by Ibrahim Essa
Kaaki looked pleased for some reason. “Okay, I’ll fill you in,” he said.
Early in life, he explained, he got a job in a public relations and advertising company in Saudi Arabia through a recommendation from a relative of his who was working in State Security and later retired. He got in touch with someone, who spoke to someone, and he received a contract offering him an insignificant job with derisory terms, as you would expect given the distant relationship between him and the man who recommended him. The company was not very active or successful and it didn’t have extensive dealings with television stations or newspapers, for example, although it appeared to be wealthy and showed signs of opulence. He worked as a clerk in the office of the Lebanese manager, Michel Abu Maalouf, a Maronite and one of those Lebanese who had helped turn Lebanon into a playground for Saudi princes and sheikhs by transferring assets, buying real estate, arranging holidays in Lebanon, and buying shares in companies. The man had considerable influence in the company and Kaaki noticed right from the start that Abu Maalouf was the big shot, so he curried favor with him the Egyptian way, just as you’d expect from an outsider who has neither money nor influence nor morals. After a few months Kaaki was the chief clerk and Abu Maalouf’s constant companion. He moved into a room in his large house on the Jeddah seafront and at that stage he found out that the company’s advertising activities were just a way to keep everyone looking busy and the real money was pouring in through the spoiled, good-for-nothing son of one of the princes. Because he was the fourteenth son, the prince wasn’t bothered that his son was useless and wasn’t upset that he was frittering away his share of his father’s fortune.
So far the story seemed very normal and Hatem was getting bored, though Kaaki’s attempts to be mysterious were very obvious. He was like a child trying to hide a balloon behind his back and asking “Do you know what I’m hiding?” when the balloon was clearly visible over his shoulders. It was obvious that Kaaki had got involved in something or that Abu Maalouf would turn out to be the leader of a gang at the end of the film.
Finally Kaaki said straight out that the Lebanese man was responsible for supplying women to the prince and his sons and that his activities extended far beyond just the household of that prince.
“Mawlana,” Kaaki said, “you know the Saudis who come to Egypt and marry young girls for pathetic dowries that go to the father, who’s poor or greedy or handicapped”—“or a beast,” Hatem added, and Kaaki didn’t object—“and then take them off to Saudi Arabia, where the girl finds she’s just one of the man’s wives and the man soon starts to ignore her so that she doesn’t know whether he’s divorcing her or keeping her on. Those men are the poorest and the lowest of the low in Saudi Arabia. When it comes to the rich and wealthy types and anyone from the princes on down, they have all dealt with Abu Maalouf, who brought them ‘what their right hands possessed.’ Once we were in a hotel in Beirut where there was a big hall that only guests and some of their trusted staff could enter, and Abu Maalouf was anxious to make sure there was more than one customer present in order to play on the competition and envy between them. It wasn’t so that he could jack up the price of the girls because there was never any bidding. Abu Maalouf got his money from them in the form of gifts and presents, with no prices set or fees calculated. But it was important to liven things up, so that every customer felt he had won a girl by snatching her from someone else. The girls would appear wearing long gowns that covered their whole body, then each one would start revealing what was underneath, turning and walking and bowing and standing up and bending over, stretching and dancing and shaking, sticking out their bottoms and lifting up their breasts until one of the men pointed at a woman and she would go over to him and be his property instantly.
“So where did these girls come from? Abu Maalouf kept that a secret as if his life depended on it. But he chose very carefully because his customers were unforgiving. If one of the girls turned out to be diseased or disobedient or rebellious, the consequences would be severe. And when the man was fed up with the girl he only had to tell Michel and Michel would take care of it.”
Now Hatem understood everything, but what did Kaaki want? He leaned back in his chair.
“Very well,” he said. “What do you want from me now? I’ve got the message that you were assistant to a highly successful slave trader in the Arabian Peninsula.”
“I’d like you to reassure me.”
“Reassure you that God will forgive you? Do you think we’re in a Catholic church, and I’m going to take your confession and forgive you?”
“What do you mean, forgive me!” Kaaki said indignantly. “Am I doing anything wrong?”
Hatem picked up on the tense Kaaki had used and was taken by surprise.
“Doing? Doing? That’s the present tense, Kaaki, not the past,” he said. “Are you still doing it, or you used to do it?”
“I left Saudi Arabia ten years ago, Mawlana, and then Abu Maalouf himself died, and the princes and sheikhs there were too much for me—they had become too much for Abu Maalouf himself a long time back—but the truth is Egypt has people who are so rich they’re never satisfied. Most of them are people who pray and give alms and are religious and make the pilgrimage to Mecca every year, and they don’t want to have anything to do with illicit sex and other such horrors, because they bring bad luck. I’ve met quite a few of them who handle it through short-term marriages, which isn’t in our version of Islam. Maybe the Shi’a do it, but we’re Sunnis, thank God. Some of them got involved with some European bastards who ripped them off, and so I decided to relive the days of Abu Maalouf as long as it’s all halal. God laid down the law on slaves, and anyway, who was the second best Muslim ever?”
“Who?” asked Hatem.
“I mean after the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace. So who would it be?”
“Please, tell us who it is and spare us!” begged Hatem in exasperation.
“Let’s suppose it was Omar ibn al-Khattab, may God be pleased with him.”
“Okay.”
“He had slave girls and other slaves and ‘what his right hand possessed,’ and he was the most ascetic man ever. Ali ibn Abi Talib had them too, and even Hassan and Hussein. Is there anyone better than Hassan and Hussein? Absolutely not. But they had good-looking slave girls and I won’t say anything about the caliph Othman or the other caliphs and their harems, yet they were the great men of Islam. I’m not doing anything that would make God angry. Women sell themselves or traders buy them in Europe or from Latin America and even from Africa or Asia. The businessmen and rich people here don’t have a market where they can buy them. When you buy a slave girl, she’ll do anything for you. She’ll make you feel good and give you a really good time without any responsibilities or any heartache. She’s there in a house or a hotel and they call her an employee in a company or a hotel or a night club but in fact she’s a slave girl at your beck and call. For your information, Mawlana, it’s true there’s a lot of money in this business but I don’t have more than ten or twelve girls in the market. I only buy as much stock as the market will bear.”
“You know what the problem is here, Kaaki?”
“What, Mawlana?”
“In your case the difference between slave trading and pimping is impossible to see with the naked eye.”
“So I’m a pimp?”
Hatem ignored his surprised indignation and continued: “I have a feeling you don’t earn much from this business but you find your true self in it. You really love it.”
“Haven’t you asked yourself, Mawlana, why I told you the story?” Kaaki asked in earnest.
“I asked you two minutes ago and you didn’t give me an answer,” Hatem replied.
“I asked you because I wanted to be sure that slave girls are halal, and that you couldn’t say they’re haram in the least—and you can’t. Anyway, the main thing is that I found out that Khaled Abu Hadid told you about me and about the Ukrainian girl he got pregnant and he asked
you what he should do with her and you advised him to marry her.”
Omayma’s restrained reaction had convinced Hatem that she was confused. He had expected her to throw a fit or explode when he told her who Mr. Hassan Boutros was. He had no idea what she would do when he went on and said that Boutros was going to stay in their house for God alone knew how long. Her moods were unpredictable and her reactions could swing from one extreme to another.
In fact she was delighted when she saw Hassan and, surprisingly, she called him Boutros. By accepting him she won his heart immediately and his initial reserve faded away. He sat next to her on the sofa like a child in middle school taking orders from a teacher. She asked him questions Hatem hadn’t asked, which led Hatem to admit that his wife’s brain was not completely frazzled and what was left of it was perfectly adequate for a person to live by. She asked him about his birthday and discovered that he was the same sign as Omar, and she began to list ten things she predicted both of them would do in the same way. She asked him which school and university he had been to and whether his boss at work had been a man or a woman, about his roots in the country and whether he went to the family’s hometown or not, about whether he knew so-and-so who was at school with him and so-and-so who worked in the same company. She grilled him on whether he had had a girlfriend as a student and told him about Omar and the adventures he had had in nursery school and later at school. Hassan answered her questions with the pride of an adolescent when his mother realizes that his voice has broken.
“Do you like your room, Boutros?” she asked. Hatem noticed that she said the Christian name as naturally as someone who had long been used to saying it.
“It’s very nice, Mrs. . . .” He stopped and stumbled on his words, not knowing how to address her.
“You can call me Omayma,” she said, trying to help him out. Hatem wouldn’t have expected her to answer that way on other occasions.
“Omayma,” Hatem interrupted, disapprovingly and in a hurry because filming time was fast approaching.
She ignored him and turned to Hassan.
“By the way, I used to love my Coptic school friends in the old days, and my friend Demiana was one of my best friends before she emigrated to Canada with her husband, who was a pharmacist,” she said.
Hatem was amazed. He no longer knew if this was professional lying or consummate acting or whether it contained a grain of truth about something he had never heard in all his married life.
Omayma continued. “And Salwa Abdel-Malak was my neighbor and my friend. Her mother used to make us the best rice pudding I’ve ever tasted, and I went to church with her often and the priest once told me he could see the radiance of the Virgin Mary in my face.”
“The priest was probably flirting with you,” said Hatem, interrupting again. Then he turned to Hassan and said sarcastically, “Is this national unity spiel having any effect on you?”
“To tell the truth, no,” said Hassan, embarrassed for Omayma but in collusion with Hatem. Hassan and Hatem laughed, and Omayma joined in belatedly.
“As for me, Hassan, or Boutros so you don’t get angry with me after my virtuous wife has baptized you, I’ve never really known any Copts. In the neighborhood where I grew up I hardly ever came across a neighbor who was Coptic and I never dealt with any Coptic pharmacists in a drugstore for example, even by chance, and of course I was an Azhar student and so there weren’t any Christians in my school life right through to graduation. Then I was in the Ministry of Religious Endowments and you know about that. Then in the world of satellite channels and television I might have come across one or two, colleagues or technicians, but not colleagues or friends close enough that we would visit each other at home and so on. I now realize that’s been negligent on my part, or perhaps a strange turn of fate, that’s gone on for forty-five years. Everything I know about Christians comes from books about Christianity. But I’ve always felt uneasy when I hear a Muslim talking about his friendships with Christians, or a Christian talking about his Muslim friends. When Omayma was making up those stories for you now, or dragging them out of some forgotten region in the memory center in her brain, she wanted to prove that she was good and not prejudiced, or that she was normal, but it’s not normal that just because someone’s Muslim they should be required to prove they’re not prejudiced against Christians, or because they’re Christian that they’re supposed to talk about their Muslim friends, to prove that they’re tolerant. We’re all defensive here. We’re defending ourselves against an accusation that no one has specifically made against us, but now it seems to become a wound that we all keep touching. So anyway, I’ve never in my life knowingly met or made friends with a Christian, I’ve never had a Christian neighbor, and there was no Uncle George that was my father’s friend and no Umm Rizq that was my mother’s friend. I never went to a Dr. Jeannette to have my tonsils treated when I was young. If one of the requirements for being tolerant is being neighbors with a Copt, does all this make me prejudiced?”
Hatem stood up, feeling nervous. “Okay, Boutros, I have to go on air,” he said.
“Why the hurry?” asked Omayma. “It’s only five minutes to the studios.”
“This is the first program in the series and I’d like to be there early. Besides, I got dressed here for a change, because I haven’t sat down with the production people and the director for days and I don’t know what we’ll be talking about in the first place. So off we go.”
In the car, as they were about to drive through the gates of Media Production City, Hatem spoke to the driver. “Sirhan, could you go deaf for a minute?” he said.
“I’ve been deaf since I was born, Mawlana,” replied Sirhan, happily compliant.
“Sirhan?” said Hatem.
“Yes.”
“Come on, how can you be deaf when you heard your name?”
Sirhan laughed, and Hassan too. Then Hatem whispered in Hassan’s ear.
“In the studio you’re Boutros, okay? But everyone will treat you as a Christian who wants to turn Muslim, and I’m persuading you to convert or I’m teaching you about Islam. But if they find out you’re Muslim and you want to be Christian or you’ve already converted and I’m trying to persuade you to revert to Islam, I guarantee you they’ll pulverize us. We’ll take a beating that’ll crush our bones and turn them into dust.”
*
When the red light on the camera facing him came on, Hatem recited the Fatiha and put his trust in God. He heard the song that had been composed for the program sung by a famous young singer that made the girls swoon. Kaaki had decided that, to give the program more appeal, he would drop the sad, soft music that dominated religious program after religious program and grab people’s attention with a song by the most famous young singer in the country. It was a chance for the singer to associate himself with religiosity, especially after some well-publicized relationships of his had tarnished his image. The singer had decided to set this straight with a song that he called a gift to the program, although Kaaki claimed he had paid half a million pounds for it. In Hatem’s view, the song was an accurate reflection of how children behave when they try to get involved in adult conversations, but Kaaki and the production staff around him were delighted with it and thought it would be a big hit. Hatem was sure it came from a different world from the one he knew. The rhythms of the music faded out with the singer’s voice in Hatem’s earpiece and then the director said, “Over to you, Mawlana, we’re on air.”
Hatem was standing in the middle of an incomplete semicircle surrounded by young people sitting on wooden tiers. Their faces and clothes suggested that Kaaki had chosen them himself. He gave each of them a respectable amount of money for taking part in the program, so they were carefully chosen to be smart and well-dressed. Hatem could well have been meeting the public relations team from Thomas Cook. He had asked for the girls not to be separated from the boys, while leaving a clear distance between any boy and girl who were sitting next to each other.
“Mixed but
not cheek by jowl,” as Hatem had put it clearly.
Kaaki objected, arguing that it was too late to change the plan. Then he revealed his real motive: Saudi stations might refuse to buy the program if the boys and girls sat together.
“Mawlana, I barely managed to persuade them to let girls be present without the hijab,” he said. “Leave the format to me, Mawlana.”
So Hatem left it to him and cleared his throat, abandoning his ideas about being the enlightened preacher if that was a threat to marketing the program.
“Peace be upon you and the mercy and blessings of God. How are you all?” he began.
None of them answered and he realized they had not been given instructions to speak, except for the ones they had agreed would ask questions. The production team had assured Hatem that all the questions were phrased in a way that looked spontaneous and the questions were safe. Kaaki himself had reviewed them for censorship purposes and they had offered to brief Hatem on them so that he could prepare his responses. He smiled confidently and turned the offer down.
“Return the greeting. Don’t you know that if someone greets you, you should respond with an even better greeting, or at least return the greeting?” Hatem said.