If his life were a movie, Muhammad would’ve been a relatable protagonist, despite his seeming colorism and vendetta against pubic hair. Like Copts, Nubians, Jews, the other four hundred thousand-odd Bedouin in Egypt and fellow minorities, his life was defined in large part by his ethnic and traditional roots. He had grown from them, and then decided he didn’t like at all where he was planted.
“What’s wrong with Egyptian girls?” I asked from the back of the cab, half-joking.
“My father, he forced me. I married one of my family, a cousin—close cousin,” said Muhammad. “My father say to me, ‘You must marry this girl.’ I said no, I didn’t love her, I didn’t want. He say, ‘No, if you didn’t want marry her, get out, don’t come in my home, don’t come in my family, get out, go to hell.’ ”
The girl, eighteen, was onboard; she didn’t want to give him time to fall in love with another woman. Now, Muhammad has two boys, sixteen and eighteen. “I married her. Not love her. I divorced her. My mother she take her, my boys with me.”
“I didn’t do this with my son,” he said. “I tell him, see what you need, what you love and go ahead, marry. I’m not force you, not like what my father do with me.”
There was less judgment in the backseat now. Muhammad looked at me. “That’s your girlfriend? Very good. Lucky. Take care of her, yeah? Inshallah.” Masha was everything he said he wanted, and I was holding her hand. The young tourist, gleaning lazy impressions from the backseat of a taxi.
“I love the American people, I love the tourists,” he said. “Also the head—big head. European women, like open. Not like the Egyptian lady.”
He glanced at Masha. “If you have a sister, I marry your sister and I give your father fifty camels? Fifty camel for pretty woman.”
“What’s the most you’ve ever heard of?”
“Thirty or forty. Fifty is the highest thing.”
No belaboring, but he wasn’t joking either. If I had offered a viable prospect, we could have made a deal right there, halfway to Alexandria, sight unseen. Yet even though it was Masha’s nonexistent sister on the line, the deal was mine, the man’s, to facilitate. Certain traditions were more resilient than others.
He had been performing for her the entire trip, but I relished the chance to watch from the outside. I felt so well wired to Masha that I thought I could absorb what she was absorbing, too. And she brought out so much more from the men who spent so much of their lives with men. It was a kind of immersive surround sound: as she listened and I watched her listen, Egypt and I shared more points of contact.
“If you find one lady for me, I give you good commission, two camels one donkey,” Muhammad said. “Two camel one donkey.”
And like this, we picked up the brass tacks of the matchmaking business. And then, he offered the single most valuable and concrete nugget of information I hadn’t known I was seeking: the camel-to-donkey conversion rate.
“Maybe ten donkeys per camel,” said Muhammad.
Soon, he might be making those calculations for his sons. The average Egyptian groom is twenty-nine, the average bride twenty-four (up five years over the past five decades)—the burgeoning youth populations across Arab countries are delaying marriage simply because it is too expensive. Sixty percent of the youth polled in a Cairo survey reported “marriage expenses” as a main hindrance. “Mismatching?” Four percent.
Both men and women in Egypt seek to marry younger than the averages. Men peg twenty-six as the ideal age for matrimony. Women picture a wedding before they turn twenty-two.
Muhammad glanced back again at Masha and me through the rearview mirror. “Maybe you married her in the future, why not?” He laughed. We smiled. He laughed again. “You’re still young.”
ON TARIQ EL-GEYSH in Iskandariya, Army Road in Alexandria, a man was waiting for a communal van taxi. We waved, hoping he would know where the famous fish souk was.
“ ‘Aarif feyn suq as-samak?” I asked.
He smiled blankly.
“As-suq . . . ?”
A nod.
“. . . as-samak?”
The man readjusted his keffiyeh, thin and white around his head. “Samak!” Fish! he exclaimed. Then he looked us over, curious—or disinterested. I tried to think of ways to use our understanding of “fish” to some mutual advantage.
Just then, a young “Can I help you?” sounded behind me.
I heard this in the Cairene accent in which p becomes b, j becomes g, q disappears and vowels are rounded like luxuriant smoke rings. Two friends in their twenties smiled at us—one big, one small—with the blamelessly chiding look you’d give a baby who stepped in a bowl of oatmeal.
“Why you pick this guy?” they said. “He can’t speak Arabic. He speaks, but not this language.” The old man was Sa‘idi, an ethnic group comprising a fifth of Egypt’s population hailing from the south, Upper Egypt. Literally “of the plateau,” the Sa‘idi can usually understand others’ Arabic far better than they are understood.
The friends knew where a few good seafood restaurants were, where the menu is the day’s Mediterranean catch laid out on ice, and after only a little coaxing they agreed to join us. We crossed the street and stuffed into a van taxi heading down Army Road. My new seatmate insisted he bear my duffel on his knees.
THEY WERE BOTH wearing black leather jackets over black sweaters. (Bright colors outed us immediately as foreign—Lebanese at closest.) Hisham was at first more talkative, built like a high school football tight end, smiling through the stubble on a kind face. Ahmed was thinner, with slightly receding short hair. Within a few weeks, we’d all be twenty-three.
In one direction, Army Road runs straight southwest down the edge of the sea. Men in twos or threes blasted music from the speakers of rented motorcycles and wove in jerky zigzags through traffic, yanking the handlebars so abruptly that the bikes nearly fell at every turn. On the beach, a couple of boys flung handfuls of sand into the water. At its southern end, the road curls like King Tutankhamen’s false beard, and at its tip: the fifteenth-century Qaitbay Citadel, built on the remains of the legendary Lighthouse of Alexandria. The fallen lighthouse was once a towering four hundred feet of wheat-colored stone, another of the world’s so-called seven ancient wonders. Now some of the rocks that formed it decorate the end of a long jetty popular on pleasant evenings. We thought to head that way to find some shisha.
“Shisha, I do!” Hisham would smoke with us, but Ahmed would not.
“No, no cigarettes, no shisha, no drinking. No exercise.”
“I do everything! You like something, I did it before. He didn’t do it.”
Ahmed smiled cordially. “I have rules and principles.”
We sat in ductile chairs around a red plastic table at the end of the promenade with the seaside castle in front of us. The sea blew lightly against the rocks where couples were sitting taking pictures, and cats pawed around unnoticed. As fish soup was delivered, and then calamari, and then something fresh and local, they guided us through familiar teenage and postcollege points of concern that were in so many ways similar to our own—money, sex, politics, our parents, the origins of the universe, Paris. The backdrop, though, at least this year, was a little different.
One week earlier, the votes of the first two of three rounds of parliamentary elections had been cast all across Egypt. Turnout had been “the highest since the days of the pharaohs,” said one electoral official famously. Ahmed had voted for the expansive Islamist alliance with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood—he admitted their faults but felt that he shared the same pure ideals. This Freedom and Justice Party won the plurality of seats, just ahead of the more orthodox option that sought to establish Sharia law in Egypt.
Hisham voted for the liberal bloc that was Seabiscuit to Western hopefuls. They came in last. And we were weeks away from January 25, the one-year anniversary of the explosive protests throughout Egypt. A week earlier, Cairo had seen the largest demonstration of Egyptian women in a hundred years. The next day, Hisham to
ok to the Alexandria streets for a women’s march. “Really, when I saw these pictures on the Internet”—of a protestor beaten and stripped to her now-famous blue bra by soldiers in Tahrir Square—“it’s a human being! You don’t do this. We did a revolution and you did this to the people?” He liked addressing the regime as if they were at the table. “Plus, it is a woman, it is a lady, you must respect her.”
There were protests in Alexandria as there were in Suez, in Luxor, and up the Nile. It was just like in Cairo, he said, only smaller. “They shoot we fight they shoot we fight they shoot we die.”
If change came, it would come slowly. “Not in one year, not in two years . . . five, six years. You know, they start to take something, something, something—after ten years you will find us like Iran.”
And then it would be time for another uprising. “I think so. Another revolution, another people begin.”
I PULLED FISH BONES out of my teeth and set them on the plastic mat covering the table. It was still warm outside even in the last days of the year, and Army Road was crowded beside the silty shore. Fully veiled women passed with shopping bags; a young guy with dangling headphones pushed a handcart loaded with bread. A thick stone wall separated the sidewalk from the sand and a little girl in pink walked along the top, her father holding her hand from below.
Our conversations braided in the way they do in four-person squares, kitty-cornered and sideways, coming together and pairing away. Face time with Americans prompted questions about sex, gay rights, God and gods and godless-ness (or was it just speaking in a second language, bypassing certain filters hardwired into the first?)—and if it didn’t, and if I felt energetic, I might steer conversations in that direction. Who knew how long we would have access to our comrades in age, and to the things we call their “worldviews” and the trains of thought that ran through them?
A man brought four glasses of crimson black tea, and after making certain several times that we wouldn’t be offended, Ahmed assumed the mantle of religious explanation.
“Where do you think this all comes from?” Ahmed asked. “Imagine that we don’t believe in God, where did this all come from? It’s big. It’s huge.”
Our paired-off conversations reunited—there wasn’t room on the table for the whole universe and another chat. “There’s only one answer, but you keep on denying and I never understand that: that someone has created this world,” he said. “If you read about, I don’t know, planets and astronauts and things, y‘ani”—the all-purpose filler word that means “it means” or “like” or “you get the picture” or “you know” or “I dunno”—“these things are so accurate.” Ahmed talked louder to muffle the roar of a looming motorcycle making its way toward us like a drunk slalomer. The truth of Creation was proven by all things created.
“If all this was another way,” I said, “then it would be another way. And that would be perfect, too.” The tinny sound of tambourines and ululation approached.
“The universe is not, how I say, fouda, y‘ani—chaos.”
At that exact moment, the motorcycle for two rounded the narrow pedestrian cul-de-sac, swerving deliberately. The driver stared me square in the eye. In an instant, he lost his balance and slammed into the ground with the bike’s full weight on his right leg. I saw it buckle as he fell.
A crowd circled around him. Everyone issued orders. The friend who had been on the backseat righted the bike, throttled the engine, and disappeared. Masha and I were far more excitable than our Egyptian friends. Here was a kid who had very ostentatiously pulled up and broken his leg in front of us as if he wanted a tip. We owed him at least a call for an ambulance.
“Actually if you do call an ambulance, they will hang up on you,” Ahmed said. “They don’t care if someone fall—they have bigger catastrophes.”
“This is not the kind of thing I want you to see in Egypt,” Hisham said, upset.
“It’s very common, to rent a cheap thing and they play these stupid, very stupid, songs and then fall. It’s very common here in Bahari,” Ahmed explained.
“As we were saying—how much sugar?” Ahmed lifted a container of grainy, off-white crystals. “This is not real sugar. It’s very not sweet.”
POLITICIANS FEIGNING MIGHT, SUGAR feigning sweetness, stupid bikers pretending to be fearless while the ladies are watching—there is posturing in Egypt in all things. Though he would have mocked the bikers were he alone with Ahmed, Hisham didn’t want us to see Egypt’s stupidity. We have that, too, I could have said, but it wouldn’t have made a difference. The pain on the injured biker’s face was matched with shame on Hisham’s.
Soon, I took a jab again at dorm-room philosophizing.
“Before, people thought the sun went around the Earth, and they said ‘Perfect! That’s great, of course it is!’ and they said ‘How could it be any other way?’ and then we discovered the other way and we say ‘Great, of course! How could it be any other way?’ ” I rambled on, hoping something would stick. “If I think of the name ‘America,’ that’s how it should sound, right?”
“Yes,” said Hisham.
“But if I was raised for twenty years hearing people say ‘ama-Reeka,’ I’d go, ‘Of course that’s how it has to sound.’ ”
“You’d say, ‘This way is the right way.’ ”
I left the analogy’s loose ends on the table, and listened to Ahmed against the noise of the evening.
“We have been given brain to think,” he said. “And I think, and I choose what suits my brain.”
Would those choices be different if he didn’t grow up in Egypt?
“Maybe. It would be harder to find.”
“Everyone says, ‘I was lucky. I got the right choice,’ ” I pushed. “What are the chances that we were all born with the right choice?”
“Yes, yes,” said Hisham, nodding at me. I knew that religion had a weaker grip on his politics and options for nights out than it did for Ahmed, and yet he seemed able to agree firmly with his friend on every point of faith and sympathize with me on every relativistic objection.
His brain could continue to suit itself to whatever it liked. Faith was so deeply rooted that it was safe from doubt and statistics; everything else was up for discussion. In a realm where human logic was inadequate, so much depended simply on comfort.
Maybe I was more comfortable being uncomfortable. “I say there’s no answer. And I say, ‘Okay! There’s no answer.’ ”
“I think that because we don’t know, I think God sends us prophets, sends us a book that may guide us to what we don’t know. Ey rayik?”
“Isn’t that too easy?” I asked. “A book with all the answers?”
“Not all the answers; the answers that we should know. I believe that there are many things that we should not know. We know only a few things,” said Hisham.
“Why seek for the hard answer, which you will not find?” Ahmed asked.
“Because it’s a possibility,” I said.
And it was such a common refrain, that in a universe where everything is possible, doubt prevails and proof is nowhere. It’s a wonderful fuel for endless seeking. But for Ahmed and Hisham, proof and possibility had nothing to do with each other.
“If there’s physical proof, what’s the point of religion?” Ahmed asked. “God would never lift a mountain for you. Because if he did, you would believe in him. Where is the difficulty?”
I thought I was the one defending difficulty, but I flip-flopped. (The Christian faithful in Cairo had a tenth-century legend to match: when the caliph challenged Jesus’s claim that mustard seed-sized faith could move mountains, a committed crowd prayed Mount Muqattam right off the ground, just a bit.) “Why does it need to be difficult?” I asked.
Life could be difficult, without being complex, Hisham said. “He give you the rules—”
“And then he test you. You fail the test, you go to hell,” said Ahmed. “You succeed it . . . life is not—it’s just a small test. A person can live hundreds and thousands of y
ears—he will live hundreds and thousands of years. But this life itself is just a small test.”
Masha looked for a summary: “So you’re saying God created us to worship him, that’s why we’re here?”
“Yes,” Hisham agreed.
“Isn’t that selfish?”
Ahmed didn’t care if it was or wasn’t a good enough reason to make a planet. “If he created us, he can do whatever he wants. I have a car, I can throw it over the mountain.”
At first they seemed like the ones who needed certainty, assurance, answers. Ahmed said he “couldn’t imagine” life—this terrestrial installment of it—without a clear, greater purpose. But at its dual core, faith depended on an absence of certainty. What gave life meaning was its meaninglessness. What made all the uncertainty worthwhile was the certainty that it was.
Beyond that, we were trespassing into the kinds of uncertainty that can never be reconciled. Hisham chided me, “You try to think like a god! Why you do this?” He was right that there was some hefty seed of arrogance in all this seeking—in the need to quell my own doubts on my own.
Masha looked back to the biker, still contorted and grimacing silently. “Does he want Advil?”
“Happy pills?” Ahmed joked. “I know, I know—painkillers.” He didn’t think the man would accept them.
“If he were drinking . . .” I offered.
“It would make the pain go away,” said Ahmed.
WHAT IS BAD for dough is good for friendship—after kneading our most deeply held beliefs for hours, we were lighter on our feet with one another. We didn’t have to tiptoe around potential sensitivities. The sun dropped and we walked to a man-filled café down the unstraight city streets. Over more shisha and more tea, we could refocus our brain trust from the purpose of human existence and the ramifications of chaos theory on predetermination back to handholding and sex and their values on our respective continents.
The Alexandrian duo delivered us to the train to Cairo, and we exchanged nothing but silly looks and the kind of hugs-without-ego that America’s men have not yet adopted. No phone numbers, no Facebook—the coulds of connection can become the shoulds of Good Friendship, whose neglect brings a special kind of sadness. But it wasn’t deliberate. It wasn’t that we had weighed potential and responsibility and kept our phones in our pockets—we just didn’t think to ask one another for anything else. We understood one another, I thought. And there could be no neglect of something so perfectly frozen in time.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 21