The Televangelist

by Ibrahim Essa

  Hatem almost wet himself.

  He had been distracted and had missed much of what Farida had said and the details her husband had added by way of explanation. They could tell what a shock it was by the way Hatem sat there immobile, staring at the design in the carpet under his feet. Now Hatem had to pick up the pieces of his nervous system, which lay scattered on the ground, on the sofa, and under the table, and reconnect the wires to the control board in his brain. Disaster has struck, Hatem, and it’s struck you, not because of the mission that within minutes you will obviously be asked to carry out, and not because it’s very possible that you will fail in that mission, but simply because you’ve been told. Just knowing means there’s a dagger at your throat. But the question that pounded the loudest in Hatem’s head was “Why me?”

  When Hatem recovered from the shock, Farida was still speaking.

  “He’s always been very well-behaved and obedient and loving to his mother and father. Although he was pampered and spoiled of course from childhood, till recently he had never behaved in a way that was worrying. He had a generous allowance and plenty of credit cards. But even so he didn’t party or drink too much, just the usual fun stuff you’d expect from his generation, and I don’t think he ever smoked hashish or marijuana in his life. He studied business at the American University in Cairo after spending a year in England. He didn’t feel at home in England although he had a Western education and spoke the language well and had friends there. He felt horribly homesick in England and went into a depression. So he came back early and didn’t finish his course there. It never occurred to us to ask why a kid who spoke English fluently and was brought up in a very Western culture wasn’t able to adapt to living in England. Then the psychiatrist told us just very recently that maybe he missed the sense of protection, being pampered, and the support that made him feel safe, so he got depressed. Besides, Mother and Father couldn’t bear him being so far away, so he came back and finished at the American University. He graduated a year ago and worked for a while in one of Father’s companies. Then some very strange things began to happen and he started behaving in a way quite different from the Hassan we knew.”

  “Are you following the story, Sheikh Hatem?” the president’s son interjected.

  Hatem nodded. “Absolutely,” he said firmly. “I’m all ears.”

  The president’s son turned to his wife and signaled that she should continue.

  “I can’t claim we’ve ever been a family that reads about religion or pays much attention to the details, just what you learn at school or see on television,” she said.

  “Do you know Sheikh Mohamed el-Ghazali?” Hatem suddenly asked. Even he didn’t know why he had asked the question, so there was no reason why Farida and her husband should know. “I mean, have you read any of his writings or heard of him or ever seen him on television?” Hatem continued.

  “I remember from childhood there was a very big library in the house and I think it had all the religious books, but none of us ever read any of them and I never saw Father or Mother reading one of them either. But of course we had newspapers and magazines in the house and Father was very interested in them and would comment on them in our presence, even though we didn’t really pay attention and he didn’t ask us to be interested in them. Our life was very full and we didn’t feel we were missing anything and despite all the many changes the country’s been through—Islamic groups, the spread of the hijab, and all the other things you know about—Father never worried that we might think about that kind of religion. He isn’t religious himself. I’ve never seen him praying, for example, or going to Friday prayers, but he’s very much a believer and always talks about God protecting him and helping him make the right decisions, with very many business problems. He used to say that God was standing by him. And he would never talk to us about so and so being a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew. Yet Hassan never had Christian friends despite the English-language schools and the American University. I just realized now that he didn’t have any Christian friends from elementary school to the time he graduated, or any girlfriends. Even the foreigners he knew, he only knew them superficially, and they weren’t interested in religion so I don’t know if they were Christian or not. Oh yes, one of them was Buddhist, I’m sure. He met him in England and he was from India perhaps.”

  Her husband stepped in, perhaps from a sense that it was time to speed up the process. “Someone who works at the bank with my father-in-law noticed something very strange about Hassan’s account. There’s a monthly review of the charges on his Visa card, showing how much he spent where and when. The guy told his boss but the boss dismissed it, saying he didn’t want problems. The next month the guy asked to meet my father-in-law, but he was busy and the meeting was delayed two or three weeks.” He paused a moment. “Tell the story, Farida,” he added.

  “Suddenly we found Hassan had put a statue of the Virgin in his room,” she said. “It took Mother a while to notice, and it didn’t worry her. It was a beautiful, artistic statue. No problem. After a while she found many things changing or mysteriously appearing. He was playing hymns in the house, and pictures of Jesus were going up in his room. Of course she hid all this from us and didn’t know what to do.”

  “She didn’t understand what was happening,” the president’s son added.

  “Mother was afraid to ask him or confront him,” Farida continued. “She told Father, and of course my father travels a lot and is very busy. He was away at the time and he told her not to say a word till he got back. She started going into Hassan’s room and ignoring the changes, such as the new Coptic icons and the fact that Hassan was sitting at the computer for hours on end. Then he let his hair grow to his shoulders and she concluded he was trying to look like Christ in the icons.”

  “My father-in-law had a call from his office saying that the guy at the bank wanted to discuss something important with him to do with his son,” the president’s son continued. “When he heard it was about Hassan, he told the guy to go to the airport and take my father-in-law’s private plane that he was sending to Cairo to pick him up. I think he was in Dubai on business at the time. He came back on the plane after the guy at the bank told him that Hassan had written checks worth 160,000 dollars, all of them to a Coptic charity organization or another Christian organization based in Cyprus, and I think it was fourteen or sixteen thousand pounds on his Visa card to buy books from two church bookshops in Egypt.

  “My father-in-law called Hassan from the plane and asked him to get ready and come to the airport to fly to Gouna with him. Hassan felt something was up and as soon as he’d said hello to his father and was sitting next to him on the plane he said he hated Islam and wanted to become a Christian. My father-in-law said there wasn’t any point in the trip then and he told the pilot to turn around and land in Cairo. He went home with him in the car and didn’t say anything, and as soon as he was home he told Hassan’s mother. She asked for a glass of water and collapsed speechless. She had a stroke. That was about a year ago.”

  “She went for treatment in London,” Farida continued. “Thankfully she recovered and has only a few problems moving, but she’s much better thanks to the physiotherapy. Hassan was a little shaken by his mother’s illness. My father couldn’t take it and he went in and cut up Hassan’s pictures and threw out the books, and broke the statues and the icons. As I told you, Your Grace, we’ve never been religious, either in the wider sense or the narrow sense, but when this happened with Hassan it was a big shock. Father built six mosques in five months, for example, and donated a million pounds to an Azhar institute in my grandfather’s village, and my mother started wearing the hijab. My sister also took up the hijab and we started taking an interest in the religious programs on television. That’s how we saw your programs, and my mother took you to heart because of your simple style and your tolerance and the modern way you speak. But Hassan became even more defiant, even though none of us had said anything to him about it since Mother collaps
ed in front of him. On the first day of last Ramadan—like all Egyptian households the whole family usually gathers for the first iftar—we were all invited to the presidential palace and, imagine, he stood up before the call to prayer at sunset and told us he’d decided to change his name and call himself Boutros!”

  “Then two things happened,” said the president’s son. “I asked State Security to intervene and I asked for any information they had on the boy’s movements, who he’d been meeting and who his friends were and everything to do with this conversion to Christianity. Of course there was one thing that had to be absolutely clear: that not a word on the subject should get out, because that would seriously alarm public opinion. It could create terrible unrest in the country if it was known my wife’s brother was an apostate from Islam and a convert to Christianity. It would destroy all the good things we’re doing in the country. Of course you know we’re not against Christianity or fanatical, and we really do believe in equal citizenship for everyone. Religion is a matter between the individual and God while the country belongs to everyone. But this business is sensitive and dangerous and we can’t just let it pass. Besides, people in the West and the racists will jump on the subject and make a big deal out of it, and the extremists and the terrorists, if they get wind of the story, they’ll set fire not just to us but to the whole of Egypt. The second thing I said is we have to find a solution. If he’s ill, we’ll have him treated. If he’s been tricked, we’ll understand, and if he’s been induced in some way we’ll put an end to that. In fact the kid’s been very open to any attempt to discuss things with him, and that was a surprise. He had a session with a very big psychiatrist—you must know him, Muhyiddin Kamel—and he’s also had plenty of time with Sheikh Fathi el-Maadawi.”

  Oh my God, adult breastfeeding, thought Hatem. That sheikh will declare Hassan an infidel, and his mother too into the bargain!

  “Of course, a great scholar that we all respect,” was what he actually said.

  “He failed abysmally,” said Farida. “Hassan hated him and attacked him and almost insulted him. The sheikh thought Hassan was obviously bewitched or possessed by some demon—something retarded like that.”

  What she said set off major alarm bells for Hatem, warning him that he was destined for hell on earth if he failed with the boy. These people had taken Fathi’s failure lightly because he was their sheikh, their man, whereas it would be no great loss to them if Hatem met a sticky end. He tried to move away from the subject of Sheikh Fathi. “What did State Security say?” he asked.

  “They almost made it into an international crisis,” Farida continued. “They arrested some groups they accused of trying to convert people to Christianity and they launched a security campaign. They gave the media instructions to start newspaper campaigns and to do special episodes on the issue on the television programs. It got to the stage where the country was in ferment and it all came very close to backfiring in our faces, at home and abroad. Maybe you yourself spoke on the subject in one of your programs, but there wasn’t a scrap of information about what had happened to Hassan, even after they tracked down all the websites he’d viewed on the Internet. It turned out that for about eleven months he’d been spending many hours a day in Paltalk chatrooms and inter-religious discussion groups. We confiscated his computer and found he had downloaded hundreds of books and videos on the persecution of Christians and Christianity and the Gospels, and of course terrible attacks on Islam. But even so we didn’t find a single name we could confront him with or that would help us understand what had happened.”

  “And the psychiatrist?”

  “There were three of them in the end and they all said he didn’t have a mental illness or nervous condition, and he was completely normal except for a little depression, which couldn’t have led to this dramatic change.”

  Unconsciously Farida assumed a pleading tone, as if to win Hatem’s sympathy. “We’re in deep trouble,” she said. “He’s decided to apply to the courts to recognize his conversion and change his religion on his ID card,” she said.

  “Of course we won’t let him,” her husband added firmly. “And we won’t allow any department in the country to approve his request. We won’t let anyone find out in the first place. But the problem is the boy’s very obstinate and he’s become obsessed with the idea. We face several possible disasters. He might cause a world-wide scandal, and he’s capable of that unless we lock him up in an isolated cell. Or something might be leaked by the organizations or people who converted him to Christianity. That would threaten a family that represents the very essence of Egypt and it would threaten the security of the whole country. Of course we couldn’t deny it because the boy would dismiss the denial and play the persecuted Christ figure. Or he could go and live abroad in America or Europe, even under his new Christian name, but that option is fraught with the danger that he might go crazy in public or stab the country in the back, and that would be exploited by people who hate the country or have grudges against it. On top of all that, there’s the trouble and anguish he’s caused his family. There are only two solutions: either someone persuades him to revert to Islam or else, well, I’d rather not discuss that now.

  “So we’re placing our hope in you,” he added.

  Hatem didn’t have it in him to flatter him by thanking him for his precious confidence, because he knew it was a deadly trap. Instead he said a silent prayer to God.

  “Of course you’re going to ask why we chose you,” said Farida.

  The words ‘we chose you’ had a comical effect. He sang them to himself: we chose you, we chose you, then thought to himself, “Because of my lousy luck.”

  “Mother was watching your program on television and you were answering a question from a viewer,” Farida continued. “And while she was concentrating on what you said she realized Hassan was standing behind a screen in the sitting room listening to you with interest. She noticed you made an impact on him and in fact it was she and Father who suggested you sit down with Hassan in the hope that through you God might give him guidance.”

  They agreed on many of the details and the president’s son took him to the lift to say goodbye. “You spoke about another solution you didn’t want to talk about right now,” Hatem whispered, “apart from me sitting down with Hassan. What might that be?”

  “His father’s from the south,” the man replied calmly. “Don’t be deceived by appearances. In the end he has south Egyptian blood in his veins, and the south Egyptian solution here is obvious. When someone brings shame on you, what do you do to him?”

  “What do you do?” Hatem replied, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was only pretending to be stupid.

  As Hatem saw it, the arrangements for his first encounter with Hassan were important and delicate. If he went to see Hassan at home, the boy would immediately feel that he was just another sheikh hired by his father or his sister’s husband who had come crawling in on orders from his masters. The truth was, Hassan had already seen a considerable number of sheikhs who drooled over his father’s wealth or his brother-in-law’s influence. When they stopped acting like men of religion, they lost their prestige and credibility in the eyes of the boy. Hatem was seriously worried what might happen if he clashed with the boy in a setting he hadn’t chosen, where he couldn’t cut and run if necessary. It would also be dangerous if the boy came to visit Hatem. The boy might refuse to come and then they might force him, which could aggravate his hostility and stubbornness, of which he had plenty already, judging by what Hatem had heard. Or Hassan might decide that Hatem’s house in the affluent suburbs didn’t meet his expectations in some way, and that would then discredit Hatem, if Hassan gave him any credit in the first place. Then there was the question of what strategy he should adopt in the first encounter, which, if it succeeded, which it had to, would lead to other meetings. How should he begin? How should he proceed? When should he shut up and when should he act tough? When should he raise his fist and when should he smile? Hate
m could think of nothing else on the two evenings after that damned meeting with the president’s son and his wife. He went through the motions of his television programs: answering questions, handing out fatwas, telling stories from history and sayings of the Prophet. But he was like someone driving a car and watching the road while his mind was elsewhere, focused wholly on the meeting with Hassan.

  He knew it would be a tough test and a massive headache. He would have to try out unfamiliar arguments in a debate with a young man who was saying goodbye to his old religion and moving on to another religion. Such people were often hostile toward their old religion and ecstatic about their new religion. Besides, he would be arguing with a young man and not a scholar who had already staked a claim in the world of ideas and religious law, and he sometimes found it harder to answer people who were ignorant and enthusiastic than to answer eagle-eyed scholars. On top of that, Hassan was related to powerful and influential people who could ruin him or have him thrown into a dungeon if he didn’t find a way to make Hassan change his mind or if he inadvertently let out the secret of their hidden shame. He had no previous experience with such an assignment and he couldn’t consult anyone, so he decided to put his trust in God and go into battle on the principle that he would have no one to back him up and no way to escape. He would say what he really believed without worrying about something he could do nothing about, even if he was worried. He decided that when he sat down with Hassan, or Boutros as he liked to call himself after Christ had shown him the light, as he put it, he wouldn’t be afraid of the influence of Hassan’s family, or the anger of State Security, or rival sheikhs, or the conditions set by his producers, or the demands of sponsor companies, or the instructions of the director or the rules for lighting or for cutting for a break. He decided to revert to the self he had lost and that he longed to be in his wildest dreams. He would go into the ring freely to ensure through his freedom—what a painful paradox—that he retained his celebrity status and his income.