The Republic of False Truths

by Alaa Al Aswany

  3

  Good morning, Mazen!

  I’m Asmaa Zanaty. I was sitting opposite you at the Enough! movement meeting yesterday. I have long black hair and was wearing a white pullover with a collar and green jeans. Do you remember me? I wanted to talk to you after the meeting, but I was too shy. I got your email address from the secretary and made up my mind to write to you; I always express myself better in writing. I have a BA in English Literature and have made several attempts at writing. Perhaps I’ll show them to you one day. Would you like to know what I want from you?

  I’m going through a difficult time and I need your friendship. I know that I’m putting my reputation at risk, because if an Egyptian girl asks a young man to be her friend, she brands herself as loose. I’m sure you’ll understand me. I’m not loose, Mazen, just different, and being different is the cause of all my problems.

  I’m from a traditional Egyptian family. My father, Muhammad Zanaty, has been working as an accountant in Saudi Arabia for a quarter of a century. I only got to know him during the holidays. For one or two months a year I would have a real, “tangible” father and for the rest of it he was turned into an elided pronoun, a mere idea, a cloudy concept. I can’t blame my father for the displacement he was forced to undergo to support us, but he had no impact whatsoever, apart from the sums of money he sent to cover my expenses, on my upbringing. It was my grandfather Karem—my mother’s father—who raised me and shaped the way I think. I was so attached to him that I’d often leave our house on Feisal Street and go stay with him in his flat in Sayeda Zeinab, where he lived on his own after my grandmother died and my uncle, his only son, emigrated to Britain. Grandfather Karem was a man of letters and culture, and it was he who made me love reading and the arts and gave me self-confidence. He used to take me to the opera, to the theatre, and the cinema, and he taught me that a woman is a legally competent individual and not just an instrument for sexual pleasure and a machine for producing offspring. He supported me against the reactionary thinking of my family to the day he died, five years ago, leaving me to fight my battles alone. I live on my own with my mother. Our life is one of unending arguments. My mother is my father’s representative in the house. She talks to me as though she were he and she believes all his ideas are correct and the essence of wisdom. I love my father and I’m certain that he loves me, but I’m always at odds with him and cause him such worries that sometimes I imagine he regrets having had me. My father is more comfortable with my elder brother Mustafa and my sister Sundus, who is two years younger than me. They, in his view, are normal. Mustafa graduated from the College of Engineering and got a contract in Saudi Arabia, and Sundus covers her hair and obeys her parents. She got an undergraduate degree in commerce, married the usual nice boy, went to Saudi Arabia, had a son, and now she’s pregnant again. I, on the other hand, refused to cover my hair, refused to work in the Gulf, and rejected the principle of marriage just for the sake of respectability. I can’t imagine sleeping with a man I don’t know simply because he’s paid the bride money, bought the engagement ring, and signed some legal papers with my father.

  Lots of men have made offers for me, and each time my parents pressure me to agree to see the suitor. I refuse and argue, and in the end, I’m forced to see him. The suitor usually comes to our house all dressed up, full of himself, confident in the impact of his well-stuffed pockets. He softens us up with sentences that make passing reference to his possessions—a high-end car (Mercedes or BMW), a chalet on the North Coast and another in Ein El Sukhna, a luxurious flat (generally in Medinet Nasr) with 300 square metres of floor space and two levels. Following this display of wealth, the suitor begins his inspection of the goods (namely me). I feel his eyes exploring my body, bit by bit, slowly. We can’t blame him. The man will pay a large sum of money for me, to allow him to use my body for his pleasure (which is the definition of marriage in some religious law books), so doesn’t he have the right to a visual inspection of my body so as to be sure he’ll be investing wisely? Isn’t it possible that I have a club foot, for example, or suffer from some skin disease, or that my breasts are artificial? The suitor has the right to make sure that the goods are in sound order and he isn’t being swindled.

  How humiliated I feel, Mazen! I feel cheap and without self-worth—just goods displayed in a shop window waiting for the customer who will pay what I cost and take me away. On such occasions, the feeling of humiliation drives me to behave aggressively. I try to prove I’m worth more than just the body that is displayed for sale. I ask the suitor who his favourite authors are and what novels he has read recently (generally, the suitor hasn’t read a book in his life, apart from commentaries on the Koran and the set books at school). I feel happy when he reveals his ignorance in front of everyone. Then I lure him into a discussion of politics. I ask him, for example, if he accepts the torture of innocent people at the hands of National Security and the rigging of elections, and whether he accepts the hereditary transfer of rule by Mubarak to his son Gamal, as though Egypt were a battery farm.

  At this point, the suitor looks at me in astonishment, as though I were a winged creature just landed from Mars. He is an ordinary Egyptian citizen. He considers himself lucky that he works in the Gulf where, usually, he puts up with the slights of his local sponsor and lives with oppression to secure his livelihood. He really cannot understand, at all, how anyone could concern himself with anything in the world other than making money, plus regular performance of the rites of religion out of fear that his pampered existence will otherwise come to an end.

  Despite the interruptions from my father and mother and their desperate attempts to change the subject, I persist with my scheme. I tell the suitor about my participation in the Enough! movement’s demonstrations and about the wall magazine I used to write against the regime when I was at university. Then I turn to the topic of religion and announce that I will never ever cover my hair and review the legal opinions that assert that Islam has never imposed covering of the hair on women.

  This is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The suitor leaves and never returns. And after each suitor has fled, the arguments with my family—my father and mother, my sister Sundus, and my brother Mustafa—begin. They all think that I’m unbalanced, stupid, and don’t know what’s in my own best interest. I’m completely convinced of the rightness of what I’m doing but sometimes I get tired. I wish sometimes that I could be in harmony with society, not in conflict with it. All the same, I quite simply cannot be anything other than what I am. I’m sorry to go on at such length, Mazen, but I need to talk. After I obtained my bachelor’s degree, I went for two years without work. Then, after numerous interventions by friends of my father’s, I was appointed last September as an English teacher at the Renaissance Preparatory School for Girls in Mounira. If you were to see the school, Mazen, you’d leave with an excellent impression: the building is elegant, the walls are freshly painted, and the lavatories are clean. This beautiful outward appearance, so rare in government schools, is attributable to the efforts of the headmaster, Mr. Abd El Zaher Salama, who follows up personally on every matter, large and small, at the school and also takes an interest in his girls’ morals and how closely they observe the teachings of religion.

  Mr. Abd El Zaher forbids any of his Muslim students to enter the school with her hair uncovered and halts instruction for the performance of the midday prayer, when he himself leads the male teachers and workers in prayer in the school courtyard, while the girls and the female teachers perform the prayer in their classrooms. The headmaster isn’t the only one characterised by such rigorous religiosity: all the male teachers are religiously observant and bear on their foreheads the mark made by frequent prostration, and some of them are bearded, while the female teachers all cover their hair and we have three who cover their faces completely. You may be wondering, how do these hardliners deal with someone like me, who doesn’t cover her hair?

  On the fi
rst day, the principal female teacher, Mrs. Manal, said to me, with a smile, “You look like a good girl, Asmaa, and you deserve to enjoy the comfort of obedience. I have to say, you’ll look lovely with your hair covered!”

  Mr. Abd El Zaher received me warmly, gave me a tour of the school, and introduced me to the other teachers. The following day, he called me into his office, gave me a short pamphlet on covering the hair, then smiled and said, “Listen, dear girl. Where the students are concerned, I make them cover their hair because they’re young, and I’m responsible for them before Our Lord, Glorious and Mighty. As for the female teachers, my duty towards them goes no further than advice. I’ve provided you with all the legal proofs that the covering of the hair is a religious duty. Read them carefully and Our Lord will, should He so wish, inspire you to do the right thing.”

  I thanked him and told him that I would read the pamphlet but that I knew of other arguments to the effect that Islam imposes decency in general terms and does not impose any specific form of clothing.

  Mr. Abd El Zaher laughed sarcastically and said, “My, my! So you’re a scholar of religion too?”

  I tried to list the legal opinions on which I relied but he interrupted me by saying, “Listen, Asmaa, covering the hair is as much a religious duty as praying and fasting. Any other opinion is wrong.”

  I realised there was no point in arguing with him, so I thanked him and left. After that, no one talked to me about covering my hair. I’d put a covering over my head when I was praying at noon with the girls, then take it off, and no one objected. I think they were prepared to coexist with me. I can almost hear you saying, “What more could you want, Asmaa? A well-maintained model school, and a headmaster and colleagues who are religious but not fanatical?”

  That, my dear friend, is how we look from the outside. The truth, though, is that the Renaissance Preparatory School for Girls is nothing less than a gang of criminals, in the full meaning of the word, that includes all the teachers and is led by Mr. Abd El Zaher himself. This gang’s sole goal is to extort money from the students and force them to take private classes. The school is in the Mounira district, and the girls are poor. If the cost of going to school becomes too much for their families, they have to abandon their education, and my pious colleagues know no mercy. They divide the girls into three categories, starting with the girls who take private classes, who are treated well and get top marks at the end of the year because the teachers help them cheat. This happens with Mr. Abd El Zaher’s knowledge and encouragement. Cheating is considered normal at the school, where they call it “helping.” The second category of students consists of those who can’t afford the cost of private classes but take “review” classes. These aren’t treated well but the school administration is obliged to make sure they pass their exams because if they fail, the other students won’t take the review classes. Then there’s the third category, who are so poor that they can’t afford to pay for either private classes or review classes. These are the pariahs who always fail. I can’t describe to you the lengths to which the teachers go to take it out on them and humiliate them. At first, I couldn’t understand what made them so cruel. Then I realised that they were defending their livelihoods. They have to take it out on the poor girls to keep the machine of private and review classes going. The parents understand that without these lessons and special classes, their daughters will be subjected to humiliation, punishment, and mockery and that they will go on failing till they are expelled from the school. My problems began when I refused to give private classes and review classes. I’m no hero and no saint. However, I am quite simply better off than my colleagues. I’m not married and I don’t have children. My needs, too, are simple, and my father helps me by giving me some money every month. From day one, I decided that I’d give the teaching my all, and my students’ level began to improve, little by little, until they all passed the mid-year test. Not one student in the three classes that I teach failed English. Such a result ought to be considered an achievement for any teacher, but Mr. Abd El Zaher called me into his office and instead of praising me, gave me a lukewarm greeting, and said, “If you don’t change your approach to teaching, I shall punish you. You aren’t leaving the girls any opportunity to think for themselves. Pedagogically speaking, that is a very harmful approach.”

  I tried to argue with him but he insisted on his point of view. Then he said, offensively, “Listen, I don’t have time to waste on you. Consider what I’ve said a warning. If you don’t change your approach to teaching, I shall punish you. You may go.”

  You cannot imagine, Mazen, how shocked I was. Think of yourself making every effort to succeed at your work and then being punished! Mrs. Manal, the principal female teacher, made her position even clearer than the headmaster. She told me, rudely, “Look here, dear. If you’re too rich to need the money from the private classes, that’s your business. But every one of your colleagues has a family to support. When you explain everything in the classroom, you’re stealing the bread from the teachers’ mouths and you can be sure that no one’s going to let you get away with that!”

  Naturally, I paid no attention to these warnings and continued to do my work in a way that satisfied my conscience. Two weeks later, Mr. Abd El Zaher called me in to his office, where I found Mrs. Manal and a group of teachers. The moment I walked in, the headmaster accosted me angrily with the words, “Asmaa! I’ve decided to give you a final warning in front of your colleagues.”

  Before I could respond, Mrs. Manal shouted out derisively, “Which are you, Asmaa? A Muslim or a Copt?”

  I said, “I’m a Muslim.”

  The headmaster said, “There are no Muslim women who do not cover their hair.”

  I tried to argue, using my usual justifications, but the headmaster interrupted me. “Silence! Forget this nonsense! Our function here is to educate and inculcate morals. I cannot permit you to corrupt the girls’ minds. Are you or are you not going to cover your hair?”

  I yelled in his face, “Covering one’s hair is a personal matter, and no one has the right to impose it on me!”

  The headmaster shook his head, seemingly relieved at my answer, and said quietly, “Fine. Kindly go to your classroom.”

  The next day, Mr. Abd El Zaher presented an official complaint to the director of the Education Administration accusing me of wearing inappropriate dress at school. He asserted that he had put me on notice more than once in front of my colleagues but that I had treated him with contempt. At the end of the complaint, he demanded that decisive measures be taken against me to preserve the students’ morals. Naturally, a complaint of this sort could open the doors of Hell before me. I am to go to the ministry’s Legal Affairs department for interrogation tomorrow. I’m not afraid, Mazen, but I feel unjustly treated and demeaned. In what other country in the world do they punish a person for being successful? Plus, how can the headmaster and the pious teachers be such liars?

  Today, in class, I could tell from the girls’ looks that they knew about the interrogation. When the girls leave the school, the parents usually say hello and ask me about their daughters. Today, they avoided me completely, though the mother of one of my first-year students shook my hand and drew me aside from the others who were waiting.

  “Don’t let it bother you, Miss Asmaa,” she said. “Good luck. We know they’re just taking revenge on you because you have a conscience. We’re all praying for you, but the parents are afraid that if they stand up for you, the director will persecute our daughters.”

  You know, Mazen, the parents’ behaviour annoyed me more than being referred for interrogation. I defend their daughters’ right to an education and they abandon me because they’re afraid they might have problems?

  Are all Egyptians now either corrupt or cowards?

  What is this swamp that we’re living in?

  I feel nauseated by all this lying and hypocrisy and corruption. Please, tel
l me what you think, because I’m really depressed. Thank you for your time.

  Asmaa

  P.S. I’m writing from an email account that isn’t my own. Would you mind opening a new email account just for our correspondence? As you know, we’re all watched by Security.

  Even More Important Note: If this bothers you, don’t reply. I shall understand and shan’t write to you again.

  4

  As the time approached, they gathered, as though they couldn’t bear to wait. They went out to the gate of the villa, men in front, women behind, waiting for Sheikh Shamel to arrive. All were well-known figures—businessmen, celebrated doctors and engineers, former ministers, police and army generals either serving or retired. Most of them were accompanied by their wives and daughters, and there were famous actresses, some of them—the ones who had repented and abandoned acting—with their hair covered, others—the ones who were still taking their first steps on the path of piety—decently dressed but without hair covering. The moment the black Mercedes appeared, a thrill ran through the crowd. Sheikh Shamel always sat next to the driver, keeping the back seat for the ladies, as he was usually accompanied by two of his four (fully veiled) wives. As soon as the sheikh began his descent, men rushed to shake his hand, some of them even bending to kiss its precious back, though he would pull it quickly away, saying “God forgive me!” in an audible voice. The sheikh’s disciples believed that the source of the delightful odour that filled the air as soon as he descended from the car was not the expensive musk with which he anointed his clothes but one of the signs of grace that God bestows on those of His servants whom He loves; the disciples believed in their sheikh that much. Few knew that he had received no formal religious education and had a degree in Spanish from Cairo University. He had tried hard, on graduating, to find a job as a tourist guide, but tourism had been hit by a recession, due to terrorism. The sheikh had then obtained a contract from Saudi Arabia to work as an administrator at a sports club; God had done well by him, and at the mosque he’d got to know Sheikh El Ghamidi, who saw signs of promise in him and imparted to him a generous portion of his learning. Sheikh Shamel had lived for ten years in Saudi Arabia before returning to Egypt, where he made up his mind to devote his life to proselytisation. With a tender smile and in grateful tones, he would say, “God was generous to me. I sat at the feet of Erudite and Learned Sheikh El Ghamidi, quaffing the religious sciences from that pure spring until my thirst was quenched, and then my learned sheikh—may God reward him well for his selfless service to religion!—granted me permission to teach.”