The Butterfly Mosque

by G. Willow Wilson

  Uncle Ahmad cleared his throat and I looked up. He was the ideal patriarch, pleasant and intelligent, with a deep authoritative voice and an unnervingly complete grasp of what was going on within the family at any given time. I argued with him exactly once, and for less than a minute; he simply restated his argument with a tone of finality and I fell silent in admiration.

  “We must thank America,” he said, in that same tone, “for Willow.”

  Two dozen faces turned fondly in my direction and assented. I put my head in my hands and made a sound that was half laugh and half something pained. Uncle Ahmad stared at me, bewildered. I was at a loss to explain what I felt. The responsibility of that unconditional affection was overwhelming. I could see what was coming: with angry rhetoric escalating in the press, and the possibility of war in Iran already on the table, I knew Uncle Ahmad’s chivalrous, peace-making instincts would not be rewarded. There was no answering hand reaching out from the other shore of the Atlantic saying We must thank Islam for Uncle Ahmad. Even if there was, my country would still wage wars. Men would still blow themselves up in marketplaces and stone and mutilate in the name of Islam. Every day there would be something to erode that goodwill. I could not bear to see this family’s faith and optimism stripped away.

  My dreams turned violent: again and again I saw myself in a house with doors that didn’t lock, trying desperately to barricade them against wolves or wild dogs that circled outside, seeking entry. It was as if my unconscious mind was trying and failing to take Sheikha Sanaa’s advice: I was sticking to the walls of a house that was no longer under my control.

  Fracture

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  —William Butler Yeats,

  “The Second Coming”

  THE MOVEMENT I HAD BEEN WATCHING WITH ANTICIPATION from the other side of the world—the one that had given me hope for middle ground—was falling apart, becoming a parody of all the things it claimed to oppose. In Cairo, left without support from liberal Muslims, Sheikh Ali Gomaa began issuing fatwas designed to appease the hard-liners: one was ambivalent toward wife beating, another forbade the practice of yoga, a third discouraged the display of statues. The last blow came in a call from Ursula, my editor at Cairo Magazine.

  “You can stop working on anything due after next week,” she said. “The next issue is going to be our last one.”

  “What?”

  “We lost our funding.”

  “You had funding?”

  “We estimated it would take about a year and a half for the mag to become financially solvent—we needed another six months of support. But the donors have pulled out.”

  It was the way of all independent media in the Middle East—in a climate of political pressure and economic disorganization, the pulling of funding was almost inevitable. It could be that the donors felt uneasy about supporting a paper so critical of the Mubarak regime in the repressive aftermath of the presidential elections. It could be they simply lost interest. Either way, it was over.

  “This is awful,” I said to Ursula.

  “I know,” she responded gloomily. “I feel worst for some of the young Egyptian journalists—about what this is going to do to their careers. Now they have to find somewhere else to go.”

  At home, Omar noticed the change in my mood. I was still functioning—I hate inactivity and don’t tend to slow down even when I’m depressed. But though I went busily about my strangely parsed life, bartering for chickens in the souk in the morning and writing about politics and religion in the afternoon, Omar could tell I was not myself.

  “I want to see you smile again,” he said at one point, when we were driving to Madinat an Nasr to visit an aunt. “What’s wrong with you? Is it just the magazine?”

  I had been keeping my existential crisis more or less to myself. In Egypt, having an existential crisis is largely considered bad manners.

  “I guess I’ve been feeling helpless,” I said, after a long pause in which I discarded ten other ways to describe it. “And guilty. And like none of the positive things I’ve tried to do will make any difference.”

  “Guilty?” Omar looked incredulous. “Why?”

  “I wonder a lot if I’m the best person to be saying and writing some of the stuff I say and write. I don’t represent the majority of Muslims—I come from such a different background from the people I write about—I wonder if it’s my place. I wonder if I should wait for someone else to say this stuff. Someone from here or Pakistan or something.”

  “I’ve learned something about westerners,” said Omar, smiling a little. “The ones who feel guilty are the ones with the least reason to be. And the ones who should feel guilty never do.”

  “It doesn’t matter, anyway.” I rubbed my eyes. “No matter who tries to make things a little better, it always ends up the same—it’s like trying to collect sand in a sieve. People want to hate each other.”

  “Who’s put this in your head? What’s going on?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s a lot of little things all at once. I’ll be fine.”

  The Oracle of Siwa

  For thy kingdom is past not away,

  Nor thy power from the place thereof hurled;

  Out of heaven they shall cast not the day,

  They shall cast not out song from the world.

  —Algernon Charles Swinburne,

  “The Last Oracle”

  AFTER THE MAGAZINE FOLDED, I FOUND MYSELF AT LOOSE ends, with plenty of time for indulgent contemplation of my identity issues. Self-pity is hard work. When Omar’s cousin Mohab suggested a trip to the remote oasis of Siwa, I didn’t need much convincing. Mohab was a film student from Omar’s father’s side of the family. He was a couple of years older than me and had recently returned from a long stint studying in Italy. I liked him because he was a cultural intermediary. Raised in a staunchly socialist wing of the family, he could talk at length about European films and brands of cigarettes. At the same time, he maintained an avid interest in Sufism, reading and analyzing old texts of philosophy and jurisprudence with great enthusiasm. From Italy, he’d brought back a host of Region 2 DVDs and an accent. After a couple of weeks back in the smog and chaos of Cairo, he was eager to get out. Siwa, a mere forty kilometers from the Libyan border, was as far as one could get while still in Egypt.

  Our route was simple but arduous: we drove north along the Alamein Road, skirting Alexandria, then took the coastal road to Mersa Matruh. After Mersa Matruh we left the coastline and crossed into the open desert. Between Matruh and Siwa are three hundred kilometers of indifferent road and no civilization of any kind—no way stations, gas stations, or even wells. Isolated as it is, Siwa vies with Central Africa as the birthplace of man: the oldest human-oid footprint on record, thought to date back three million years, was discovered there. Alexander the Great passed through, as did the Nazis, but neither stayed, and both left few traces of their presence. The oasis is too remote to be useful to imperial expansion. Today, the trek to Siwa is still daunting. If you don’t take those three hundred kilometers at a good clip, armed with plenty of drinking water, a full tank of gas, and a spare tire, you can end up in trouble. I call it “the sprint.” But even the sprint only provides so much insulation from the catalytic influences of tourism and westernization. In the face of modern technology, manifest in the air-conditioned buses from Cairo that roll through Siwa once a week, the Sahara is losing ground.

  We originally planned to reach the oasis just after sunset, but a traffic jam outside Cairo had set us back a full three hours, and less than halfway through the sprint we found ourselves driving in total darkness. There was no moon, and the resulting black was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Our headlights reached out feebly in front of us, picking out a road blurred and faded by sand. Where the light petered out, the road seemed to drop off into nothing. The rippling earth around it, totally devoid of vegetation, caught the light we gave off in a str
ange way, and made shadows like massive trees; the illusion was so perfect that on several occasions I forgot there were no trees for a hundred miles in every direction, and several hundred in a few. There was no horizon, no city lights anywhere to distinguish the edge of the earth, and after half an hour we found ourselves in a state of semihallucinatory panic.

  “Do you think we should pull over and wait—”

  “Wait for what? Dawn?”

  “How much water is there?”

  “Four—wait, no, there’s some—you count.”

  “Six bottles.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Let’s at least pull over, I have to rest my eyes.” This last from Omar, who had insisted on doing all of the driving. We pulled off into the sand, the tires going silent as they met less resistance. I climbed out into purer air than any we had in Cairo. Taking deep breaths, I stepped off into space, and with a jerk found myself sliding down a small dune. I let out a shriek.

  “Willow?” I heard Omar’s anxious voice and saw the dancing beam of a flashlight.

  “I’m fine.” I started laughing almost uncontrollably, floundering ankle-deep in the sand. With effort, I climbed back up the dune, thinking of the vipers and scorpions that might be skittering around in the darkness.

  “Are there snakes here?” I asked.

  “Snakes? No, no!” Mohab’s voice answered from some indeterminate point. “Snakes need to eat something. Out here there’s nothing to eat.” The Italian lilt to his Egyptian accent lent him a reassuring universality.

  “Okay.” I balanced on one foot, tapping sand out of the shoe belonging to the other foot. “I hope you’re right.”

  We made our way back to the car, stumbling over rocks and giggling. An hour or so later, exhausted, dirty, and night-blind, we saw lights on the near horizon and found ourselves on the outskirts of the oasis. We pulled up to our hotel, an incongruous plaster building on a dirt road, and shedding our bags and sand-filled shoes, retreated to our rooms to sleep.

  The next morning I woke up unsure of where I was. Going to the window, I looked out on a small town square circumscribed by roads that led off into dense blue-green palm groves. One corner of the square was dedicated to a fruit-and-vegetable souk; elsewhere there were open-air cafés lined with dusty plastic chairs and faded awnings. Beyond the square, rising on a prominent hill, was the Old City: a labyrinth of mud-brick houses and elevated streets, now in ruins. Before the Egyptian government extended its reach, and the rule of law, to its Libyan border towns, the Siwans used the Old City as a fortress to protect against Bedouin raids. In the early twentieth century, a hard rain—the first in three hundred years—destroyed much of the infrastructure and the Siwans built the modern buildings that make up the town today.

  I felt the muscles in my shoulders relax. Cairo was so relentless and grimy that I had forgotten how good it is to have beautiful things to look at. The palm groves threw watery, inviting shadows in the morning sun, and the air smelled like wood smoke and warm earth. There were men moving in the streets below, driving donkey carts and carrying sacks of rice; the women, who were fewer, wore blue embroidered chadors and black face-veils, and slipped along with a ballerinalike, toe-first gait. I had an odd sense of déjà vu; I think I had constructed, unconsciously and with a kind of longing, a place that resembled this, where the stolen restful moments I had in the city were magnified and took physical form.

  We met Mohab at a pleasantly shabby café called Abdu’s for breakfast. As we tucked into bowls of cream and honey with hunks of flatbread, a man in a white robe and camel-wool cloak approached us, hailing Omar with an outstretched hand.

  “Omar, my son,” he said smiling, “your mother called to say you were coming. How are you?”

  Omar rose to shake the man’s hand, ducking his head respectfully.

  “My wife, Willow.” He put a hand on my shoulder. I lowered my eyes and smiled.

  “Does she speak Arabic?” the man asked.

  “I speak a little,” I said.

  “She speaks very well.” Omar gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  “Good,” said the man in English. I looked up and met his eyes, and he smiled, approving. “That’s very important.”

  His name was Abdullah, and he was a local tribal leader and education director. He was also the man responsible for the oasis’s remarkably high literacy rate: 90 percent among men and nearly 98 percent among women, making Siwa the only place in Egypt where more women than men could read. Omar and Sohair had met him on a visit to Siwa a couple of years earlier, and had invited him to dinner when he was in Cairo for some governmental function; the old rules of hospitality meant that he was now a close friend of the family. Before that moment I had only vague ideas surrounding the term “tribal leader.” No city dweller really understands how tribal societies function, study all she may. But seeing Abdullah, a lot of things fell into place.

  He looked to be in his early fifties, and was bearded and sun-browned, with an athletic, erect posture that suggested a person used to leadership but familiar with difficult physical work. One of his hands was crippled, as if from polio or a poorly set break (it turned out to be the latter), but he was so able that I would forget about it until I saw him again several months later. What was most striking about Abdullah was his manner: without words, he commanded the attention of everyone around him. He provoked some inborn pack response in all of us, suggesting with the set of his shoulders and the tone of his voice that he was here to protect us, and in return confidently expected obedience. I saw no one, man or woman, Egyptian or European or American, who was immune to it.

  Charisma is a silly word for this quality of Abdullah’s. He didn’t go out of his way to be charming or friendly, yet his presence was spellbinding. It was an aura of benign and formidable power, and of great intelligence. Meeting him, it became conceivable that an entire tribe could be organized around a single person. When we went back to Cairo, Sohair would ask me, with a twinkle in her eye, what I thought of Abdullah, and I could think of no reply but, “Talking with him, I understand how polygamy worked for all those years.” She would laugh so hard she had to hold on to a chair to keep from falling over.

  When Abdullah offered to take the four of us out into the desert to visit a hot spring, we said yes almost in unison. We left early the next morning, piling into a colossal, retrofitted Range Rover before the sun was high.

  “Ready?” Abdullah asked when we were situated. “You’d better hold on.” The Range Rover had no seat belts. We took off, winding through the palm groves until we reached the open sand. This was the Sahara as it is most often envisioned: the “sea into which no oar is dipped,” dune after dune of vanilla-colored sand stretching a thousand miles into the distance. Even with the rise of modern technology and sophisticated satellite locating devices, it is one of the least-explored places on earth. I watched Omar as we went bumping over the dunes: he was watching the horizon, turning every so often to grin at us in silent glee. Mohab leaned precariously out one window with his video camera, filming, using his free hand to keep the incongruous newsboy cap he wore from flying off his head.

  “You’ll fall out!” I said as the nose of the truck went up and came down with a jaw-rattling thud.

  “No, I won’t!” Mohab smiled, gripping his hat, and I caught my breath as we tipped down a thirty- or forty-foot dune toward a tiny oasis sheltering in a broad ditch below.

  The oasis—a stand of palm trees, some brush, and a few flowering plants—veiled a deep spring around which the Siwans had built a circular retaining wall. Nearby was a bamboo shelter where I went to change—not into a bathing suit, but into a cheap galibayya I didn’t mind ruining. The path to the shelter went through a dense patch of brush. Abdullah told me, in an offhand unconcerned way, to watch for snakes, and I shrieked and ran the rest of the short way. When I had changed I came back out and joined the men by the spring, which sent little eddies of vapor up into t
he morning air.

  I sat on the retaining wall and dipped one foot in the water: it was the perfect temperature, very warm but not hot. One by one we all slid in, taking seats on the bathing steps that led down from the wall. The palms made dry whispering sounds as they moved overhead and beyond the oasis the sand rose up yellow-white in the sun. When we went back to Siwa proper there would be an e-mail from the State Department waiting in my inbox, asking very politely whether I was registered at the local embassy (I was), but for now I was happy without reservation—the happiest, I think, that I have ever been. I knew then what Heaven must look like: a garden in a desert, all unapologetic and sudden green, where there were friends to talk to and springs to bathe in. You couldn’t think about war there, or injustice, or sacrifice, only wonderful simple things. It was un-Babel—everyone present spoke at least three languages, but for a few reverent minutes we didn’t need to use a single one of them.

  Omar and Abdullah broke the spell, speaking quietly in Arabic. I didn’t listen until I heard my name.

  “Willow is a writer,” Omar was saying. “She has written about Egypt for western magazines.” Like so many educated Egyptians I knew, Abdullah was trying hard to believe that the banality and misinformation western media spread about his culture were the product of ignorance, not conspiracy. Earlier he had voiced quiet concern that western outrage over Arab attitudes toward homosexuality was being used as a smoke screen to divert attention from the exploitative gay sex tourism perpetrated by western travelers.