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The Televangelist

Page 30

by Ibrahim Essa


  He felt he had shocked her so he took a break. But she bristled and replied, “Do you deny the Sunna, Mawlana?”

  “My dear pretty Nashwa, you’re always turning our discussion of hadith into denial of the Sunna. Couldn’t I reject just this one hadith? Why do you always want to get me into trouble by trying to make me deny the whole Sunna outright?”

  “You say it’s a hadith from Bukhari.”

  “Yes, and in Bukhari there’s a hadith in which Abu Hureira quotes the Prophet as saying, ‘If it wasn’t for the children of Israel meat wouldn’t putrefy, and if it wasn’t for Eve, no female would ever betray her husband.’ It’s hadith number 60 in Bukhari’s chapter on prophets, and number one in the chapter on the creation of Adam.

  “Do you know what it means for meat to putrefy? It means it rots. And what’s meant is that, just as meat rots, women betray their husbands, as a fact of nature. So either the Sunna tells us that women are treacherous by nature, or else we face two other options: either we deny this hadith and then you tell me that it’s in Bukhari, as if Bukhari is untouchable and as if he didn’t collect hundreds of hadiths that are strange and poorly attested, or else we do something else, and that is to look at it rationally. We can either agree that the hadith is sound and then interpret it in a way that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that women are treacherous by nature, and if others disagree, so be it, as long as they don’t say that their interpretation is more correct than our interpretation. And what do you think of the hadith related by Abdullah bin Omar: ‘I heard the Prophet say, “Three things bring bad luck: mares, women, and houses.”’ Bukhari cites this hadith in the summary, number 60 in the chapter on jihad. Is it equality in Islam that women should bring bad luck like mares and houses?”

  He was worried he might have gone too far in offending her with his vehement and mocking intrusion into areas that, to someone of her background and as religious as she was, might appear to be a challenge to the Sunna, but he could see that she had recovered her composure and was in fact even more stubborn and defiant. Okay, then she deserved to be treated harshly.

  Hatem continued. “For a start, I’m not being selective. On the contrary I’m quoting hadiths in full, with their numbers and where they are in Bukhari. Second, your ulema, with all due respect, see no contradiction in this because they’re inclined to believe the text when it occurs in Bukhari and they’re told it’s genuine. Well, let them think that way, no problem. The problem is I don’t accuse them of ignorance or of being wrong or troublemakers, whereas if they heard what I think, they wouldn’t dismiss me as just someone who disagrees with them. They would accuse me of disputing the Sunna and, as you heard from someone or other, of being a Mutazilite, and I bet you don’t know who the Mutazila were in the first place or what they believed.”

  “I studied them in the Institute of Missionaries,” she said, raising her voice and showing how young she was.

  “Great. So you read maybe a two-page tract by some Salafist sheikh that insults and defames them. You probably read a hasty, cursory account by someone who hates them. You’ve read about them, but not what they say themselves. Suppose you heard, for example, another hadith that’s in Bukhari. It’s hadith number 17 in the book on marriage and number 10 in the book on marrying women who’ve already been married, and the source for it is Jabir ibn Abdullah. He says, ‘I got married and the Prophet of God, God bless him and grant him peace, said to me, “What kind of woman have you married?” And I said, “I married a woman who’s been married before.” And the Prophet said, “Why? Don’t you have a liking for virgins and playing around with them?” I mentioned this to Amr ibn Dinar and Amr said, “I heard Jabir ibn Abdullah say, ‘The Prophet of God, may God bless him and grant him peace, said to me, “Why didn’t you marry a young girl so that you could play with each other?’” Nashwa, do you think . . .”

  He paused and then asked,“What’s your second name, Nashwa?”

  She didn’t answer and for a moment he suspected Nashwa wasn’t her real name, but he continued, “Do you think the Prophet was really interested in hearing from Jabir ibn Abdullah, the man who narrated the story, whether his new wife was a virgin or a woman who had been married before? Then the Prophet in all his glory talks about fondling virgins, and the expression ‘playing around’ here in the hadith means being naughty and flirtatious, and the way the girl behaves. Can you imagine the Prophet trying to turn a man against the woman he’s just married and advising him to marry a particular kind of woman? And then this incomprehensible intrusion by the Prophet ends with the Prophet feeling sorry for Jabir for having married a woman who’s already been married because kissing a virgin is completely different from kissing another woman. For heaven’s sake, isn’t this hadith, which is cited in Bukhari, really insulting to the Prophet, who was always modest and proper in the way he spoke? How could he take part in such a conversation and ask such a question?”

  She tried to argue back, like someone who won’t admit how hopeless their cause is.

  “But there’s nothing to be embarrassed about when it comes to religious learning, as long as the Prophet wanted to give Muslims something that would be useful to them in their lives,” she said. His phone was flashing with an incoming call and the name Omayma appeared on the screen. Hatem had already ignored two calls from her but at the third he felt she must be listening to his talk about virgins and previously married women.

  “Oh right! So the Prophet was interested in giving us a lesson in the merits of marrying virgins rather than non-virgins!” he said, commenting on Nashwa’s answer.

  He swiped the telephone screen with his finger and answered Omayma with a sigh, anxious not to mention her name.

  “And peace be upon you,” he said.

  He looked flustered and his face was strained. Nashwa noticed how nervous he was, despite her own nervousness.

  Omayma was telling him that some security people had been with her in the house for some minutes and they had told her that the president’s son and his wife were on their way right now, and the security people were asking about Hatem and where he was so that he could be there to meet the president’s son.

  Hatem looked over toward Nashwa, who was busy playing with her phone. Somehow her face helped him think straight.

  “Okay, I’ll be right with you,” said Hatem, trying to calm down Omayma, who had raised her voice. “But tell Hassan his sister and her husband are coming, so that the surprise doesn’t upset him.”

  “The thing is that Hassan’s disappeared. He’s not in the house,” Omayma replied.

  “What?” said Hatem, standing up and slapping his gown. “Okay, okay, I’m on my way right now.”

  He turned to Nashwa, who looked at him in a way you wouldn’t expect from a student of religion who was arguing stubbornly with someone like him. She looked more like a woman defying a man who thinks he has overcome her and tamed her. He ruled out the possibility that she was anything more than a stupid but attractive young woman to whom he was drawn by something in himself, rather than by something about her.

  “There’s even plenty of doubt about the story of playing around with virgins,” Hatem said, “because it’s experienced women, women who have been married and had sexual experience, who know how to play around with men, but an inexperienced virgin, an unfledged kitten, who would she play with, for God’s sake? You might spend the whole of your honeymoon trying to persuade her to get over her shyness and her fear.”

  Nashwa smiled and he suspected that behind her master’s she was hiding a doctorate in some other specialty.

  “Shy virgins belong to another age, Mawlana,” she said.

  “Right, a time about fourteen hundred years ago, so playing around with her would have been really difficult.”

  He clearly faced a puzzle but he was in too much of a hurry to solve it now.

  “I’m very sorry. Some people have suddenly descended on me for some silly visit, an unexpected one no less. It’s more like a raid than
a visit, I tell you, but I would be interested in pursuing this conversation with you. Will I see you tomorrow at the next program?”

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  Hatem stood up, walked toward her, and waved her to the door, where they stood face to face.

  “So tell me, Nashwa, how did people discover God?

  “They discovered him through reason.”

  Hatem laughed triumphantly. “That, my lady, is the Mutazila’s whole theory—that people discovered God through reason!”

  He opened the door for her. Khodeiri and Sirhan stood up immediately and followed him and Nashwa to the elevator. Hatem and Nashwa went down together while Khodeiri went back to the office and Sirhan walked down the stairs to get the car ready.

  In the elevator Hatem could feel her breath on his face. For a moment he thought it was deliberate and he was cautiously surprised. But she was behaving so normally that he tried to dismiss the suspicion that it might have been deliberate. In the silence that was hard. Finally, when the elevator reached the ground floor, she said, “I’ll read up on the Mutazila so I’ll be ready for you.”

  “I’m always ready,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll always be waiting for you.”

  There was definitely something between them at this moment, he told himself as she shuffled along in her loose gown and he followed on behind. He could still make out the shape of her tight young body beneath the folds of cloth and he completely forgot for a moment the disastrous reality that the president’s son had come to his house to check up on the progress he was making with Hassan. Not only had he made very little progress but now his charge had gone missing as well.

  It wasn’t in fact the president’s son who was waiting, though all the hullabaloo and commotion strongly suggested he was there. It was only his wife Farida, who Hatem called ‘The Lady’ because she reminded him of the grand, dignified ladies in furs and black evening dresses who used to appear in the audience at Umm Kalthoum concerts broadcast on television late at night. Farida had apologized for arriving without an appointment, then apologized doubly because Hatem wasn’t at home when she arrived and had had to drop everything to get there. She was sitting at one end of the sofa, bolt upright on the edge without leaning against the sofa back. Hatem couldn’t tell whether this was out of politeness or nervousness. Without saying anything, he glanced at Omayma, thanking her for sitting with Farida with all the graciousness she knew how to summon when necessary and without indulging in her hobby of undermining his image as a sheikh. It was clear that the two of them hadn’t said much, since neither of them knew what the other knew. Omayma opted to talk about how heavy the traffic was, while Farida praised her good taste in interior design. Hatem was still thinking about Nashwa and how, behind the hijab and the loose skirt, a sexy young woman might be hiding. Omayma took her leave on some nonsense pretext that Hatem didn’t understand, but he appreciated her good sense in leaving him alone with Farida. Now that Omayma was gone, Farida suddenly looked sad. He realized she was really exhausted and urgently needed to confide in him. He pre-empted her.

  “You’re worried about Hassan, aren’t you, Madam?” he said.

  Her resistance collapsed. “Something very upsetting happened and it’s kept me awake the last two nights,” she said.

  “All’s well now, I hope?”

  “Did you hear what happened to the son of that famous Hamas leader?” she suddenly asked.

  The question took him by surprise. He hadn’t heard anything about the man, didn’t even know who he was, although he was apparently famous. He only just understood that she meant the Palestinian group Hamas.

  “I’m not sure quite what you mean,” he replied.

  “A couple of days ago we were at dinner with one of the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, someone from Fatah. To tell you the truth I wasn’t really interested in what Fatah and Hamas mean or in following Palestine and Gaza and the Hamas government from a distance, but I found out many things at that dinner. The man was staying with us and he was an old acquaintance of my father. They’d done business together long ago in Ramallah because the Fatah leader was originally a businessman or he took advantage of his important position there. But anyway my husband also likes him, and both of them hate Hamas like poison, as was clear from what they were saying over dinner, but the Fatah man told a story that he said was a scandal we should use to attack Hamas. Although he said he didn’t like to get into personal matters, the subject from his point of view had an important political aspect and showed that Hamas had been infiltrated, because the son of a Hamas leader had turned out to be an agent and spy for Israel and had told the Israelis where to find several leaders, who were then assassinated because of his betrayal.”

  Hatem couldn’t see what this had to do with anything related to anything he knew, but he listened patiently out of respect for Farida.

  She continued her confession: “The scandal, as he put it, wasn’t just that the son of the Hamas leader was working for Israel but that he announced that he was converting to Christianity and renouncing Islam.”

  “Ah.”

  Now he understood what a deep impression the story had made on Farida.

  “The kid’s name was Musaab. He started calling himself Joseph and completely washed his hands of Islam. A while back he said something really horrible on an American television channel about Muslims and Islam, and attacked his father and Hamas and called them terrorists and said Islam was a terrorist religion and that he had found himself through Christ, had been baptized in a church, and had fled Palestine and traveled to America.”

  She cleared her throat before continuing.

  “Apparently the kid attacked Islam really viciously and of course the Israeli press picked up the story and it was a big scandal despite Hamas’s attempts to dismiss the story as a personal matter. But our guest, the man in the Fatah leadership, said some members of Hamas had attacked their own leaders, especially the father of the kid who converted to Christianity because he hadn’t had his son executed for apostasy, and this showed the double standards of Hamas, which always kills spies, and this damaged Hamas’s prestige even among its own supporters.”

  “But this is all very remote from us,” said Hatem, trying to give her a little reassurance.

  “Not at all. It’s very close, closer than I thought,” she replied in surprise.

  “How so?”

  “Because the Christian evangelical sites on the Internet have started presenting the story as a victory and as having infiltrated the Hamas leadership, and they’ve been promising other conversions in the most important ruling families in the Muslim and Arab world,” she said.

  “Ah, that would be quite a painful coup. But it could just be bluffing and bluster.”

  “It may be, but my husband looked very tense, so much so that the man from Fatah sensed that something was afoot, and he shut up after saying that the Fatah people hadn’t exploited the scandal, which might ruin any Palestinian or Arab politician.”

  Hatem could see that she was growing increasingly anxious. “So you’re worried about the news getting out and creating a scandal for your husband?” he said.

  “No, I’m worried about Hassan,” she said. Strangely she spoke calmly, staring into space.

  “My husband’s very kind, as you know,” she added after a pause, but before Hatem had time to ask her to explain.

  He kept his reaction to himself. Besides, he certainly wouldn’t have expected the wife of the president’s son to say anything different, even if she had seen signs that Hatem was skeptical about her husband’s character or intentions.

  “Maybe many people who don’t know him as he really is or who disagree with him politically say the opposite, because no one can please everyone,” added Farida.

  “Of course, of course.”

  “The truth is that he’s kind, but his political ambitions are enormous and he has high hopes of governing the country. I’ve never said this to anyone, even to him. Although he
loves his family, there are lots of things he wants to do for the country that his party hasn’t yet managed to do.”

  “And of course,” said Hatem, anxious to put an end to the spiel about her husband’s altruism, “if it leaked out that his wife’s brother had publicly converted to Christianity it would do a lot of damage to his reputation.”

  “He won’t let anything leak out,” she answered firmly. “I’m quite sure of that. It’ll remain a secret, and that’s what makes me terrified for Hassan.”

  What she said was clearly mysterious. He looked at her face for clues. She lowered her eyelids and whispered, “I’m frightened for Hassan’s life.”

  The revelation was a slap in the face.

  “Are you serious?” he said.

  “I love my husband very much and I can’t think ill of him, but there are people around him who might advise him to do something, or might do it on their own initiative, to serve his ambitions by getting the problem out of the way.”

  They both stopped, especially as Hatem thought he too might be a target, along with Hassan, since he knew the secret, and also because he was being asked to protect and go around with a young man who was in imminent danger.

  Farida broke the silence. “Is Hassan an apostate, Mawlana?”

  He wanted to tell her that Hassan was disturbed and not an apostate but he was worried it might sound too harsh for such a sensitive woman.

  “Given that Hassan says he’s a Christian and has abandoned Islam,” he said, “the term ‘apostate’ does apply to him under Islamic law, but Islamic law gives him a chance to return to the faith. But Hassan is basically confused and he isn’t thinking straight and I don’t think his conversion is serious yet, although he’s making an enormous effort to prove to you and to me that he is serious.”

 

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