The Televangelist

by Ibrahim Essa

  “O God,” Hatem stammered in a whisper. “I wonder how Hilal bin Umayya felt when he went to see the Prophet about his wife’s infidelity. He told the Prophet he had come home for dinner and found his wife with a man. ‘I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears,’ he said.”

  That was how Hatem felt now—devastated, because he had brought this on himself. The Prophet hadn’t wanted to hear what Hilal bin Umayya said about his wife. In fact he almost had him flogged. He told Hilal he needed to produce clear proof of his wife’s infidelity, to which Hilal replied that seeing a man on top of his wife was surely enough.

  “Do you know what happened then, Omayma?” asked Hatem. “From beyond the seven heavens God took pity on Hilal and revealed the Li’an verses to the Prophet. The solution was that if a man makes accusations against his wife but has no other witnesses, his evidence will stand if he swears to God four times that he is telling the truth and then swears a fifth oath that God should curse him if he tells a lie. But the wife can avoid punishment if she swears by God four times that her husband is telling a lie and then swears a fifth oath that God should curse her if she is lying. But we don’t need to waste time taking oaths because you’ve confessed. In Hilal’s case, his wife was told to think carefully before she swore the fifth oath because she would be punished in the afterlife if she lied. The woman hummed and hawed, beat around the bush and mumbled, then she made up her mind and swore the fifth oath. The Prophet decreed that they should separate and ruled that if Hilal’s wife had a child, the child should not take a father’s name but no one should call the child a bastard. The Prophet had said earlier that he would be able to tell the paternity of any child by its appearance, depending on whether it looked like Hilal or like the man she was accused of sleeping with, whose name was Sharik bin Sahma. In fact that child grew up to become a military commander in Egypt. See how lucky Egypt is!”

  Hatem stood up. Omayma was startled and sat up in bed in fear he might approach her, but he moved away to a corner of the room, then turned around, then leaned against the wall, then walked, then stood stock still and said nothing, then stared at her, then looked away from her toward the ceiling with his head up and his neck stretched out frozen for some moments, then turned to her with a rigid face that frightened her.

  “In my capacity as Hilal bin Umayya, I would have had such self-control when I saw my wife with another man that I would have gone to the Prophet to ask him what to do. So I’d like to know if you’re still seeing your lover!” Hatem shouted.

  Omayma bristled as soon as she heard the question and then lashed out like an enraged lioness, her face wet with tears and snot and the sweat from burying her head for hours between the pillows. She picked up and threw everything she could get her hands on—flower pots, lampshades, pillows, the plates on the table, cups, a key ring. She even grabbed the pictures in wooden frames on the walls and threw them at him, covering the floor with pieces of glass. She threw things at him as if demented, while he tried to dodge them. Although he took some hits on his arms and shoulder he stood still, watching her as she screamed hoarsely at him in wounded pride.

  “Shut up!” she said. “How low can you stoop? You think I’m a whore, Hatem el-Shenawi? That’s the limit, Mawlana! Did you pick me up off the pavement, or was I a dancer in a video clip that tricked you? I’m more honorable than you or any woman in this country.”

  With that she collapsed into such a stupor that he thought she might be dead.

  In the distance the muezzin gave the dawn call to prayer, possibly through the radio of one of the security men at the beach houses. Omayma was waking up and Hatem was sitting on the balcony watching the sun rise from the sea on the morning of a day that would be a strong contender for the title of most miserable day of his life. The hotel staff had heard Omayma screaming and smashing the contents of the room, although it was some distance from the main offices and the hotel building did not overlook the beach houses. But because there were few guests around in the winter lull, apparently people were all ears for the scandal raging in the sheikh’s beach house. They knocked on the door and Hatem opened it quickly. He was unsure what to do with Omayma because she was lying rigid and her skin had turned sallow. He was worried something bad might have happened to her. He brought in two of the hotel staff quickly and they helped him lift her up and lay her on the bed. One of them called the hotel doctor while Hatem got a bottle of perfume from the bathroom and almost poured the whole thing onto her face. He patted her cheeks in an attempt to revive her. One of the hotel staff advised him to check her pulse at her wrists. He established that she was breathing, albeit rather slowly and with a rasp. When the doctor arrived, he turned out to be a young man from somewhere deep in the countryside who was taken aback when he recognized Hatem. Hatem told him Omayma had lost her temper when she heard some bad news and had started crying and screaming and smashing things in the room. The doctor diagnosed it as a nervous breakdown. He used his stethoscope on her and took her blood pressure, and then assured Hatem that all was well, especially after he opened her eyelids and shone his little flashlight into her eyes.

  Omayma stirred and mumbled, “What’s going on?”

  The doctor gave her an injection and said it would send her to sleep but it didn’t seem to work, because after a while she got up from the bed, wrapped herself in a blanket, and walked slowly and weakly out to the balcony, taking Hatem by surprise. She sat next to him, breathing heavily from exhaustion.

  “And what did the boy turn out to be?” she asked.

  The question took Hatem by surprise and he didn’t know what she meant.

  “Which boy?” he asked.

  “The son of the woman whose husband accused her of betraying him, or the one who became governor of Egypt. What did he look like? Was he blond and thin like Hilal her husband, or dark and fat like the man she was accused of sleeping with?”

  “He turned out to be a bastard, dark and fat,” Hatem replied, with a bad-tempered laugh despite himself.

  “And what did the Prophet do with her? Did he punish her for lying? Did he have her stoned?”

  “He didn’t do anything to her. He only separated her from her husband.”

  She started to sob again, but not as violently or loudly as before. She gave Hatem a deep, sad look.

  “I’m sorry, Hatem. I couldn’t keep it a secret from you any longer,” she said. Is she sorry for betraying me or for confessing, Hatem wondered.

  “Do you know why?” she continued. “Because I love you. I love you as my husband and as the father of my son. And because I really appreciate what you’ve been going through recently and because once again I’ve seen the Hatem who taught me about religion. I’m ready for any punishment, because I’m guilty. When my friend who works in the bank called me and told me you’d transferred all the deposits to Omar’s account and my account, I was very worried about you. Even when I knew you were in love with that girl Nashwa, and although I was jealous, I was more worried about what she might do to you. Ask, so you feel better, Hatem.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I imagine you remember what happened to you after Omar had his accident. Suddenly I found myself alone with my child, who had almost drowned in the swimming pool and had gone into a coma. He had oxygen tubes in his nose and inside him and he was lying in front of me in the intensive care unit. I felt like someone had cut my heart out with a knife and thrown it down on Omar’s bed. Remember after that how I asked you about God several times and how He described the mother of Moses as having a void in her heart. Well, my heart had a void in it and was lonely. You had abandoned me and Omar at that time in a strange, painful, wounding madness, and I tried to forget about you. What did it mean when our son was in the hospital unconscious and on the verge of death and you left me alone and disappeared? And then I found out you had gone to the mosques and tombs of the holy men to work as a servant, cleaning the washroom for prayers, mopping up in the bathrooms, sweeping the carpets and flo
ors, and sleeping in the street. You were like one of those Sufi dervishes in the mosques of el-Hussein or Sayeda Zeinab. So my husband had abandoned me. The great sheikh, the most famous preacher in the country, had become a crazy dervish. You were the man I went to for protection but you almost went mad and you ran away from facing up to your terrible weakness toward your son and your crazy love for him and your morbid fear of losing him.

  “You threw yourself into the mosques so that God would cure your son or relieve your pain. Okay, but where did I come in? I was stuck with my son and I was hurt. I was weak and fragile and I missed my husband. Dr. Adel, the neurologist who was treating Omar, was very kind to me and made friends with me. He was a married man in his fifties but he made me feel that someone was interested in me. One day in his clinic he took me in his arms and I submitted. After that I hated myself and I broke down and I felt that God would punish me and take my son from me, but even so I couldn’t resist Adel. He was attentive and said he loved me and was going to divorce his wife and that you were no longer in full control of your mental faculties and I should get a separation. I lived in this whirlwind for a while. Omar was in a coma for seven weeks and you almost drove me mad, Hatem, when you told people about Omar’s illness and said he was in a coma for twenty-two days. I don’t know where you got that number from. As soon as Omar moved his hand and his body functions started to get back to normal, I realized how confused I had been, with the pain and the sadness and betraying you, and I was unhappy with my relationship with Adel and I asked him to stop looking after Omar and assign another doctor to the case. Omar’s condition improved and I began to realize he would need time to recover his health and there were areas in his brain that had been affected by the coma. But I did have him back and he gave me new life and hope, and of course you remember when you came to your senses after Sheikh Mukhtar el-Husseini intervened, may God honor him and set him free, and we went home with Omar and started the physiotherapy and the rehab and everything we went through together.”

  “And did your relationship with the doctor continue?”

  “Of course he tried to resume the relationship,” Omayma said. “He put pressure on me and called me. But just as I tried to forget you earlier because you were weak and ran away and abandoned me, I then tried to forget about him because he had exploited the weakness of a miserable woman who was frightened for her son and had been hurt by her husband. He wasn’t at all a gentleman, and basically I don’t have memories of any of the time I spent with him because I was like a patient who was drugged. I forgot about the sex right away but when you wanted me as a wife I felt that I had betrayed you for nothing and I was so disgusted with myself. And you just gave up and I couldn’t believe it.”

  “And has the doctor tried to get in touch with you recently?”

  Omayma sighed.

  “The doctor died,” she said.

  “What do you mean, he died?” Hatem asked in surprise.

  “There’s no ‘what do you mean’ about it. He died, about two months after you and I went back home. He had a heart attack while he was operating on a patient and he fell down dead.”

  Hatem couldn’t help joking about it.

  “You finished him off, Omayma,” he said.

  “Not really,” she said with a laugh.

  The balcony was flooded with daylight and Hatem felt that his head was heavy and his body lethargic from all the events of the night.

  “Come on, Omayma, go and rest. Go to sleep because you’re tired,” he said as he rose and took her hand.

  She started crying again and leaned on him as she went into the room.

  “Have you forgiven me?” she asked.

  “But you haven’t forgiven me my weakness and the fact that I fell ill over my son and ran away from you,” Hatem replied, helping her lie down on the bed.

  “No, I haven’t,” she replied, with painful honesty. “Something cracked in the way I felt about you, and it tormented me, along with the agony I felt for my son, who’s bound to continue to suffer.”

  “So remind me to show you the program I did about happy marriages in Islam,” Hatem said with an uneasy laugh.

  “God is forgiving and merciful,” said Omayma, her face taut and pained.

  He nodded. Tired and overcome, he stretched his legs out over the side of the bed.

  “He is indeed,” he said. “You know, there’s one saying of the Prophet I really like. If all the sayings of the Prophet turned out to be untrue, and just one true one was left, it would be the one where he says, ‘If you did nothing wrong, God would find others who had done wrong, so that when they asked for forgiveness, He could forgive them.’”

  “Our Sweet Prophet,” whispered Omayma in tears.

  As they returned to Cairo, he knew there was no going back. The silence between them had been too heavy for either of them to lift since they had woken up, their faces bloated and exhausted, defenseless against the wrinkles of the years.

  Hatem was moving painfully slowly, while Omayma dealt with the hotel, the bill, the car reservation, and the flight times, like one of those automated female voices that ask you to press “1” if you want customer service or “2” if you want technical assistance.

  In a small plane several rich passengers looked at Hatem in recognition. It was the kind of greeting you give to a celebrity, not to a man of religion; Hatem could tell the two types of greeting apart. The newspapers the passengers were holding were the first thing that brought him back into a world that was closing in on him like a metal ring around his neck, and Omayma added lock upon lock to it. Was it possible, he wondered, that Omayma’s betrayal of him had been noted in a file in State Security? It’s true it had been some years back, but who was to say that for years State Security hadn’t kept files on him and his wife, along with all the other people and their wives? He was afraid to ask her to confess if she had had any other affairs after the doctor who had died. She would think he had classified her as a whore. It wouldn’t be good for him if he asked a question that she wouldn’t answer properly, if she even answered at all. Hatem couldn’t go back to being what she wanted him to be and who knew what she wanted him to be anyway? Why had she confessed to him? She would have done better to keep quiet, keep her secret, not just to protect herself but to protect Hatem from himself and from her guilt.

  He would never go back to being her husband in her bed or in her heart, because that’s not what he was, and it was absolutely clear that she too hadn’t been like that for years. But he couldn’t divorce her. He would never deprive his son of his mother, living in his father’s house, and anyway he still cared what people thought of him.

  They finally got out of the car outside their house. He sat on his favorite seat in the corner of the bedroom while she quickly started to unpack the bags.

  “Do you have any suggestions as to how I might react?” he asked her, breaking their silence for the first time that day.

  She arched her back and bristled.

  “Do as you please,” she said.

  “So you’d clearly like me to spring to the defense of my dignity and honor, and divorce you,” he said. “Or kill you or have you stoned perhaps,” he continued when he saw she was troubled. “Especially as you’ve confessed, so there’s no need for me to find four witnesses who saw the act of penetration, and by the way there are some jurists who require that one or all of the witnesses confirm that they tried to slip a thread between the genitals of the man and the genitals of the woman to be sure there was no space between them and that intercourse really did take place.”

  “You know, you’re not only insulting me by what you say. You’re also insulting yourself,” Omayma whispered.

  “Everyone else has already insulted me, so there’s only me left, Omayma,” Hatem replied calmly. “And while we’re on the subject, it would be no use me trying to kill you, because I’m not the killing type and I don’t feel angry enough to kill you. Maybe even the opposite. I sympathize with you. I care about you
, and myself and Omar, and for all the time we’ve spent together and everything we’ve struggled to achieve. Besides, for you to be stoned for confessing to adultery, you’d have to make your confession in person to the appropriate authorities. If I reported you, you could be summoned to testify, and if you denied it, we wouldn’t have achieved anything. It would also require the authorities to announce that they were going to start implementing sharia law. Then there would have to be a fatwa from a sheikh and they might come to yours truly and ask me to give a ruling. ‘Should we stone her to death, Mawlana? She’s a married woman who committed adultery with a married man.’ And I would reply, ‘Does she have any children?’ And they would answer, ‘She has a fourteen-year-old son who almost drowned in a swimming pool and went into a coma after they took him out of the water, and he stayed in a coma for twenty-two days—sorry, seven weeks—and then he miraculously regained consciousness, but he was no longer in full physical or mental health. He continued to receive treatment and had to go abroad for more treatment and for education in a specialist clinic that’s a combination of a hospital and a school for those with special needs. The woman in question looks after him, Mawlana.’ And I would rule that she shouldn’t be stoned to death but she should be available to look after her son, so until her son recovers, she’s free.’”

  Omayma was sobbing, but Hatem continued. “Then they would ask, ‘Should she be separated from her husband, Mawlana?’ And I’d reply, ‘Her husband can forgive her, or he can separate. She has no say in the decision.’ ‘But Mawlana, what if he forgives her and then some time later the wife thinks her husband is like a pimp and approves of her adultery?’ And I would reply, ‘That depends on her character. If she’s generous, she’ll think her husband is either kind-hearted or easily fooled. If she’s not generous, there’s no harm in a pimp marrying a whore.’”

  Then came the long days of disengagement: Hatem had no one to see and nothing to do. He treated his new-found freedom as if it were a gift from God, because the only possible outcomes in the long term seemed to be imprisonment or banishment. Things had calmed down suddenly and the tears dried up. He came back from their holiday and found that the furor on websites had subsided and they had lost interest in him and his circle and in Mukhtar el-Husseini. Apparently the massive remote control that was in the hands of the country’s security services had put an end to all discussion of the subject overnight. It was an extraordinary show of submission to the security services and their ability to emasculate all those television stations and programs—the presenters, the sheikhs, the broadcasters, the whoremongers—as well as the newspaper columnists and reporters, all in one fell swoop. Hatem tried to call Mukhtar’s mother but he couldn’t get through. Her phone was out of order or out of service. He hadn’t heard anything about Mukhtar’s case being sent to court or about him being released. He expected they had already fulfilled the promise they gave him that the case would be wrapped up, so what was happening to Sheikh Mukhtar now, Hatem wondered, and where was he?