by Ibrahim Essa
Sheikh Hatem didn’t see Mukhtar el-Husseini in the same way as he saw the others, so he liked him, and he accepted the invitation he received on the evening of Khaled Abu Hadid’s banquet. When the party was over and the gathering was breaking up Mukhtar came up to him and patted him on the back with a pleasant, shy smile. As people wished each other well, said their goodbyes, and gave and sought each other’s advice, Mukhtar whispered in Hatem’s ear.
“I need to see you about something very important at my place in the country, tomorrow,” he said.
Quickly and with unfeigned enthusiasm, Hatem replied, “You give the orders and I obey, Uncle.”
Hatem was struck by a sadness in Mukhtar el-Husseini, so he embraced him, not with the solemnity of a sheikh or the obsequiousness of an obedient disciple, but as if he were a brother, or a cousin whose mother has just died—firmly and sincerely, in sympathy and solidarity.
ON THE WAY TO SHEIKH Mukhtar’s hometown the next day Hatem had some long and excruciating phone calls and Sirhan, his driver, bombarded him with news about production companies, television stations agreeing to new religious programs, a rival televangelist filming his Ramadan program, what another preacher said in his program the day before yesterday, and the number of calls he had received. Hatem didn’t respond, although he was interested—this was the world that would transform you from a sheikh into a producer, from a preacher to a television star. There were dues he would have to pay to remain a star and to make sure he continued to get paid as a star. It sometimes occurred to him that what he called his “oil well”—the fatwas, the hadiths, the snippets of Quranic verses and his explanations of them, the stories and homilies about early Islam, the lines of devotional poetry—might suddenly run dry because of the glut of programs, lectures, and soirées with important and wealthy people. Keeping up with the others was tiring. It meant he didn’t have time to catch his breath. So he thought about the décor in the same way he thought about fatwas. He took an interest in what his rivals’ programs looked like and was worried if they obtained access to television channels that were wealthier or better known. When he reached Sheikh Mukhtar’s place he slumped into an easy chair and cleared his mind after the ordeal of traveling. He could easily have fallen asleep in the chair.
When he had recovered, he said to Mukhtar, “Uncle, we race around like men of the world, not like men of learning.”
Mukhtar laughed.
“Of course you don’t think we’re men of learning, or anything like it,” Hatem commented casually, as if speaking to himself.
“Don’t say that, Sheikh Hatem. You’re a man of great erudition, of oceanic learning.”
“Yes, Uncle, oceanic. But more like a lifeguard who stands on the beach and whenever a swimmer goes beyond the buoys he jumps in and brings him back, not like those who explore the secrets and treasures of the ocean depths.”
He suddenly stopped speaking.
After a moment’s silence he laughed and said, “Now I feel like eating fish.”
Mukhtar replied with a relaxed laugh, despite his sad appearance.
“My mother insists on seeing you, Sheikh Hatem. You’re like a son to her.”
Mukhtar’s house wasn’t forbidding and didn’t have the appearance one might expect from the house of one of the leading Sufi sheikhs. Hatem liked that. The house was neither grand and luxurious, nor simple and unadorned. The house was ordinary, without any striking architecture or furniture. It wasn’t a mansion or even a house with a garden. It was in a four-story building that looked like millions of other buildings in Egypt, but it had a comforting and reassuring warmth and ordinariness, with no sign that the owner was an ambitious man who wanted his house to make a statement about himself. It was very obvious from the start that Sheikh Mukhtar wasn’t at ease these days, but in his own home, away from the demands that his role imposed on him, he felt free to express his anxieties. When Mukhtar said that his mother wanted to say hello to him, Hatem realized that Mukhtar really did see him as a brother, because it was customary among some sheikhs that disciples didn’t have anything to do with their sheikh’s private life, as it would be an unacceptable invasion of privacy. Only close relatives of Mukhtar and his family could go into his house. The house that was set up and furnished for meetings with members of his Sufi order was in the city center, opposite the mosque that bore the name of Mukhtar’s father, who was known as al-Sayed Mukhtar.
One of the things he liked about Mukhtar was that he had resigned himself to his fate with a willing spirit. He didn’t resist or object, he didn’t rebel or refuse to play his role. His name was in fact Mahmoud and not Mukhtar. His father was Mukhtar el-Husseini and when the father died his elder brother Ahmed was ill with kidney failure, needing dialysis three times a week, and had eventually died too. But they had long since preferred the younger son Mahmoud as heir to the leadership of the Sufi order. He had graduated from college a few months before their father died and hadn’t yet made use of his education in the faculty of sciences. His name was changed to Mukhtar, his father’s name, to maintain continuity and out of affection for the father, and he himself forgot his original name.
In his father’s presence when he was a child, Sufis kissed his hand and placed him in a seat of honor. Oddly, throughout his childhood, no one had ever made any effort to ask what he felt or thought, or given him a proper education in the Quran or the Sunna. Some of the Sufis he met said that someone with his ancestry held his learning in his heart and did not need to memorize things in the normal way. They said he could understand by intuition and could see through the fog that blinded other people. He liked words and they had a deep impact on him, but when the time came for him to speak in public he felt that he would not be able to meet expectations. He was so at peace with the world that he said what he wanted to say without being devious or compromising the truth for personal advantage. He wasn’t a scholar who could teach, he wasn’t a leader who would take control, he wasn’t a spiritual leader who gave guidance, he wasn’t like his father in knowing how to strike a balance between religion and personal interests, and so he didn’t speak much. He was silent most of the time. His silence made him seem dignified and mysterious. Then, when he met his wife, Suha Atef, it was as if he had come across his Aisha. She stole a part of his heart and gave him new life.
Sheikh Hatem shook hands with Mukhtar’s mother, who was welcoming and attentive and said a prayer for him in a sentimental tone. Hatem knew that there were two women that mattered in Mukhtar’s life. There was his mother, who was almost eighty but formidable and in robust health. Hatem knew what it meant when she appeared in his presence. It was a statement about the respect her son had for him. It was also a sign that she cared about him and had given her seal of approval for Mukhtar to bring up the subject he was going to discuss with Hatem and to ask Hatem to help. When she came in to see Hatem, it was more than a mere formality.
The other woman in Mukhtar’s life was someone Hatem had never seen. If she had appeared, it might have signaled an even closer relationship. This was Mukhtar’s wife Suha, the love of his life and the daughter of a member of the Sufi order. He had married her after a complicated love affair, after seeing her when visiting her father. He had married later than his brother and the other men in his family. The sheikh of a Sufi order couldn’t remain unmarried, but he hadn’t taken to any of the many women his mother insisted on proposing. His followers imagined spiritual and cosmic reasons why Mukhtar hadn’t married, because Sufis see all of their leader’s conduct as inspired, and they refrained from asking. Then he met pretty Suha, who was years younger than him. She loved the way he loved her and the fairy-tale world he lived in. She also liked the fact that he didn’t ask her to wear a hijab or niqab or to change her way of life too much, though she was perfectly willing to play the role of first lady of the order, so she wore a hijab on top of the latest fashions and clothes so elegant that no one would have thought she was the Sufi wife of a Sufi.
The story th
at always made the rounds among sheikhs, both Sufi and Salafist, was that it was a love match, and Hatem had sometimes been intensely envious of Mukhtar and his wife in recent years. Their marriage gave him insight into his own eroding marriage and reminded him that he had failed to save his relationship with Omayma. When he and Omayma started life together, she could look forward to a comfortable marriage and an ordinary life, but his fame made her uneasy as much as it made her happy. She had managed to adjust to it, because it changed her, and through her ideas and her ambition Hatem’s fortune had grown. They had moved from a small apartment to a spacious one with fine furniture and then to a large house in a gated community, but everything changed and deteriorated after Omar’s accident. It was like being in a race and discovering yourself in the lead, and then finding that your partner can’t keep up with you and cover the same distance at the same speed or with the same energy. There’s a major difference of pace and it has a distorting effect and prevents the two of you reacting in the same familiar and concerted way to the same event. And then Omayma’s grumbling made his life miserable in a way that was hard to explain. The things that gave him pleasure no longer gave her pleasure, and he no longer understood why she wasn’t pleased. Perhaps she had fallen in love with the Hatem she needed and on whom she depended, and when he needed her, she was reluctant to help. Maybe being rich had made her more worried about him, and fearful of him, and as a result she dealt with him with increasing rudeness and hostility. She would ask skeptically why people liked him. She would have angry outbursts and would storm out saying, “If people knew the truth about their beloved sheikh!”
“What is the truth about their sheikh, Omayma?” he once asked.
“They think you’re humble and godfearing in what you do and that you never do anything wrong.”
“Okay, and what do you think I am?”
“You’re average,” she said coldly. “It’s not like I’m living with Sheikh al-Ghazali or Mohamed Abduh.”
“My dear, is anyone of the same stature as those two sheikhs?” he said, trying to make light of it.
“You pretend to be modest, but in fact you think you’re something,” she scolded.
Sometimes he shouted angrily, stormed off, or slammed the brakes on in the car.
“Yes, Omayma, I do think I’m something.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me, what am I to you?” asked Hatem in desperation.
“A mosque preacher and a television evangelist.”
“Very well, that’s all very well and good. I thought you were going to say a mechanic or a carpenter.”
Omayma used to watch his programs and listen to his sermons and lectures. She discussed things with him and disagreed with him and treated him as a teacher, but when Omar was in a coma and Hatem disappeared, she started to oppose and criticize his opinions sharply. She belittled his fatwas in the company of family and friends. For a while she kept talking about giving up the hijab and in the end she did take it off. He knew she had done it to annoy him so he ignored it. She dressed up, put on lots of make-up, and behaved outrageously, but then she tired of that. After one program in which Hatem attacked the niqab and said it was a custom and not a religious obligation, he came home to find her in a niqab—inside her own home, with Omar by her side. They had tried doctors, physiotherapy, medicines, reading the Quran, and giving alms in an attempt to restore Omar’s memory and help him walk normally again, and there she was, giving Omar a distorted image of his mother by wearing a niqab in her own house. Once Hatem had got over the shock he started laughing, which annoyed her. Then he advised her to wear the niqab outside the house, since he was her husband and was allowed to see her hands and face. He said this with a laugh but she told him off and said there was a cook in the house and Zeidan the gardener in the garden. He laughed so hard that he started choking. He pulled himself together, sat down next to his son, gave him a hug and said:
“So, my love, what exactly do you think your mother wants from your father and his ancestors?”
Despite all this, or maybe because of all this, Hatem could sometimes be very sympathetic and solicitous toward her and apologetic about everything he did, because what he had done when he heard about his son’s accident was no laughing matter. He had abandoned everything in the belief that his son had died or was going to die. He was in despair and fell apart. He was afraid of dropping dead himself and afraid he wouldn’t be able to control his anger against God’s will. “Why me, Lord?” he asked. “Why have you done this to me?” He had been devastated when his mother died, but he hadn’t felt the need to ask why a woman in her sixties would die of grief after her husband took a second wife. That death was bitter and painful, but he took it in his stride and never questioned the divine decree. Two of his sisters had died young, so he came to know sudden death much earlier than a boy deserved, and he thought his mother was so long-suffering that she must have been descended from Job. His father had changed after his daughters’ deaths and he married a girl the same age as they would have been. His two other sisters had been living in Saudi Arabia with their husbands, who were brothers, for the past twenty-five years. He didn’t even know their children’s names. The last time he had a phone call from them it ended in a silly religious disagreement over something he had said in a program and he expected his sisters’ children would become members of the religious police in Saudi Arabia.
When Omar had his accident, Hatem lost everything—his fragility was all that was left of him. He wanted to protect himself from his weakness and his anger; those who are weak and angry are the most harmful to themselves and to others. He went to the Hussein mosque but didn’t go inside. He spent twenty-two days in the restrooms there, or in the restrooms at the mosques of el-Sayeda Zeinab, el-Rifai, the Sultan Hassan, and some smaller prayer rooms and other mosques here and there. He cleaned the toilets and mopped the floors, getting rid of the pieces of shit left on the bowls and on the toilet seats. He mopped up the pools of urine left on the tiles and removed the dirt that had dried in the corners of the bathrooms. He washed the marble of the urinals with soap and sprayed the place with carbolic acid. He sat on the wet floor, lifted buckets, carried brooms, bathroom wipers, and rags on his shoulders from one toilet to another. His hair was unkempt, he was covered in dust, unshaven and barefoot, his clothes were tattered, and his eyes red. He was exhausted and the skin on his hands was peeling. His heels were cracked and his fingers were wrinkled. He grew as thin as if he had lost half his weight. No one would have recognized him in the crowd at such places when he looked like that. Neither his father, nor his driver, nor his secretary could find him, and the producers and owners of the television stations were about to announce that he had gone missing. He was later told that news of his disappearance had leaked out on several websites but had been contained because the person in charge of his Facebook page had been posting material in his name, giving opinions and even issuing fatwas, confusing those who believed he was missing. Omayma was almost as puzzled by what he had done as she was distressed about her son. She was angry with her husband because she had expected him to support her in this ordeal, but he had run off like a mouse. She never forgave him. Then, in the half-light of morning one day, Sheikh Mukhtar el-Husseini stood at the door of the toilets at the Hussein mosque and said, “O you who hear the call, answer your uncle.”
Hatem felt a tap on the door of his heart. When he came out through the open door of a bathroom stall, he saw Sheikh Mukhtar and ran toward him, weeping as he had never wept before and would never weep again. Mukhtar went and asked the imam of the mosque for permission, grabbed hold of Hatem in his shabby state, pulled him off to the imam’s prayer niche, and led the people in dawn prayers. After that Hatem reverted to how he had been. He went with Sheikh Mukhtar to the hospital where his son was lying and they went up to his room. Mukhtar told him that the boy was still alive.
“So get a grip on yourself, and thank the Lord by giving your wife some support,” he
added.
How did Mukhtar el-Husseini know that Hatem was there in the restrooms, doing penance for his pride, his anger, and his weakness? He later found out that one of Sheikh Mukhtar’s followers lived in the Hussein mosque as a mendicant and had recognized Hatem after days of following him and making inquiries. He told his master, who came and took Hatem off. From then on, Sheikh Mukhtar was bound to have a special place in his heart.
Now that he was in Sheikh Mukhtar’s house he was curious and impatient to find out what Mukhtar wanted to discuss, especially as time was short and he wanted to leave early enough to arrive in good time for a live program he was doing. He calculated the length of the journey and the rest time they would need and thought that after a good meal he would hardly have an hour. So he hurried things along. The servant brought tea and put it next to the sweet pastries, of which Sheikh Mukhtar recommended the basbousa.