The Butterfly Mosque

by G. Willow Wilson

  It was true. Sohair’s immediate neighbors, who were familiar with my situation, were very kind to me. And I saw my own neighbors being kind to each other. But it was small comfort.

  A few days after we moved in, I woke up to a ringing doorbell, so late at night that it was almost early. Unnerved, I stayed as I was, cocooned in the stained blue quilt that matched my stained blue mattress. After a pause, the ringing continued. Because she could sleep through anything, Jo had taken the room looking out to the busy road that ran along the Nile, so I wasn’t surprised when her light stayed off. Fumbling in the dark, I pulled on a robe and went to the door. Through the peephole I saw a guard and one of the local zabelleen, the Cairene untouchables, whose lives and livelihood revolve around the collecting and sorting of the city’s garbage. I hesitated in the doorway. By Egyptian rules, I was well within my rights not to answer; I was a woman, they were two men, it was the middle of the night. On the other hand, refusing to answer did not necessarily mean the men would leave. Since one of the men was a military guard, it could be important—I wouldn’t have put it past the local authorities to announce a fire by sending long-winded delegations door-to-door. I opened mine a crack.

  “Aiwa?” I asked coldly.

  “Mise’ al’khayr hadritik,” responded the guard, using the polite form of you. The zabell stood with his eyes politely downcast. The two men didn’t look especially threatening, so I stayed to listen. The zabell, I gathered, after his request was simplified several times, wanted to buy an ancient, broken vacuum we had found in a closet and put outside to be salvaged. I stared at him.

  “Just take it,” I said, baffled.

  “Really?” asked the guard.

  “Yes, for God’s sake, good-bye.”

  He apologized and I shut the door and went back to bed.

  The next morning, I caught up with Omar in the staff room at school and told him the story.

  “The weirdest thing happened last night,” I said, trying to decide whether I should be casual or serious and settling on casual. “A guard came to our door at two in the morning with one of the zabelleen, trying to buy that old vacuum we found.”

  He leaned forward. “What?” There was carefully restrained anger in his voice. I tried to hide my uneasiness.

  “Yeah, they showed up like it was the middle of the afternoon on market day—”

  “He came to your door in the middle of the night with another man?”

  I could sense something was very wrong.

  “Yes.”

  Omar stood up abruptly. “I have to make a phone call,” he said, taking out his mobile.

  “Was that bad?” I asked, feeling ridiculous.

  “That was a test,” he said curtly, and headed for the door.

  On the bus home I pressed him for details, but he was evasive. Eventually I gathered that the military guards who patrolled our complex liked to press their advantage with inhabitants they perceived to be weak. They were attempting nothing so overt as rape or theft, but something psychological—in international politics and on their own streets, westerners bullied them; now they had a chance to bully vulnerable western women. Better yet, one of these women was about to become a member of an Egyptian family, which presented its own unique possibilities.

  Outside the luxurious world of expatriates and the westernized elite, a middle-class Egyptian family functions as a chain forged to protect intangible (and for a westerner, unthinkable) virtues like honor and status—which, in reality, represent that family’s influence over whatever tiny corner of the Egyptian socioeconomy they’ve managed to carve out for themselves. The guards had identified me as my new family’s weakest link. Now they were out to discover how far I could be pushed and, by extension, how far Omar could be pushed.

  Omar, as it turned out, could not be pushed at all. He went to the local administrative office, and the result was the sentencing of the guard in question to eight days in prison. Omar came back to our apartment and told Jo and me this, as a reassurance.

  “Prison?” Jo looked at me anxiously.

  I bit my lip. I wanted to resolve the situation but I couldn’t stand the thought of sending anyone behind that awful half-kilometer of dun walls and barbed wire.

  “I’m not sure anyone needs to go to prison over this,” I said. “I really feel like he was just being an idiot to see what he could get away with—I don’t think he was out to hurt anyone.”

  “It will teach him a lesson,” muttered Omar, but I could see he was beginning to waver. Later, he would argue with the guard’s commanding officer on his behalf, and the sentence would be reduced to a pay suspension.

  Despite Jo’s and my fervent prayers, the guard was not transferred to another building. He continued to sit in our filthy concrete lobby like a two-legged Cerberus, chanting the Quran and glaring at us with open hostility as we passed. Relief only came in the early morning, when he slept on his stool with a blanket pulled over his head. We learned to tiptoe around him when we left for school in the chill of seven a.m.

  After this falling-out with our guard, Jo and I began to rely heavily on the goodwill of the local grocers, who ran a duken on a side street near our building. Since there was no local coffeehouse, possibly due to the influence of the fundamentalists, the duken was the default center of local life. Everyone passed through its doors to buy their eggs, olives, cheese, and bread, as well as cooking oil and matches and other household necessities. For some reason—I don’t know what, though I am thankful for it—the grocers took pity on us and it was because of them that our stay in Tura was not completely unbearable.

  I was nervous around them at first; I had learned better than to be too open with any man to whom I had not been formally introduced. For the first few weeks I practically snuck around the store, collecting all the things I needed instead of asking the shop boy, and avoiding eye contact whenever possible. It was not always an easy maneuver. In college I took modern standard Arabic, the language of the press; the colloquial dialect of Egypt used a completely different vocabulary. In order to understand the label on a packet of beans, I had to stare at it for several minutes, which gave other people in the shop ample time to stop whatever they were doing and stare at me. One day, when I was scrutinizing the labels above a row of spice jars, I heard a voice over my shoulder.

  “Erfa,” it said, and a hand pointed to one of the jars. I looked up wildly. It was one of the grocers. He was about thirty, had a mustache, and was smiling mildly. “Ismaha erfa,” he repeated.

  “Shokran,” I muttered.

  “Afwan,” said the grocer gently. “W’da camoon.

  Camoon.” “Camoon,” I repeated, cumin. Erfa, I was fairly certain, was cinnamon.

  He nodded. “Sah, hadritik.”

  It was the beginning of the pattern that would characterize our interdependence, for such a relationship can’t really be called friendship in the sense that we mean it in the West. Jo and I shopped at Mohammad and Namir’s duken, and they taught us street Arabic. We would come in, together or separately, and after wishing us good morning or good afternoon or good so-late-it-can-only-be-Cairo, Mohammad and Namir would quiz us.

  “What’s this?” Mohammad would ask, holding something up.

  “That’s an egg,” I would say.

  “Red or white?”

  “Red.”

  “And this?”

  “Cheese.”

  “What kind?”

  “Falamank? I don’t know for sure.”

  “It is falamank, and it’s fresh, have a little.”

  They were always courtly and mild, and by treating us this way, in front of other customers, I think they helped chisel away at some of the suspicion that our neighbors had built up about us. Mohammad and Namir subtly defended our honor by insisting that within the confines of their shop we should be treated like Arab women; that is to say, with the proper degree of respect. I first noticed it when I was at the store one afternoon buying our daily bread, and a round-faced, middle
-aged man approached me and asked, without preamble, “Excuse me, but are you American?”

  Such a question, innocuous in the States, was hugely forward in Tura. In the split second it took me to decide whether I should answer according to my rules or the neighborhood’s, I noticed that Namir and Mohammad had stopped stocking the shelves and stood very still, looking at the man with an expression that was not friendly. Without speaking, but very clearly, they were saying Stop, go back, and approach her more suitably. The man understood, and ducked his head so that he looked up at me instead of down, a symbolic gesture of submission.

  “I’m sorry, Lady,” he said in Arabic.

  “It’s nothing,” I replied. Mohammad and Namir had relaxed, but were still listening.

  “I ask only because my wife is also American,” the man continued, switching back to English, “and I thought perhaps you might like to visit her. She is always eager for familiar faces. She is in the United States now but she will be back next month.” He recited their address, and gave a short bow.

  “I’d be happy to,” I said, charmed and confused at once. “Thank you.” It was inconceivable to me that any other American should exist in Tura.

  “Not at all,” said the man, bowing again, and left.

  There was a near-audible sigh as the door closed behind him, and the owners of the duken went back to their sweeping and stocking.

  “Kulu tamem?” asked Namir, Everything’s okay?

  “Yes,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  He looked as though he wanted to say something else but stopped himself, deciding instead to slip an extra loaf of fino bread into my bag on top of the sale, a gesture of sympathy I never fully understood. In the coming weeks I paid attention to the women I saw in the neighborhood, hoping to spot the mysterious American, but I never found her. Perhaps she was one of the women who veiled their faces, resisting identification, beyond the reach of race or provenance. Or perhaps, despite my own experience slipping in and out of Turan behavior, I, too, could be fooled.

  I still bear the internal and external scars of that place. I incubated so many intestinal parasites that I learned to distinguish between bacterial and amoebic dysentery by the presence of a certain kind of pain. One kidney infection turned severe and nearly put me in the hospital. And the insects: the swarms of mosquitoes that raised welts on Jo’s and my arms and feet, the maggots and full-grown caterpillars we found in our food, the spiders that left bites as delicately colored as stargazer lilies, which would go numb, bruise, and open into sores if left untreated. We developed a condition I jokingly termed “anorexia bacteriosa”: a deep-seated disgust that arose from repeated exposure to vile things in our food, which caused us to eat smaller and smaller meals spaced further and further apart, until we would only eat when driven by faintness. For a long time I couldn’t stand the feeling of a full stomach, and rarely ate more than it took to stem hunger. Anything more and I began to imagine I was full of carrion and rotting. Photographs of Jo and me from this time period reveal two women who are only vaguely recognizable: ashy-skinned and solemn, with dark rings around their eyes.

  All this could have been avoided: an Egyptian woman would have learned very early how to distinguish between a good tomato and one infested with maggots. Through a network of neighborhood women she would have identified cheap, good butchers (having no such network, Jo and I simply didn’t eat meat); through her mother she would have learned to hang her carpets in the sun once a week to kill germs and insect eggs. She would have put feneek and kerosene under the door to keep away roaches and ants, and put her bread in the refrigerator to keep it from growing mold overnight.

  I, too, learned to do these things, but much later than my situation required me to know them. Omar was sympathetic but confused. To him, Tura was the natural state of the world; he couldn’t imagine why anyone would be unable to function in it. Jo and I were too proud to ask Sohair for help, and she was too sensitive to our need for independence to interfere. Years later, when I told her about the way we had been forced to live, she felt so dismayed and guilty that she became visibly upset. I tried not to bring it up again—understanding, by then, why my confession had caught her off guard. To her, a buffalo carcass hanging in a butcher’s window looked like cuts of meat for stew and kebab; to me, it barely looked like food. There is almost nothing to say when instincts are so mismatched. She could not have known how helpless we were.

  In the meantime, I learned a lesson that was as crucial as it was debilitating: all the formal education in the world, at the best universities and under the best authorities, cannot teach you to understand an environment you’ve never seen for yourself. I have come to see the concept of expertise as something of a myth; there can be no Middle East expert who has never lived unaided in the Middle East. Using academic theory to explain and predict the behavior of real human beings under stress is at best shortsighted. Living in that concrete box of an apartment in Tura, what I knew intellectually became less and less useful to me, and what an ordinary Egyptian knew practically became more and more so. A tolerable understanding of Safavid art, an appreciation for Arabic grammar? I would have traded my entire education for an insect-free house and three square meals a day of clean food.

  The proximity of the fundamentalists, who hated us, and of ordinary Egyptians, who feared us, did have one upshot: it helped me understand the difference between the kind of antiwesternism that gives rise to terrorism and the kind that doesn’t. In the years since 9/11, theories have been proposed linking Islamic terrorism to the poverty of many Muslim countries—despite the fact that the 9/11 bombers came from upper-class backgrounds, the terrorists in the July 7, 2005, London subway attacks came from middle-class backgrounds, and the activity of poor terrorists has been limited to Muslim-on-Muslim (or on Jew) nationalist campaigns in Israel-Palestine, Pakistan, and postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. One might argue that it simply takes more money to fly a 747 into a skyscraper than it does to load a homemade bomb into a produce truck, which means only wealthy extremists can engage in international acts of terror and that poor ones would if the opportunity arose. But the fact remains that violent extremists have been culled from every imaginable economic background.

  Clearly, the catalyst is something more complicated than income. Jo’s and my neighbors in Tura did not hate us for religious reasons; they hated us because they saw us as a danger to their security. Their antiwesternism did arise from economics, but it had no jihadist element whatsoever. In fact, I think that if we had been physically threatened, our neighbors would have rushed to our defense. Trouble with a western government was something they wanted very much to avoid.

  I think this holds true on a larger scale: of the Middle Easterners I have met who resent the West (and specifically the United States), the vast majority resent it because they perceive it to be a military and economic juggernaut bombing whole countries into rubble, putting local industries out of business (though this title is slowly passing to China), and succeeding and succeeding where the Middle East fails. Religion never enters the discussion.

  On the other hand, the fundamentalists we could see from our bathroom window hated us for very religious reasons. It became clear to me, living in the shadow of that brainless minaret, how little the anger of our local extremists had to do with military America. While the situation in Iraq gave them political legitimacy and direction, and a dangerous amount of emotional leverage with average Muslims, it was not the reason they were angry. They hated the America that exports culture. They were aghast at the suggestion that enlightenment could be bought on tape, and that right and wrong were fluid and could change from situation to situation. They hated being made to sympathize with adulterous couples in American movies. They hated the materialism that was spreading through Egypt and the Gulf like a parasite, turning whole cities—Dubai, Jeddah—into virtual shopping malls, and blamed this materialism on western influence.

  I would struggle to explain to Egyptian friends (for th
is alarm was not limited to extremists) that consumer culture functioned in a surprisingly complex and sophisticated—arguably unhealthy, but still sophisticated—way in the West, playing on subculture and social memes and giving rise to an entirely new system of symbols. Because materialism, in the sense that we mean the word today, arose in the West, it is at home there; a retrovirus sitting quietly in the genetic makeup of the civilization without doing monumental harm. But the Middle East is peopled by cultures that struggled for centuries to rid themselves of anything iconic or graphic or unnecessary; there, materialism acts as a kind of cultural smallpox, leaving mindless ostentation and artistic sterility in its wake.

  What seemed to threaten the fundamentalists most, reading between the lines of their rhetoric and behavior, was the sheer accessibility of western culture: the fact that everything a person could want, from consumer goods to emotional highs to sex to spirituality, was public and available to anyone. Nothing was hidden, nothing required serious effort to attain. In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam as it is practiced in the Middle East, where the things that are most precious, most perfect, and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman’s body, Heaven. The fundamentalists, in their own way, were mourning the loss of legitimately beautiful ideas. They knew they could not make the ritualized, morally appraising culture of traditional Arab Islam—in which one must be worthy of truth, love, and God to attain them—more attractive than the lifestyle endorsed in the West. So they demonized attraction itself.

  I thought a lot about extremism on Fridays, when I listened to our neighborhood imam give sermons. I would stand in the doorway of our bathroom and look out at the minaret that rose beyond it like a bony finger, and beyond that, at a graceful bend in the Nile fronted by green rushes. I could only follow small portions of the khutba or sermon; Omar and Ibrahim often filled me in on the rest. A typical khutba by the Hammer of the Infidel, as my mother would christen the imam, was limited to quotidian things: the correct way to behave in communal prayer, the length of one’s garments, even the foot with which one should enter and leave the bathroom. But every few weeks, angry, it seemed, at the religious fatigue of the men who were required by Shari’a law to attend Friday services (women could go or not as they chose), the imam would let loose: heaping gory and imaginative curses on the American soldiers in Iraq, condemning the immorality of Muslims who did not abide by stringent Wahhabi codes of conduct, orating self-contained monologues about the dangers and sins of the material world. He was careful never to say anything critical of the Mubarak regime or to explicitly endorse violence, and managed, somewhat miraculously, to avoid unpleasantness with government security forces.