early sixties and had a heart condition that made him tire easily, but his expressive eyes were youthful.
“I’m glad to meet you,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek. I handed him the bouquet of flowers I had picked out at a local shop. He smiled, delighted.
“They are beautiful,” he said, putting them in a green glass vase. “The color, everything is good. I pay attention to these things because I am a painter. I search for details.”
We looked at some of his paintings. He was a devotee of Picasso, and had copied several of his paintings. A canvas based on “The Frugal Repast” caught my eye.
“This is amazing,” I said.
“You like it?” Amu Fakhry seemed pleased. “Then when it is finished, I will give it to you.”
“I would hate to take it away from you—”
“No, you must have it,” said Amu Fakhry. “Art is not for the artist. Art is for other people.”
We smiled at each other in silent agreement. From that moment, we were allies and coconspirators. The painting I admired would arrive wrapped at my doorstep several weeks later, with one addition: the bouquet of flowers I gave Amu Fakhry had appeared on the table near the subject’s elbow, picked out in daubs of pink and green.
It’s very easy to keep secrets from people who live thousands of miles away. It’s much less easy to keep them from your roommate. I wanted to talk to Jo about my news, but I was a little afraid of her reaction. If I told her about the engagement, I’d have to tell her about my conversion as well, and that was a conversation I was not yet prepared to have with anyone whose opinions about religion were as strong as hers.
“Every time I see the word God, my brain shuts down,” she told me one afternoon as we were walking in Maadi. After the news of a death in Jo’s family, a colleague at school had given her a book of inspirational essays and sayings. She had read it dutifully, but it didn’t stick. “It makes me suspicious of the whole book, even the parts I like. There were some beautiful ideas in there. But I just can’t see God, God, God, and take them seriously.”
“Why not?” I asked. We were walking along a street we’d named Dead Cat Road, in honor of the bloated tabby carcass that had been lying in the median for weeks. We stepped into the street to avoid him.
“The word doesn’t mean anything positive to me,” Jo said. “I’m not religious, and I feel like God is forced on me in a way that seems dishonest and manipulative
.”
“Not everyone thinks of God as a big white guy who floats on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel pointing at people,” I said irritably. “You could think of Him as something more pervasive and universal.”
This got a smile. “I could,” she said, “but that forces me to work too hard as a reader, which means the book isn’t written well enough to catch my attention without using the word God as a crutch.”
“What?” I squeaked. A boab in the doorway of a nearby apartment building stared at me. I ignored him. “Are you saying that if a book contains the word God, it’s badly written?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying.”
I took a breath, caught a yeasty lungful of cat, and began coughing. We continued down the road in philosophical silence.
A few days later, Omar invited us to observe a lesson at Beyt al Oud, the music school where he studied with Iraqi lute maestro Naseer Shamma. The school operated out of an eighteenth-century house built in the traditional Arab style—there was an open courtyard called a salamlek, where concerts and group lessons were held, and above it a screened series of rooms used for practice, formerly the harem. While Omar chatted with Naseer and his students, Jo and I explored the house, admiring the high, painted ceilings and narrow stone stairs, and the latticework balcony where women of the house would sit to observe the men, centuries ago. We were lingering in the balcony when I told Jo that Omar and I were engaged. A lesson was in progress below us in the salamlek, and little melodies drifted up one by one, playful and sad. Omar chatted with Master Naseer near a dry tile fountain. Secluded behind the lattice, we could see everything without being seen. Jo squeezed my hand and said nothing. We listened to the music for a few more minutes before heading downstairs arm in arm.
When we were alone back at the apartment, the questions began.
“What about all the religion stuff? Don’t you think that’s going to cause problems between you?”
“I’m a Muslim.”
Jo immediately looked worried. “You converted for him?”
“No, I converted before we ever said anything to each other. He had no idea I was a Muslim until we had the getting-married discussion.”
“You converted before?” Worry became surprise. “When? Can I ask why?”
A gnawing sensation began in my stomach. I felt like I was back in fifth grade health class, when they separated the boys from the girls and taught us the Latin names for our anatomy and the mechanics of sex, all with a grim detachment that seemed Kafkaesque in retrospect. I could never quite shake this reaction to the question “Why religion?” To me it would forever feel like health class; like condensing something ineffable into a series of events. I knew, also, that I wasn’t really being asked to explain my conversion, I was being asked to defend it. It was this that unsettled me most.
“I tried to be an atheist,” I said plaintively. “It didn’t work.”
“Okay, yeah, but why Islam?”
“I discovered I was a monotheist. Believe me, I was as unhappy about it as you are. That rules out polytheism. I also have a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or a leader who claims to be God’s representative on earth. And I cannot believe that having given us these bodies, God thinks we should be virgins unless we desperately feel a need to reproduce. That rules out any religion that’s against family planning or sex for fun rather than for procreation. Islam is antiauthoritarian sex-positive monotheism.”
“Islam is sex-positive? Come on.”
I fought back my frustration. “In Islam, celibacy is considered unhealthy and unnatural. The best way for a Muslim adult to live is in a committed, sexually joyful relationship with another Muslim adult. That sounds about right to me.”
“You see the way women are treated here. You walk in the streets. It’s like being a hunted animal! If that’s sex-positive I’m the freaking pope.”
“I’m not arguing with that. It’s disgusting and hypocritical and wrong. And I don’t think there’s a single Muslim cleric out there who’d disagree with you. This is not Islam. This is a society in freefall. This place is a mess. Egypt is at a lower point today, today, than it has been in its entire history.” Tirade over, I realized my hands were clenched.
Jo looked out the window, into the street where we were harassed on a daily basis. Cairo was crawling with unemployed, furious, infantilized men who were still sleeping in their childhood beds and taking orders from their mothers. Parents of girls were demanding more and more in bridal settlements and real estate, putting marriage—and therefore adulthood—out of reach for many in this poverty-stricken generation. As the middle class shrank, marital expectations rose; by marrying well, a working-class girl could help her family climb back into a “respectable” social stratum. There was no higher goal than being ibn i’nas or bint i’nas, the son or daughter of genteel people. The stress this put on working-class men was almost unfathomable. These were the men who hunted us and hated us. In their eyes, they had been betrayed by female social mercenaries and denied their dignity by a class-obsessed society. I was marrying into a country on the verge of a meltdown.
Jo turned back from the window and studied me, sunlight illuminating her thick blonde hair. “Are you happy?” she asked.
“I’m happy,” I said. It was a lie; I was terrified. There are few things more overwhelming than love in hostile territory. Despite my anxieties, I couldn’t show any hesitation. My confidence was the only thing that would convince my friends and family that this was a good idea. I had to be disciplined about my own anxieties and focus on calming the fears of others.
Ramadan
And know that victory comes with patience, relief with affliction, and ease with hardship.
—Prophet Muhammad
I TOLD JO ABOUT MY CONVERSION JUST IN TIME: THAT YEAR, THE fasting month of Ramadan began in October. She would have been dismayed—and maybe insulted—to discover me eating at sunset after refusing food all day. On the twenty-ninth day of Sha’aban, Omar, Jo, and I were having tea in our living room when Omar held up his hand for silence. The evening call to prayer had just gone up from the city’s thousand mosques. He was waiting for the special chant that would announce the start of the holy month.
“Why don’t they know when it is yet?” Jo was perched on the couch sorting through our CDs, bemused by Omar’s restlessness.
“It’s not an exact date—they have to see the crescent moon.” Omar shifted out of the darkened porch doorway and came to sit in the living room with Jo and me. “If they see it tonight, we start fasting tomorrow; if not, we start the next day.”
There was an electricity in the air I was used to associating with Christmas. “I think it’s going to be tonight,” I said.
“Do you?” Omar smiled. “I imagine it will be then.”
A minute later we heard voices swell up from the mosques and fill the empty space between the noises in the street.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” Omar answered, cheerful now and pulling on his shoes. “Come on, let’s go shopping for sa’hoor.” Sa’hoor is the “late meal” eaten just before sunrise during Ramadan. In Egypt, that usually means stewed fava beans and yogurt, along with a licorice drink that helps the body retain fluids. And, for an untried westerner like me, lots and lots of water.
We went by cab to Souk el Maadi. It was crammed with shoppers carrying bags of vegetables and flatbread in their hands and on their heads. “From now until next month, Cairo will not sleep,” Omar said. “A lot of these people will just stay up until dawn tonight, sleep all day tomorrow, and then get up for iftar and party. They’re out buying food for sa’hoor, like us.”
We stopped at a tiny general store to buy white cheese and bread.
“Remember to drink water tonight. Don’t wait until dawn,” Omar said in the cab on the way back. He came inside the apartment long enough to kiss me, promising to be back first thing in the morning. I went to bed wi
th the holiday feeling lingering in my mind.
At 3:45 a.m. I woke to the sound of a man singing out in the street, accompanied by a drum. “Sa’hoor, sa’hoor, wake, oh, sleeper!” went his chant, echoing between the silent apartment blocks. I stumbled to the window and peered out, seeing a galibayya-clad man bathed in neon from the street lamp overhead. He swayed down the block, trailed by one of the local cats.
“Who wakes you up?” I asked as though he could hear me. The muffled clank of cooking pots could be heard from the flat upstairs. I went into the kitchen, feeling resolved; I drank a liter of water. This left almost no room for food, but it was the idea of going without liquid that made me nervous. Feeling slightly hypotonic, I went back to bed and slept.
I woke up again around ten a.m., dry-mouthed.
“It will pass,” said Omar, who had appeared like a mirage in the living room. Both he and Jo were irritatingly awake and fresh-looking.
“How do you feel?” asked Jo, clearing away traces of her breakfast.
“Kind of jet-lagged, actually. Like I’m trying to adjust to a new time zone.”
“The first day is like that,” said Omar, smiling with encouragement. “After that it gets easier.”
The rest of the day had a trancelike quality—sometimes I felt sleepy and sore, sometimes unusually alert. We watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I drifted off again halfway through, cocooned between Omar and Jo, both of whom seemed at least partially convinced that fasting was incompatible with my Anglo-Saxon physiology. Much later, the sound of Omar’s voice prompted me awake. He was reading Al Jabbar in English. “And I take Al Haq, the Truth, as my birthright; as a creature I am transitory. And He said, ‘Veil this symbol, and know it, and be satisfied.’”