The Televangelist

by Ibrahim Essa

  After a conciliatory pause, Omayma resumed. “Do you work with them, Hatem?” she asked.

  Hatem had tightened his belt but now he let it out crossly. “I’d work with them and more if they asked, but I hope to God they never ask. A two-bit officer who doesn’t even know the Maun chapter of the Quran can force you to stay home and deprive you of millions of pounds in earnings, and I wouldn’t rule out them throwing me in jail on any old trumped-up charge, and then you wouldn’t find a single television station that would condescend to offer me a three-minute program. Omayma, I keep the truth to myself and I thank the Lord when I don’t say the wrong thing.”

  She calmed down and seemed persuaded, then she sighed. “So what can I tell Shaimaa?” she asked.

  “Which Shaimaa?”

  “Kaaki’s former wife,” she shouted.

  “Omayma, if Kaaki were to give Shaimaa three million pounds she’d kiss his hand and say the opposite of what she’s saying now. So calm down and tell her that her former husband, the big bastard, has bought your husband for three million pounds and she’ll sympathize with you immediately!”

  “You don’t know Shaimaa.”

  “The truth is I’d like to get to know her,” he said with a smile.

  Omayma decided to drop her bombshell. “Did you know he imports slave girls and sells them to millionaires in Egypt?” she said.

  The problem was that Hatem had already heard this rumor. But right at that moment they heard a voice calling from outside the room. “Sheikh Hatem!” it said.

  Hatem knew at once who it was, but Omayma was taken by surprise.

  “Who’s that?” she screeched nervously.

  “I’m Boutros,” came the answer, hesitant but still loud.

  She turned to Hatem with her mouth open in a stunned stare. He had finished dressing and he responded to her reaction with a broad smile and nodded. “Would you rather shoot me now or wait till I come back from the recording session and poison me at your leisure?” he said, confident that disaster was imminent.

  In the studio that day Kaaki deliberately hung around with Hatem and insisted on giving Hatem a lift in his car. In fact Hatem was surprised by how grand and luxurious the car was, but he had trained himself to be indifferent to the behavior and material wealth he came across, although a man like him should have spoken out against the greed he encountered. Being impressed might lead to envy or imitation or indignation or frustration with the power and arrogance of money. He didn’t trouble himself with comparisons between, on one hand, the abject poverty of the millions of people who lived along the road from his house to the studio and, on the other hand, the wealthy people who were bingeing and carousing with all the dismal and disgusting wealth they had. He had given up making comparisons because it was all relative. Everyone at each level of society saw the next level up as the ultimate end, and there were people who would be envious and competitive toward other people at the same level, because there were distinctions and differences within that level. “We have raised some of them by degrees above others.” He often found peace of mind in this verse of the Quran when he went to places where he used to live and met crowds of people seeking alms or wanting recommendations for jobs, or he had to deal with the people who rushed to the television studio doors to wait for him and ask him for help. Some interpreters of the Quran talk about these “degrees” as if they are degrees of piety or closeness to God. Others interpret them as meaning degrees of knowledge. But Hatem was inclined to believe that there wasn’t one single scale, but many different scales. Someone might score 1 out of 10 on the wealth scale but much higher on the faith scale, for example, or 8 out of 10 on the health scale but very low on the knowledge scale, because they were ignorant. And over time people could move up and down the various scales. Hatem imagined the scales having colors to distinguish them: green for faith, say, and red for wealth.

  There were poor people who would consider Hatem a millionaire, while Hatem himself thought he was poor compared to the people he met. For every man of learning there was someone more learned and for every rich person there was someone who was richer. For every car there was a newer model, even though you could get into an accident and die in any of them. There are no limits to ambition and those who can never have enough will always be hungry, however much they eat and however much they think they are full. Hatem very much liked the concept of judging a car by its condition, not by its model. Applying this to people had an interesting effect: you would judge people by their health, their knowledge, their faith and their happiness, and not by external features, such as whether they were rich or poor, important or insignificant, famous or unknown.

  Hatem was deep in thought because throughout the one-hour journey Kaaki never stopped talking on his cell phone. He made decisions, cursed, flattered, humored, whispered, shouted, paused, and exploded twenty times, and when they reached the studio he was still talking as he got out of the car. One of his staff had been waiting for him and opened the door of the car. When three of Kaaki’s employees welcomed Hatem, Hatem took one he knew by the hand and said, “Wait a moment.”

  Hatem turned to Kaaki, who was smiling at him as he chatted and who waved him into the studio. Hatem grabbed the phone from Kaaki’s hand. “We regret the technical fault,” he intoned gravely to the person on the other end of the line. “We will contact you after the break.” Then he hung up to laughs from everyone around and put the phone in the hand of the employee.

  “Keep your boss’s phone well away from him or else I’ll commit a felony in the studio,” Hatem told him.

  The studio was equipped with the most up-to-date and most expensive equipment. They went in together to where the studio set was. Kaaki was talking to him about the set designer and how so-and-so was the most expensive and the most famous. Kaaki was pleased that the program was based on his idea, even though it wasn’t a new idea, but with his money and with the staff he had around him they thought it would be an international television event. The idea was that Sheikh Hatem would stand in the middle of the set and would occasionally sit in a chair on one side of the frame. In front of Hatem there would be chairs arranged in a semicircle or a horseshoe shape where the audience of young people would sit. Hatem would move around among them with five cameras covering all the angles, giving his condensed lecture. Then he would listen to what they thought, answer them, and comment on their questions, which could also be asked by text message or on Facebook or by email. Hatem had seen it a million times in many programs and he didn’t believe there was anything new in it but he agreed to it because it was a new format for him. As they admired the set, which was overwhelmingly green (on the grounds that green was the favored Islamic color, without anyone really knowing what green had to do with Islam), a tall, well-built young man slipped in among the group. He came up to embrace Hatem and Kaaki introduced him as “the film director who’s going to direct our programs, Mawlana.”

  “You’re the one who directed that film with that really pretty girl, aren’t you?” Hatem asked him.

  The director and Kaaki couldn’t think who Hatem was talking about. “Which one was that, Mawlana? They’re all really pretty,” said Kaaki.

  Hatem gave Kaaki a friendly push. “You don’t know anything about women, Kaaki,” he said.

  “You’re the artist,” Hatem added, turning to the director. “So tell me, are all women really pretty?”

  The director was unsure how to answer.

  “You look confused. Look, all women are pretty but there are different types of pretty—there’s even pretty plain and pretty awful.”

  “But we still don’t know who the actress is,” said Kaaki.

  “It was the girl who starts wearing the hijab at the end of the film,” said Hatem. “Why would anyone do that anyway, make that girl wear the hijab? Putting a hijab on her is a crime!”

  Everyone laughed, but Hatem would probably pay a high price for that moment.

  Kaaki then asked him to come over to the h
orse stables he owned nearby to discuss something important and urgent, and since the money had been decided and the contract had been signed and Hatem had received his millions, Hatem didn’t understand what important and urgent subject they needed to discuss in the shade of the lime trees and to the sound of the horses neighing. Hatem wasn’t surprised to discover that Kaaki owned horses, but when they reached the stables he realized that the man was more interested in acquiring all the trappings of wealth and high social status, regardless of whether he liked horses. The stables dated back to before Kaaki became rich and it was the first stable Hatem had ever been in where the owner wasn’t impatient to show off his horses and boast of their pedigree and their beauty. Hatem felt immediately that this was a man who didn’t deserve his horses, but he didn’t say anything. The money in his pocket was still warm from when he had received it from Kaaki and the program hadn’t started yet, let alone finished. In the absence of Kaaki’s staff, who usually clung to him through all his disastrous doings, and with the door of the large office in the annex to the stables closed behind them, Kaaki ambushed him with a question Hatem couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

  “Mawlana,” he said, “why did God say it’s okay to buy and sell slaves?”

  Hatem almost said, “What the hell does that have to do with you?” but he changed his mind when he saw Kaaki’s face, which was serious with a hint of evil.

  The question took Hatem by surprise, although the subject was scattered throughout the history books like goods on the pavement that people had tired of buying and selling. But given that the question came from Kaaki, the owner of a famous advertising agency, and that he asked it with such impatience and so secretively and with a mysterious flash in his eyes, it suddenly struck Hatem as significant. He hadn’t put much stock in the vague rumors discrediting Kaaki because the intense rivalries, inevitable when hundreds of millions of pounds were at stake, undermined the credibility of accusations involving anyone in the television business. It was true that ever since he had met him, Hatem had known deep down that Kaaki was just a clever conman—not clever in the positive sense, but clever as the word might be used to describe a thief. He was also very influential, perhaps by sharing his profits with senior officials, or as Khodeiri put it when he brought Hatem tea in the office after Kaaki had gone, after having handing over the bag with the three-million-pound fee for the program, “That man, Mawlana, is laundering money, either his own money or the money of important people.”

  Why did Kaaki insist on giving Hatem the money in cash rather than by depositing it in the bank or by making a bank transfer? Hatem thought it was showmanship. He wanted you to see his millions in front of your eyes, not just a number on a piece of paper coming from a bank, or else it was a display of his financial might at a time when fraud and evasion prevailed among producers like these, but unfortunately Khodeiri’s logic was the soundest. Rationally the three million pounds should have been handed over in installments, not all in advance like that, and in the form of checks or bank drafts. But putting the money in front of him in the form of thirty thousand one-hundred-pound notes in a bag was the kind of scene you’d expect in a gangster film. Hatem’s suspicions about Kaaki never made him consider refusing to do the program and he thought he had plenty of arguments to justify his position: he reckoned he was giving people knowledge and religion, for a start. But when Kaaki asked him about buying and selling slaves Hatem realized that he was even more of a lowlife than he had suspected, and he tried to avoid the question by asking more questions.

  “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Do I have to have a reason for asking? Suppose I just want to know!”

  “Know why?” Hatem asked stupidly.

  Kaaki tried to be clever. “Isn’t it just an accusation made by the West and by people who hate Islam, that the Prophet permitted slavery and the slave trade?” he said.

  “And you’re suddenly interested in Islam’s reputation?”

  “What’s up, Mawlana? Why are you so stingy with your knowledge?”

  “Okay, you want knowledge, you can have it. When we say Islam didn’t ban slavery, that is more precise than saying Islam allowed it, because slavery, like alcohol, existed before the Prophet Muhammad began his mission. Then Islam came and alcohol was banned, and please don’t ask me whether hashish and weed are halal or haram.”

  Hatem expected Kaaki to laugh. But instead Kaaki said seriously, “For your information, Mawlana, I never go near alcohol and I never have sex outside marriage.”

  “You only buy and sell slaves,” Hatem said with a laugh.

  Kaaki’s face turned various shades. There was a long silence, interrupted by Kaaki muttering and recovering.

  “Could you continue, Mawlana,” Kaaki finally said.

  “Continue what?”

  “Your fatwa on slavery.”

  “I’m not giving a fatwa on it, because it doesn’t call for a fatwa. The truth is that Islam didn’t in fact outlaw the slave trade or slavery, and you’ll find dozens of religious scholars trying to defend the position of Islam on this.”

  “And does Islam need to be defended, as if it’s been accused?”

  “The underlying principle is that Islam is a religion of freedom, justice, and equality. One of the aims was to free Muslims from slavery to anything and anyone other than God. We are slaves only to God. Besides, humans are free, and if a religion with this message didn’t say that no human being should be a slave to any other human being, then this is something that calls for thought about how far this is compatible with the message of freedom that Islam brought. In fact no religions ban slavery. It looks like God accepts and approves the existence of slaves among His creatures on Earth, and this is something that believers might not be able to understand. Why indeed didn’t Islam ban slavery and the slave trade? Since the Prophet died”—Kaaki quickly mumbled, “May God bless him and grant him peace” though Hatem himself hadn’t used the formula—“a million people have explained that Islam says that slaves should be well-treated. Even the Prophet”—Kaaki slipped in another “May God bless him and grant him peace”—“said, ‘My friend the Angel Gabriel advised me to be kind to slaves and I even thought he was going to set a deadline for setting them free.’

  “You’ll find people who talk about the explicit verse of the Quran that urges good treatment for slaves, or what your right hands possess, as the Quran puts it. Worship God, and do not ascribe anything as partner to Him. Show kindness to parents and near kin and orphans and the needy, to neighbors who are kin and neighbors who are not kin and friends by your side and wayfarers and what your right hands possess. God does not love those who are proud and boastful.

  “It tells you to feed slaves with the same food that you eat, dress them in the same clothes, not to make them do more than they can bear, and to help them. It urges you to marry off widows and slave girls, and male slaves if they are virtuous, and not to break up families that fall into slavery. There are many verses that recommend emancipating a slave as a way to atone for sins, but none of this challenges the indisputable reality that Islam did not ban the slave trade and did not take a stand against slavery. In fact the spoils of Islamic wars included prisoners and slaves and there are very many stories about thousands of slave girls and slave boys living in the houses of the Companions of the Prophet and the generation that came after and in the palaces of the caliphs of course, and of princes, and in the mansions of Muslims. And there was an enormous amount of activity in the slave trade, so much so that there was government oversight of the sector by the Islamic state. The slave traders had a government official who supervised their operations with the title ‘superintendent of slaves’ because there were special markets for slaves in Muslim cities. In the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Mutasim it got to the stage where they set up a special government department for slaves, the equivalent of a ministry today, called the Diwan of Mawali and Ghilman.”

  “That was the same Mutasim as in the expression ‘Waa
Mutasimaah.’” Kaaki cut in. “The caliph in the story about the woman who appealed to him for help when the Byzantine merchant hit her.”

  “Yes sir, the Waa Mutasimaah guy. He had a government department for supervising slaves. Any objections?” Hatem asked.

  Yet again Hatem stopped and waited to hear where this intense and sudden interest in slavery was leading, but Kaaki just waited for Hatem to say more.

  “And of course there are books with stories about slave girls,” Hatem added in desperation. “Would you like me to tell you a few slave girl stories with lots of sex and music and wild parties?” he continued, warming to the theme. Then he stood up, pretending to be startled.

  “What’s up, Kaaki?” he said. “There’s something weird about this conversation and I’d like to know what this is about.”

  Kaaki smiled for the first time since they’d arrived. “Calm down, Your Grace,” he said, “just sit down and tell me what Islam says about right hands possessing things.”

  “I’ve sat down, sir,” Hatem said, “but I won’t say a word about right hands possessing things, or left hands for that matter, until you answer my question. What’s all this about?”

  “It’s a new film, a historical series, and I’d like to know what you think about the sharia aspects,” Kaaki said. Hatem listened to his hasty explanation and took it with a large pinch of salt.

  “Look,” Hatem said. “It’s modern law, which many of our sheikhs don’t like, that outlawed slavery. Slavery came to an end as humanity progressed and societies evolved. After slaves had ruled Egypt, for example, for five hundred years—in the Mamluk state, as you learned at school, owning slaves became a criminal offense, but not a religious offense unfortunately, and that means that I, with my inadequate intellect and my limited knowledge, can’t understand God’s logic in not stipulating that slavery is haram. There must be a reason but I haven’t been able to find it and I suspect that no one else has either. It’s a gap in our understanding. People have filled the gap by banning slavery, but only after hundreds of years of misery that was inflicted with the support of holy books and religions. Whatever people tell us about Islam imposing limits on slavery or mitigating the effects, what’s undeniable is that Islam didn’t ban it or stop it and it never told us what the logic was in that, or if it did I’ve never heard it or come across it.”