“But then there was Muhammad, the hirsute and handsome caretaker of the shrine. He knew me.
“‘Your mother has not come with you,’ he said. I said I was alone because I was angry. Muhammad gave me some water and we chatted.
“‘Khuda Baksh is what my parents call me, but you should call me Muhammad, because that is my proper name,’ he said. I giggled, telling him that doing that in English this would become ‘Muhammad, Forgive Me God.’
“‘Oh, I am always asking God for forgiveness,’ he said, and then, ‘You go to St. Mary’s school, don’t you? Will you teach me English, Parvez?’ I promised him I would if he would allow me to see the small room where he lived a few hundred feet away from the grave.
“What we did in the room involved pleasure and pain. At thirteen I did not know how to distinguish between the two. But I knew that I wanted Muhammad with every fiber of my young being. I did not know his age, but I knew the feeling was mutual. I had never kissed a man before and as we lay in the room, spent and wordless, he caressed my face and kissed me again.
“Shadows grew longer. I mumbled about needing to leave but he put his hands to my lips as the call to the evening prayer spread across the roofs of the hundreds of mosques in Saharanpur and entered our private little world through the room’s lone window.
“‘We must pray, Parvez,’ he said.
“I told him I did not know how to pray properly.
“‘Well, now you will learn. I will teach you to pray the Namaz, just like our Prophet did, and you will teach me English. Deal?’
“We stepped outside as the muezzin’s voice exhorting the faithful to pray reached a crescendo. As afternoon faded to dusk, Muhammad taught me the proper ways to perform the ritual cleansing before prayer, stressing that because of what we had just done we would need to do the longer ghusl, a ritualized bathing of our private parts, instead of the usual wudu, which was a simpler ritual.
“He unfurled his blue-and-green prayer rug and I sat a few feet behind him so I could follow his lead. Muhammad was leading me in my first complete Namaz prayer. He was thus becoming my first imam, literally, a learned man who knows how to lead Muslims in prayer. I wondered if he was asking for forgiveness. I knew that, for me, the thrill of our afternoon was greater than my shame of it. When we were done, Muhammad held my hand.
“‘Why did you not get circumcised in the Prophet’s way, Parvez?’ In Hindi, the question would have been crude, but Muhammad spoke in the more elegant Urdu using the metaphorical way of describing the mandatory Muslim male circumcision, Sunnat (“circumcised preceding in the Prophet’s way”).
“After that, I would always excuse myself from my mother’s frequent desires to visit the shrine together. Just days after my secret afternoon with Muhammad, the shame of my uncut penis had been discovered at a urinal while at school. I would often return home in tears. I strangely remained ashamed of my uncircumcised penis. In India, you could go either way. But the boys who instilled the shame were circumcised. For them it was confirmation of my ‘girl-boy’ status, and on me they practiced the kind of cruelty only children possess.
“Weeks passed and when I finally dared to tell my mother, she forbade me ever to reveal this ‘uncircumcised’ status, adding again that ‘this kind of talk is dirty.’
“She could have chosen to confront my pain with a different choice of words. But she was bequeathing the legacy of shame and of secrets that she had grown up with. The rest of my life would be marked by it. For example, my notion of sex being shameful came from my mother, and could not be solved by therapy.
“The only way to escape this childhood of shame was to leave home. And as soon as I knew I could, I did. Only years later did I realize that some of us go on journeys hoping that we can be transformed into better selves, but sometimes we discover that we never needed to leave home in the first place. For as long as I can remember, I have always been escaping home. And each time I left, I was searching for it.”
“So basically, your first trick taught you how to pray,” said Imran, laughing.
Those conferencing, label-loving Muslims applauded my thesis film, In the Name of Allah, which we played later that day. Imran hated it.
“You are very brave,” said a white Muslim convert covered in decidedly un-Islamic tats and piercings as he shook my hand. “I saw your film.” I did not tell him that I would forever hide that “film” monologue of silhouetted Muslims. And that he should forever cover his arms!
I wondered what form of masochism made this Caucasian (presumably Christian?) man convert to Islam. There was much I could have said, but I didn’t want to break his heart. I thanked him and sought Imran, telling him about the encounter.
“Do these guys even understand the destructive forms of Wahhabi, Deobandi, and other styles of Islam and how much damage they have done? Their version of Islam would never be taken seriously by almost the entirety of Muslims on the planet!”
“This utopia will remain in this suburban hotel!” Imran replied. “Fools!”
My friendship with Imran was a precious thing. Back home, Pakistan and India were not exactly BFFs.
CHAPTER 3
PUBE FACE, TOWELHEAD, CAMEL FUCKER, CAVE NIGGER
In 2005, I started filming Zahir, who called himself a “gay imam,” in Johannesburg. I joined him and his partner in what was to culminate as a journey to Mecca for the Umrah (the lesser pilgrimage—a Hajj-lite) via a tourist trip to Egypt. I did the latter and filmed voraciously. We traveled from Upper Egypt (which is the south of the country) toward Lower Egypt (surprisingly, the north) on the Nile. Floating through the country, I vowed I would never again go on a packaged river or ocean cruise—a tightly regimented week of tourist-trap-filled horror, with nowhere to escape. But a semi-interesting pharaonic history of the land through Aswan and Philae and Luxor unfolded from the mouths of a medley of avaricious tour guides. My fear of the Umrah to Mecca was growing. I had started filming Maryam and Maha in Cairo earlier that year. So far Zahir was allowing me to film his grand voyage.
I lingered at Luxor, wanting to engage him in a discussion about anything but the Quran. Zahir, who knew absolutely nothing of modern politics and the history of Islamic terror, showed little interest. His knowledge seemed to begin and end with the Quran. I was always trying to test his real-world intelligence.
“Do you know any derogatory post-9/11 slurs?”
“What’s a slur?” he asked
“Like Muslims in America being called towelheads and cave niggers.” Ironically, I did have a towel on my head that day—Luxor was in a heat-wave. “Same in Joburg?”
“Nigger like Negro? Of course.” That enormous slur rolled off his tongue nonchalantly.
For someone who had lived (and, some would argue, continues to live) through apartheid, he showed surprising naiveté. We were wandering the immense spectacle of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut’s temple, the scene of the horrific massacre in 1997 that saw more than sixty tourists dead and hundreds injured. While he clucked about how pre-Islamic Egypt was Islamically wrong, I countered with how absolute feminine power had historically never been a religious or political novelty.
“That’s true,” he admitted.
I explained that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had exiled leaders of a political Islamic movement called Al-Gamma’a al-Islamiya. And they were behind the attacks in ’97.
I told him that Mubarak the dictator was always afraid of the Islamists and had jailed hundreds belonging to the Ikhwan al Muslameen, the Muslim Brotherhood, founded on the extremist teachings of a schoolteacher, Hassan al Banna, in the 1920s. An Ikhwan government would one day briefly rule Egypt, but that was inconceivable at the time. I asked him if he knew that the Ikhwan used slogans like, “Allah is our objective; the Quran is the Constitution; the Prophet is our leader; jihad is our way; death for the sake of Allah is our wish.” I asked if he knew they, too, had been accused of terror, even in Saudi Arabia. He had no idea of the former or what I was about to sa
y. The Ikhwan had an on-again-off-again relationship with terror, and many from their brotherhood, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, broke ranks to join al-Qaeda. I asked if he knew that al-Qaeda had finally been held financially responsible for the massacre. Could his knowledge of the Quran answer any of the violence and terror that was being used in its name? This was a post-9/11 world. Surely he had to know. Surely his Quran was different from bin Laden’s.
“You know, I try and stay away from politics,” he said. “That is better left to people like you. My wisdom comes from the Quran. Let’s go back to the boat. It will soon be time for Maghrib prayers.”
Obedient, though disappointed, I followed. We ended up where we had started, in the chaotic megalopolis of Cairo. I took a Bombay-style auto-rickshaw to the nice neighborhood of Garden City. The driver asked me in broken English where I was from.
“Min al-Hind,” I replied.
“Wow! Amitabh Bachchan!” he said, showing me CDs of the Bollywood megastar he kept in his auto. In a surprising act of generosity, he refused to charge me for the ride. Cairo reminded me of Bombay, a name I defiantly clung to because Hindu right-wingers had changed the name to Mumbai; using Bombay for me at least was a political choice. Driving in Cairo was certainly similar: no rules. Accidents were common, and yet the city somehow functioned. The auto was taking me to meet Bassam, an old dissident journalist friend whose latest piece tore Mubarak apart, listing just a sampling of his crimes. As the auto careened, I thought about how long Mubarak’s Mukhabarat, Egypt’s version of the FBI, must have watched him. Every Arab dictator has a Mukhabarat. People often disappeared overnight, forever. I had always worried for Bassam.
Later on that balmy Cairo night, I was back at the hotel. Zahir said we should start “spiritually preparing” for our next stop, Mecca, for the Umrah. But indescribable terror and guilt had filled me as the day of departure to Mecca drew closer. Tickets had been bought. Hotel booked. I was wasting scarce production dollars. But I just could not go to our planned final destination in Saudi Arabia.
I had said it to Zahir every night on the boat. By now he was furious with my refusal—my absolute inability—to go to Mecca with them.
“You have to understand my crisis of faith!” I said.
“What crisis? You were always meant to come with us to Mecca. That was the plan all along.”
“I know I am failing you. But I am not feeling the religious devotion that brings millions of Muslims to Mecca.”
“We will be with you. It will be fine. The Kaaba changes everyone who comes into contact with it.”
“You have to understand. I feel like I am going there for the wrong reasons. I am going there to film you. I am not coming with faith. I am not coming for faith, either.” I would be letting down the memories of my mother and Khala by making a journey this important with no faith in my heart. Not going to film Zahir in Mecca for a one-minute scene in the film hardly had the gravity of defiling my mother’s memory.
So I backed out. My first opportunity to go to Mecca and I did not have the courage to take it. What I really felt was immense terror—that the Saudis would find out. And I would never be able to get out. Zahir and his partner would be going to Saudi Arabia for almost two weeks. My producer was livid when he heard. “We will not have a film without Mecca,” he said.
This imam, Zahir, told me he would need a detailed document proving my faith so we could continue filming upon his return.
“You can change your ticket and go back to Johannesburg,” he said, offering me a magnanimous solution. “The housekeeper will let you in. I will call her. Stay there and meditate on why you could not make this journey and then when I return I shall have an answer and hopefully so will you.”
Initially my guilt was brutal. I had turned my back to the Kaaba. My damnation was complete.
I had two more nights at the Ramses Hilton, whose balconies would provide perfect backdrops for Al Jazeera’s cameras to film the goings-on at Tahrir Square and the nearby Qasr al-Nil bridge as revolution arrived in Cairo’s streets almost five years later in January 2011. I changed my ticket after Zahir left. I wanted a few more days in one of my favorite cities. I moved in with Garth, an old Cairo hand, hack, and, more important, dear friend. We discussed the dangerous work he had helped me with during a brief trip in winter 2001. As always, he urged me to “be careful.” Garth was straight, but because he had helped me find gay subjects a few years ago, both he and I knew deeply that this was probably the world’s most dangerous city for gays. In summer 2001 the Mubarak regime’s pogrom against gay men that came to be known as the Cairo 52 made worldwide headlines. In order to placate the restive religious establishment, Hosni Mubarak arrested fifty-two men at a floating gay nightclub called the Queen Boat. Fifty were charged with “habitual debauchery” and “obscene behavior,” while two were charged with “contempt of religion.” They were treated like “terrorists.” They were tortured and raped repeatedly after being subjected to “forensic examinations” of their buttocks. Ziyad, whom I later met in Paris, was one of the fifty-two. He finally escaped the horror to end up in unfriendly France. (I wish all asylum-seekers knew that the West was hardly a “promised land.” Refugee status is rarely the key to an easier life.) Egypt’s newspapers had in 2001 published all the arrestees’ names, addresses, and photos, intentionally provided by the dictatorial regime. Ziyad was included.
“What shame to my poor widowed mother,” he wept.
“Satanic Cult,” screamed those headlines. Homophobia, as on most of our planet, is deeply entrenched in Egypt. Mubarak had often successfully invoked “Islamic morality” to keep his Muslim “subjects” suppliant. Once it was a debate about hijab, and the latest threat to Islam was rampant homosexuality. To this day, Mukhabarat types troll websites like Manjam to “entrap” gay men. It is said the police know if someone is gay by the color of his underwear. White is straight.
I hung out in Zamalek cafés with Hamza, an old friend. This wealthy neighborhood was old money. And many of its residents had no idea about the dire straits just a few miles away in Manshiyat Nasser, home to the infamous Garbage City. Zamalek residents didn’t venture there, but Hamza had once taken me. He knew, even more than I did, why this country was a ticking time bomb. Now he was producing some chic Arabic T-shirts that, while playing with language, indirectly talked of change. One said hurriyah, the Arabic word for freedom, on the back, and on the front was a big question mark. He gave it to me.
Nothing ever changed in Zamalek. Ladies lunched, many of them expat European wives married to rich Arabs, and they gathered at places like the Gezira Sporting Club to share cocktails. Membership was coveted. They were Cairo’s version of the Real Housewives franchise. Zamalek’s schizophrenia about the real Egypt was decades old.
Later, back with my host, I reminded Garth how he and I had met a “gay” man a few blocks away at the Hardee’s, which would in just a few years become a crucial trauma center for the Tahrir Square revolutionaries. Garth and I visited old haunts. He told me getting bylines from the region was getting harder, meaning it was hard financial times for freelancers like him. That, too, would change in just a few years.
Cairo was always the (broken) heart of the Middle East—its political, historic, cultural, and even political center, but the majority of its residents lived in abject poverty. Cairo had given the Arabs some of their richest cinema and, later, television. Gaudy telenovela-style soaps called “Ramadan Specials,” manufactured in Cairo TV studios, got big Arab audiences in entertainment-starved Saudi Arabia, for example. For some, Cairo was the center of Islamic thought and theology because it contained Al-Azhar University, the Harvard of Islam. Unfortunately for me, not far behind was the Wahhabi-taken-over Darul Uloom Deoband of my childhood, probably Islam’s Princeton. It seems that the latter has won the battle of theological supremacy given the enormous impact Wahhabi ideology has had in the Sunni Muslim world. But Al-Azhar, which even includes seven Sufi schools in its curriculum, remains the lar
gest. Its impact cannot be underestimated. It implements gender segregation and yet disdains the Wahhabis. I always wonder how history would be different if Al-Azhar’s “Islam-lite,” relatively speaking, were at the center of worldwide Sunni opinion. The even larger campus of the American University of Cairo did not have gender segregation, but it did not claim to be a religious school.
I had time to visit Al-Azhar’s campus, where as expected men and women were separated, Saudi ikhtilat-style. Long Saudi-style abaya garments on women were a rarity in the Cairo of my memories, but unfortunately I now saw many, a dramatic increase since prior visits. More women, especially the younger ones, were embracing the hijab, fashionably covering the head and part of the neck, miles away from a Taliban-style burqa or Saudi-style abaya. Print magazines like Hijab Fashion, the InStyle for the fashionable young hijabis of the American University of Cairo, were the rage, as they presented chic prêt-à-porter versions of the headscarf. The Prophet Muhammad’s wives could never have envisioned this haute-couture takeover of his simple command for modesty in dress for both genders. This was not oppression; it was clear that the women who covered chose to do so. There was no sharia here. But like everywhere else, the extent to which a woman would go when choosing to cover herself was, in many minds, a marker of conservatism. Hijabs wrongfully equaled extremism in the West’s mind already.
I had built a wide network of journalists, writers, and filmmakers in Cairo. Years later this network would embrace my film. Its members would also form a crucial source of minute-by-minute information when I would report about the unfolding revolution in 2011. Every bit of information they gave me formed a tweet or Facebook status. At this time, in 2005, my network included a favorite of the film-festival circuit, Yousry Nasrallah. Over tea and coffee at his downtown Cairo office, he was in recovery from his four-and-a-half-hour epic Bab el Shams, or The Gate of the Sun. Based on celebrated author Elias Khoury’s fabled novel of the same name, it was a vivid, epic-like history of the Palestinian people. At its core was the word every Muslim knew, Nakba (“the catastrophe”). For Muslims, it was the violent 1948 occupation of Palestine by the newly created state of Israel. From bin Laden to Mubarak to the Ayatollah Khomeini, every Muslim zealot or politician had used the Nakba as Islam’s never-ending injustice, a rallying cry to Muslims around the world. For many the Nakba had never ended at all.
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