The Televangelist

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The Televangelist Page 39

by Ibrahim Essa


  Startled by what he had said or maybe primed to confront him, she stood up.

  “I heard you yourself say that this verse showed how important it is for women to stay at home, honored and respected,” she shouted.

  She was so upset and agitated that her glasses almost fell off.

  “I can’t have said that, even under duress. I know as well as anyone else that I often say things to please the customer and to go along with what the people sitting in front of the television think. I give them the benefit of the doubt and don’t bother them by making them think, because all they want is a couple of words that will make them happy and that won’t confuse them with other ideas, so I give them what they want of course, and may God protect the faithful from the evil of fighting, but I’ve never been so obliging that I’d say anything like that—that women should stay at home. And what do you mean, stay at home, Nashwa? Would I really say that to people in a country where thirty-two percent of the families are supported by working women, not counting the fifty percent of households where the wives help their husbands with the expenses? Perhaps I said some people cite this verse to argue that women should stay at home, as their interpretation of the phrase ‘Remain in your homes,’ but I don’t usually volunteer the rest of my opinion, which is that the whole verse applies only to the Prophet’s wives. It’s specific, not general.”

  “Oh yes? All the other ulema have said it applies to all Muslim women.”

  “Don’t say ulema, sister Nashwa. Say preachers and evangelists. No ulema could ever say that. The verse itself is absolutely clear and inconvenient for those preachers. Because God is addressing the Prophet’s wives. ‘You are not like other women,’ He says, so how for the love of God could ‘You are not like other women’ change its meaning and refer to all women? And have you read what any work of interpretation has to say about the meaning of the word ‘qarna’ here? Do they say it just means stay at home and don’t go out, when in fact the Prophet’s wives did go out of their houses hundreds of times after the verse was revealed? The most common interpretation of the word ‘qarna’ is that it means they should be dignified, and it’s addressed to the wives of the Prophet, remember, and that’s an interpretation that fits in with the rest of the verse when He tells them, ‘So do not speak indulgently to men lest those who have sickness in their hearts start to have designs on you.’ It means that God wants to protect the Prophet’s wives, so He asks them to stick to formal conversation with others and not to speak indulgently, not to be too friendly and familiar. And maybe the Prophet’s wives really did do that, just intending to be nice and friendly, and this led to some men trying to catch their eye or get a word or a smile out of them, which shows that society in the days of the Prophet and even around his house was not some angelic ideal. No, there were men who tried to chat up the Prophet’s wives with bad intentions.”

  Nashwa shuddered. “What do you mean?” she said.

  “I mean that at the height of the Prophet’s mission there were people who spoke about his honor and dignity. They talked for a month about the conduct and reputation of his wife Aisha. Do you think it was a perfect society, with wonderful people whose hearts were as pure as the driven snow? Not at all.”

  The moisture in her breath had steamed up the lenses of her glasses, so she took them off and wiped them with her gloved fingers.

  “Next you’ll tell me the hijab’s only for the Prophet’s wives too!” she said, in the same sharp tone she had maintained since she came in.

  Hatem laughed, completely dismissive of the conversation and of Nashwa, and angry and frustrated with the ignorance that followed him like his shadow.

  “In this verse, yes, the hijab is only for the Prophet’s wives, and notice that you said the hijab and not the niqab. And by the way, for the verse on the hijab, there are thirty-nine different interpretations of the form the hijab should take, including one that says it’s the same as the niqab, and just to remind you, the niqab had just one eyehole rather than two, perhaps because glasses hadn’t been invented when those writers were alive. And as for the phrase ‘Do not display your finery as in the first Age of Ignorance,’ before you ask me whether there was a second Age of Ignorance, I’ll tell you, yes, there was.

  “Roughly speaking, the first Age of Ignorance, according to the people who wrote Quranic exegesis, was between the time of Noah and the time of Abraham and lasted maybe nine hundred years. Abul-Abbas says of those times, ‘In the Age of Absolute Ignorance women didn’t cover up in the way they should. A woman would even sit with her husband and a male friend, and her friend would have his way with the top half of her while her husband had his way with everything below her waist, and one of the men might ask the other if he’d like to switch.’ What do you think of that kind of Age of Ignorance and finery like that? Do you believe it? There are people who say that women used to wear dresses made of pearls, open at the sides and at the breasts. That was what ‘finery’ meant in the Age of Ignorance—a woman showing her body to people as she came and went. I’m not objecting to this rather bizarre concept, which gives the impression they were living in nudist colonies, but were there really pearls in the Age of Ignorance that we read about in biographies of the Prophet? They would have been rather a luxury, completely out of place in the austerity of the desert. And they wouldn’t go down well with men who were jealous and protective. The people of the Age of Ignorance were not such dolts or pimps, Nashwa, that their women would dress up like that. That’s all a figment of the imagination of writers who came from nomadic tribes in the desert and it has nothing to do with Islam.”

  “You tell people one thing on television, and then in private and to me you say something different. Would you dare tell people what you really think about these verses?” asked Nashwa.

  “Okay, so you’re here to have an argument. Is that because you regret what happened and you feel we committed a sin?”

  Nashwa stood up nervously and then sat down again.

  “Did you hear what you just said?” she said. “You feel we committed a sin. Is it just a feeling or did we really commit a sin? What do you call it when there’s a naked woman in the arms of a man who’s making love to her as if she’s his wife?”

  “For a start, calm down. We don’t want to create a scandal,” he said calmly. “You may have noticed that I’m not short of scandals. Secondly, there was no naked woman. She didn’t take her clothes off and I didn’t have time to undress her, unfortunately for me or luckily for her. Thirdly, I didn’t make love to her like a man to his wife, but more like a boy with the neighbor’s daughter in the stairwell. And by the way, so that you’ve covered all the bases with your religious fatwas on what we did together, then it definitely wasn’t fornication and it wasn’t a cardinal sin. It was what the Prophet was referring to when he said to one man, ‘Perhaps what you did was thighing or kissing.’ It might count as a temporary lapse for which one can make amends by giving alms, or we might treat it as a sin for which we can repent by asking God for forgiveness and by praying and giving alms. We could also treat it as a failure on the part of a man to resist a very pretty and reckless girl who enticed him with seductive words, and the man then let her down with his dismal performance and she regretted what had happened and stayed away from him for three days, which were the most difficult days of his life, not just because she wasn’t there but because he was abducted, intimidated, and taken hostage by wild dogs.”

  She suddenly made a dash for the door. Humiliated, he rose to catch up with her and when he tried to hold her arm to stop her rushing out she pushed his arm away roughly. He stepped back in shock. She paused and turned to him. Wet patches of tears showed on the veil over her face and tears started to drip from the frames of her black glasses.

  “I can’t. It’s impossible. I can’t go on. This far and no further,” she said, her voice softening.

  He realized that an intense struggle was raging inside her. As she dashed out of the room, she shouted back, “It’
s my fault. Why did I agree in the first place?”

  He couldn’t work out what she meant.

  “Agree to what? What do you mean?” he said.

  There are moments when one turns to God and wishes that life would return to normal, that the sick hadn’t fallen ill, that those who are missing were not gone, that feelings had not changed, that links had not been broken and places had remained as they were. The life we are used to, however unpleasant it might be, can sometimes be better than a new life, and definitely better than a new life that is unfamiliar. Hatem was used to sitting in the studio set, on the sofa that was put in place whenever it was time to film. It was fetched from a storeroom at the back and the workers aligned it with the marks drawn on the floor, which they sprayed with some liquid to make it shine. The technicians finished setting up the lighting in the right positions. The lighting director who was standing on the ground gave his orders to the workers climbing on the metal gantries near the studio ceiling (Hatem often worried they might slip and fall and hurt themselves), and one of the workers held a very long pole with a metal hook on the end with which he moved some of the spotlights in the ceiling nearby to adjust the light onto his face. He looked at the screen set up in the studio to see whether the light was properly aligned on Sheikh Hatem’s face. The cameramen knocked the ash off their cigarettes quickly before taking up their positions. The assistant producer asked them to stand behind the cameras since they were going on air in just five minutes. The soundman stuffed wires down the back of Hatem’s neck, attached the radio transmitter to his side, and clipped the tiny microphone to the hem of his gown, apologizing all the time. Georgette the make-up woman dabbed powder on gently. She knew that the sharp smell of the powder might irritate his nose and upset him. She apologized profusely but insisted on going as far as his eyelids, and he usually ended the program rubbing his eyes. The crowd around him suddenly thinned out just as the order came down to them on the set: “Five, four, three, two, one . . . Over to you, Anwar.”

  Amazingly Hatem was delighted to hear the sound of Anwar Othman’s voice when his phone rang on the afternoon of the day when Nashwa turned up in the niqab.

  “Mawlana,” he said. “I’m back from holiday and I’ll be expecting you on air tonight. The audience has probably had enough of reruns.”

  What a relief! He couldn’t deny he was really delighted. He felt that his life could go back to normal, without a trace of anything new—the same routine again and again, the same traditional approach, the cloned sermons, the recycled lessons, and the fatwa sessions about women, giving alms, and trivial questions. He had been prepared for an upheaval in his life, from the dangers that threatened him from every quarter. He was also still irked by Nashwa’s mysterious remark about ‘agreeing in the first place,’ so much so that he stayed alone in his office, eating the food that Khodeiri forced on him, and speaking only to shout “no” in Sirhan’s face when the driver told him that Nader Nour had called and would he like to answer. When Anwar spoke to him in his deep voice, he forgot his fear of being ostracized by the television channels, their owners, and the advertising agencies, and he felt that State Security must have pardoned him. He put his anger behind him for some moments as a result of this surprise reprieve, and he imagined that the president’s son had intervened as a favor to Hassan. Hatem called Omayma and told her he would be back home within an hour, in order to get ready to go to Media Production City and appear with Anwar Othman. Omayma was surprised, and he replied that he was optimistic because there hadn’t been any orders to stop him and cut off his livelihood.

  “Hatem,” she replied reassuringly, “God has been generous to us so don’t worry. We could live on what we have for years, even without work.”

  Hatem responded to her sudden kindness. It was one of those moments when he felt he had wronged her by what he had done with Omar and what had happened with Nashwa, however trivial that had been.

  “God bless you, Omayma, that’s a very nice thing to say,” he said.

  Later, as he was about to leave home for the studio, Omayma asked Hatem what the program would be about. For some mysterious reason her question brought his optimism to the surface, showing his attachment to his old placid life of routine.

  “It’ll just be Anwar Othman’s usual themes, exciting in their cheapness,” he mumbled with a contempt for which he would pay a high price.

  When he arrived, Anwar came up and welcomed him warmly.

  “What’s the theme for the program tonight, Anwar?” Hatem asked him.

  Anwar was ecstatic about having lost ten kilos in one month and was raving on about his diet and how his female admirers were impressed by his new weight, about his old suits, which he planned to give away to poor people with pot bellies, and about the segment on dieting that he would introduce into his daily program.

  This outburst by Anwar made Hatem tense and apprehensive.

  “But you haven’t told me what the theme is for the program,” he said.

  Anwar spread his arms in surprise and surrendered to the technician who was attaching the microphone and the earpiece.

  “Since when have you had to ask what the theme is, Mawlana? You’re like a train that doesn’t care what stations it passes through,” he said.

  He paused to rearrange his clothing after they had attached the wires to the inside of his shirt.

  “Anyway, what else could we talk about other than the subject everyone’s talking about these days, Mawlana? The Shi’a of course.”

  Anwar went on about how, after the Mukhtar el-Husseini scandal, people were interested in the Shi’a and their secrets, but Hatem wasn’t listening. Anwar brought up all the elements that would make for a lively program—the accusations that they defamed the Companions of the Prophet and slandered the Prophet’s wife Aisha, and that they thought the Prophet Muhammad received the revelation by mistake, because it should have come to Ali.

  So this was the ordeal they had decided to put him through, on the most popular program of its kind against a host who was a servant of State Security. Anwar’s friendships with State Security officers went as far as shared summer holidays with their families, close friendships between his wife and their wives, and children at the same schools. How would he stand up to Anwar Othman’s interrogation skills? The guy was a master at scheming how to undo a rival or another television station.

  Hatem remembered how one night they left the studio and went to sit and socialize in the coffee shop Anwar had opened two years earlier near the beginning of the desert road to Alexandria, where there was a large garden with tables here and there, and heaters on poles in the walkways in winter and vast fans bolted onto metal stands in summer. Inside there was a fancy air-conditioned hall where they played endless traditional instrumental music and the staff provided efficient and enthusiastic service, from the maître d’, who seemed to be an old friend of Anwar’s, to the shisha boys, who had been trained to bring everything he or Sheikh Hatem might need after a program, when it was less crowded and the customers were less intrusive. Everyone knew it belonged to Anwar and two partners of his from State Security, so it was no surprise that it was immune from any harassment from the health inspectors, the tax people, the local council, or any other government bodies. Anwar was keen to maintain cleanliness and smartness, although he was obviously lying when he said he was losing money in the restaurant and that keeping high standards was more important to him than making a profit.

  That night Brigadier Mohamedi Suleiman came to join them from another table and he coughed a dozen times from a dodgy shisha. Anwar had it changed and gave the shisha boys a sharp rebuke, while Mohamedi swore it was because of his chest problems and because he insisted on smoking shisha in defiance of his doctor’s orders.

  Mohamedi said boastfully, “Tomorrow you’ll see your friend on television like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  At first Hatem didn’t know who he meant but he soon found out: there was someone in the opposition who was i
n the news, and they had threatened to expose his lawyer brother who had been implicated in some cases of fraud.

  “He’d do best to act the hero,” Anwar commented at the time. “He should say he’s only responsible for his own behavior and that his brother should get the punishment he deserves because we’re all equal before the law. He should say he’ll hand him over to the public prosecutor himself and nonsense like that. That way he would be able to turn the tables on you.”

  “I’m shocked, Anwar. What, do you think I went to the Police Academy?”

  Anwar laughed. Apparently it was an old joke between the two of them.

  “Of course not. You’re a graduate of the university of life,” said Anwar.

  “Exactly. Where do you learn to be cunning and devious, Sheikh Hatem? From cradle to grave, after a long life.”

  He paused to let Hatem take in the idea, and then continued.

  “I told his brother the lawyer to write a confession saying that his brother, the big opposition guy, was his partner in all the transactions because that would protect him whatever happened,” he said.

  “And did the bastard write one?” asked Anwar.

  “Sure he did. He thanked me and kissed me and damn near danced for me too.”

  Hatem wondered whether Anwar had sat with Ahmed el-Faisal in the same place in the same restaurant and whether they had made a deal at his expense. He imagined the brigadier saying, “Get him onto the subject of the Shi’a, and either he’ll say what we want and attack his friend Mukhtar el-Husseini and kneel down and reaffirm that he’s the loyal servant of State Security, forgetting that he has secret information about the country’s rulers, or else he’ll be finished as far as people are concerned, and as far as we are concerned.”

 

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