The Butterfly Mosque

by G. Willow Wilson

  “I can see why we do this,” I said.

  When the sun began to drop into the Nile, Jo and Omar and I took a cab to Sohair’s flat for iftar, the meal eaten to break the daily fast. According to prophetic tradition, iftar should be a modest meal of dates and milk. Egyptians ignore this. Syrup-coated butter pastries round out nightly feasts of stuffed eggplant, mutton, and rice spiced with cinnamon and fat raisins; despite a day’s worth of dehydration, thick apricot nectar is the drink of choice.

  “Sugar for energy, and salt to retain fluids,” Ibrahim reasoned as we set the table. Jo helped Sohair in the kitchen; I heard her laugh. Outside, the call for sunset prayer rang out.

  “They’ve started,” said Omar, handing me a glass. “Ramadan karim!”

  “Allahu akram,” I said, repeating the traditional response I’d learned just that morning. Ramadan is generous; God is the most generous. I raised the glass to my lips to take a polite sip.

  It was the best glass of anything, ever. My senses, muted all day, clamored to be heard again, to taste and be full. The jumbled euphoria of fast-breaking—part chemical, part spiritual—was unlike any other sensation I could name. I slumped in my chair and let my head roll back.

  “Oh God,” I said.

  They all laughed. Jo poked me in the ribs and winked. I was happy with everything: the people sitting around Sohair’s tiny wooden table; the drowsy, flushed desert outside the window. I was happy, also, with myself. I had lived up to my choices. If I could fast one day, I could fast another twenty-eight—I could do it all again the next year. And the year after. For the first time since I converted, I saw a satisfying little glimmer of what the future might look like. Choosing the way you live is choosing to live. From that night onward, Ramadan to me was about having gratitude—for revelation, for prophesy, for the sheer joy of being human in the world.

  After the food was eaten and the leftovers cleared away, we lingered over tea. Omar took out his oud and played Arabic folksongs full of quarter-tones that do not exist in western music: fleeting, wry sounds. Ibrahim showed Jo and me his electric guitar, explaining all the knobs and buttons the nonmusical have trouble understanding.

  “I would like to learn to play the piano as well. I started, but,” here he gestured at an old Casio keyboard sitting on a shelf, “that thing is not very inspiring. I would like a real piano.”

  “I wish there was such a thing as teleportation,” I said.

  “Aeda?”

  “Making things disappear magically from one place and reappear in another.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “Why?”

  “At my parents’ house in Colorado, we have a huge old piano that no one can play. You would love it.”

  “Perhaps if I come visit you one day.”

  “You should. I want you to see our mountains.”

  He grinned, then looked away with a pensive expression. “I have met many Americans and they are all friendly and open-minded. I don’t understand, then, why—” I’m not sure if he finished the sentence. “I try to remember this every time I see what the United States is doing to the Middle East or I watch your news—which is very depressing—but it is hard not to be angry. To become closed. There is so much lying.”

  In situations like this I always want to defend my country, and every rational way I might do so evaporates.

  “The American media is much more radical than the American people,” I said weakly. This was something I couldn’t control but I still felt guilty. I could see Ibrahim standing in his living room with his prayer beads in one hand and his electric guitar slung over the opposite shoulder, and think, He proves the world isn’t so bad yet. Yet there was still Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the net closing around Iran, and the encroaching disaster in Israel-Palestine. When such ugly conflicts were so close by, who in Egypt could feel entirely safe? Looking at Ibrahim, I thought, this Middle East is either being born or dying, and which it will be depends largely on people who will never see him play his guitar.

  “It would make more sense if you saw it.” I said. “If you saw America itself.”

  “Someday in sha’Allah.”

  “In sha’Allah.”

  In order to be understood, feelings that are universal—love, mourning, joy—must be expressed in a mutually comprehensible way. This should be easy. If the feelings are universal, their expression should be as well. In reality, they aren’t. In the beginning, Omar was more conscious of this than I was; he saw that the only customs we had in common were Islam and rock music, and that these intangibles had to be cobbled together into the foundation of a third culture. Religion and art aren’t terrible tools to start with, when it comes to creating a peace for two in the midst of a war. But even with them, the struggle for that peace would be painful and exhausting. Sometimes it felt like I was being asked to unstring my bones and pass through the eye of a needle. The image was constantly in my mind. Everything we thought, everything we did or said or wore or espoused unthinkingly, had to be brought forth and reconciled. In the process, old symbols were given a new vocabulary. That vocabulary would become the language we spoke in the culture we created for ourselves.

  It began with the symbols I had etched into my skin.

  “Ben told me you have an interesting tattoo,” Omar said one night not long after we were engaged. “Is it true?”

  I knew which one he meant. “Yes. Does it bother you?”

  Omar was smiling. “No. But can I see it?”

  I turned away from him and lifted the hem of my shirt so that he could see the lower part of my back. I wondered if the tattoo would shock him, or whether he would be able to read my good intentions in the ink. He was silent for a moment.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said finally. I let out a breath. “Did an American do this? No.”

  “Yes, actually.”

  “But the style is very good. You didn’t write it yourself?”

  “No, no. I found it online.”

  “Why Al Haq?” He touched the first line, the letter alif, where the skin was smooth but raised like a scar. I closed my eyes as he traced the word with his index finger.

  “I like Al Haq,” I murmured. “Truth without untruth, truth without opposite. The real that encompasses even the unreal, the most-real. And it comes next to Ash-Shahid, the Witness, which I also like.” I opened one eye. “But Ash-Shahid has more letters so it would’ve hurt more.”

  He smiled. “When you got this tattoo—were you a Muslim then?”

  “No,” I answered. “This is over two years old. I got it when I knew I would convert someday. I wasn’t ready then, but I had the tattoo done to remind me.”

  “Amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “I had no idea such a story was possible in America.”

  “Neither does anyone else back home, I’m sure. You were the first person I told.”

  He looked surprised. “Really?”

  “Yes. People at home think I have a cultural or academic interest in Islam. I have six Qurans, not one of which I bought for myself, and at least as many books of Sufi poetry, which were also all gifts, but if I told the people who gave them to me that I’ve converted, they would all be horrified.”

  Omar’s face darkened. “Is it so unacceptable?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He touched the back of my hand. “I hope you know that this is going to be very, very hard,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  * * *

  A simple team-building exercise given to the staff at Language School showed us what we were up against. The principal was an Egyptian woman who had taught for years in the United States. It’s safe to assume, then, that when she gave us this exercise she knew exactly what she was doing. We were given a handout with a short scenario: a woman whose husband is always away on business goes out at night to meet a lover. A known madman is on the loose. At the end of the evening the woman asks her lover to escort her home in case the madman appears. The lover refuses. The woman goes to a fri
end’s house nearby and asks her friend to walk with her; hearing the reason why the woman is out so late, the friend refuses. The woman goes on alone. At the river separating her neighborhood from her lover’s, she asks a ferryman to take her across. Because she has no money to pay him, the ferryman refuses. As a result, the woman is trapped on the wrong side of the river and killed by the madman.

  “Who,” said the principal, her eyes twinkling, “is responsible for her death? Rank the characters by the order of their guilt.”

  After a few moments of silence, like a communally gathered breath, the room erupted into shouting. The westerners all came down on the same side: obviously, the madman was number one, because he had committed the murder. After that, the friend, lover, ferryman, and wife came in various orders, and the husband, that gray absent figure, floated at the bottom of the list.

  The Egyptians were aghast at this interpretation. Clearly, the wife was number one, as she was the one who decided to have an affair and leave her house late at night in the first place. The madman, they said, was insane, and could not be held fully accountable for his actions. Most of them put him at number six. Hearing this, all the Western women—including me—nearly went crazy ourselves. Our feminist principles had been insulted and we argued, patronized, and went red in the face to defend them. Some of the women looked shaken to the point of tears. Here was Arab culture, as chauvinist as everyone had warned us it was, staring us in the face after we had so generously assumed that beneath the differences in language and custom there were westerners waiting to emerge.

  I looked at Omar; he held my eyes for a moment and then shook his head, as if to say, The bridge you want to cross doesn’t exist. We could do no more than look; our engagement was not public knowledge. I felt it wouldn’t be fair to my family if strangers knew about my engagement before they did. Here was another river that couldn’t be crossed except by telling small lies.

  I was pulled aside by Hanan, an Arabic teacher, who seemed eager to explain why the Egyptians thought as they did. The wife was the only one directly responsible for her actions, she said. No one forced her to have an affair, and emphatically, no one forced her to leave the house when she knew a madman was loose. Next to her in accountability was the husband. He had failed in his duty to his wife and should be ashamed of himself for neglecting her and, by doing so, indirectly causing her death. This startled me. It was a common thread in the argument being made by my Egyptian colleagues, both men and women: most of them had ranked the husband at number two and spoke of him with as much disgust as if he had been a real person. The westerners, on the other hand, had no idea where to put him, and usually stuck him between four and six.

  While the westerners were arguing literal responsibility—who wielded the knife and who could have helped the woman but didn’t—the Egyptians were arguing moral responsibility. Morally, the madman was like a force of nature; he couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong and his actions were indiscriminate. The woman could distinguish between right and wrong, and had chosen to put her own life in danger for an inadequate reason. If her husband, who was responsible for her physical and emotional happiness, had neglected her, then he was at fault for encouraging his wife to seek happiness elsewhere.

  I realized why the Egyptian teachers were so bewildered by our western anger: in their eyes we were arguing that cheating on one’s spouse is not wrong and that a husband has no emotional responsibility to his wife. But our argument was about personal rights, not social responsibilities. To us, both the husband and wife had the right to make their own decisions. If the husband decided his career took priority over his marriage, that was his prerogative; if the wife looked for emotional fulfillment elsewhere, that was hers. Spousal responsibility never entered the argument.

  In the end we settled on a compromise. The madman was slotted at number one for wielding the knife, the wife at number two for knowingly endangering her own life, the husband at number three for encouraging her to do so, the lover at number four for being a general bastard, the ferryman at number five for being uncharitable (a sin in Islam), and the friend, whose motives were questionable, at number six. We had argued as though the characters in question were waiting outside the door for our verdict. I was surprised that it took so little to divide a group of intelligent people straight down the middle, precisely along cultural lines, without exception. While everybody laughed about it afterward, and talked about the incident for weeks (“The ferryman! The ferryman!” was a standard greeting for a while), it was clear we were all unsettled. Everyone knew this compromise was not limited to the hypothetical.

  This was not the last time Omar and I would look at each other from across a bewildering gap. It would open up suddenly, beneath our feet. Alone, our origins didn’t seem to matter, but as soon as we found ourselves in a group he became an Egyptian and I became an American. It was automatic. Aside from love—which made us more sensitive to cultural differences, not less—there was nothing we could take for granted. When I talk about those early months, most people still make the optimistic assumption: surely there were things to build on. Surely at some point the expectations of two cultures must intersect. And I am forced to say: no. There was nothing. Violently, utterly nothing.

  Jo was often the only one who understood what it was like to navigate this interworld, the little fissures between East and West where no clear common values held sway. As the weeks passed, we developed the shared rituals of outsiders. The most hallowed of these was Punch Fundie. It was a game modeled on Punch Buggy—wherein you slug the person next to you if you spot a VW Bug while you’re driving—but modified to fit the more common roadside appearance of a fundamentalist. According to the rules, a fundamentalist was anyone with the telltale beard but no mustache and a galibayya that stopped short of his ankles, or a woman who wore the all-encompassing black niqab, leaving only her eyes visible. All car rides were fair game. One smoggy day in a cab downtown, I felt two hard punches slam into my right arm just above the elbow.

  “What the hell?” I turned to glare at Jo. Her eyes were wide. She pointed out my window.

  “Punch Fundie and Punch Buggy,” she said in an awed voice. I looked: sure enough, cruising alongside us was a fundamentalist driving a yellow VW Bug. He frowned into the oncoming traffic, sporting a calloused prayer bruise and an unkempt beard that crept up his cheeks like Spanish moss. We gaped out the window, unable to speak. When the car pulled away we pressed our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing, tears rolling down our cheeks. The whole thing—the city, the great world, the conflicts we faced—could not be mortally serious as long as there were fundamentalists in hippie cars. Jo and I spent the rest of the night breaking into spontaneous grins, confident, for once, that things were going to turn out all right.

  The Bowl of Fire

  He gave me a bowl

  and I saw:

  the soul has this shape . . .

  help me now,

  being in the middle of being partly in my self,

  and partly outside.

  —Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

  ON MY OWN, IN SMALL, QUIET INCREMENTS, I BEGAN TO inhabit Islam. Once I wrestled my ego into obedience and faced Mecca, I began to understand the reason for “organized” worship, in which ritual innovation is discouraged. When you join an organized religion, you do not worship in isolation, even when you are alone. In Islam, prayer is a full-body experience: you stand, bow, stand, kneel with your forehead to the ground, and stand again, repeating a variation of this cycle several times. You become part of a mathematical algorithm linking earthly and heavenly bodies. Your calendar is based on the phases of the moon, your daily prayers on the movement of the sun across the sky. Mecca becomes an idea with a location. You orient yourself toward it not with a compass, but with a Great Circle, calculating the shortest distance between the spot where you stand and the Kaaba, the shrine in Mecca believed to be built by Abraham. In most parts of the United States, you face north, over the f
rozen pole.

  Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night of Ramadan, drifts—its precise date is unknown. The iconoclasm laid down by Muhammad was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones. Ramadan, Muharram, the Eids; you associate no religious event with the tang of snow in the air, or spring thaw, or the advent of summer. God permeates these things—as the saying goes, Allah is beautiful, and He loves beauty—but they are transient. Forced to concentrate on the eternal, you begin to see, or think you see, the bones and sinews of the world beneath its seasonal flesh. The sun and moon become formidable clockwork. They are transient also, but hint at the dark planes that stretch beyond the earth in every direction, full of stars and dust, toward a retreating, incomprehensible edge.

  There are hundreds of metaphors about the effect of religion on the religious. Religious experience is so abstract that drawing concrete parallels is often the only way to explain it. To me, religion was like a pill: once swallowed, it began to work in ways I could neither control nor anticipate, nor unswallow. If I left Islam tomorrow, I would remain chemically altered by it. Rituals that seem arbitrary to the irreligious—the precise wording and physical attitudes of prayer, the process of ablution—are carefully formulated tonics. Almost unconsciously, I was being changed by them.

  The change manifested first in my dream life. Dreams have always been important to me—since childhood I’ve remembered mine almost every night. Together, they form a kind of parallel personal history or unconscious narrative. Dream symbols figured largely in the events leading up to my conversion. As more and more Muslim rituals became habit, the character and content of my dreams began to alter. There was less clutter, fewer indecipherable gibberish images. What was left came into focus.