The Yacoubian Building

by Alaa Al Aswany

  People had heard about Abu Himeida for the first time some years before when he opened a chain of large shops in Cairo and Alexandria. He had flooded the newspapers and television with advertisements undertaking to give any woman a number of new, “modest” dresses and colored headscarves if the same woman would take the decision to observe religiously sanctioned dress and agreed to hand in her old, revealing clothes to the store management as a sign of her seriousness. At the time people were amazed at this strange offer and their astonishment grew when the Approval and Light stores did in fact receive the old clothes of dozens of women, to whom it handed over new and expensive Islamic garments as free replacements. The project’s noble objectives did not prevent the infiltration of certain women who already wore “modest dress” but who wanted to take advantage of the free clothes. These would pretend that they had not worn modest dress before and present the store with revealing garments that did not belong to them so that they could receive new ones in return. The Approval and Light stores caught on to this ruse and published announcements everywhere warning these tricksters of the punishment they faced in law, as the contract that the woman signed in the store included a penalty clause if she lied.

  Despite these setbacks, the project achieved enormous success and helped thousands of Muslim women to adopt modest dress. Paid advertisements in the form of journalistic reports about the project appeared in the press where Hagg Abu Himeida went on record as saying that he’d sworn to set aside a large sum of money to be spent on charitable works in the hope of winning the favor of God, Almighty and Glorious, and that following consultation with qualified men of religion he’d discovered that the best method by which he might serve the call was to help Muslim women to observe modesty, as a first step toward a total commitment to God’s true path. When he was asked how much the distribution for free of thousands of new modest garments had cost him, Abu Himeida refused to say how much he had spent, asserting that he anticipated that God, Almighty and Glorious, would compensate him for the money; and there can be no doubt that the “modest dress” project catapulted Abu Himeida’s name into the world of celebrity and turned him into one of Egyptian society’s leading figures. Despite this, rumors constantly circulated that Abu Himeida was one of Egypt’s biggest heroin dealers, that the Islamic project was a money-laundering front, and that the bribes he paid to top officials protected him from arrest.

  Abu Himeida had expended enormous effort to get the Patriotic Party nomination for the Kasr el Nil constituency, and when the party nominated Hagg Azzam, he was furious and made strenuous representations to important people, but in vain. El Fouli’s word was supreme. In fact, a high official who was a strong friend of Abu Himeida’s listened to him complaining against El Fouli, then smiled and said, “Listen, Abu Himeida. You know that I love you and look out for your interests. Under no circumstances escalate your differences with El Fouli. If you don’t get into the People’s Assembly this time, there’ll be other times, God willing. But you don’t ever lose El Fouli because he has backers and contacts beyond anything you can think of. Plus, he’s cunning, and if he gets mad, he’ll cause you problems you can’t even imagine.”

  Abu Himeida wouldn’t, however, back down. On the contrary, he put himself forward officially as an independent, flooding the Kasr el Nil constituency with hundreds of election posters bearing his name, his portrait, and his election symbol (the chair). He also erected large election marquees every night in the downtown area where his supporters would gather and he would make speeches to them attacking Hagg Azzam and hinting at the illicit sources of his wealth and his dedication to the pleasures of the senses (an allusion to his new wife). Azzam got angry at this smear campaign, went to El Fouli, and told him frankly, “What’s the benefit of being the party’s candidate, if it doesn’t protect me from being insulted every night in public?”

  El Fouli shook his head and promised that everything would be all right, then the next day put out a statement that was prominently displayed on the front pages of all the newspapers, in which he said, “The Patriotic Party has one candidate in every constituency and it is the duty of all party members to stand with all their strength behind the party’s candidate. By the same token any member of the party who puts himself up against the party’s candidate will be tried by the party and stripped of his membership once the elections are over.”

  The statement clearly applied to Abu Himeida, who, however, was unfazed by the threat and continued his violent campaign against Azzam, the marquees being set up now every day while hundreds of gifts were distributed to constituents. The two sides competed at collecting followers and supporters by any means possible, and violent fights broke out daily, leading to many injuries. In view of the great influence that both the opponents enjoyed, the security forces always adopted a neutral stance. Thus, the police would usually arrive at the site of the fight after it had broken up, or make symbolic arrests of some of those involved, who no sooner reached the police station than they were released without interrogation.

  For some reason, the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences of Cairo University is associated in people’s minds with affluence and chic. Its students, if asked which faculty they are in, are accustomed to reply, “Economics and Political Science” in a complacent, confident, and nonchalant way (as though saying, “Yes indeed. We are, as you can see, the tops.”). No one knows the reasons behind this mystique that surrounds the faculty. It may be because it was created separately, many years after the other faculties, that it acquired a special cachet, or because the government established it specifically—or so they say—so that the daughter of the Leader, Gamal Abd el Nasser, could go to it, or because the political sciences put those who study them in close daily contact with world events, which lends a certain stamp to their way of thinking and behaving, or finally perhaps because this faculty was for a long time the royal gateway to a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the children of the great would join it as a sure first step to a diplomatic career.

  Despite all of this, no such ideas were in Taha el Shazli’s mind when he stuck the Faculty of Economics sticker onto his placement application as his first choice. His hope for a place in the Police Academy was gone forever, and he wanted to exploit his high marks to the maximum; that was all there was to it.

  On the first day of studies, when he passed beneath the university clock and listened to its celebrated chimes, he was seized by that certain sense of awe and majesty, and when he entered the lecture hall filled with the reverberating buzz given off by the chatter and mingled laughter of hundreds of students as they began getting to know one another and swap merry small talk, Taha felt that he was something extremely small in the midst of a terrible congregation that resembled nothing so much as a mythical animal with a thousand heads whose eyes were all looking at, and examining, him. He found himself climbing up to sit far away at the highest point in the lecture hall, as though hiding himself in a safe place from which he could see everyone without their seeing him.

  He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and had continued to believe as he left the house that he looked smart. But when he saw his student colleagues, he discovered that his clothes were not at all what was called for and that the jeans in particular were nothing but a cheap, second-rate imitation of the original. He made up his mind to persuade his father to buy even just one outfit from El Mohandiseen or Zamalek instead of the Approval and Light store from which he bought his cheap clothes.

  Taha decided that he would not get to know anyone because getting to know people meant exchanging personal details and he might be standing in the midst of a group of his colleagues (including girls, maybe) and one of them would ask him what his father did. What would he say then? Next he was overcome by a strange feeling that one of the students sitting in the hall was the son of one of the residents of the Yacoubian Building and Taha might have bought him a pack of cigarettes once or washed his car, and he started to think what would happen
if the unknown resident’s son found that the son of the doorkeeper was a colleague of his in the same faculty.

  He kept thinking like this as the lectures went by one after the other until the call to the noon prayer rang out and a number of the students rose to pray. Taha followed these to the Faculty’s mosque and noticed with relief that like him they were poor, most of them being apparently of rural origin. This encouraged him to ask one of them when the prayer was over, “Are you first year?”

  He replied with a friendly smile, “God willing.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Khalid Abd el Rahim, from Asyut. What’s yours?”

  “Taha el Shazli, from here in Cairo.”

  This was the first acquaintance Taha made and in fact from the first moment, just as oil separates from water and forms a distinct layer on top, so the rich students separated themselves from the poor and made up numerous closed coteries formed of graduates from foreign language schools and those with their own cars, foreign clothes, and imported cigarettes. It was to these that the most beautiful and best-dressed girls gravitated. The poor students, on the other hand, clung to one another like terrified mice, whispering to one another in an embarrassed way.

  In less than a month, Taha had become friends with the whole mosque group. Khalid Abd el Rahim, however, with his short stature, his body that was as dry and thin as a piece of sugarcane, his deep brown complexion, and his glasses with the black frames that lent his face a serious, self-possessed cast, so that, in his modest, classic clothes he looked much like a recently graduated teacher in a state school, remained the one for whom he felt the greatest affection. Taha’s affection for him may have been due to the fact that he was as poor as or even poorer than he was (as witnessed by the darns in his socks, which always showed during prayer). He was also fond of him because he was deeply religious and when praying would stand and invoke God’s presence in the full meaning of the words, placing his folded hands over his heart and bowing his head in total submission so that anyone who saw him at that moment might have imagined that if a fire broke out or shots were fired next to him, these would not distract him from his prayer for an instant. How Taha wished he could attain the same faith and love for Islam as Khalid! Their friendship grew stronger and they spoke to each other frankly and confided in each other, sharing the same distaste at the daily displays of frivolity they saw on the part of some of their affluent male colleagues and at their abandonment of the True Religion, as well as at the shamelessness of some of their female colleagues, who would come to the university dressed as though for a dance party.

  Khalid introduced his friend Taha to others from the university dormitories—all country boys, good-hearted, pious, and poor—and Taha started to visit them every Thursday evening to pray the final evening prayer and stay up with them chatting and discussing. Indeed, he benefited greatly from these discussions, for he learned for the first time that Egyptian society was at the same stage that had prevailed before Islam and it was not an Islamic society because the ruler stood in the way of the application of God’s Law, while God’s prohibitions were openly flouted and the law of the state permitted alcohol, fornication, and usury. He learned too the meaning of communism, which was against religion, and of the crimes committed by the Abd el Nasser regime against the Muslim Brothers, and he read with them books by Abu el Aala el Mawdudi, Sayed Kutb, Yusef el Karadawi, and Abu Hamid el Ghazali. After several weeks, the day came when following an enjoyable evening with his friends from the dorms, they stood up to bid him farewell as usual and at the door Khalid Abd el Rahim said to him suddenly, “Where do you do your Friday prayer, Taha?”

  “At a small mosque near the house.”

  Khalid and his brethren exchanged a look and Khalid then said gaily, “Listen, Taha. I’ve decided to use you to get myself some reward in Heaven. Wait for me tomorrow at ten in Tahrir Square in front of the Ali Baba café. We’ll pray together at the Anas ibn Malik Mosque and I’ll introduce you to Sheikh Shakir, God willing.”

  Two hours before the Friday call to prayer, the mosque of Anas ibn Malik filled to capacity with worshippers. They were all Islamist students, some wearing Western clothes but most in Pakistani dress—a white or blue gallabiya that reached to just below the knees with trousers of the same color beneath it and on their heads a white turban whose tail dangled at the back of the neck. These were all devotees and followers of Sheikh Muhammad Shakir and they came to the mosque early on Fridays to reserve their places before the crowd came and pass the time making acquaintances, reciting the Qur’an, and engaging in religious discussions. Their numbers grew until the place became too small to hold them all and the mosque officials brought out dozens of mats and spread them in the square opposite the mosque. This too filled to capacity with worshippers so that the traffic was brought to a standstill; even the enclosed balcony of the mosque, which was reserved for female students, despite being hidden from sight was the source of a loud murmuring that indicated that it was filled to overflowing as well.

  Someone turned on the mosque’s loudspeaker and it emitted a loud squeal; then the sound cleared and one of the students started to chant the Qur’an in a sweet, submissive voice, the students listening to him with rapt attention. The atmosphere was fabulous, authentic, and pure, the ascetic, homespun, primitive scene bringing to mind the first days of Islam. Suddenly, shouts of “There is no god but God” and “God is most great” rang out and the students, rising, crowded one another to shake the hand of Sheikh Shakir, who had finally arrived. He was about fifty and stocky, with a sparse beard dyed with henna, a face not without certain good looks, and wide, impressive, honey-colored eyes. He was dressed in the Islamist fashion like the students, with a black shawl over his robes. He knew most of the students crowding around him, and shook their hands and embraced them, asking them how they were. It took a long time for him to mount the pulpit and take from his pocket a siwak, with which he purified and sweetened his teeth. Then he said, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and the cries of “God is most great” redoubled in strength until the walls of the mosque shook. The sheikh made a gesture with his hand and immediately complete silence reigned.

  Starting his sermon with praise and thanks to God, he continued, “Beloved sons and daughters, I want every one of you to ask himself this question: ‘How many years does a man live on this earth?’ The answer is that the average lifespan, at the best estimate, does not exceed seventy years. This, when we come to think about it, is a very short time indeed. Moreover, a man may be afflicted at any moment with a disease or by an accident and die. If you ask among your acquaintances and friends, you will find more than one who has died suddenly while young, and it would never have occurred to any of those who died young that they would die. Pursuing this line of thinking, we find that Man has two choices before him, no more. He may focus all his efforts on his life in this fleeting, brief world that may come to an unexpected end at any moment, in which case he is like the man who wants to build himself a luxurious, elegant house but makes it of sand, on the seashore, so that the house is exposed to the possibility that at any moment a wave may come and knock it down; this is the choice that is doomed to failure. As for the second choice, that to which our Lord, Almighty and Glorious, calls us, it requires that the Muslim live in this world from the perspective that it is a brief and passing stage in the life of the immortal soul. One who lives their life in this way will gain both this world and the next and be always happy, content in mind and conscience, and courageous, fearing none but our Lord, Almighty and Glorious. The true believer has no fear of death because he does not consider it the end of existence, as the materialists believe it to be. Death for the believer is the transition of the soul from the ephemeral body to everlasting life. It was this sincere faith that allowed a few thousand of the first Muslims to be victorious over the armies of the great empires of that time, such as Persia and Byzantium. Those simple Muslims were successful in raising the ba
nner of Islam in every part of the world through the strength of their faith, their true love for death in God’s cause, and their deep contempt for the evanescent pleasures of this world. God has made it incumbent upon us to struggle to raise high His word. Gihad is a pillar of Islam, exactly like prayer and fasting. Indeed, gihad is the most important of those pillars but the corrupt rulers dedicated to the pursuit of money and the pleasures of the flesh who have ruled the Islamic world in times of decadence have attempted, with the help of their hypocritical men of religion, to exclude gihad from the pillars of Islam, knowing that if the people cleaved fast to gihad, it would in the end be turned against them and cost them their thrones. In this way, by eliminating gihad, Islam was robbed of its real meaning and our great religion was transformed into a collection of meaningless rituals that the Muslims performed like athletic exercises, mere physical movements without spiritual significance. When the Muslims abandoned gihad, they became slaves to this world, clinging to it, shy of death, cowards. Thus their enemies prevailed over them and God condemned them to defeat, backwardness, and poverty, because they had broken their trust with Him, the Almighty and Glorious.

  “Beloved sons and daughters, our rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy. God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their thrones forever. They lie and lie and lie, and they want us to believe their revolting lies. We say to them, loud and clear, ‘We do not want our Islamic Nation to be either socialist or democratic. We want it Islamic-Islamic, and we will struggle and give up our lives and all we hold dear till Egypt is Islamic once more.’ Islam and democracy are opposites and can never meet. How can water meet with fire, or light with darkness? Democracy means people ruling themselves by themselves. Islam knows only God’s rule. They want to submit God’s Law to the People’s Assembly so that the honorable representatives may decide whether God’s Law is worthy of application or not! A monstrous word it is, issuing from their mouths; they say nothing but a lie. The Law of the Truth, Glorious and Sublime, is not to be discussed or scrutinized; it is to be obeyed and implemented immediately, by force, unhappy as that may make some people. Come, my children, let us prepare our hearts to receive God’s presence, and while we are in this blessed congregation of ours, let us contract with Him, Great and Glorious, to be faithful to Him in our religion, struggle for His cause with every atom of our beings, give our lives gladly until it is God’s word that is supreme….”