The Butterfly Mosque

by G. Willow Wilson

  Sameh would be my Arabic teacher for almost two years. Perhaps because he, too, was part of a minority in Egypt, he understood the mechanics of the place the way a minority or an outsider must. This didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm for his country. Sameh, like Omar and the friends and family members I admired most, seemed to have his eyes trained permanently on the horizon, as if he could will it closer. It’s a kind of idealism I have seen only in this part of the world, where there is urgency to all rebirth and reform, because everyone is aware that this very moment is the last and best chance to save a faltering civilization. Omar and Sameh, each in their own ways, were architects of a Middle East that does not quite exist yet, but in which determined people could already begin to live. No one willing to participate in it would be a foreigner, and so Sameh insisted that I learn not to speak like one. The first afternoon I came into his classroom, I think I wanted to show off; while chatting with the student who had the lesson before mine, I doodled a sentence in Arabic on the board. When Sameh came in he paused for a moment to read it.

  “Did you write this?” he asked. I said that I had. Without speaking, he carefully erased my diacritical marks and drew in the correct ones, then smiled in a way that suggested he had forgiven me this time but in the future would find such precociousness annoying. The tone of our lessons was set.

  One evening, he asked me a strange question.

  “Why did you come to Egypt?”

  I looked up, surprised. Sameh had one hand under his chin, and the delicate blue colored tattoo of a cross that distinguished him as a Copt was visible on the inside of his wrist. The space of the table was between us: we never sat or stood side by side, and never ever touched, not even to shake hands. The garden door was open, even in the dead of winter; these were the things that we did to make our lessons proper. For a man and a woman who are unmarried to be alone together in private is a violation of Shari’a law; that tension is increased by social stigma when the man is a Christian and the woman is a Muslim. By leaving the door open, we made the classroom into a public place, technically speaking—though the language center itself was a public place, half of the time there were no other classes in session. For good measure, we rarely spoke about anything personal, and this is why his question surprised me.

  “I came because I wanted to see what it was like to live in a Muslim country,” I said, remembering too late that this was his country, too, and he was not a Muslim.

  He wasn’t offended. “Try it in Arabic,” he said.

  “I went to Egypt because I want to live among the Surrendered,” I replied obediently.

  “Is it a good/nice/pleasant country?” He switched to Arabic as well, using an all-purpose adjective that made his question sound cautious. I was meant to understand that he was really asking if I was happy.

  “Egyptians are the best people.” I resorted to a polite idiom.

  Sameh laughed. “Beged,” he said, “Seriously.”

  I thought for a moment. “Egypt is a good/nice/pleasant country,” I said. “There’s too much pollution, of course, and it’s very crowded, but the people have . . .” I ran out of words and put one hand to my chest, in a gesture that can mean thank you; no, thank you; or I am deeply touched.

  “Grace/charity,” said Sameh, “or kindness?”

  “Yes,” I said. And for the first time, I realized that it was true; that in spite of the terrible stresses of life in Egypt, despite the chaos and suspicion that characterized public life, the Egyptians had preserved pieces of a better time and could be tender to strangers. I’d seen it only a few days earlier when I was stuck in a nasty patch of foot traffic and breathing car exhaust, trapped behind a pair of extremely fat women. I had to catch a bus, and I found myself thinking, Why would anyone ever want to live here? It was too dirty, too difficult, too isolating. I began to run flat-out as the bus moved slowly away from the stop where it had been idling. Egyptian women, as a rule, never run; when necessary, they shuffle elegantly. I cared more about the bus than about propriety, and pelted through the rubbish that had blown against the sidewalk.

  A car pulled up beside me—in it was a middle-aged couple. “Get in!” called the woman in the passenger’s seat, opening the back door. I scrambled inside, salaam alaykuming as the man in the driver’s seat smiled at me, half-laughing. He sped to catch the bus, beeping furiously. The bus driver contained his annoyance and stopped when he realized what was going on. I pressed my hand to my heart and thanked the couple as I got out of their car. “Hurry, hurry!” said the woman. I had never seen the couple before, and I would never see them again.

  There were no seats left on the bus, so I leaned against a pole in the aisle, blushing under the cool amusement of the other passengers. A woman sitting nearby reached over to tug at the hem of my shirt. It had inched upward while I ran, revealing a ribbon of bare skin. “Better to wear a coat next time,” she said, and I thought, Why would anyone want to live anywhere else?

  “That’s true,” said Sameh in English. “Sometimes I think about leaving, then I wonder whether I could be happy in another place, even if it was more organized and less of a pain.”

  “And cleaner,” I said wistfully.

  “Also cleaner. It’s hard to make a good start in life here, but . . .” He trailed off and looked pensive.

  “Someone has to stay,” I said. It was a phrase I would hear over and over from educated Egyptian friends, the ones who could have found work abroad, outlets for their talents, but who decided to stay here. Christian or Muslim, they were deeply religious, romantic, well-read; they had asked the question, What is Egypt? and found that it came to them to answer. This was something I could now understand. There were questions being asked of all of us that had no easy answers. But there were too many good things and good people at stake not to fight for those answers.

  “Yes,” said Sameh. “Someone has to stay.”

  I knew that this was the way Omar felt as well. No matter how many checkpoints we had to endure, no matter how loudly the extremists howled at the dawn, he was committed to his culture. His mind was constantly occupied by it. Every errand we ran was an opportunity for a history lesson, an oral essay on Islamic thought, a digression about Arab contributions to mathematics and astronomy. Coming from anyone else it might have gotten annoying, but love, if not blind, is certainly deaf. He had the intellectual enthusiasm of the self-taught, and it was infectious. I learned more wandering around with Omar than I had in four years of college.

  “There is a legend,” he would say as we passed the yellowing walls of the Citadel, “that Murad Bey el Alfi once escaped assassination by—”

  “Jumping out of that window on his horse.”

  “I’ve told you this story before.”

  “Yes, several times.”

  “I’m sorry!” He would laugh, and I would console him, leaning my forehead against his shoulder as passersby stared.

  It didn’t take long for me to absorb Omar’s dedication to the landscape. Cairo is so cluttered with monuments that many—like the butterfly mosque—have fallen out of common memory, walled up with a shrug. On the eastern outskirts of the city, toward the Suez road, there was a nameless ruined watchtower that I came to love. A low concrete wall between it and the road declared that this was military ground and thus inaccessible; I guessed about its history from the car window each time we passed.

  “Saladin,” I said. “He must have built it to keep a lookout for crusaders.”

  “Or Napoleon,” said Omar, “to keep a lookout for the British. Or the British, to keep a lookout for everybody else.”

  I shook my head. “There’s almost no mortar left between the stones. That kind of erosion takes time.”

  “It could be Mamluk.”

  “It was Saladin,” I repeated, raising my voice flirtatiously.

  Omar grinned. “Okay.”

  We would never know. A watchtower behind a wall, a mosque behind a wall; to most Cairenes taking an interest in these thin
gs was perverse. Walls are built for a reason, especially in a military dictatorship. Omar was one of the few people whose soul could stretch out in a city most found stifling. Through him, I was learning to be unbothered by walls—to accept them as part of the landscape instead of struggling against them or pretending they didn’t exist. Omar had a remarkable ability to remain free in a country full of barriers. As much as I admired this, I was uneasy about what it meant for me. There was nothing America could offer Omar that he did not already have. In empty moments, I began to wonder whether I would live in my own country again.

  Iran

  There is only one rule

  on this wild playground,

  for every sign Hafiz has ever seen

  Reads the same.

  —Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

  AT THIS POINT, I REALIZED THAT IT WAS IN MY BEST INTERest TO start thinking about the Middle East as a home. Whether it would be permanent or semipermanent remained to be seen, but either way, my future was firmly tied up in this place. I felt an urge to push further east, and see more. Maybe I could find a country so unfamiliar that Egypt would seem less so. Iran, being Persian and Shi’ite, seemed like a good place to start if I wanted to visit a part of the Middle East very different from the one in which I lived. I’d studied the Iranian revolution—I knew names, dates, and facts from which individual human experiences cannot be guessed. Similarly, I knew how Shi’a Islam developed as a movement, but when I looked at photographs of an Ashura procession or a Shi’i passion play, there were things I didn’t understand.

  “Who does understand Shi’a?” Omar asked philosophically when I brought it up. We were sitting in a café with his friend Mohammad, a blind musician.

  “The Shi’i, we assume,” said Mohammad. “Otherwise there is no point in us trying to understand.” Mohammad had spent the first six months of our acquaintance speaking to me only in Arabic or French. He was won over by the fact that I had neither fled the country nor westernized his friend, and he had recently begun to use English—in which he was perfectly fluent—for my benefit when we spoke about complicated things.

  “I think it’s more like a political movement than a separate sect,” said Omar. “When you think about what happened after Karbala—”

  “No, no, no,” said Mohammad. “They don’t think of it this way. It’s a completely different spiritual idea.”

  “But in basic religious things, they’re the same as us,” responded Omar. “They fast and pray.”

  “They don’t pray juma’a on Fridays. They’re waiting to pray behind the Mahdi, you see.” (The Mahdi is the future savior in Islamic tradition.)

  “What? No.”

  “Well, now it’s a question: you must find out, Willow, whether the Iranians pray on Fridays.”

  It surprised me, as I was researching ways to get into Iran, how little contact the country had culturally with the bulk of the Arab world. Egyptians viewed Iran with almost as much fear and suspicion as Americans do, and were just as confused about the intricacies of its religious life. While there were hundreds of Arab satellite channels available all across the Middle East—including a dozen out of Iraq—Iran spoke only through the occasional televised passion play. Omar was dismayed by my desire to go there and resisted the idea at first. Eventually my stubbornness prevailed, and he contented himself by learning some rudimentary Farsi so he could threaten the appropriate people if I got into trouble.

  I began the complex visa application process. Once a week for almost two months, I took the metro downtown and walked to the Iranian consulate, which occupied a dignified Victorian-era house in Doqqi. Its employees came to know me by name. We played a courteous game in which I lied about having any knowledge of Iranian politics and they pretended to believe me. We talked instead about Safavid art. They seemed reassured by my religion and my willingness to cooperate, and in the end I obtained my one-month tourist visa with what was—despite the amount of time involved—far less hassle than Americans usually face in the application process.

  One afternoon during this diplomatic project, Sohair called me from work with an intriguing question.

  “Beloved, I need your help with a phrase.”

  “Sure,” I said, “what are you working on?”

  I heard papers rustling. “I’m translating the latest message from Al-Qaeda,” Sohair replied.

  This took a moment to sink in. “The latest message from Al-Qaeda?”

  “Yes, it was sent to some news agencies several days ago. It talks about Iraq, of course, and the bombings in Madrid. I have a phrase—’fie upon the hypocrites.’ Does this make sense?”

  I laughed. “Definitely. It’s exactly the sort of thing people in the West expect Al-Qaeda to say. It sounds like a warped version of Shakespeare.”

  She laughed, too. “Good. They use a very flowery, classical kind of Arabic, so I wanted it to sound the same in English. There is one more word I’m having trouble with: ghazwa. Do you know it?”

  “No, I’ve never heard it.”

  “It refers to the battles of the Prophet Muhammad against the pagans. It’s used to describe an attempt of a Muslim force to overcome a non-Muslim one. I have battle, siege, incursion, attack, foray . . . what do you think?”

  I chewed on my lip. We have very few words in English that convey multitiered meaning; usually we rely on adjectives to describe what a single noun can’t.

  “You might want to break it up into two words. Holy battle or holy attack or something.” I knew these were awkward phrases at best.

  “Hmm. It isn’t quite like that.”

  “It’s not as strong as jihad?”

  “No no, not as strong as jihad. And jihad is more abstract; more about struggling than attacking. This is specific.”

  I thought of something and brightened. “What about crusade?”

  Sohair seemed surprised. “Crusade? Really?”

  “I’m serious. It’s the only word we have that conveys ‘attack’ and ‘holy’ at the same time.”

  “I don’t think it can be crusade, my dear, crusade has a very specific meaning for Muslims. Use of that word has caused all kinds of problems in the past. When George Bush used it in one of his speeches a couple of years ago, there was chaos in the Arab world.”

  “But that’s exactly what it is,” I said, more for my own benefit than Sohair’s. “It’s an attack for reasons that are specifically religious, whose end goal is to topple another faith from power. Al-Qaeda is on a crusade.”

  Sohair was saintly at putting up with my unfashionable opinions, from the nature of a crusade to the reason you can’t blame Israeli children for being born in Israel. “That may be,” she said, “but the word crusade will certainly be taken the wrong way. For an Arab reader, crusade could only mean an attack on the Muslim world from the West.”

  “Then there are two crusades,” I said. “It’s crusade vs. crusade. I wonder if we have a word for that in English?”

  “I think you call it war,” said Sohair.

  Shortly before I was due to leave for Iran, the war came to me. Looking back I see that it was inevitable. Ben, having recently completed his Arabic courses, had just returned to the United States. Less than twenty-four hours after Jo and Omar and I had seen him off at the airport, the phone rang in our apartment, and he was on the other end.

  “Willow?”

  “Ben? Are you okay? What’s going on?” I thought for a moment that he might have left something important behind.

  “I was just interrogated for an hour and a half by the FBI.”

  My heart began to beat faster. “What? Why?” I heard a click; the call was being monitored. There is nothing subtle about a phone tap.

  “They knew where I went to lunch last Saturday. In Cairo.”

  “Here?”

  “They said they could take away my citizenship . . . because of the Patriot Act—”

  “What?”

  “Willow, they asked me about you. They asked me about you
and about Mehdi.” Mehdi was a mutual friend of ours from college, who had the misfortune to be Persian, and who was, as far as I knew, a simple computer geek.

  “Me and . . . why? What did we do?” As soon as the question was out of my mouth I recognized how self-evident the answer was.

  “They wanted to know why I was flying back and forth from Egypt so much. They wanted to know where I got the money from—I told them my parents pay for my tickets, but—they think we’re terrorists, Willow. They think we’re fucking terrorists.”

  “But we’re the good guys,” I said weakly. It was the most coherent thing I was able to contribute to the conversation.

  “It’s so messed up. They asked for Ireland’s information, I think they’re going to talk to her—” Ireland was Ben’s ex-girlfriend, and a daughter of two conservative Washington lobbyists—“and God knows who else is going to get dragged in. I called you as soon as I got home.”

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I just thought I should tell you what was going on. I don’t know.”

  “But I’m leaving for Iran in two weeks.”

  “Are you out of your damn mind?”

  “I already have tickets,” I said. I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine who worked with asylum seekers back home—he told me that one of the questions the authorities ask to determine whether or not someone qualifies for asylee status is “Are you afraid to return to your own country?” I was afraid; at that moment, and for a long time afterward, I was afraid to return to my own country. It was a feeling so alien that I found myself unable to cope with it emotionally. I had always been a member of a comfortable majority—I was middle-class, educated, white, of no unusual political bent. I had always felt, though I would never have admitted it, that the laws protected me before anyone else.