Omar drummed his fingers on the carved wooden arm of the couch. “Your Arabic is getting better. Sameh is a good teacher.” He looked like he was considering his next words. “I know there are things that are hard for you to understand,” he said, “but be a little careful about whose authority you trust. Plenty of people talk without anything to say, and without understanding.”
“I know.” I squeezed his hand. “I’ll be careful.”
Early that March, when the weather in Cairo was yellow with sandstorms, the Progressives in New York held a Friday prayer led by a female scholar, Dr. Amina Wadud. There was a chorus of praise from western observers and a mixture of bemusement and alarm from the Muslim world. Savvy by now from years of fallout over the Salman Rushdie death fatwa, many conservative leaders instructed their followers to leave the Progressives alone. “We know that the enemies of Islam have many tactics they use in trying to get a misdirected and emotional response out of the Muslims,” was the remark of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, a member of the Zaytuna Institute. “And perhaps they do that in order to produce a situation where they can justify taking action against those they label as extremists, radicals, terrorists, and fundamentalists. I think that if people want to make up their own religion, let them do as they like. We just ask them to give us a little respect.” It was an opinion repeated in orthodox circles across the globe, along with the surprisingly canny pronouncement that the prayer was a publicity stunt and would not result in any real change. Conservatives were getting smarter about media.
“Except for the usual trickle of sociopaths, it looks like this is going to be a pretty civil scandal,” I told Omar, reading over reactions as they came in, “I’m impressed.”
“Actually,” said Omar with a little smile, “I was going to tell you that the mufti was just on TV. He’s supporting the prayer.”
I stared at him.
“He is? Is he still on? What did he say?”
“He didn’t say that it’s necessarily a good thing for women to lead prayer,” Omar explained, “because to let an unqualified woman lead prayer simply to make a statement about women leading prayer is wrong.”
“Right. Tokenism.”
“But he said it was a matter for debate—that there is no scholarly consensus that women should not lead prayer. He says it’s for each congregation to decide for itself.”
It was by far the highest level of support the Progressives would get for their agenda. I spent the day glued to Arab news channels and MuslimWakeup!, the flagship Progressive Muslim Web site, waiting to see if there would be any more discussion of Gomaa’s endorsement. I was shocked at what I saw.
“Why do we need approval from some guy in a beard on the other side of the world?” someone commented on the MWU! article about Gomaa.
“Who cares what the mullahs think?”
“I’m surprised that this is even posted here—these people are not our friends.”
“MWU! is publicizing the endorsement of a man who supports terrorism.”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. If this was progress, Islam was in trouble. Gomaa had never supported terrorism; I could only assume the anonymous commenter thought all clerics in beards and turbans were violent. It was disturbing to see such suspicion and self-hatred. Gomaa had gone out on a limb—it was unlikely he would receive support for his ruling from the rest of the Sunni establishment, and if he didn’t get it from the West, where he was undoubtedly expecting it, he might be forced into a retraction.
“They’re out of their minds,” I said to Omar that evening. “They’ve been offered an olive branch from the traditionalists and they don’t give a damn.”
“Why does it matter to you so much? You’ve never even met these people.”
I struggled with an answer. For so long there had seemed to be no overlap between my history and my religion—when I was in Egypt I had to translate my past, make it digestible and comprehensible and safe to other Muslims, and when I was in the United States I had to do the same thing to my beliefs. Here were people refusing to translate. They were westerners and Muslims in one fluid identity, and they felt no need to apologize or explain themselves. I didn’t want to admit how burdened I felt by my conciliatory instincts. The contempt I felt for converts who turned their backs on their own people arose in part out of jealousy; I wished I could simply shrug people off as soon as loving them made my life difficult, as they did. It would be easier if I could simply choose one camp or the other. The Progressives allowed me to hope I wouldn’t have to. That was why it gave me so much pain to see this opportunity slip away.
Sure enough, by the next morning Al-Azhar had issued a statement opposing the mufti’s endorsement of the Wadud prayer—a highly unusual move in an organization that usually took pains to present a unified front. Gomaa would spend the next year covering his right flank, catering to conservatives with a series of fatwas that baffled western observers. A great moment had passed by, mishandled on all sides.
The Fourth Estate
When the people cast their votes
we can all go home and cut our throats.
—Irving Berlin, “The Honorable
Profession of the Fourth Estate”
IN 2005, UNDER PRESSURE FROM THE UNITED STATES, PRESIdent Mubarak called for an election. For the first time since he was thrust into power by the assassination of Anwar El Sadat, Mubarak allowed serious candidates from parties other than his own to run against him—a move that inspired the City Victorious to breathless political optimism and heavy rioting for many months. The Ikhwan al Muslimeen—known in the West as the Muslim Brotherhood—were still barred from politics, but ran dozens of parliamentary candidates as independents. In the presidential race, one serious contender emerged: Ayman Nour, a young progressive who formed a party he named Al Ghad, or Tomorrow. Nour’s platform appealed to a wide cross section of Egyptians: he was religious enough to be popular with the young, but had political savvy that appealed to their socialist parents. He stressed freedom of speech, assembly and the press, and talked of new infrastructure; from the very beginning it was clear he was a doomed man. Nevertheless, his dedicated supporters demonstrated over and over again in downtown neighborhoods, clashing with hired National Democratic Party thugs and rival parties. Cairo stepped out from its behind-the-scenes role as the site of negotiations and summits to become, for a short while, the center of international attention.
“Here’s one from the board,” said Richard, the Cairo Magazine culture editor, at a meeting one evening in early April. “State media coverage of the political demonstrations that’ve been going on downtown.” He tapped the spot on the crowded assignment board where it was scribbled in. “As you’ve probably all noticed, there hasn’t been much to speak of. This would mean talking to some of the higher-ups in the Egyptian Radio and Television Union about their election coverage policies. I’m not touching it. Who wants it?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind some excitement.”
“Good. Here.” Richard handed me a list of contacts. “Off you go.”
Several days later I found myself at the beginnings of a demonstration in Tahrir Square. Over a hundred black-clad riot police lined the traffic-choked space between the Egyptian Museum and the American University, acting as a human perimeter to contain the mayhem. State media outlets were claiming the protest was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and refused to cover the event on the grounds that the Ikhwan were an illegal party. The protest was so chaotic that it was difficult to make heads or tails of its ideology. It was not uncommon for women to be groped and molested at these demonstrations, so I stayed along the outer edge, away from the oppressive mass at the center of the square. After half an hour I gave up: there was so much infighting that determining the original intent of the protest was impossible. I left and took the metro home, overheated and frustrated.
The Cairo metro is divided into two sections: mixed cars in which both men and women can travel, and the wo
men’s car, in which men are not allowed. In the women’s car, which seemed to exist in a feminine vacuum untroubled by the turmoil in the streets above, I spotted a familiar heart-shaped face encircled by a head scarf: it was the daughter of my upstairs neighbor, a girl a year or two younger than I was. She waved and came over to give me a kiss.
“What are you doing here in the middle of the day?” she asked in Arabic.
I hesitated. It was rare that I covered something so controversial, and when I did I was discreet about sharing details with Omar’s family and our friends. The prevalent opinion in the world we inhabited was that a woman did not, strictly speaking, have the right to put herself in potential social, political, or physical danger.
“Covering the protest,” I said finally, deciding the truth was simplest. My neighbor seemed unfazed. “I couldn’t tell what was going on,” I continued, more confident now, “they’re claiming it’s an Ikhwan demonstration but it didn’t look that way to me.”
She didn’t bat an eye. “That’s because it’s not,” she said. And that was how I discovered my dutiful, conservative upstairs-neighbor was an Al Ghad party member. The demonstration had been organized in support of Nour, a man to whom the state-owned media had no intention of giving free publicity. Claiming it was an Ikhwan stunt was their excuse to stay away. This information was essential to the article I wrote, and I had learned it not on the streets, but in the women’s car.
The women’s car was a moveable, segregated hothouse—a determined peace prevailed there, and produced a miniature society. I began to write an essay in homage to the women’s car, picking out narrative threads that I thought might help a western reader understand its subtler implications. I sent the essay to the New York Times Magazine. When it ran, I showed a cutting to Sohair.
“I enjoyed this,” said Sohair after she’d read it. I watched her anxiously for signs that she was just being polite. “It was very human. You did a good job.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m just happy they printed it. Usually the things you read in magazines about women’s society in the Muslim world are anthropological—scientific, I mean, like the writer is studying the behavior of monkeys instead of human beings.”
When several furious responses were published a week later, full of blistering language about gender apartheid, I was totally unprepared.
“But you generated controversy,” my mother told me over the phone in an attempt to cheer me up. “You got people talking. That counts for something. Just imagine the Manhattanite ladies who lunch who read this and were absolutely scandalized, so scandalized that they actually wrote in to the New York Times to complain about it. It’s worth it just to piss them off.”
“I don’t want to generate controversy,” I said, feeling desperate. “Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can’t communicate anything meaningful. I want consensus. And I didn’t do that. I did the opposite of that. I didn’t say the right things. I wasn’t trying to defend the women’s car in and of itself—just to show that these little human connections can happen anywhere. You can’t stamp them out. Culture doesn’t blunt them, language doesn’t blunt them. It doesn’t matter whether these people agree about the veil or gender or anything—all I wanted to do was make them see that, see that when they talk about Islam they’re talking about real people who can feel affection for a stranger on the subway and that it means something.”
This argument sent everyone I used it on into a short meditative silence. Controversy is seen as the best thing for a writer’s career short of actual success, and the fact that I was so upset by it must have been a little baffling. But I didn’t want to be fashionable, I wanted to be accurate. I didn’t understand the literary economy that had built up around Muslim and ex-Muslim writers in the West: there was a market for outrage and anyone who created it, whether by condemning Islam or apologizing for it, was considered in vogue. It was a formula in which truth and consistency were secondary. Staying complicated—refusing to tell incomplete stories with pat moral endings, and remaining a Muslim professional rather than a professional Muslim—was going to be a challenge.
Later that week, Sohair asked me why I was so upset. I had been trying to hide my frustration from her and Omar—revealing its source would mean showing them how hated they were in the West, something I tried very hard to downplay.
“You look pale,” was what she said to me, mixing something on the stove in her apartment as I hung in the doorway of the kitchen.
“I’m always pale,” I said.
“You look paler than usual, and also unhappy.” She fanned herself with one hand: this was the time of year when the kitchen became stiflingly hot.
“There were a bunch of letters in the New York Times Magazine attacking my essay.”
“No.” She seemed genuinely shocked. “How? What was wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. It frightened people. I should have said things differently. They didn’t understand what I was trying to say.”
“What kind of attacks? What was in these letters?”
“They said—well, one said it was the saddest defense of a dysfunctional culture she’d ever seen.”
I can’t forget the look on my wonderful, secular, educated mother-in-law’s face when I said this: it was dismay mingled with pain, a momentary loss of confidence. It was her women’s car, too. She didn’t agree with it; she thought men should be expected to behave themselves in the presence of women, making a women’s car unnecessary, but it was part of her history. She’d argued theology in it, commiserated over the rising price of meat, helped mothers wrangle mischievous children—this was the point; there was not nothing going on in these spaces westerners did not understand or inhabit. There were universes in these spaces, whether their existence was just or not. But I hadn’t communicated that properly, leaving the door open for an anonymous American woman to negate my mother-in-law’s relationship with her own history.
A week later, Japanese officials announced that a women’s car would be added to the Tokyo subway to protect female commuters from inappropriate male attention; precisely the reason the women’s car had been implemented in Cairo. The Tokyo car was hailed as a step forward for women’s rights. The discrepancy would stay with me for weeks—it was the final proof that I had underestimated the amount of fear and prejudice surrounding Arab culture in the West. In my mind the week of mercy that had come after 9/11—the week when one of my Muslim friends was approached in a grocery store by a tearful man who said he hoped no one blamed my friend for what those evil people had done—was eternal. People in my own life had made a titanic effort to accept me after I converted. Sometimes the effort failed, but I appreciated it nonetheless. I had no idea that things were getting worse around the greater United States, and did not understand why.
The Sheikha
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
—Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son”
LAILA WAS ONE OF THE FEW CONVERTS WITH WHOM I FOUND common history, and who I admired and loved; her wry, serene pronouncements on the nature of religion and human nature made it into several of my essays. Though half Egyptian, she looked European, and had been raised in Stockholm by her Swedish mother. Because of her heritage, she had always been conscious of Islam—I, on the other hand, could not have told you what Ramadan was a bare four years before I converted—but was brought up without religion. Like me, she had been a reasonably happy, productive western subculturette, playing drums in a goth-punk band called Dark Lords of the Womb and reading Kant as a teenager, until one day, as she described it, “I woke in the middle of the night, thinking I heard someone call my name. Immediately, my heart began to race—I was having
a panic attack.” She paused.
“What happened then?” I prompted.
Laila wore a sybil-like expression. She first told me this story while we sat in a café near Tahrir Square, having ditched a mind numbingly bad performance of Madama Butterfly at the Opera House and walked through the evening filth across Qasr el Nil Bridge to have coffee. Wrapped in formal, jewel-toned silk veils—neither of us had much opportunity to dress up so we had taken advantage of the occasion—we were the object of many semibenevolent stares. They bothered her less than they bothered me.
“The panic attack stayed for months and months,” said Laila. “It didn’t go away until I converted.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. And then the panic attack went away, but I was a mess—you know how it is, at first after you convert you cry every five minutes.”
I laughed. “It’s so true! You get so sensitive—”
“See something sad, cry. See something happy, cry.”
“There’s this Donna Tartt novel,” I said, referring to The Secret History, “that calls becoming religious ‘turning up the volume of the inner monologue.’ She’s talking about the Greeks, but the principle is the same.”
“Turning up the volume . . . yes, that’s what it was like. A very strange experience.” She smiled. “And here we are.”
A few weeks after my Ali Gomaa profile ran in the Atlantic, Laila called to tell me some women from her Sufi order were planning a day trip to the north coast to visit a reclusive and admired Sufi sheikha named Sanaa Dewidar. Sheikha Sanaa and her family lived most of the year in Syria but summered in Egypt. If I was interested, the sheikha had consented to an interview. I didn’t need to be asked twice: I packed a notebook and a tape recorder, and on a morning thick with smog took the subway downtown to meet Laila and her friends. They picked me up in a blessedly air-conditioned Hyundai.
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