by Ibrahim Essa
Hatem was deeply resentful, and his resentment focused on Hassan, who had nodded off feeling safe, maybe a safety he didn’t find in his bedroom in his father’s mansion, or perhaps it was because he wasn’t lonely or alienated here or because the group support had relieved his depression. Hatem, himself exhausted, could see that Hassan, unlike his colleagues, was sleeping like a cute little puppy, whereas the others in the cell—and surprisingly the young Christians were the only prisoners there—were either tired and bored, or upset and angry, or sleeping fitfully, though all of them were content with their fate and proud to be there. They kept themselves busy by writing on the walls—verses from the Gospels, the name of Jesus in badly formed letters and lines—determined to cut the words so deep that they would be hard to erase.
Hatem wasn’t one of those sheikhs who grew big bushy beards down to their waists, and then shaved and even plucked their mustaches. He didn’t cover his head with a light piece of white cloth, he didn’t have bulging, staring eyes, and he didn’t wear his watch on his right hand as a declaration of his Salafist commitment to sharia. Hatem had always been puzzled by that ridiculous obsession with wearing the watch on the right hand for religious reasons. For heaven’s sake, the watches were Swiss or German or Japanese. Hatem could understand a sheikh showing off his watch on his right hand, but it wasn’t as if it was an Islamic invention. Wasn’t it the Christians, the Magi, the Buddhists, and the Jews who had invented all the devices used by this Salafist with his thick beard—his watch, the microphone clipped to the lapel of his gown, and even his gown itself, as well as the camera that filmed him, the broadcasting equipment, and the screen on which people watched him? Why didn’t he wear all that on his right hand too?
That was the stereotype of the Muslim televangelist projected by the television stations that Hatem hated. But Hatem was very careful not to disparage them. In fact he flattered and complimented them, and when the owners of those stations came into a room, he greeted them and praised them. But they didn’t really like him, because a large number of these garrulous sheikhs filled their television programs with hatred for him and for what he said. Hatem never debated a fatwa with any of those sheikhs, never challenged the opinion of any of the other preachers, never criticized their lessons or refuted any of their claims. Nonetheless they never stopped attacking him with ridicule and sarcasm. They declared war on the fatwas he issued, the ideas he suggested, and the stories he told. There was of course an underlying reason: the number of adverts that were broadcast during his programs, whether he was giving a lecture or answering questions from a presenter. He knew they were counting the adverts that ran just before the program began—six, seven, ten, sixteen. They were also riled by the names of the sponsors who financed and supported the program. They explained this largesse on the part of advertisers and sponsors by saying that Hatem promoted the kind of religion that ordinary people liked—the religion of pleasantries and anecdotes, of sentimentality and liberal fatwas, the religion of the women and the housewives who made phone calls to all his programs. They envied his adverts and tried hard not to be dependent on ads for cheap goods sold on the doorstep or with free home delivery. Their fees were lower, their audiences were smaller, and the women who watched were poorer. But the princes and Islamic organizations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf preferred them and lavished money and gifts on them, especially when they were invited on trips to the Gulf to perform Islamically approved forms of ritual healing.
Hatem tried to stop thinking about the situation he was in and what he might have to do to get out of it. He resigned himself to listening to the snores from the disciples of Bethlehem lying beside him in the cell. When they slept, they still looked like children. They were no longer fighting back, pretending to be brave martyrs determined to convert. They seemed very weak and fragile and in need of their mothers’ hugs.
Young men who turned Christian after abandoning Islam usually faced a massive backlash. They generally emigrated, because abandoning Islam goes hand in hand with disengagement from the country. That’s what he had heard from Hassan about three converts who had traveled to Canada through a church in Helmiya or Zeitoun. He couldn’t remember exactly, but Hassan was very proud of the church. He argued that the Muslims were throwing young Egyptian Christians out of their own country through persecution and discrimination.
“What do you think of Muslims who drive young Muslims out of their country too, through unemployment and poverty?” Hatem asked Hassan. “They get onto boats that take them to distant ports and drown in the sea or freeze in the forests and need to have their limbs amputated because of frostbite. They scrape together pennies to leave the country, lamented by their mothers. They have too many relatives and so few options in life that they can barely survive but they see a glimpse of hope for a world where food is plentiful and work is available, where you can live a decent life instead of the wretched life of poor people who are like the living dead, dressed in rags worth less than the box of tissues that you put in your car.”
Hatem knew what the country was like. It had no time for poor people or people who changed their religion, unless they were from a minority, as if Islam acquired new strength or new energy when Copts in particular turned Muslim. He had seen people who were destitute and yet who jumped for joy when the wife of their Christian neighbor converted to Islam. He had often tried to understand the extraordinary happiness that these people felt, particularly amid the poverty of the south and the squalor of the Nile Delta countryside, where conversions to Islam made the most noise and were celebrated most enthusiastically. He’d never seen anything like that in the Citadel area, where he had grown up near the Sultan Hassan and el-Rifai mosques. It was only in the poverty belt, in the slums that surrounded Cairo, that he had ever seen a Coptic woman convert to Islam. It was usually a female—a young woman or a wife. There were very few cases he had seen or heard about where a Christian man converted to Islam. As soon as news spread that a Christian woman had converted to Islam, especially if she was married, crowds of people would turn up to ask questions and then spread the word. People would start dancing and shouting “There is no god but God” in celebration. Guns would be fired amid hysterical jubilation. Even the local toughs, the kids who did drugs and hung out at night with knives and waylaid passers-by and stole their wallets, treated the conversion of a Christian woman to Islam as if they were early Muslim warriors attacking Persian positions on orders from Khaled ibn al-Walid—the ultimate in faith and devotion.
Hatem still remembered the time when an old acquaintance by the name of Abdel-Basir invited him to a wedding party in the Nile Delta countryside. He thought it would be a banquet and he would deliver a homily. Hatem had visited the area before for a funeral and had won the admiration of the men of the village; he became well known there for his voice and the way he preached in a language that combined literary and colloquial Arabic, the historical and the contemporary. He spoke in a way that brought him close to ordinary people and that was also warmly received by people with an interest in religious matters. Religion has an audience, not necessarily of religious people but of people who admire a preacher’s voice, even if they don’t pay much attention to the meaning and intricacies of his words.
In this village, they wanted the superficial aspects of religion and were crazy about charismatic preachers and melodious voices that could move the listener. Most of them smoked hashish in generous quantities and were corrupt, but they liked to listen to sheikhs, attend religious celebrations, and judge Quran readers. Hatem used to go there with the Arzaqia sheikhs, who would never say no to a good dinner or turn down an invitation to a wedding that would end with some pancakes soaked in ghee or some mint banknotes just withdrawn from the bank, so sharp they could leave scratches on their fingers. Ever since Hatem had spent time with the simple sheikhs who liked their hot meals—at first obsequiously, then ingratiatingly, then hesitantly, and finally uncomfortably—and even when he spent time with the sheikhs who appeared
on television, at official conferences and at the homes of businessmen—at first enthusiastically, then restlessly, then irritably, and in the end dismissively—he had never known a sheikh who came from a rich family. Perhaps that’s what made them so cantankerous and competitive about making a living, their overwhelming sense that they had no security; the years of abject poverty had left their scars on them. Even when Hatem moved out of his apartment of seventy square meters to the apartment of two hundred square meters and then to the large house with the garden, he still worried that poverty would strike back and ruin him and his family. Many sheikhs were terribly naive when it came to business and people took advantage of them in all the ventures they took part in. At the very least, these ventures did not produce as much as they earned as men of learning. A ritual healing for an Arabian princess or for the wife of a wealthy man in some oil-rich country, or a visit to recite the Quran or prayers in the mansion of some businessman, would bring in more money more quickly and more easily, without compromising their reputation for piety.
An hour after he arrived, amid all the noise and the greetings, Hatem realized it was a wedding that Abdel-Basir was sponsoring. He heard people boasting gleefully that Nadia, who was a Coptic girl from a nearby village and worked as a nurse in Dr. Samaan’s clinic in the health center, had converted to Islam and abandoned her family. Dr. Samaan had protected her when the family came after her, had put her up in his spacious house, and had decided to buy her an apartment and arrange for her to marry any young Muslim man, offering to make all the arrangements for the wedding. Naturally enough, there was competition to marry her, especially when it emerged that the girl was pretty with pale skin and blue eyes. A teacher in the village got engaged to her and the victory wedding was that night. He heard the story from the guests, including the children. People added details they had invented and others corrected them. When a man appeared in a white galabiya, with a green turban on his head, a long thick beard, and steel-rimmed glasses on his nose, Hatem realized that this was the local hero who had persuaded Nadia to convert. He was Gamal el-Naghi, who was proud to be the first Muslim pharmacist in the area, in a profession that was once the exclusive preserve of Copts. Some of the guests who fought to greet Gamal kissed his hands and slapped him on the shoulders and he seemed proud to be among the imams and Salafist preachers from the nearby mosques. The noise was unbearable and the women intermittently broke into a chorus of trilling noises that sounded like the screeching of fireworks.
Abdel-Basir confided in Hatem that he planned to stand in the coming elections, then grabbed Gamal’s hand in the crowd to introduce him to Hatem and, with two loyal followers, pushed the two of them into a side room. When Hatem went in, it was a massive relief to have some peace and quiet. He sat on the nearest of the sofas arranged in the four corners of the room, which was clearly a reception room for guests. Gamal el-Naghi sat down beside him and they then shut the doors on them, though four of Abdel-Basir’s followers had slipped in under his feet, some of them in case they were called upon for any purpose and the others so that they could boast of having sat with their hero and with the sheikh who had come from Cairo. Gamal was superciliously ingratiating: he had expected Hatem to congratulate him warmly and when that didn’t happen quickly enough his confidence in the sheikh was immediately shaken. But Abdel-Basir’s followers didn’t waste the opportunity to start up a lively conversation, retelling Hatem the story of Nadia’s conversion.
Hatem, irritated by their naive enthusiasm, turned to them in the middle of the story and asked, “But Nadia, ma‘aaha eeh?” meaning ‘What’s the matter with her?’ though the question might also have meant ‘What does she have?’
The people in the room didn’t understand the question. But after a moment, Gamal replied: “She has a diploma in business studies.”
“You’re a pharmacist, aren’t you, Gamal?” Hatem continued.
Someone answered on Gamal’s behalf immediately, repeating the story about him being the first Muslim pharmacist in town.
“Great,” said Hatem.
As the noise of the wedding grew outside, Hatem was thinking that Gamal had probably spent years in Saudi Arabia and had then come back and opened his pharmacy. Gamal confirmed his expectations shortly afterward.
“I spent five years in Riyadh,” he said.
“That’s great,” said Hatem. “Being a pharmacist is an excellent profession. I hope you manage to invent some medicines for us instead of these Western crusader medicines. I mean, when you go to the pharmacy and ask for some medicine, they say, ‘Don’t buy the local version. You’d best buy the imported one.’ So you ask, ‘But why? Doesn’t it make more sense to buy the Egyptian one?’ And they say, ‘No, because this medicine is imported. It’s made by a Christian man in Europe or America.’ You say, ‘And what’s the difference?’ And he says, ‘The active ingredient in the imported version. Don’t forget, ‘imported’ means it comes from the land of the Franks and the Christians, the sons of whoever. The active ingredient is bigger and more powerful, unlike the Egyptian version, the halal version that’s ritually pure.’ So Dr. Gamal, why don’t you make us some effective medicines instead of sitting reading the Quran in your pharmacy day and night. You ought to be doing research and inventing better medicines.”
The unexpected sarcasm stung Gamal.
“Are you making light of reading the Quran, Mawlana?” he snarled in reply. “Surely Muslims, whether they’re doctors, engineers, mechanics, or farmers, are called on to promote Islam, Sheikh Hatem?”
Hatem nodded, reluctant to take part in a debate that he thought deserved only his contempt. He was always resisting the temptation to express ideas that people would not like to hear.
“I’m not making light of it, God forbid. I’ve memorized the Quran and I’m a Quran reader, but we shouldn’t read the Quran in the workplace, in class, in factories, or even in fields. On the contrary, we should work, and not every Muslim is called upon to spread Islam, or else why would God have sent the Prophet Muhammad?”
“May God bless him and grant him peace,” everyone intoned devoutly.
“That’s what you’re good at,” Hatem whispered to himself. “The Prophet would have sent Muadh bin Jabal or Salim Mawla Abu Hudhayfa to teach people religion,” he continued. “He wouldn’t have sent Khalid ibn al-Walid or Bilal ibn Rabah for that task.”
He didn’t wait to find out whether they had understood or not, but turned to Gamal, asking, “But how did you persuade her to convert?”
“She used to come to the pharmacy because of her work, and I used to play the Quran all the time and she liked hearing the verses of the Quran. She asked me what they meant and I realized her heart was receptive to Islam and I explained things to her.”
“You explained things to her?” Hatem asked, then stopped. Gamal didn’t like the emphasis that Hatem had put on the phrase.
“Scholarship isn’t the monopoly of sheikhs, Mawlana, it’s in people’s hearts and in books. I’ve read many books on the Quran and on the sayings and doings of the Prophet, as every Muslim should, and I’ve learned from our major sheikhs,” continued Gamal, stressing the word ‘major’ as if suggesting that Hatem was minor, “so when I saw that Nadia was ready to find out about Islam it was my duty to provide her with books.”
“Quite right,” said Hatem. “A girl with a business diploma,” he added to himself, “is going to read Zamakhshari and Ibn Kathir and Ibn Taymiya and understand and take it all in and believe it as well. It sounds unlikely.”
“And I gave her tapes with lessons and sermons,” added Gamal.
Hatem waved the idea aside dismissively. “Indeed, that’s a good idea—Islam through tapes. It’s novel. Like the ‘Teach Yourself English’ tapes. How old did you say the girl is?”
Several people joined in, eager to tell Sheikh Hatem the story. “The girl’s young. She’s twenty. But her father’s a nasty guy and likes to drink. He’s no match for any of the Muslims in the town and he beats hi
s wife and abuses his daughter. The priest stepped in several times to try to make him mend his ways but it was no use, but I swear, Mawlana, her father’s the best guy in the whole area when it comes to restoring furniture. The girl ran off once before and went to become a nun in a convent but her father acted all humble and cried in front of people in church.”
“We don’t have a church in our village,” someone else interrupted, with pride in what he was saying. “That was the church in the main town.”
“Her father went with the priest and they took her out of the convent,” they continued. “But two days later he beat her and her mother.”
Hatem was watching the way Gamal was following his clique of admirers in their spontaneous and spirited account of the psychological background that drove the girl to stand in front of Dr. Gamal in the pharmacy and show interest, or pleasure in his interest. With the remnant of logic that some Egyptians had managed to retain, Gamal could see that the story undermined the spiritual nature of the girl’s religious transformation. It suggested factors other than his own powers of persuasion, his religious knowledge, or the idea that her heart was receptive to Islam. When Hatem saw again how Gamal was looking around, he came to the conclusion that the girl had fallen in love with Gamal, and that Gamal had let her down.
Hatem struck while the iron was hot. “But why didn’t you marry her, Dr. Gamal?” he asked.
The question hung in the air, unanswered. Just at that moment, Abdel-Basir came into the room, accompanied by the registrar, the teacher who was the jubilant bridegroom, and dozens of others who were jostling to get through the door. Abdel-Basir kept them out of the room with his back and invited Sheikh Hatem and Dr. Gamal to move through the other door to a reception room overlooking a large garden fringed with trees along the walls and massive vine trellises shading the entrance to a guesthouse. Beyond lay an expanse of greenery, which was now decorated with colored lamps and rows of wooden chairs stamped with the name of the businessman who supplied them. The wedding seemed to have kicked off, because the noise grew louder and the music bellowed out, interspersed with trilling sounds from the women. Hatem stuck his head between Abdel-Basir and Gamal and asked, “So guys, why didn’t you organize a Muslim wedding? With no music or singing, I mean.”