by Rajia Hassib
The next morning, she needed to make sure he was okay. It was both the charitable and the smart thing to do. After all, she didn’t want him infusing his articles about Egypt with laments of food poisoning. Her relationship to him was that of an ambassador, a representative of her country and her people, and she had to make sure she made a positive impression. Still in bed, grateful that it was a Friday and she didn’t have to go to work, she had fished his business card out of her purse, picked up her cell phone, and sent him a text message. He, of course, had been fine. He wondered if she would be willing to invite him to the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club, located near where she lived. He had never been there before, and was interested to see it. She, reminding herself of her national duty, said that she would be happy to, and then jumped out of bed and spent forty-five minutes trying on different outfits before realizing what she was doing and, in self-reprimanding defiance, donning her customary jeans and T-shirt.
In the following months, her steps into the waters of love followed steadily, stealthily. There was the way he looked at the donkey-pulled carts with their child drivers and saw not the poverty and filth her German teacher had noted, but the nobility in the genuine smile of a child forced to provide for himself and for his family. The way he devoured coal-grilled ears of corn as they walked by the Nile, and then stopped midsentence to watch a sailboat float by, his eyes gleaming with the same excitement she would later experience on first seeing New York City’s skyline. She took a leap on the day he rescued a kitten to add to the two he apparently already cared for in his apartment. Driving him to the vet with the kitten dozing in a cardboard box in his lap, she had explained to him that he could not possibly save all of Cairo’s stray cats, their population rivaling the 15 million inhabitants of Egypt’s capital. He, in typical Markian simplicity, had agreed, but had retorted that he could rescue this one cat, and that he was going to.
Later, he would write an article on Egypt’s stray cats, focusing on an elderly man called Ibrahim, whom Mark dubbed the Cat Whisperer. Mark had dug him up in Bolak, one of Cairo’s poorest neighborhoods, living on the first floor of a decrepit apartment building and running a feline soup kitchen, placing dozens of plates of home-cooked rice mixed with bone broth out for the neighborhood’s stray cats, feeding, according to Mark’s estimate, at least four or five dozen cats daily. Ibrahim spent a good third of his income on the cats, and that earned him a glowing essay.
Mark, Rose would later find, viewed the world through a lens of impartial morality. When she was first getting to know him, she had found his moral compass fascinating, had genuinely admired his stances on society’s ill treatment of the less fortunate. He had a marvelous ability to jump cultures seamlessly, to talk with the same vehemence about America’s greedy capitalism as he did about Egypt’s corrupt autocracy. Mark held moral stances. Fixed stances. Mark, Rose would later find out, knew what was right and what was wrong, and wrote about what he knew. Article after article came out during the months they first met, all infused with Mark’s views on social justice, all focusing on personal, intimate stories that demonstrated such justice or the lack thereof. Rose would read his articles, sometimes in the hard copies he shared with her, sometimes online, and, with time, her skepticism turned into fascination as she, too, shared his conviction that writing about something could fix it, that putting words down on paper could affect history.
Mark, like the Pharaohs, believed in the power of words. That, perhaps, gave Rose the final nudge.
* * *
—
“MARRY ME,” he said for what was perhaps the tenth time.
“You know I can’t.”
“Since when are you so religious?”
“I may not fit your idea of a religious Muslim woman, but that is a line even I can’t cross.”
They had finished eating dinner but were still sitting at a restaurant by the Nile, one of the small, inconspicuous nooks that Mark loved and that they had been regularly visiting for the previous nine months. Next to them, waiters cleared a table that had been occupied by a dozen raucous college students. Rose was grateful for the relative calmness their departure had allowed. Now the place was almost completely hers and Mark’s, and she hoped would be for the next hour or so, allowing them to enjoy dusk and the city lights turning on before people started flooding the restaurant for a late Thursday evening dinner. Rose was always grateful for moments of calmness in the center of a sleepless city, a rare gift. They cleared her brain, allowing her to notice details that otherwise escaped her, such as the family of stray cats that now sat under an adjacent table. Rose watched the mother, an emaciated white-and-peach shorthair, groom one of her kittens.
“You know you will end up marrying me anyway, right?”
She lifted an eyebrow, glared at his cocky smile. He was right, of course, but she was not ready to admit that.
“You know I literally cannot marry you, right? I’m legally not allowed to marry you.”
“We’ve been over this before. I’ll convert.”
Mark, who had been living in the Middle East for six years—in Lebanon, then Egypt—knew that Muslim women were not allowed to marry outside of their faith. In Egypt, interfaith marriages were legally permitted, except when a Muslim woman sought to marry a non-Muslim man. Even a civil court would not issue a marriage license in such a case, not unless Mark presented a certificate of conversion to Islam issued by an accredited institution. The alternative would be equal to living in sin—not a big deal to any Westerner, but in Egypt an offense that still warranted honor killing in some parts of the country. Not that Rose’s parents would kill her, of course.
“My parents would kill me,” she sighed.
“No, they wouldn’t.”
“Not literally, no. But close. My mom’s family would ostracize her, and she would disown me.”
“No, she wouldn’t. You don’t give your parents enough credit. Besides, I said I’ll convert.”
“Please stop. This is not a joke.”
“I’m not joking. I mean what I said. All I have to do is say the shahadah: I profess that there is no god but God, and that Mohammed is his messenger. Here. I said it already. Now I’m a Muslim.” He smiled.
“You know it’s not that simple.”
“It is, actually. I asked.”
“You have to believe it, not just say the words.”
“Believe that God exists? I do. Believe that Mohammed was one of his prophets? Why shouldn’t I? Why is this less likely than Moses being a prophet, for example?”
“Believe that Jesus was not divine? That he, too, was a prophet?”
Mark shrugged. “Some of the earliest Christians didn’t believe Jesus was divine.”
“Your mother would kill you.”
“It seems that one of us is destined to be the victim of filicide.”
“Please stop joking about this.”
He leaned across the table, reached out, and grabbed her hand. “You want me to stop joking?”
Rose nodded. Between his firm grip on her wrist and his eyes, wide and staring into hers, she knew he was serious.
“I’ve read about every single major religion in the world. I have long ago concluded that, at the end of the day, all religions are the same, just as all people are the same. You want to know if I’m certain that God exists and that Mohammed is his prophet? No one can be certain of this. This is the definition of belief—to think that something is true without having proof. Do I think it’s true? Sure. Why not? I have no way of disproving it, any more than I have a way of disproving that Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead or that Moses split the sea. And while I’m being honest, I should probably tell you that I would be just as open to being Buddhist or Hindu or Baha’i. I believe in the validity of the religious experience, in the necessity of a spiritual life. And despite many rational objections, I do believe that God exists.” He reached ov
er and grabbed her other wrist. “Now, this is what I’m offering you. What I know, what I’m certain of, is that I love you, and I would very much like to spend the rest of my life with you. I respect your adherence to your religion. I would not want you to do anything that goes against your conscience and regret it ten or twenty years down the line. I’m not going to claim that I would have converted if I hadn’t met you—that would be a lie—but I am going to reassure you that my conscience is clear, and that I’m open to Islam as much as I’m open to Christianity or Judaism. I think this is all you can fairly ask of me. What I’m asking of you is to answer one question: Do you love me?”
Rose turned her hands and grabbed his wrists, too, just as strongly as he was grabbing hers. “You know I do. Of course I do.”
She pulled her hands free. She was tearing up, and she hated crying in public. From her purse, she pulled a tissue and blew her nose. If someone had asked her opinion on this same matter only nine months earlier, she would have had a clear, firm answer: Muslim women should marry Muslim men. Her entire life she had heard the arguments: children inherited the father’s religion; if she were to marry a Christian, she would not be able to raise her kids as Muslims. How would she fast the entire month of Ramadan each year—a requirement of every Muslim, one of the five pillars of Islam—if her husband didn’t practice the same faith? How would she raise her kids to do the same and to pray five times each day if their father didn’t do it? The arguments against such a union went on and on. She could recite them all.
Theoretically, it all made sense. Any person of faith would apply the same arguments to his or her own religion and agree to their validity. But theoretical arguments gained an irritating level of complication once they tried to impose themselves on one’s personal choices. Besides, who said she had to believe those arguments anyway, all of which were, at the end of the day, justifications for religious injunctions issued by mortal men interpreting a sacred text. Did she truly believe that Muslim men could marry Christian women, but that the rule did not apply the other way around? The prophet Mohammed married a Christian and a Jew, and as far as she knew, there was no clear verse in the Qur’an that forbade women from doing the same. What if all those arguments were merely another manifestation of the patriarchy’s obsession with controlling women? What if they married and Mark promised to allow her to raise their kids as Muslims, regardless of his own religious beliefs or lack thereof? What if they married and decided they would remain childless? And which version of God did she believe in: the God who revealed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and would therefore not prefer the followers of one to the followers of another, or the God who took sides that differed depending on whom you were talking to? Most people believed that God favored their religion, regardless of what that religion was, and that He would therefore certainly send the followers of all other religions to hell. Did she truly believe in that?
She knew of only two women who had had to make a choice similar to the one she was now struggling with: Hanan, a school friend who married a German convert and who took every opportunity to assure people of her husband’s true Islamic faith, even carrying a photo of the beaming, bearded, blond man performing pilgrimage in Mecca; and Soha, a college friend who married an American, and who, when asked, calmly declared that neither she nor her parents cared what her husband’s true religious belief was, even though he, too, had converted to Islam before marrying her. Rose was neither one of these women.
And Mark was unlike any other man she knew. In a country of 80 million souls, she had to fall in love with a foreigner. She looked at him, sitting back in his chair, watching her, smiling. She imagined him going to his parents and announcing that he had converted to Islam. She imagined herself going to her parents and announcing that she was eloping with him to the U.S. She imagined standing in front of God and explaining why she chose to marry an agnostic or an omnist or a deist or whatever Mark classified as.
“My parents will kill me, and your parents will kill you, and I may end up in hell,” she said.
“Is this a yes?”
She put her head down on the table, her forehead resting on its edge. “I need to think about this,” she said, speaking to the family of cats that now sat by her feet.
“Take your time,” Mark said, grabbing a piece of bread and tearing it up into smaller chunks before feeding it to the cats. “I’m in no rush.”
* * *
—
IN HER PARENTS’ living room two months later, Rose announced her engagement.
“Mark and I are getting married.” A statement. Not a question.
Her parents sat next to each other, her father holding her mother’s hand as if in anticipation of disaster. Rose saw his grip tighten with her words, saw his shoulders tense, but then he smiled. For his smile, Rose would forever be grateful.
“Married?” her mother repeated, bewildered. Her expression implied that Rose had announced the rebirth of the phoenix, some mythical experience that could not possibly happen in real life. “How?”
Rose was expecting this.
“He’s converted to Islam, Mama. Don’t worry.”
Then and only then did her mother sigh in relief. “Oh, thank God. Your aunts would have killed me.”
Ahmed wiped a tear. Nora hugged her husband. Rose watched them congratulate each other before either one thought of congratulating her. Neither one asked how Mark was willing to change his religion.
Gameela asked. Gameela, Rose had anticipated, would be counted upon to ask.
“Does he really believe in Islam, or is he just doing this to marry you? He has to genuinely believe in it, you know. You can’t fool God.”
She had been standing behind Rose as she announced the engagement to her parents, so Rose had not seen her expression. She turned around to face her sister. Gameela had just walked in from campus and had not taken off her head cover yet. The only covered woman in the entire family, rebellious in her conservatism, Gameela stood peeling off her scarf, unfurling the bun at the nape of her neck, running her fingers through her long, curly hair.
“So you want me to question his intentions? I thought only God knew what was in our hearts. He went to Al-Azhar. He pronounced the shahadah. What else do you want? If he were Egyptian, born a Muslim, would you have tested him on his faith? Are you really naive enough to think all Muslim-born men have true faith?”
Rose did not try to restrain the edginess in her voice. She had endured this censure from Gameela for the previous year: every time she got a text from Mark; every time they went out together. A silent, reproachful glance; a turning of the head; even a muttered I hope you know what you’re doing. Gameela the missionary seemed a universe away from Gameela the sister. Rose could not remember the last time she had looked at her sister and not felt guilty. Now Rose looked at Gameela and saw only the embodiment of the judgment she would face once people knew she was marrying an American, a judgment she both resented and feared.
“I’m just asking, Fayrouz. You know I want only what’s best for you. I’m glad you’re happy, I really am, but I just want to make sure you’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Thank you for your concern.” Rose turned away to face her parents. She ground her teeth, tried to swallow a thought, failed.
“Why are you the only one who still calls me Fayrouz?” She turned again to face her sister. “Everyone else calls me Rose. Even you used to call me Rose when we were kids. But then you became all religious and it’s Fayrouz again. Something wrong with Rose? Too Westernized a name? Haraam?” Sinful?
“No, of course not.” Gameela crumpled her scarf in her hands, balled it up. “I didn’t realize it bothered you. I’m sorry if it did. I just thought Fayrouz was such a beautiful name. I like the sound of it. And the meaning.”
For Rose’s previous birthday, her sister had given her a turquoise stone wrapped in thin gold chains. “Fayrouz—like you
r name,” Gameela had smiled, handing it to her. Rose had held the stone in her hand, felt the thin gold chains that wrapped around it, intersecting, keeping the stone in place, making sure it behaved. “Yes. Very appropriate. Thank you.” She had given her sister a hug and worn the stone around her neck that day. In the evening, she had shoved it in the corner of her bedside drawer. She had not worn it since.
Now, Gameela looked at her parents, puzzled, imploring.
“Your sister didn’t mean anything bad, Rose.” Nora got up and embraced Rose, then pulled Gameela closer. “Here. Give your sister a hug and congratulate her. She is getting married! Can you believe that?”
Gameela stood in front of Rose. Rose, seeing her sister’s eyes well up, pulled her in a tight hug that she held until her father, too, walked over and hugged them both, pulling her mother in with him. They remained standing, all entangled arms and awkwardly angled elbows. Rose felt one hand pat her on the back, another hand tousle her hair, but she couldn’t tell whose hands they were.
◆ 6 ◆
The next morning, Gameela snuck out of the apartment before anyone woke up—an easy feat in a family that slept past ten on weekends. She needed to walk the Cairo streets at the time she loved them most: early on a Friday morning in October, when the summer’s heat had finally subsided, replaced by a crisp breeze just cool enough to sting her nose, when the sprawling city was mostly still sleeping. Stepping out of the apartment building and onto the street and, crossing it, reaching the promenade that bordered the Nile, Gameela felt refreshingly clean, as if she had just stepped out of the sea and under the shade of an umbrella, like she loved to do when they used to vacation in Mersa Matruh years ago. She walked slowly down Saraya El-Gezira Street, occasionally glancing at the Nile below. Watching a boat float down the river, Gameela took a deep breath in and waited for that familiar sensation to fill her, the one that she got whenever she, as a child, strolled by the Nile with her father—the feeling of blissful belonging, an anchored identification with all that surrounded her: not only the running water, but also the Cairo dust that rendered everything a dull shade of gray, the suffocating heat that often prevented her from pursuing this same walk, the chaos of the streets crowded with peddlers and taxicabs and donkey-drawn carts and Mercedeses all maneuvering around each other with skill that decades of coexistence bred.