A few weeks after Ramadan, I dreamed of a massive desert. Running through it was a highway, empty: no cars or trucks traveled along it, no people or animals. I walked along it alone, carrying a bowl of perfumed oil. I had to take the bowl to a Shi’ite friend in New York, and I was confident the highway would lead me there. I arrived to meet my friend at an ancient-looking stone building in a small park. When I offered her the bowl of oil, my friend refused, and asked me to keep it safe for awhile. Turning away, I dropped a lit match into the bowl. It burst into flame. In the fire I saw the face of Imam Husayn, the Prophet’s warrior-poet grandson, who was martyred at Karbala in the seventh century. I don’t know how I knew it was him—in Sunni Islam, we make no pictures of holy figures.
“He started to speak to me,” I told Omar and Ibrahim later, “but I don’t remember what he said. I think I woke up in the middle.”
“You don’t remember?” Omar looked crestfallen. “But that might be the most important part!”
I shrugged helplessly. “Maybe he was speaking Fus’ha,” I said, using the term for classical Arabic.
“What did he look like?” Ibrahim asked.
“He had a rectangular face—not handsome, but strong. Pale skin and dark, almost black eyes. A dark beard. His head was shaved. He looked very intelligent and very sad.”
Omar nodded. “That fits the way he’s described. It was a true dream.”
In Islam, dreams are divided into three categories: ordinary dreams, which are the internal ramblings of the unconscious mind; satanic dreams, which are nightmares; and “true” dreams or visions, believed to be inspired by God. A true dream is religiously provable, containing elements of Islamic history or scripture with which the dreamer may or may not be familiar.
It was not at all strange to Omar or Ibrahim that I dreamed of Husayn without ever having heard him described. They saw no boundary between the explicable and the inexplicable. To talk about such an experience without fear of judgment or skepticism was a profound relief. I was not strange or abnormal: I was experiencing the world as people had experienced it for thousands of years. This was what religion was to me. When I stumbled into Islam, I wasn’t looking for a radical new moral or social system. I wasn’t angry at society. I was looking for words, the words, ones that would match what I had seen and felt but could not explain. Like my dream. Faith, to me, is not a leap but an affirmation of personal experience. With Islam I gave myself permission to live in the world as I saw it, not as I was told to see it.
After dreaming of the bowl of fire, I was curious about Imam Husayn, and decided to visit the mosque named in his honor. Masgid al Husayn, as the mosque is known, makes up one side of a large square in Old Cairo. Beside it is the entrance to Khan al Khalili, a medieval bazaar made up of a hundred tiny alleyways, one of which houses Fishawi’s café. The neighborhood is collectively called Husayn. It was one of my favorite parts of the city, but I had never been inside the mosque.
The shrine within the mosque was rumored to contain Imam Husayn’s head. The claim is not unusual; Cairo is full of the bones of saints. To Sunnis, these holy figures occupy uncertain ground—praying to a saint is considered idolatrous, but seeking spiritual blessing at his tomb is acceptable. Hard-liners frown even on this practice, and many Wahhabis—puritanical Muslims—have called for the shrines and burial places of saints to be torn down, but the average Cairene can still tell the difference between loving reverence and outright worship, so the shrines remain. The Imam’s official tomb is at Karbala in Iraq, and every Shi’ite I’ve ever spoken to is mortified by the suggestion that his head might be elsewhere. Still, most Cairenes believe that some physical remnant of the Imam is locked inside the shrine at Masgid al Husayn.
I went during the middle of the day, between the noon prayer and the midafternoon prayer. When I arrived, the women’s side of the mosque was only half-full. I walked barefoot across the carpet, falling under a series of curious stares and smiles. In Egypt, visiting shrines is a habit most prevalent among the poor, whose mystical folk tradition is more resistant to Wahhabism than the pensive, rationalist faith of the middle classes. Most of the women I saw were working-class, and wore plain black or brown robes that left only their faces and feet exposed. A dozen stood clustered around the shrine on one side of the prayer space, abutting the men’s section. The shrine was a cube of pure silver eight or nine feet high, decorated with ornate calligraphy and latticework. Men and women faced each other across it—a rare occurrence in a mosque; necessary, in this case, to provide both genders with equal access to the imam.
Finding a spot near the shrine, I cupped my hands in front of my face and whispered the Fatiha, the first words of the Quran. A woman squeezed beside me and greeted the imam with as-salaamu alaykum, as naturally as if he was a beloved uncle or family sheikh standing there in the flesh. Unsettled, I began to forget that I was looking at a silver box. I thought of a hike I’d taken once through the foothills in Colorado, when I saw a bear and momentarily mistook it for a person. There was nothing human about the bear, but its awareness and intelligence were so tangible that my brain tried to make it look like one. For an instant I saw an enormous, shaggy man bent over and hurrying through the grass. At the shrine, I felt the same disorientation: I was in the presence of an imam, and had mistaken him for a silver box. The sense of a definite personality, full of grace and sadness, permeated the room—whether it arose from the worshippers who greeted the imam, or from the silver box that may or may not contain his bones, didn’t matter. Something pressed against all the knowable objects in the room, a reminder, strange and luminous, of all we could not see.
* * *
It was during this period that I learned to trust my religion, because it became one of the central arbiters of my daily life. More often than not, Egyptian culture and American culture demanded opposite things. American men kiss women on the cheek in greeting, for example, but not other men. In Egypt the opposite is true. Each side claims that a kiss on the cheek is not sexual, which raises a question: Why, then, should Egyptian men refrain from kissing women, or American men be afraid to kiss other men? This conflict, and others like it, exposed an exasperating truth: cultural habits are by and large irrational, emerge irrationally, and are practiced irrationally. They are independent of the intellect, and trying to fit them into a logical pattern is fruitless; they can be respected or discarded, but not debated. The question, If a kiss isn’t sexual, why kiss one sex but not the other? is as rhetorical and inconclusive as searching for the practical function of a bow tie, or arguing the logistical merits of doorknobs (which are common in the United States) versus door handles (which are common in the Middle East). Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function.
Omar and I turned to Islam, which was neither Egyptian nor American and often contradicted both, to arbitrate between us. It was an ethos we had both chosen and seemed the fairest way to resolve our disputes. Whenever we disagreed about something, out came the Quran and the books of hadith, or sayings of the Prophet. What we disagreed about nearly always had something to do with either gender or freedom of movement. Private life, with its ritualized and prescribed relationships, forms the axis of Egyptian society, but I was used to living my life publicly and independently. I paid little attention to the gender of this friend or that and what it might mean.
I was surprised by how often Islam, in its purely textual form, took my side. There is no religious limit on the public spaces that women can inhabit; nothing prevents them from running businesses or driving cars, there is no reason they must walk behind men or cover their faces. A woman’s role is not defined by the kitchen and the nursery.
I discovered, as Omar and I patiently constructed the intermediate cultural space in which we would live, that Muslim women were in some respects freer in the seventh century than they are today. The Prophet’s first wife, Khadijah, one of the most beloved women in Islamic history, ran her own successful business. M
uhammad spent much of his early life working as her employee; they were married after she proposed to him. She was almost fifteen years his senior. Her death plunged the Prophet into mourning so intense that it is known even today as the Year of Sorrow. The Virgin Mary, known to Muslims as Maryam, is mentioned more times in the Quran than she is in the Bible, and raises her miraculous son entirely on her own; Joseph is not present in the Islamic version of her story. Asia, the wife of Pharaoh, is revered by Muslims for having disobeyed her husband in defense of Moses. A powerful entrepreneur, a single mother, and a rebellious wife: all three women are revered as the embodiment of perfect faith.
I didn’t realize how much internalized prejudice I still had against Islam. I was surprised by the evenhandedness of the bulk of Shari’a law—and then embarrassed that I was surprised. Spiritual impulses aside, part of me unconsciously believed that I had done something shameful by converting to Islam. Religion was taboo in my family, and Islam was taboo in my society—these pressures are not easily shaken off, and I sometimes felt as guilty as if I had committed a crime. I would never have admitted it, but on some level I believed that Bin Laden’s Islam was the real Islam—that barbarism was waiting on the next page of the Quran or in the next hadith, that someday soon I would turn a page and be horrified. There were parts of Shari’a law that were premodern and problematic, but no more so than the Old Testament. Islam had all the hang-ups, along with all the potential for resolution, of any ancient faith.
Some aspects of the law were actually more liberal than their counterparts in other Abrahamic faiths. In Egypt, I discovered, liberal Islamic divorce law is frequently the reason for conversion among local Christians who, under Coptic law, are prevented from divorcing their spouses except in extreme and often unprovable circumstances. In 2005, a scandal would break out when the unhappy wife of a Coptic patriarch converted to Islam in order to divorce him.
My initial impression of Shari’a law, based on western news reports, conservative pundits and Saudi propaganda, was actually an impression of Wahhabi law—an angry, violent tradition propagated by the nomadic raiders of the Arabian Peninsula. The sayings of the Prophet contain warnings that the people of Najd—the birthplace of Wahhabism—would try to corrupt the faith: warnings the Wahhabis, in their supposed piety and unstinting legalism, have chosen to ignore.
Those first few months were made up of conflict punctuated by calm. Looking back I am amazed by the trust and discipline it took to work so tirelessly for the sake of a relationship so new; there was no guarantee that we wouldn’t drift apart for all the usual reasons. We had potential, not history, and yet that potential had to be protected with a kind of confidence that usually only comes after years of intimacy. There were moments—days, weeks—when I felt Omar was disappearing in a blind spot in my vision; that in creating a space in my life where he could exist culturally, I had lost sight of him as an individual. He also suffered from these moments: in certain social situations or about certain ideas, I would become unrecognizably American, and the intersection of personality and background would blur. It would sink us both into anxiety and doubt—though we were careful never to say it, I think we were both afraid it was possible we could never really know one another.
This came up again and again when we tried to go out with other American expatriates. Our Egyptian acquaintances were much more forgiving of my strangeness than our American acquaintances were of Omar’s, and were affectionate and protective of me even when they disagreed with what I said or did. The Americans we knew, on the other hand, expected a certain amount of cultural submission almost as a matter of course. If someone didn’t hold the right views about things like homosexuality and drinking, or couldn’t adjust to their level of casual familiarity between men and women, the atmosphere would get strained and contemptuous. This was not always true, of course, and may have had a lot to do with age. Older and better-traveled expats tended to have more humility and a tougher sense of humor. The younger jet set—recent college graduates who wanted the same clubbing and boozing they had back home, but in a more exotic environment—could be poisonous.
One of these, a flamboyant college classmate, showed up shortly after Ramadan. He was traveling and hoping to find work abroad; my enthusiastic e-mails about Egypt convinced him to pass through the country. I agreed to meet him at a café in Maadi, where we sat down at a street-side table with cups of Turkish coffee. Our conversation was full of pauses. He wanted to pick up where we’d left off as freshmen in college, when we were irreverent and chemically fortified; for obvious reasons I found it difficult to speak in that key anymore. After an hour of stilted talk, we left, and he escorted me back to Omar’s. Omar was sitting in the living room with his friend Khaled, a Bedouin whose tribe was settled less than fifty years ago, after Cairo began to encroach on their traditional campgrounds. After introducing himself and saying hello, my friend turned to leave—and as he did, cheerfully blew me a kiss. I stared after him, amazed.
“I hope Khaled didn’t see that,” said Omar afterward, with mild amusement. When it came to women, the Bedouin were one of the most conservative peoples in Egypt, though blowing a kiss at an engaged woman in front of her fiancé and a strange man was bizarre even by Cairene standards. It would take many more such incidents—voluble monologues about my ex-boyfriend, snide remarks about religion—before I realized that a lot of people I knew who visited Egypt were simply not interested in respecting local boundaries, and thought it was edgy and sophisticated to trample over them.
At first I tolerated these lapses in manners, or tried creatively to gloss over them. Omar was always surprised that I didn’t simply call people out for their behavior. The intelligence he admired and cultivated was classically Islamic and essentially judicial: the facility to remember and assimilate huge numbers of facts for the purpose of determining right from wrong. The inventive way I had been taught to think—American public schools, with all their drawbacks, make use of one of the only education systems in the world that recognizes the necessity of the imagination—was alien to him. If a conversation took a bad turn, to his thinking I should end it, rather than manipulating it so that it limped along to a quiet and natural death. Personality, that compromise between one’s culture and one’s soul, was sometimes invisible; around other westerners, I was an American and he was an Egyptian.
“Then let’s not think about it now,” he would say to comfort me when we were confronted by this division. “Let’s just stay here for a little while with what we already know.”
A Tree in Heaven
Bismillah your old self to find your real name.
—Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
IN EGYPT, THE MARRIAGE OF TWO PEOPLE IS REALLY THE marriage of two families. Omar’s was not limited to his parents and brother: there was a clan of aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins, all living in different parts of Cairo. Some of them I met at a cousin’s engagement party. Most of the family, however, was still a mystery.
They gathered together every Thursday evening at the family flat in Doqqi, a district on the other side of the Nile. Even in a country full of family-oriented people, this kind of dedication stood out. They were, as Omar put it, a tribe. Worried I would be overwhelmed by the crowd and the Arabic—aside from Sohair and Ibrahim, no one else in the family spoke fluent English—Omar kept postponing my introduction, pushing it back by incremental Thursdays. But a Thursday came when the meeting could no longer be postponed: Sohair’s father, the family patriarch, had passed away quietly in the evening after saying his prayers.
“This is going to be intense,” Omar said on the way to the wake, taking my hand despite the curious glance of the cab driver. “Will you be okay? Don’t be afraid if the women get very emotional.” He looked tired, his face pale above the deep black he wore in mourning. I worried that I was a burden in an already stressful time.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, unconvinced. It felt awkward to intrude on the grief of people I didn’t know, bu
t it would have been insulting not to pay my respects. Grief is different in Egypt—there is no embarrassment attached to it. Funerals are public, open to all who want to mourn the dead or console the living. I was used to thinking of death as something deeply private. Worried I would do or say something wrong, I hung back as we got out of the cab and headed down a dark side street on foot.
The family flat was situated in an alley, in the classical Arabic sense of the word: a narrow street teeming with activity. There were grocers and peddlers, a “doctor,” an ironing man, and a dressmaker, all packed precariously beside and on top of one another. Until very recently, it was not uncommon for people to be born, work, marry, and die in the same district. Omar’s grandmother had lived in this alley for her entire married life. Sohair and her seven siblings had grown up in the very apartment we were visiting: boys sleeping in one room, girls in another, meals together in the middle. With the arrival of her first great-grandchildren, Omar’s grandmother had seen four generations pass through her doors in the span of eighty-odd years.
As we walked down the alley I became aware of the color of my skin. Many of the people who lived here were East African, tall and slender and blue-black. I attracted appraising stares, as if I had arrived from another world. I almost felt like I had. This was a place where the raw facts of life—birth, survival, procreation, death—were so powerfully condensed that there was room for little else. Up until now, I’d lived my life in the space wealth creates between those forces, space where art and education and ambition can exist. Here, that life felt superfluous.
Omar opened a door and ushered me into a fluorescent-lit room with high ceilings. It was full of people: men with beards, women in head scarves, younger girls who were bare-headed, and young boys who squabbled and cooed over an infant. Many of the women were crying. I shook hands with each of Omar’s five maternal uncles, who smiled wearily and touched my cheek. Uncle Sherif, the second-to-youngest, asked me if I ever had a chance to meet his father. I told him I wished I had.