“I am sorry,” he said, choosing his words in careful English. “Very sorry you could not meet. He would like to meet the khateeba of his first grandson.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I said, without knowing what else to say. In the background, a radio had been tuned to a recitation of the Quran. A male voice chanted verses across static, in a tense, stripped, longing melody that is now as familiar to me as my bones. I saw a girl named Saraa coming toward me from across the room. We had met at the cousin’s engagement party; with her wide dark eyes and expressive mouth, she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. She had been happy then. Now when she kissed my cheek, her face was wet. I took her hand. She led me to a room where five or six other young women were sitting together. In hushed voices we introduced ourselves, giggling at the inadequate words to which we were limited.
Marwa, Uncle Ahmad’s daughter, began reciting a prayer for her grandfather’s soul. The other girls cupped their hands in front of their faces. I did the same. It’s a strange feeling, praying to your hands, filling the air between them with words. We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it permeates the infinitely small—the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you. I spent hours there with these women and girls whose names I couldn’t yet keep straight, but who were already my family. They told stories I didn’t understand, laughing and weeping by turns. I went back and forth to the kitchen for tissues and glasses of water, or sat silently, hoping they somehow understood what I didn’t know how to say.
After that day, whenever I went to a family gathering an arm would slip through mine and pull me away to be kissed and fussed over by the other girls. As I learned more of their language, their conversations would burst colorfully to life; they were articulate, funny, frank, opinionated about news and politics. Marwa likes to tell the story of my odd entrance into the family. “One day she danced at a wedding, the next she sat through a funeral, and on the third she was one of us,” she says, usually with a laugh. And that is how I felt.
Writing Muslim on employment and visa forms was harder than I expected. Modest as it seemed, this was the first public affirmation of faith I’d ever made. Finding the courage to write those six little letters took a long time. After this small triumph, I was shocked when the forms were returned to me labeled Christian. Religion is not a private affair in Egypt; if you have a Christian name, the government will not acknowledge your conversion to Islam until you take the shaheda in front of a state-approved sheikh. I had to laugh. In a bizarre, autocratic way it reminded me not to take myself too seriously—as monumental as religion is to a believer, its public face is usually ridiculous. If I was going to survive as a Muslim in a Muslim country, I needed to develop a healthy appreciation for the absurd.
There was no avoiding it—I would have to go to Al-Azhar, one of Sunni Islam’s most highly respected judicial institutions and the oldest continuously operative university on earth, for a state-sponsored conversion. I had a reason beyond bureaucratic necessity: tired of being questioned by police when we were out together, Omar and I had decided to “register the certificate,” the first of several steps necessary to formalize an Egyptian marriage. Registering the certificate, or katb el kiteb, refers to the drawing up and signing of a marriage contract, in which the price of the dowry is fixed, the terms of divorce decided, and the legal status of any shared property set out. In some senses katb el kiteb more closely resembles a western prenuptial agreement than a marriage contract; while a couple is considered religiously married after they sign their kiteb, they are not considered socially married—and are expected to abstain—until their wedding.
The period between the registration and the wedding is confusing for young couples, who are married in the eyes of God yet prevented by their families from spending too much time alone. This waiting period has no basis in religion and in modern Egypt it has become an excuse to throw an ostentatious party between a couple’s engagement and their wedding. Omar and I decided to register for a different reason: we wanted to travel together, which was legally impossible unless we could present a kiteb at military checkpoints and hotels. If I married Omar as a Christian, I would have fewer rights as his wife. If we wanted to travel together, we had to draw up a marriage contract; and before we could draw up a marriage contract, I had to “legally” convert. It was a numbingly complex set of requirements, as only an Islamic police state can demand or deliver. And it necessitated the discussion of my name.
“Call her Zeinab,” was Uncle Sherif’s suggestion, because he liked me. His mother, Omar’s grandmother, was another Zeinab, and his daughter another. It was a somewhat old-fashioned name, after a magnetic and fearless granddaughter of the Prophet, and unusual in a generation of Laylas and Yasmines.
“When Zeinab was a baby, the Prophet Muhammad would carry her around during prayer,” said Omar when the name was offered. “He would put her on the ground as he knelt and pick her up again as he stood.” Standing nearby, Ibrahim cradled a newborn cousin, so the scene was not hard to imagine. Though Omar was trying to be helpful, the subject of my Muslim name made him uncomfortable.
“The name Willow is not anti-Islamic,” he said, with a protective glance in my direction. “It’s a kind of tree. She cannot leave her name, too . . .” The kamen (too) gave him away; that sentence was supposed to end, because she left so much to be here, she should not be asked to do this as well. Since I was not Egyptian, it wouldn’t quite be as bad as all that—I wasn’t legally required to change my name, as an Egyptian convert would be. And like the other discreetly Muslim expatriates I knew, the world would go on calling me by my English name. Zeinab would become my name only to those who found Willow too difficult to pronounce.
“Zeinab is a tree as well!” Uncle Sherif pointed out. “A small tree, fragrant—”
“A tree in Heaven,” said Omar.
Though I was touched by my future in-laws’ eagerness to help, I was not enthusiastic about the idea of formal conversion. It felt insulting, as though the shaheda I recited with God as my witness was not good enough for the dry old men in turbans who oversaw the intersection of religion and state. Whether one’s Muslim name is made legal or not, formal conversion requires the convert to choose one. While the idea of taking a new name was symbolically satisfying, it also made me feel divided. I already had a second name. Willow was an adolescent derivative of Gwendolyn, my legal name, which was too long a word to attach to a child in conversation. Willow stuck. Adding another name seemed redundant.
“I have too many names,” I said to Omar.
“God has ninety-nine,” he said, smiling and squeezing my hand. “You’ll have three. That’s not so bad.”
The next morning Omar and I tried to make our way through the extensive campus of Al-Azhar. We shuttled between buildings in which we could and could not wear shoes, looking for one Ish’har al Islam labeled el Aganeb, “foreigners declaring Islam.” We were both on edge. I was irritated by the whole process; it was more Egyptian bureaucracy. Had I taken a step back, I might have felt privileged to formally declare my faith in such a historic place. Instead I felt vulnerable. By the time we found the right building, I was close to panic. Conversion is a personal process, and to bureaucratize it is, I still think, a little cruel. The hours between my arrival at Al-Azhar and when I slept that night are hours I still find hard to explain.
I was ushered into a room with a sheikh in it. He seemed inanimate, smiling on a couch, a creature with the spiritual gravity of a small sun. I had never met a sheikh before. He was talking with an American woman in a head scarf who seemed to be organizing some kind of event. They finished their conversation as I filled out the requisite paperwork. (Why do you wish to convert to Islam? The question seemed unanswerable. I scribbled something complimentary and generic.) Then the sheikh turned to me.
“Hello, Gwendolyn,” he said, in perfect English.
&
nbsp; I wish I could remember more of our conversation. He asked me a series of questions and made a few encouraging remarks. When I stood up again he was still smiling. This is what I took away from what he told me: you were put on this earth to do good, and you must remember that duty every day.
“You have chosen a name?”
“Zeinab.”
“Sister Zeinab, when you repeat the shaheda, you will become like a little baby. Imagine!” He laughed. “You will start from nothing. What you do with that is between you and God.”
Afterward, I was asked to sign a ledger thick with the signatures of other converts and the dates of their announcement. Seeing hundreds of names—British, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian—I began to calm down. Until that moment, Islam had meant something very private to me—it defined my relationship with God and with Omar. I had never felt part of a world religion with over a billion adherents; during the silent inward process of conversion, I don’t even think I realized that this is what Islam is. Yet here I was, looking at the names of men and women who were now akh and ukht, my theological brothers and sisters. The world seemed substantially smaller.
Now that I was an “official” Muslim, Omar and I could do our katb el kiteb, giving us the freedom to travel together. It should have been romantic, analogous to getting a marriage license at the courthouse, but since I was a foreigner, this, too, was tangled in bureaucracy. First, I had to get official permission from the U.S. Embassy. It was delivered with sour congratulations; they probably assumed I was a gullible woman being duped into a green-card marriage. Then Omar and I had to take this permission slip, along with my Azhar-approved record of conversion, and go to another warren of government offices. When it finally came time to sit down with a notary and draw up our marriage contract, I was hot and irritated.
“Name?” he asked briskly. He spoke in slow, formal Arabic so that I would understand.
“Gwendolyn Wilson.”
“Where were you born?”
“New Jersey, Al Willayet Al Mutaheda Al Amrikaya.”
“Yoo Ess Ayy.” He abbreviated my sarcastic elongation and smiled, eyes twinkling. “Dowry?”
“One Egyptian pound.” Enough to buy tamarind juice when this is all over, I thought.
He nodded, jotting away on a series of forms. “One Egyptian pound now, two in case, God forbid, of divorce.”
Omar took a pound note out of his wallet and presented it to me with a grin. “Itfaddali,” he said, You are welcome to it.
“How much cash do you have on you?” I said. “I should have asked for more.”
The notary, revealing a decent grasp of spoken English, laughed.
Omar and I signed all four marriage contracts—one for him, one for me, one for the government, and one for Allah knew who—and with a few official stamps, we were husband and wife in the eyes of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The contract laid out the terms of our marriage: I was entitled to a slew of things if Omar took a second wife (Egyptian men can legally marry the Islamic four), my dowry reverted to him if we broke things off before the wedding, et cetera. As the almost-wife of an Egyptian, I could be fast-tracked for a long-term resident visa or citizenship, if I liked. I suddenly had rights in Egypt, not as a member of the foreign elite, but as a demi-Egyptian.
Omar and I left the Ministry of Paperwork and walked into the street. Dust hung in the air and settled in layers on the buildings, blunting their outlines. Omar took my hand and kissed it—he could do that publicly now.
“We did it, ya meraati,” he said; Oh, my wife. I laughed. With that, Omar and I were technically married before we were publicly engaged. Today one of our running jokes is that we are mitgowezeen awee—very married. Adding together all the social and legal rituals, we have been married three or four separate times. This marked the first.
Meetings in the Desert
Eliza removed her husband as soon as possible for the interior, and some account must now be given of their adventures. Her pen is . . . curbed only by her fear of the Turkish Censor, and by her desire to conceal her forebodings from friends at home.
—E. M. Forster, “Eliza in Egypt”
OMAR AND I LEFT THE CITY SHORTLY AFTERWARD ON OUR FIRST trip together. We took a public bus—taped Quran blaring over tinny speakers, dust, solemn men spitting sunflower-seed husks on the floor—six hours southwest into the Sahara, to a small oasis called Farafra. When we arrived it was two in the morning and the surrounding plains were a startling blue-white: there was a moon, and it had turned the sand the color of ice. Feral dogs watched us uneasily as we, alarmed by the utter silence after the constant noise of Cairo and the road, walked from the bus stop toward our hotel.
In the sunlight of the following morning, Farafra took on a more earthly character. It was a series of dirt roads lined with one- and two-story buildings, punctuated by cultivated groves of date palms fed by cold-water springs. After wandering around the town—most tourists stayed in locally-run hotels along its outskirts and didn’t venture into the commercial and agricultural district, so we attracted some attention—Omar and I decided to take a jeep trip into the deep desert. This part of the Sahara, known as the White Desert, was crossable but not habitable, and had been left fairly pristine. We heard that there were limestone formations twenty or thirty kilometers toward the interior that were worth seeing. Saad, a famous local guide, was making a trip out to one of his camps in the area, and we hitched a ride with him. One of his sons, a boy of five or six, napped in my lap on the way out, oblivious to the spine-wracking jolts of off-roading over sand. Half an hour later, feeling limber, we arrived.
Away from the oasis, the landscape had changed—the sand was the color of cream, streaked here and there with drifts of darker matter. It rolled away in small dunes, dotted with arches and hills of white limestone that crumbled when touched. As I walked around, dazed, and stumbled on a darker drift, I discovered that what looked like patches of black sand were really the broken remnants of fossilized shells, left over from a time when the Sahara was a shallow sea, millions of years ago. This is what the limestone was made of. After that, every time I looked upward I had visions of long-extinct fish and huge Paleolithic sharks swarming in the air above my head.
We spent the afternoon scrambling over dunes and falling down, laughing as though drunk, and in the evening we joined Saad at his camp. There was a bonfire going and clustered around it were ten or twelve American tourists, half a dozen Cairo literati, and a few men from Saad’s tribe, all passing cans of beer back and forth. A hand drum and a reed flute were produced, and the Bedouin and a couple of the more politically-minded Cairenes began to sing Palestinian liberation songs. The tourists, blithely unaware of the content of the lyrics, clapped along. Omar and I looked at each other and smiled, our expressions ironic but without bitterness. We had already learned that as often as not, these oblivious collisions between westerners and nonwesterners were as comical as they were tragic. They must be comical; they betray a mutual impotence that is devastating if it cannot be comical. Omar took my hand.
We left the fireside and climbed up one of the limestone embankments to look at the stars. The bright earth below us threw blue half-light on our faces.
“When I was a child,” said Omar, “I used to imagine that I could travel through space in whatever room I was in. I imagined I could see stars like this out my window.”
I looked at him without remembering to be American, and for the first time did not see an Egyptian. I saw my partner. He had been a little boy, he had grown up, he had dappled the air with stars; he would one day be an old man—if I was lucky, and everything held together, I would grow old with him. To be trusted with the history of another person seemed like the best—the only—privilege there was. I understood the words God was said to have spoken to Amir Abdul Qadir, the Algerian scholar, while he was in exile in the nineteenth century: “Today, I lower your lineage and raise up Mine.” There was a divinity insensible of ethnic heritage, a truth hidden but not er
ased by geography. It demanded to be recognized and protected.
“I’m going to start wearing a scarf,” I said.
Omar was silent for a moment. We had never talked about the hijab, or head scarf; he had never expected or encouraged me to wear it. My comment must have startled him considerably. He leaned over and kissed my forehead, twice. “What made you decide this?” he asked.
“I want to do something to make this separate from everything else,” I said. “I want to give you something bigger than anything I’ve given anyone else.” It was an impulse more spiritual than religious; hijab lent itself to my purposes, rather than I to its. Having read the relevant verses of Quran and hadith, as well as the arguments of major scholars, I remain unconvinced that hijab is fard, or obligatory, as opposed to sunnah, preferred. My decision, made as it was in that particular moment, was almost defensive; it was a way to say that anyone who could not see Omar as he was would not see me as I was.
Over the past several years my relationship with the veil has shifted, yet persisted; it has become a way to define intimacy in a wider sense, and in the circle of men who have seen my hair I have included some of Omar’s and my close friends. When I am in the United States, I still go bareheaded in some circumstances. In other words, I have never been a model muhajeba, but in a sense this has allowed me to maintain an appreciation for the veil that might otherwise have faded after the inconvenience that comes with wearing it settled in.
After I’d spoken, Omar was silent again. “Where did you come from?” he asked finally. “How did I find you?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said, laughing.
He called me aziza, the feminine of “precious,” a word that has none of the ironic implications of its English counterpart. A word used to describe an anxiously awaited infant, a beloved friend, a well in the desert.
The Butterfly Mosque Page 8