The Televangelist

by Ibrahim Essa

  “You know what? It looks like I’ve given you an overdose of the deep stuff and I need to lighten up.”

  Hassan came out of his reverie and whispered, “Please stop insulting my intelligence and treating me like an idiot who can’t understand complicated things like those things you were saying just now.”

  Hatem stopped to greet an admirer who had waved at him as he came into the coffee shop.

  “On the contrary, I have the highest respect for your intelligence and your courage,” he resumed. “I’m just being frank and sharing opinions and thoughts I’ve never shared before with anyone on the face of the earth. In fact I feel as if you’re bringing me back to learning after years of pandering to the wishes of ignorant people.”

  Two days passed without sight or sound of Hassan, and Hatem busied himself with his daily life. He felt that something had lifted a weight off his shoulders, and he made a deliberate effort to tell God in person that he loved Him. He went to the Rifai mosque and performed the sunset prayer, surrounded by warm welcomes from the mosque sheikhs and other people who were praying. He lavished money and sympathy on the poor and the mosque servants, then set off on foot to his father’s house. His walk became a procession of people seeking fatwas on matters that suddenly occurred to them when they saw a television sheikh. They wanted to ask him whatever they could while they had the chance. People who wanted favors clung to him, telling him stories about houses about to collapse or disputes over plots of land that needed a signature from the local council or the provincial headquarters. Suddenly prescriptions would appear, listing drugs that sick people needed, and people would press job applications into his hand as if they had been carrying them around in their pockets until the right moment came. The sight of his father cheered him up. He met Hatem in front of the house and went inside, greeting people and inviting them to tea in the hall downstairs. His father sent them a young man trained to deal with the situation, who gave them juice to drink and envelopes with some money inside, took their petitions and doctors’ prescriptions from them and promised to meet their needs based on instructions from the sheikh. Meanwhile Hatem had slipped off his shoes and was sitting cross-legged. He heard his cell phone ring and started. On the other end it was Khodeiri, almost shouting in alarm and demanding that he come to his office immediately.

  “What’s up, Khodeiri? All’s well, I hope?”

  “Hassan Boutros is here,” Khodeiri said gruffly. “He’s not acting normal and he wants you. To be honest, I’m frightened.”

  Sirhan the driver set off, surprised that Hatem had come back so quickly from his father’s house. Insensitively, he kept asking Hatem why he was in such a hurry. Hatem was in such a state wondering what had happened that he couldn’t even hear the heavy traffic. Why hadn’t Hassan called him from his phone? He thought of calling the president’s son or his wife Farida but he decided against it because they hadn’t spoken to him since the meeting at their house and they hadn’t made any effort to find out if the meetings were going well or to ask what he thought of Hassan or whether he had any hope that Hassan would change his mind about converting to Christianity. Hatem felt that the problem was less alarming than they had made it out to be at the time and thought that Hassan was confused rather than determined to convert. (In fact he thought that Hassan might not even really convert but was only using the possibility that he might to attract attention and wind them up). Now he was anxious, but without knowing why. When they arrived at the office, Sirhan persisted in asking why the sheikh was so obviously and unusually tense, but Hatem was intent on ignoring him. His mind was all a whirl, but what he saw was the last thing he expected and definitely the last thing he wanted.

  He went into his office, ignoring Khodeiri’s noisy interjections, and pushed the door shut behind him. He found Hassan sitting at the desk, slumped forward with his arms hanging down by his sides. He wasn’t moving, didn’t make a sound, and didn’t look up. The scene stopped Hatem in his tracks and he completely forgot all the questions he had prepared in his mind while he was watching the cars battling it out along the highway. His appearance alone was cause for concern but what he saw next concerned him even more. Hassan took his arms out from under the desk and lifted them up. Hatem was shocked to see drops of blood dripping from under his sleeves at his wrists. Hatem sat down speechless. There were cuts in the shape of a cross gouged into the inside of Hassan’s wrists. The crosses seemed to have been dripping blood for some time. Thinking disjointedly, Hatem imagined Hassan holding a sharp knife and carving the sign of the cross into his skin. A smile of gratified vengeance appeared on Hassan’s lips. Hatem finally stood up, shaken by this early defeat at a time when he thought he had won an early victory. He took a square soft white towel from the drawer in the bathroom next door and brought some bottles of aftershave from the glass shelf under the bathroom mirror, and walked toward Hassan, who submissively put out his hands. Hatem took hold of them forcefully and started to clean off the blood and spray Hassan’s wrists with the aftershave. It must have stung, but Hassan didn’t make a sound.

  “That was a really stupid thing to do, but thank God you’re intelligent,” said Hatem. “You didn’t sink the knife deep in your arteries or else you’d have killed yourself by now, and you’d be buried in the Muslim cemetery whether you like it or not. Please, tell me, why did you do this? And why did you choose my place to visit when you’re dripping blood?”

  Before Hassan could answer and before Hatem knew whether he would or wouldn’t answer, his cell phone rang with a ringtone that Hatem recognized. It was the last straw. Hatem pulled the phone out of his pocket, stepped out of the office and turned his back on Hassan. “Hello,” he said to the caller.

  “Hassan’s at your place and I’m sending some people over to take him away,” the caller said excitedly.

  “Is everything okay?” Hatem asked.

  “What! Hasn’t he told you?”

  “We were just about to . . .”

  “It’s getting more complicated.”

  “To tell you the truth, as far as I’m concerned, it got more complicated just five minutes ago,” said Hatem.

  Hatem swung around and found Hassan covered in sweat. His face turned pale and then more and more bluish as the seconds passed. He grabbed the phone from Hatem’s hand. “I will not come back and I will not see you and I will go to the monastery and become a monk whatever you do!” he roared.

  Hatem, thwarted and robbed of his phone, could hear the answer loud and clear. “There isn’t a monastery in Egypt that will take you in, or else we’ll demolish it with everyone inside. Please, Hassan, don’t force me to be cruel. I don’t want that, for your sister’s sake.”

  “I’m not Hassan. I’m Boutros!” he shouted back, his voice cracked, hoarse, and tearful.

  Hassan threw the telephone down and Hatem rushed to pick it up.

  “If you don’t mind, sir,” he said. “Could you tell your people to wait a while?”

  “They’re in the sitting room with Khodeiri, by the way,” said the voice on the phone.

  “Oh, so you know Khodeiri as well, sir?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Okay, I’d just like a chance to find out what exactly’s going on.”

  He looked over at Hassan, who was cowering in the corner on the sofa, shaking and kissing the signs of the cross on his wrists.

  “Do you know about the crosses?” Hatem whispered into the phone.

  “What crosses?”

  “Okay, let’s stay calm and speak again in an hour, please.”

  “Okay.”

  He hung up and Hatem muttered to himself as he examined the message on the screen that said the call had ended.

  “Without a goodbye or a word of thanks or a ‘sorry to put you to so much trouble.’” Hatem said.

  He turned to address Hassan: “Those relatives of yours are completely shameless.”

  Hassan smiled, despite the condition he was in.

  Hatem conti
nued: “And you’re shameless too, in spite of the ketchup that came out of your arm a while back. Why did you decide to come to me, intent on being that bloody Boutros? Why did you call yourself Boutros? What’s wrong with George or Michael or Tom Cruise? Fine, you want to be Christian, but what’s that to do with my family now? I mean, instead of having a cross stamped onto your wrist in a church or in a tattoo parlor, you’ve gone and bloody injured yourself. You almost killed yourself just for the sake of a cross. And instead of saying ‘I’ll keep away from that sheikh who’s always giving me a headache and pissing me off with the stuff he says about Islam,’ you come all the way to my office and almost make Khodeiri piss and shit in his pants, and now we’ve got the death squad sitting outside with him. So what do you want from me?”

  The incident was a powerful reminder to Hatem that he was part of Hassan’s struggle with himself and his family, and the fact he had come to Hatem for refuge proved that Hassan was deeply divided between rebelling against his family, and the power and influence that it represented, and rebelling against his religion, which he hardly knew and on which he blamed his own lack of purpose, his depression, and the corruption around him. These were Hatem’s thoughts as he tried to analyze why Hassan was now lying calmly on the sofa asking for something to eat.

  “I’m worried the people outside might have brought some food, either to poison me or to poison you,” Hatem said. “So we should ask Khodeiri to eat it first, but the problem is that Khodeiri isn’t a normal human being, so the poison wouldn’t affect him.”

  Hassan laughed. “After our last discussion I felt confused,” he said. “What you said worked. It shook me, not so much that I had second thoughts but enough to make me worried. I went on the Internet and there’s a website called ‘The Home of Christian Converts’ that brings together people who’ve converted from Islam to Christianity in Egypt. I look at it every day, but that night I was looking for an answer to my questions. I was seeking strength, through the things they write about the flaws in Islam and the power of Christianity, to keep me going through this phase. I found they were inviting all converts to gather in the park. They didn’t say exactly which park of course because they know they’re being monitored.”

  “Being monitored by who?” Hatem asked.

  “State Security and Islamic groups that are against people who try to promote Christianity in Egypt.”

  “Is that really going on?”

  “How come you let Christians become Muslims but you don’t want us to convert Muslims to Christianity?”

  “The truth is I don’t want Christians to become Muslims, or Muslims to become Christians. I just want to go home,” Hatem said with a smile.

  “If you want my personal opinion,” Hatem continued, “I’m against trying to convert Christians to Islam, on the sharia principle that preventing something that does harm should take precedence over doing something beneficial. If Muslims think that converting a Christian to Islam serves Islam they are mistaken. It arises from the sense among Muslims that they are less capable and less powerful in the world. It’s a form of compensation. Particularly in Egypt it gives a sense of victory when reality is full of defeats. It’s as if, when a Christian converts, it means the Muslims are better, as if they’ve won a battle and have proved that Islam is better than Christianity. Of course that’s the feeling among poor Muslims of limited intelligence who see few victories in their lives, and besides, when everyone’s wallowing in corruption, they see this as a way to purge oneself of sin and get close to God.

  “The Christians, on the other hand, see the conversion of a Muslim to Christianity as a divine miracle that gives them revenge for the arrogance of Muslims who behave as if they’re better, and as a victory for the minority against the majority, which inadvertently torments Christians—with loudspeakers bellowing the call to prayer into their ears, and with the Friday sermons and the lessons on television that call Christians infidels every day. So when the Christians manage to convert a Muslim it’s a cause for celebration and they declare a victory. You don’t see all that in Europe, for example, where Christians can convert to Islam and the world doesn’t tremble and it doesn’t affect their jobs or their family or social status, just as Europeans and Americans become Buddhists without anyone getting upset and just as Muslims convert to Christianity without any fuss and no Christians throwing a party. Why? Because it’s not a broken society and it doesn’t see religion or doctrine as a way to compensate for a lousy economic situation or restrictions on freedom or a political vacuum or a shortage of values or a lack of options.

  “I tell you once more: if we were to suppose that the conversion of a Christian to Islam would do good, then the psychological, social, and political effects on the country would mean it also caused harm, and preventing that harm is more important than the good it would do. Do you understand me, or have you closed your mind?”

  “No, I understand you,” Hassan replied, “but you haven’t considered the possibility that a Muslim might have read and understood about religion and discovered with his own intellect how inadequate, illogical, and contradictory Islam is, and then looked into Christianity and found in it a convincing answer to his questions, and then decided to convert, or the other way around.”

  “That’s very objective of you, kid!” Hatem interrupted.

  Hassan ignored the interruption and continued. “A Christian reads books and studies Islam and thinks it’s better for him, so he converts to Islam. Not all converts are psychologically vulnerable or converting because of some situation. Of course your analysis of me is that I’m rebelling against my family because they’re a bunch of corrupt oppressors and in order to assert my rebellion, I’ve rejected my religion and adopted Christianity.”

  Hatem turned his back and said, “Look, although I’m looking forward to hearing the details of the mess you made tonight before coming to my office and also hearing why you decided to come to my office in the first place, and although time’s passing and outside this room there’s a group of what I think are thugs that your brother-in-law has sent to take you away, I would however like to agree with you on two things: first, that there really are people who change their beliefs based on reason and without any compelling social motive, and second, I really do believe that your attitude toward your family is one of the main reasons for your alleged conversion to Christianity, along with ignorance and adolescence of course.”

  Hassan was irritated. “What do you mean, alleged? You don’t believe me, even when I carved the sign of the cross with a knife to prove to you that I believe in Christ.”

  “Precisely because you did that, I think you’re confused and hesitant and you’re trying to prove it to yourself, not to me. Unfortunately I’m still not interested in what you decide, religiously speaking.”

  “You are interested,” Hassan said defiantly. “You also think you’re stronger than me with your learning and your intellect, and you’re surprised I haven’t broken down in front of you and reverted to Islam.”

  Hatem’s phone rang but he rejected the call and put the phone on silent. “Hassan,” he said. “I’m really not losing any sleep because you’ve converted to Christianity. You can be sure I don’t spend the night dreaming about you reverting to Islam. The problem is that your brother-in-law is pretty much ruling Egypt and if he takes a dislike to me, he could get me in deep trouble or drive me into exile from my own country. So now we’re in this together. I’ve really started to like you and feel very sympathetic toward you. It may come as a surprise to you that I see you as my younger brother and friend. I don’t have any friends and the last person who claimed to be a friend of mine got me in deep shit—that goddamned Nader Nour, may God never let him see the lights of a studio ever again. Inside I have a strange feeling that I’m doing something for my son Omar, for his future, when I sit down and talk with you.”

  “I very much respect your candor,” said Hassan, “although you’re only candid with me. With the government, the state,
and the police we don’t hear you speaking out.”

  “So you’re the opposition activist then!” replied Hatem. “You live off your father’s wealth, which you call corrupt, and in the shadow of your brother-in-law’s power and might, which you call despotic. It’s true I conceal my real opinions, not only from those in authority but also from the authority of ordinary people, society, public opinion, and the masses, who don’t know anything but don’t want to be exposed to learning. On the contrary they’re delighted when their ignorance is reinforced. I sell learning, not so that people will learn but to improve the quality of their ignorance.”

  Hatem sighed and sat down on the sofa, devastated.

  “Anyway, I’ll go back and answer your question about people who convert based on reason and learning. I tell you, they’re very exceptional. It might take years of research and study and poring over books and comparison and meditation and discussion and deep debate. All that’s only possible for scholars who have the free time and are interested in the idea. But all the conversions we’ve seen in recent years, with Christians turning Muslim and Muslims turning Christian, have been the result of fast talk, hasty judgments, and half-truths, usually connected with social conditions, love affairs, or psychological crises. That’s evident in your group of converts and in fact you personally. You made this decision in a month—or was it three, or even ten? And based on what? Hurried, superficial opinions and silly debates on the Internet. You want me to believe you sat down and read the Mutazila or the Muslim theologians? Have you read Ibn Rushd and his philosophy? Have you taken the trouble to read Abu Hamid al-Ghazali or Mohamed Abduh? Do you have the stamina to finish ten pages of the Imam Shatibi’s Reconciliation? Of course not, and you don’t know anything about these people in the first place, and I’m sure that the Christians who have converted to Islam haven’t read them either and the Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity haven’t read any Christian theology, or about the origins of the Gospels, the history of the ecumenical councils, or the decisions of the Council of Nicaea.”