Yet most of my friends and family were surprised when I admitted my frustration, and told me I was better integrated than they would have expected after such a short period of time. I thought, cynically, that I seemed well-integrated because most western expats and tourists in Egypt weren’t integrated at all. Many lived in wealthy enclaves, spoke little or no Arabic, and sported shorts of a length no Egyptian would consider wearing in any kind of weather. In other words, they were guilty of the same failure to make basic cultural adjustments that immigrants in much more difficult circumstances were censured for in the West. It was not the hypocrisy that bothered me as much as the absence of reflection: the inability or refusal to compare their behavior to their standards. More and more, I avoided what few Americans, Canadians, and Britons I knew.
In doing so, I ran the risk of falling into a particular category of white converts: those who are ashamed of the lives they led before Islam, and who try to erase their pasts by flinging themselves headfirst into Arab or Pakistani culture. Because Al-Azhar University is headquartered in Cairo, the city plays host to a large cadre of converts with this sensibility. I sometimes saw them in line at the duken or coming out of the mosque: the women were veiled up to their eyelashes and the men sported unkempt, vaguely pubic beards. In lieu of Arabic, they adopted fake foreign accents in their English. Though they were all undoubtedly serious and dedicated Muslims, from the outside it seemed like they were playing an elaborate game of dress up, aping Arab ways without understanding or self-awareness. My anxiety about meeting other westerners stemmed from something very different from these converts’ cultural amnesia. Sometimes I missed my own culture and my own country. There were moments when the wind shifted and smelled almost green, replacing the metallic desert air for a few hours, and when that happened I would almost collapse with homesickness. I wanted the company of other westerners, but what they inevitably became in Egypt was too alarming and embarrassing for me to watch.
People almost always arrived with the best intentions. They want to learn, to see behind the stereotypes they were presented with on television. They are willing, they think, to follow unfamiliar rules, though they can’t really agree to a contract they’ve never seen. They come here and find that many of the stereotypes they don’t want to believe are perfectly true: there is an uneasy segregation between men and women, and it does lead to animosity and dysfunction between the sexes. Women are stifled in the mosques and harassed in the streets by men reduced to the behavior of idiots by poverty and despair. Though Pew polls have determined Egyptians are the most religious people on earth, piety has not stopped endemic dishonesty in business dealings large and small. Egypt is an ugly, dirty, hungry place. It is easy to stop at this conclusion and decide there is nothing more.
The doors to the country’s quieter and more human beauty are locked: Egyptian life revolves around the family, and if you don’t have one, it’s difficult to participate. Shut out and bewildered, cheated in the marketplace, alternately flattered and sneered at in the streets, too many of the westerners I knew turned to a variety of casual racism. No amount of education could withstand it. It manifested first in language: a refusal to speak Arabic. Simple enough, and easy to attribute to laziness, but there was something malicious and contradictory about it—the American or Brit or Canadian would order a shopkeeper around in English, assuming he understood, then insult him or joke about him, assuming he didn’t. It was a pattern I saw repeated over and over again until I came to expect it; each time I was so shocked that I assumed there had to be some excuse, some mitigating reason.
One incident that stands out in my mind occurred in a taxi: I was headed to a café with a group of American students who were doing a year abroad at the American University of Cairo. The group was all girls, and after telling the taxi driver where to go (and observing that he would probably take the long way and ask for more money), they started talking about their sex lives, half-shouting to be heard over the deafening traffic. One complained that her Egyptian boyfriend, culled from one of the self-consciously westernized upper classes, wouldn’t go down on her. With an arch sneer, another girl said that Egyptian boys were so sheltered and segregated that they had no idea what to do with a vagina. I leaned my forehead against the window, watching the passing cars shimmer in the heat, and said nothing. The driver, a bearded man in his forties or fifties, probably didn’t understand the conversation in full, but in this age of the internet vagina is universally understood. He shook his head, muttering, “God forgive us all,” over and over again. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I faked my way through the chatter at the café and went home. I never saw the girls again.
After it conquered language, the racial ugliness sometimes degenerated into something much more frightening. For western men, this commonly meant abusing local women. At one of the few expat parties I ever attended, I heard a German engineer brag that he was solving the Darfur crisis by patronizing Sudanese prostitutes. Cairo was home to a large community of Sudanese refugees and many of the women were war widows and orphans without any source of income but their bodies. A couple of Americans who were listening—intelligent, sensitive, educated people—laughed, and turned around to repeat the joke to those who hadn’t heard. At home, these were the sorts of ‘liberals’ who would rather drink ipecac than utter a racial slur. A few mosquito bites, a couple of unpleasant tour guides, and their principles had evaporated.
Most of my Egyptian friends and all of my Egyptian family lived lives far removed from the breaking point between locals and expats—I was the only westerner most of them were close to, and for a few of my younger and more sheltered cousins-in-law, the only westerner they had ever met. But occasionally someone I knew and cared about would bruise under the pressure of that bitterness, and when it occurred there was almost nothing I could do.
It happened to Sameh. Two Brits I knew, both converts, needed an Arabic tutor, so I gave them his number and a glowing recommendation. A week or so later, at one of our lessons, I asked him whether they had called.
“Yes.” He paused, tapping the tabletop with the end of his pen.
“Are they going to start taking lessons? Did you work something out?”
“Yes,” he said again. He didn’t quite look at me. “They bargained with me,” he went on, keeping his voice neutral. “They said I was asking for too much money.”
My face felt hot. “God, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think they’d—I’m sorry.” One of the trickiest things to learn in Egypt is when and when not to bargain, but one rule is clear: you don’t bargain with friends. Bargaining implies dishonesty. In the marketplace, dishonesty is expected; there, bargaining is a test of both the seller’s and the buyer’s abilities as storytellers. The seller claims his scarves are pure silk and imported from India, and the buyer claims he has seen the same scarves in Attaba for half the price. By bargaining with Sameh, my British friends had snubbed him, implying he was from a lower social category than theirs, that he was a menial to inspect and suspect as they would a driver or a cleaning lady.
I was suddenly exhausted by all the things I couldn’t say: I hadn’t told them that Sameh had become a friend, that his unspoken sympathy and determination to see me succeed had helped propel me through hard times. But because I said nothing, they heard only “Arabic tutor,” and treated him as they thought an Arabic tutor—an Arab tutor—must be treated in order to be kept honest.
“What did you say?” I asked Sameh. My distress must have been evident on my face, because he smiled.
“I let them. I gave them a ten percent discount.”
“Why? You’ll teach them bad habits! They shouldn’t—”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Did you do your homework?”
We worked for forty-five minutes then broke for tea and biscuits, as was our custom. The heavy twilight air poured in through the garden door. In an apartment on one of the floors above, a parrot complained to itself.
; “Ana roht lilkaraoke night fi club fi wust el balad imberah,” said Sameh. “Wahid sahbi kan beyishrab, w’ana kunt zalen minu.” (“I went to karaoke night at a club downtown last night. One of my friends was drinking, and I was upset with him.”)
“Why?” I asked. “I thought you could drink.”
“Who do you mean by you?”
“Copts.”
“Oh, no. You can’t talk to God when you’re drunk. But some people drink anyway.”
There was a knock at the outer door of the center, and a loud voice called for Ustez Sameh, Ustez being an honorific for teachers and superiors. Sameh caught my eye, telegraphing the need for silence. He left the room, closing the door behind him. I strained to listen but heard only murmurs; a few minutes later, I saw, out the garden door, a line of men’s shoes retreating along the sidewalk, screened by the outer hedge of the garden. Sameh returned.
“I apologize,” he said. “They are students of mine from the Delta—they come to Cairo on weekends for tutoring. They aren’t used to being around young women. I didn’t think they were ready to see you.”
It was a mark of affectionate respect; something a brother would do to shield his sister from undignified staring or impolite advances. The more cherished a woman is, the more inaccessible she is made. I felt mingled appreciation and restlessness; I was so loved, so protected, and so cut off, bundled into the vacuum between East and West. It did not seem fair that this should be necessary, or that I should have to tell two educated Europeans to treat an educated Arab with respect. So much of life seemed to be about separating the people who would hurt each other.
Land of the Free
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immoveable, those that are moveable, and those that move.
—Benjamin Franklin
THAT SUMMER, I PREPARED TO FLY BACK TO THE UNITED States to see my family. I had kept my promise to myself: it was July, a full year since I had arrived in Egypt. If I could stay put for one year, I could stay put for two, three, indefinitely. I could get on a plane confident that I would come back. Assuming, of course, that my government let me.
I planned my trip around the premise that I would be detained. FBI agents had been waiting for Ben at his port of entry into the United States, so I made sure mine was Denver. If I was going to be arrested, I wanted it to be within sight of my mountains. The alternative—being rounded up with the usual suspects at JFK International Airport in New York—depressed me. I carefully organized all the documentation of my trip to Iran: boarding passes, receipts, itineraries, phone numbers. And I made up a call list. Every journalist and public intellectual working in the Middle East has one: a list of people for a trusted family member or friend to call in the event he or she disappears. The people on this list are usually the journalist’s friends in the media or politics, people who could focus enough attention on the disappeared to keep anything truly terrible from happening. People who could buy time.
I was barely enough of a journalist to deserve the name, and I was not going to some desolate backwater. It was depressing to have to make such a list before traveling to the U.S.A. The U.S.A. In fighting the Middle East we had become the Middle East, a place where people could be detained for writing letters, for speaking forbidden languages, for thought crimes. Omar and Ibrahim and Sohair were so used to living in a restrictive political environment that they weren’t even fazed when I told them I was under investigation. They were surprised that I was so shaken. Surely I expected it? I was a convert and a liberal. Several of Sohair’s siblings, my aunts- and uncles-in-law, had spent time under surveillance or even in jail for subscribing to forbidden ideas such as secular feminism or democratic change, or to anti-secular religious beliefs. To them, the refuge and freedom I had taken for granted was a luxury. It was something they had never had, and never aspired to; in Egypt hoping for these things can shatter a person.
The day I left, Omar and I drove to the airport before dawn. Smog had not yet settled on the city for the day, and the horizon was pale, promising the lemon-colored sunlight for which Egypt is famous. When we got to the international terminal and unloaded my bags, Omar kissed me on the forehead.
“Call me when you get there?” he asked.
“Of course.” I smiled at him.
“Call me every day after that?” He smiled, too, though his eyes belied how tense he was. He didn’t mention the FBI, thinking it would be bad luck, but I knew he would go home and perform extra prayers for the safe arrival of his wife in her country.
Landing in Denver, I felt a surge of euphoria. It was partially fear, and the strange high that comes from arriving changed in a familiar landscape. I reminded myself I had nothing to hide, but even with that knowledge I couldn’t shake the political instinct I had learned living in a dictatorship: sometimes that doesn’t matter. Sometimes the people in power are less interested in catching the bad guys than they are in making examples of convenient targets, thereby frightening the bad guys into line. It’s a strategy far more efficient than real justice. As I walked down the gangway, dusty and exhausted, lugging my laptop and a carry-on, I had a sense of déjà vu: I remembered standing at the threshold of the shrine of Fatima in Qom, looking suspicious for almost identical reasons, and asking to be let in. I was walking that same fine line between an ideal and trouble of an unbelievably serious kind.
I still don’t quite understand what happened next. I stood in line at passport control with the rest of the passengers from my flight, lamenting the fact that I wasn’t wearing any makeup; I didn’t want to be hauled off looking sloppy and pale. As I stood there, a man in a camel-colored trench coat walked by, like some noir archetype, and without pausing took a picture of me with his cell phone. For a split second our eyes met and I wondered if I should say something. But he turned away and continued briskly down the corridor. It was so bizarre I wondered if I had imagined it. I was still feeling dazed when my turn came at passport control. I handed my documents over to the man working at the booth in front of me. He ran my passport, looked at the computer screen, frowned, looked up at me, looked back at the computer screen, and said, “Whoa.” I felt a stab of nausea: this was it. But the man simply asked me a series of questions about my residency in Egypt, stamped my passport, and let me through.
I was free.
I have never undergone such a sudden reversal of my politics: for that moment, and for many moments afterward, I didn’t give a damn about my right to privacy. What I assume happened is this: some intelligence agency or other dug through my e-mail, sifted through my records, interrogated some of my friends (Ben, Ireland, and eventually Mehdi were all questioned by the FBI), listened to a few phone conversations, and decided I was not a threat. They did all this while I was still in the comfort of my own home and going about my daily life. I far, far preferred this arrangement to sitting at Gitmo, waiting for them to get a warrant for information I would gladly hand over myself. This is not to say that the Bush regime’s invasive approach to security in America was right—it wasn’t right, it wasn’t ethical, and it wasn’t worthy of a free nation—but it was preferable to something far worse, and staring that thing in the face, I didn’t even think of quibbling about my privacy.
However, the incident that began with an overambitious snitch in Cairo would have a lasting, hurtful impact on the other innocent people it involved. Though he was never formally indicted on any charges, Mehdi would be put on an automatic search list, subjecting him to embarrassing extra security procedures every time he tried to fly—possibly for the rest of his life. Ben would have ongoing visa and tax problems. I was the only one who escaped unscathed. I would never know why. Ben raised red flags because he traveled back and forth from the Middle East on a teacher’s salary, and Mehdi raised red flags because he was Muslim; I was both Muslim and traveled back and forth from the Middle East. Was it because I was so openly antiextremist? Because my husband was a Sufi, a Muslim minority known to be persecuted by extremists? It would remai
n a mystery. Ben occasionally talked about requesting the official records of our investigation but always hesitated—best to let sleeping dogs lie, he said. Maybe in a few years, when all this has calmed down. When the country is more like the one we grew up in again.
Maybe then.
Boulder had not changed—I love Boulder because it never changes. Its residents are absurdly proud of the city, though people who move there or visit from the coasts never understand why: it’s small and insulated, uptown and downtown run into each other after just ten minutes of walking, and strangers greet each other in the street in a way that seems to make city dwellers claustrophobic. There are no buildings over five stories high. Almost everyone owns a dog. Small as it is, for the American interior Boulder is a triumph of urbanization: it’s neither a boxy bleak suburb nor a farming community nor a tiny mining outpost—the three forms of settled life that dominate the rest of the Great Plains and the West. It’s a real town, the kind that grew up as a frontier whistle-stop and settled into prosperous middle age. Lying in a cupped palm between the mountains and the high prairie, it felt enfolding and safe—it was home.
The Butterfly Mosque Page 18