by Ibrahim Essa
Hatem’s performance was masterly and members of the program crew burst out laughing. They were standing around watching the encounter between the sheikh and the actor.
“Amazing,” said Nader. “That was a program that was broadcast in Ramadan four years ago. How come you remember that?”
“No, I stopped watching as soon as your mother died,” Hatem replied. “And I heard that your film was a big hit, earning a million pounds a day. How did you do it? Did you offer people free steaks if they came to watch it?” he added.
With Nader’s laughter Hatem began to open up and change into an actor playing the role of sheikh.
“Hmm meat, but there wasn’t much meat on the heroine. She was just a skeleton wrapped in candy,” he said.
Nader wouldn’t leave him alone that night. After the program was over he waited and took him to the hotel suite that the producer of his new film had booked for him, and they had dinner together. Nader asked if Hatem would mind if he smoked a joint in his presence, and Hatem said that he honestly didn’t mind, but then Nader laughed and said he was teasing and that God had persuaded him to give up hashish.
Hatem knew Nader was lying, but he liked his false modesty. A friendship between them developed and when Nader was around, his personality constantly took Hatem by surprise. But Hatem did start to grow wary of him because he was so persistent and would follow Hatem around for weeks on end, pestering him throughout with questions about religious matters. It gradually came to light that Nader (or Shaaban when he opened up and made confessions) was naive and inane. He was obsessed with religion but his knowledge of it didn’t equal that of a child in the first grade of preparatory school in an Azhar institute. Hatem even discovered that he didn’t know the Muslim profession of faith by heart but, like a child, struggled to get it straight.
Hatem would wake up to find Nader jumping on his bed. He had mixed in with the other people in the house so well it was as if he had been living there for years. He would drop in unexpectedly before dawn prayers and take Hatem off in his car to pray in the Hussein mosque or in the Sayeda Nafisa mosque. Months passed and Nader was very much part of his life. He never stopped giving Omayma films and CDs, and invitations to private screenings, festivals, and fashion shows, and computer games for Omar, and she put up with Nader’s presence in Hatem’s life because he was so generous and friendly and such a gentleman. He suddenly became the house manager, sorting out the car licenses, deliveries of gas cylinders, and the construction of a wooden shed in the garden. He hung lots of pictures on the walls and paid for all the workers to go to Mecca on pilgrimage. He starred at the parties at Omar’s school and at the birthday parties of Omar and his friends.
“Hey Nader, don’t you have a living to make?” Hatem often shouted at him.
In fact he didn’t have a job, but he did have an income because his sudden fame and the success of his last three films, after four earlier flops, had made him a millionaire in two years and he was now earning millions of pounds a film. But his ambition had lost its bite and he didn’t feel driven to go hunting for roles. He also had a problem knowing who exactly he was, because his personality was complex and nebulous at the same time. Hatem knew why Nader was an actor and why, in cinema circles, they said he had talents that went way beyond the limited roles he had played in his teen movies.
He had a personality that thrived in an intellectual vacuum. His mind was like a gas that assumed the shape of whatever vessel contained it. If he was let out of his box he would fall apart. He didn’t have one clear personality, so he was always looking for characters to breathe life into his body. When he acted, the character took over and you could easily believe that he was that doctor in this film or the miserable weeping child in that series, or the bad-tempered officer that was chasing the gang. Naturally he was an excellent mimic who quickly picked up on the gestures, the eye and head movements, the smiles, and the hummings and hawings of people he met. Nader was running away from his own insubstantiality by acting, and when he had lost any desire to make popular films or to live the high life he had a compulsive urge to look for new characters—ones that really satisfied him, because those limited and superficial characters no longer tempted him.
Nader had passed the age of thirty without really intending to, because he was still a child at heart. He would pick up a toy and become obsessed with it, then get bored and break it. With his stories and his confessions he had given Hatem glimpses into the mansions of the country’s famous and fabulously rich. He hardly slept because he had such a busy schedule of visits and social engagements it was hard to see how he found time for them. Hatem realized that Nader was looking for a conscience he could depend on. Nader had insisted that Hatem call him by his original name, Shaaban, if they were alone together.
“Why should I do that? Nader’s a real enough name,” Hatem asked.
“No, Sheikh Hatem, I feel that the name is fake and I want to be my real self with you,” said Nader.
“Your real self is crap, whether you call yourself Shaaban or Nader.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Okay, and neither am I.”
“Okay, enough, Sheikh Hatem.”
“Okay, it’s up to you. I could even call you Ramadan if you want.”
Hatem was sure that one night Nader would tire of him and cut him out of his life. For a while, Hatem had been a godsend for this restless young man, helping Nader deal with his loneliness and fill his spare time. Hatem had come into his life at a precarious time when Nader was on the verge of depression and Nader clung to him. Nader’s family had fallen apart when he was in elementary school, when his mother brought him back with her from Saudi Arabia after being divorced by his father, who stayed there and married an Egyptian woman twenty years his junior. His father’s heart couldn’t take the demands of his new marriage and he soon died, and Nader’s mother stayed in Zagazig, looking after him in a joyless apartment. When he was leaving to go to the Cinema Institute in Cairo, she told him she was going to marry what she called a respectable man. He didn’t take the trouble to judge how respectable he was. He just said goodbye and threw himself into Cairo, picking up crumbs of this or that: an education, some self-confidence, dreams, religiosity, and money.
His life was chaotic in his years at the institute, where he went into the production department because he didn’t know what he really wanted from the cinema, other than that it offered him the only way out of the trials and tribulations of his years as a child and then an adolescent. He loved many of the characters from films and memorized the lines of the leading actors. He was an encyclopedia of knowledge about black-and-white films. When he imitated these characters in front of his colleagues his name spread among them, and some of those who had connections recommended him to other people who had connections and he started to act in scenes so short that viewers might miss him if they blinked. But when he found out what he wanted to do, he showed talent, and as a younger generation came of age in the cinema he found himself moving unwittingly from seats in the third or second row to the ranks of the stars. His acting persona expanded to fit his body and his real personality caved in. The limelight and the extravagant lifestyle messed up his mind and when he found Hatem he saw him as a pillar of strength for his generation, so he parked himself next to him and leaned on him, and that was why he became so attached to Hatem.
As soon as Hatem appeared in his life, Nader stopped living in hotel suites and moved back to his abandoned villa in the suburbs. He filled it with servants and retainers and secretaries and drivers. Every Friday he organized a recitation of the whole Quran and brought together his acting friends and colleagues who were rising stars, along with their own associates—colleagues, secretaries, young producers, their own writers, and other film and television people. For the recitations he had famous Quran readers and Nader joined in with them. Although his religious knowledge was shallow, he was a fluent Quran reader in imitation of the famous sheikhs. Servants came around with i
ncense and bowls of aromatic herbs and the tables were spread with food from the best-known caterers. By the end of the day everyone had held down copious amounts of hashish smoke—the equivalent of a month’s hard work by a gang of smugglers. Then Nader, with one companion, got out his massive Jeep and wrapped up all the food tight in paper to keep in the heat and drove around the streets—streets he knew in slum areas such as the Pyramids, Embaba and Kitkat—giving out the food until it was time for dawn prayers. Then he drove back to Hatem, who was asleep, and woke him up to perform the prayer together in el-Hussein or Sayeda Zeinab. If Hatem complained or rebelled, he would make do with praying behind him in the garden of the mansion, but he insisted that Hatem say the dawn invocation in the second prostration. On one occasion, when Nader said the final Amen his voice could be heard throughout the neighborhood and Hatem had to control himself to keep from laughing. Nader felt it too and had to hold back a laugh as well. That made him fart and he collapsed on the lawn in fits of laughter.
Throughout their friendship Hatem had never seen any sign that his favorite actor had any interest in women. He never saw him with a girlfriend or in the company of an actress, or even heard him talking about women. Of course Omayma helped point this out to him and urged him to confront Nader.
“Why don’t I see any women in your life, Nader?” he said. “I’m worried, God forbid, you might be one of two things.”
“What two things?” Nader replied with a laugh.
“Either you’re not interested in sex at all, or you’re one of those bastards who like sex with their own kind,” said Hatem.
Nader laughed till he cried.
“Good heavens, sheikh, why would you inflict that on me?”
“You know,” said Hatem, “the way you laugh, much as it reassures me, it also makes me smell a rat.”
“Don’t worry, Mawlana, and get a cat for the rat. Yours truly is male and normal as well, but do you really want me to invite you to witness my love affairs? I’d be embarrassed, and besides you should be urging me to be pious and chaste.”
“No, I do urge you to be chaste, but that means a nice girl and I want you to get married. I’m asking in order to persuade you to go out with Nana or Tata or whoever.”
“Nana and Tata! No one has nicknames like that any more, sheikh.”
A few days later, when they were together for dawn prayers in the Sayeda Zeinab mosque, Nader reminded him of his question.
“I couldn’t possibly tell Sayeda Zeinab that you want me to fornicate,” he said.
“I swear, you do seem to avoid women, Shaaban,” said Hatem.
When they were in the car later, he suddenly said, “Yes, I do.”
“Good God,” Hatem replied.
“I do avoid women, that’s a hundred percent true. First, I got fed up because it was all about sex without love, and second, I started worrying fornication might kill me. I once got a woman pregnant and she had an abortion and I despised myself and of course I despised her and so I lost interest. But for your information I have starting going with them again.”
“With women?” Hatem interrupted.
“Yes, with women, as far as the bed. And then I pick up my clothes and leave without doing anything.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me, Shaaban Abdel-Samie!”
“You don’t believe me. I swear by Almighty God.”
“By God I believe you. Get married then.”
“It’s too early. And who would I marry? After what I’ve seen and done I couldn’t marry any woman. I wouldn’t even trust someone as good as my late grandmother,” said Nader.
Hatem wasn’t in the least surprised when Nader one day asked him, earnestly and sadly, if acting was forbidden, or haram.
“Strange question,” Hatem replied. “The question should be, ‘is acting permissible?’ ‘Is it halal?’ Why did you start with whether it’s haram?”
“You’re right. I never thought of that,” said Nader.
“And does it matter to you to know whether it’s halal or haram?”
“My God, why do you ask me this difficult question, Mawlana? You mean you think I could do something haram if I knew it was haram?”
Hatem smiled and slapped him on the shoulder.
“Yes, my friend, all humans are like that. We all know there are haram things that we do, and we do haram things that we know are haram, and that’s very different. Someone who drinks alcohol and denies it’s haram can be sentenced to death, according to some jurists, whereas someone who drinks alcohol in the knowledge that it’s haram can only be flogged. In other words, it’s the same act yet two different sentences.”
“Really?” said Nader.
Hatem laughed.
“Really really,” he said.
Nader, deep in thought, examined the pattern on the sofa covers and the paintings on the wall.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Answer me as though I’m Shaaban Abdel-Samie el-Sayed and not Nader Nour. Is acting halal? There you are, see, this time I put halal first.”
“Okay,” said Hatem. “You want me to give you an answer as Shaaban and not Nader. Okay, but should I answer as Hatem el-Shenawi the sheikh at the mosque, or as Hatem el-Shenawi the sheikh on television?”
Nader was startled.
“Oh my God, does it matter?” he asked.
“It sure does,” said Hatem, “because the sheikh in the mosque tries to please God, while the television sheikh tries to please the customer, either the producer or the company that sponsors the program or the audience, and if he manages to please God in the midst of all that, then all’s well and good and it’s a miracle.”
“Is that what you’re like, Sheikh Hatem?” asked Nader.
“Just like that.”
“Come on now, there’s no need for that feeble sheikhly humor. Tell me, on your honor . . .”
“It’s haram.”
“What’s haram?”
“Acting.”
Nader was taken aback, so shocked that he looked like a driver who’d just survived an accident on the desert highway and found out that all of his passengers were dead. Hatem felt that he had to explain.
“Hang on and don’t just take the fatwa without thinking. In Islamic law there’s a process the jurists call dissection, which means we take the subject we’re interested in and break it down into pieces, exactly like Meccano, and then we can see what the pieces are made of and how they fit together and how they stand in relation to sharia law and what sharia law has to say about them. In this case we’re talking about acting. For a start, in the time of the Prophet Muhammad . . .”
“May God bless him and grant him peace,” Nader mumbled audibly.
Hatem gave a broad smile.
“May God strengthen your faith, but don’t think that this blessing-the-Prophet business will make me change my opinion about you or about acting,” he said sarcastically. “I tell you, even if you acted like Omar ibn al-Khattab right now in front of me my analysis wouldn’t change.”
“Sheikh,” Nader replied affectionately. “You make me feel as though we’re in the Center for Islamic Research. But we’re just having a nice chat and I’ve just smoked a couple of joints, so take it easy on us actors.”
“Okay, then perhaps you’d better ask me if hashish is haram or halal. That’s a much easier question than the acting question.”
“No, I know the answer to that one.”
“Oh wow, such wide learning, such incisive legal expertise! Okay, tell me then, is weed halal or haram? And mind you don’t tell me that if it’s halal we’ll smoke it and if it’s haram we’ll burn it, because that one’s as old as your uncle’s old boots, and because it’s just wordplay, not a fatwa.”
“No, I wouldn’t give you such a cheesy answer,” Nader replied sniffily. “There’s another answer, Mawlana.”
“Well spare us the wait,” said Hatem.
“Okay.”
“Go on, spit it out,” said Hatem.
“It depends on w
hy you’re smoking weed, what it’s being smoked for.”
“Good Lord, so smoking weed is like drinking Zamzam water from Mecca,” Hatem roared.
“Yes, if you smoke weed as a cure for depression or anxiety or tension, then it’s treated like any other medicament, but if you smoke it for pleasure and to get high, then it’s haram,” Nader said.
Hatem roared with laughter.
“Who told you that, you son of a bitch?”
Nader jumped up.
“That’s stumped you! You don’t want to admit it’s a good argument.”
“Good argument, no way!” Hatem retorted. “Sit down, Shaaban, so that I don’t waste your time or mine. Acting is a subject where it’s right to use analogy, and what do we mean by analogy, my friend? We mean we compare. Simple, isn’t it? When you ask me how far it is to such-and-such a place, I say it’s like from here to the main street. Because they didn’t have acting in the time of the Prophet or his Companions or the generation that came after. So this was something that was new to Muslims, but there was singing and music and what did Islam have to say about them? There are jurists who say that they’re halal under certain conditions, and there are jurists who say they’re haram and try to ban them. So much for music and singing, which existed in the time of the Prophet. So what about acting, where we don’t have any relevant saying of the Prophet or, of course, any verse in the Quran? In this case the Muslim mind has to get to work, and this mind changes over time and with the various lives that people go through, and sometimes it’s open-minded and tolerant, and sometimes it’s stupid and narrow-minded. Get any of that?”
“No.”
“But what do you think of the method?”
“Mawlana, without the joking, please.”
“You idiot, what do you mean, joking? You think I’d joke about religion? I asked you what you thought of the method, I mean the intellectual methodology, but how could you understand what that is when you never got beyond reading children’s stories? So anyway, the Muslim mind has to ask itself a number of questions and then deduce a clear answer, or the clearest answer.”