There were months when Farida’s take-home pay exceeded what my dad earned from his savings. She was expected to cover household expenses, which made my mother angry. Safia wanted her husband to stop messing about and get some work—not live off his own daughter. My parents started to argue more frequently and passionately about money. We lived in fear of yet another fight. My mother may have been uneducated, but she never backed down from arguing with Mohamed when it came to providing for her children. When my grandparents would visit—especially my father’s parents—they repeatedly asked her not to butt heads with their son, as he was the man of the house. “You should know better,” they told her. When my grandmother was feeling particularly vindictive, she’d remind Safia that Mohamed could have married a more beautiful and lighter-skinned girl. She’d add that it was not too late for him to seek a less nagging wife. My father would have been fifty-two or fifty-three, which I guess was not too old for a second marriage, but the idea of leaving the mother of his children only came up during fights. All this took place in front of us children. It was a lesson not in family relations but in money management. Even before I fully apprehended the meaning of my sexuality, I made up my mind not to have more than one or two children so I could afford to raise them. When I told my brother Wahbi this before we went to the movies, he laughed and told me not to be so melodramatic.
ONCE MOHAMED REALIZED that our survival depended on the income of one of his daughters, he finally abandoned his pride and in 1978 sought employment in Saudi Arabia. The Gulf countries had a severe labour shortage and recruited heavily from countries with surplus populations like Egypt or Lebanon, where the civil war was into its third year by then. He found a job as an independent contract and business negotiator for a number of well-to-do Saudi families of Yemeni extraction, including the powerful dynasty of bin Laden—a name that was associated with obscene wealth long before it became a symbol of Islamic terrorism. Of course, our connection with the bin Ladens went back to the early decades of the twentieth century, as my mother was born and raised in their native Hadhramaut.
Because of visa regulations, only my father as a businessman could enter and work in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. That meant leaving his family behind for the first time since the late 1940s, when he sailed from Aden to study in England. Mohamed talked often about the hardship of working in Saudi Arabia—living alone, the egotism and capriciousness of the local businessmen and, particularly for the secular philanderer from Aden, the kind of religious intolerance he observed in the country. He’d often tell us about the “barbaric” custom of the religious observance police, the mutaween, who rounded up people during prayer time and herded them into mosques. But a decade of no serious work or income meant having to put his personal beliefs aside and adopt, in appearance at least, a kind of religious piety that would keep his business associates happy.
Back in Cairo, Helmi’s grip on his sisters only strengthened with our father’s frequent absences. Ironically and appropriately enough, Helmi struggled to finish law school at Cairo University even when his supposed new religiosity freed up the time he had spent, say, watching TV or hanging out with his family at the Ahli Club, the sports and social club we were members of in the Gezira part of Cairo. The more courses he failed, the more observant he became. “Maybe he should pick up a textbook instead of the Quran,” my mother would tell her neighbour, the widowed wife an army captain, during one of their regular lunchtime chats.
Our neighbour also had a son who was suddenly interested in Islam after years of secular living and education. The two mothers knew that such transitions didn’t bode well for the families involved or the country itself. I listened in on many of their conversations over the year, as I continued to seek shelter in the kitchen whenever and for however long I could. Our kitchen and the neighbour’s backed on to each other, with a little porch and the garbage chute separating the two apartments.
It strikes me as odd that the women in our circles of Cairo were the ones who noted and expressed concerns about the men’s—usually young men’s—new directions when the most visible sign of such change in society came from women lower down the social ladder. I was floored the first time I saw a young middle-class Egyptian woman wearing the hijab at school. Education Home was a co-ed institution that encouraged equality between the sexes, so it came as a shock to the bourgeois system to have a mid-term English replacement teacher by the name of Miss Afaf assigned to our class. Today you’d be hard pressed to find a female schoolteacher in Cairo who was not wearing the hijab, but back in 1977, in my first year of secondary school, Miss Afaf caused a sensation. We’d heard of some young women donning the hijab and even saw some of them on TV as part of a current-affairs story about the lives of young Egyptians. But to have someone like her in our school was the subject of much debate among the different cohorts. She was an excellent teacher and very gentle, but we just couldn’t get past her headwear.
Neither could some parents. It seemed that Miss Afaf did not stick to teaching English grammar and vocabulary but set herself the goal of persuading many of the young women in class—thirteen and fourteen years old on average—to cover up their own hair and follow the rules of Islam, since it was the right and only path. Her first convert was the most beautiful girl in my class: Fadwa, a petite blond Libyan-Italian stunner, who covered her hair for a few days before her mother came charging in and asked the school headmistress to keep Miss Afaf away from her child. Other parents congregated outside the school and discussed this new phenomenon. My mother didn’t get involved in the discussions, but even she didn’t like having a teacher with a hijab in school. None of this had much to do with an anti-Islam or a pro-secularity sentiment and everything to do with social hierarchy and prejudice. Mothers considered women like Miss Afaf too far down the social ladder to teach at a private school like ours. Many of the parents probably resented having to pay hefty tuition fees for the kind of teacher that staffed government schools.
Miss Afaf didn’t return to school the next academic year. But that’s not to say she was an isolated incident. In Cairo at the time, the line between class and religion was drawn—the more affluent you were, the less religious, and the same was true in reverse. Cairo was fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of politicized Islam under the banner of the regrouped Muslim Brotherhood. The reasons for this new surge are both political and economic. After over two decades of suppression by Nasser, his successor, Anwar Sadat, released many of the Brotherhood’s organizers from jail—a political gesture that would cost him his own life when he was assassinated in 1981 by a convert to the group. Economically, Sadat’s open-market policies and pro-Western-style capitalism—symbolized by the reopening of the Suez Canal as a trading post in 1975—created huge gaps between the haves and have-littles. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptian workers left the country to seek employment in Saudi Arabia, Iraq or other oil-rich Gulf states while the inner circle of Sadat—and later Mubarak—would reap the rewards of economic reforms. For the first time since the 1952 revolution, average Egyptians couldn’t count on the quasi-socialist state to help them survive. In fact, with increased police brutality and widespread corruption among government workers, the state became the enemy of the people. I dismiss as incomplete analyses of the rise of fundamentalism and, by association, terrorism that do not trace the roots of both to that transitional moment in Egyptian history. And because Egypt exerted a huge cultural and moral influence on other Arab countries, the shift towards a more politicized and economics-driven notion of Islam quickly spread to other parts of the region.
Even as an expatriate Yemeni family in Cairo, we began to feel the tensions in the air—literally so. The Friday prayers were—and still are—the most direct way of gauging the political mood in a city like Cairo. This might explain why most of the more turbulent events of the recent Egyptian revolution took place on Fridays, including, for example, the storming of the Israeli embassy in September 2011. The call to prayer would often be foll
owed with a call to action. Since local mosques started to use amplification to reach the increasing number of people who prayed on makeshift carpets on the streets, we couldn’t help but hear the Friday khoutba (sermon) from our Dokki apartment. Gone were the speeches about the history of Islam or the interpretation of domestic or economic laws. The new imams were virulent, waging a war on what they saw as decadence and corruption in Egypt’s government and the wider society. Their favourite target was Sadat himself; their second was what they perceived as the loosening of moral codes in Egyptian society. They offered a long list that included, among other topics, women going out alone and working late into the night, and the pernicious influence of Egyptian films and music—once a source of national pride—on the morals of young Muslims. My sister Hoda and I sat on our balcony and listened to these direct attacks on the arts and artists with great interest but greater apprehension. I can’t say that we comprehended the meaning of all these diatribes or that we didn’t find the colourful language and lyric-quoting to be funny. I mean, there’s something inherently comic about an old imam quoting at length from folkloric Egyptian music—songs about bathtubs calling for young ladies to wash themselves or others that used the word “prophet” or “God” in the title. Lyrics that sounded perfectly normal in a pop song acquired a surreal meaning when repeated by a religious figure.
I hated Fridays, at least until after the noon prayers wrapped up. My idea of happiness and my cultural inspirations were derived from Arabic music and cinema at first, and then American and British influences. The constant bashing of everything I liked made me feel I could never belong in this world. Just a couple of years before, none of my family would have thought it odd if one of my sisters’ male colleagues called one of them on the phone—for business or just a friendly chat. Now the friends had to play a little game where they got their own sisters to dial and ask for one of my female siblings before handing over the phone to their brother. It varied from family to family, but with the new brand of Islam came a regressive segregation of the sexes.
It started to become clear that the secular Egypt we relocated to in the beginning of the decade was under threat by the end of it—seven years that changed a city, a nation and possibly the world we live in now, since so many of the 9/11 hijackers came out of the same culture that festered in Egypt in that decade. As my father returned for family visits, you could see the look of concern on his face. With Beirut in the midst of a full-fledged civil war by then, options were running out for finding a new home for his nine unmarried children—and for my sister Faiza, whose marriage to Zaglol came to an unhappy end as well.
CHAPTER FIVE
CAIRO
Radical
Ideological shifts in Cairo’s society coincided with personal changes and realizations. I knew I was different from my brothers and friends at school in that I was not interested in girls, sexually or romantically—even though I was popular with my female classmates, the earliest example in my life of “fag hags” that I can remember. There’s no such thing as sexual education in the Arab world, so I had no concept of homosexuality or even much of an awareness of such rites of passage as reaching puberty. We may have been a secular family, but we didn’t talk freely about sex. I always masturbated about men and was turned on by handsome Egyptian movie stars like Hussein Fahmi, who had a very European look, with fair hair and green eyes; or, my favourite, Mahmoud Yassin, who was more traditionally Egyptian looking—dark olive skin, dark brown eyes and thick black hair. I bonded with my sisters over our adoration of these two leading men of Egyptian cinema in the 1970s. To me they represented ideals of masculinity and beauty and were never far from my dirty little mind as a young boy. I smuggled movie magazines into the bathroom and kissed their pictures.
There was no one I could talk to or ask for guidance. When, in the summer of 1977, one of my masturbatory sessions ended with an ejaculation, I seriously thought I was being punished by God for my sins. I’d never heard of ejaculation or seen semen and, to use a more modern expression, freaked out. This, I told myself, was a sign, a punishment for my anti-religious views and for refusing to go to the mosque on Fridays. I had to renounce all carnal thoughts and desires and look for something in Helmi’s bookshelves that might explain what had just happened. Those bookshelves were once home to English classics and Arabic translations of great world literature—this was where at twelve I first read an abridged version of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and, in Arabic translations, was introduced to great nineteenth-century Russian writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who came to prominence in Egypt during Nasser’s socialist years. Now the shelves were filled with interpretations of Islam by mullahs I’d never heard of and a stream of books about signs of the Apocalypse—a sub-genre of Islamic literature that has, as I saw on a visit to Cairo more than thirty years later, clearly remained popular.
There I found it, in one of the books: homosexuality, or in Arabic shozoz (aberration). There was a passage about how it made God angry and that He preferred that men copulate with stones before they did it with each other. A story about Lot and Sodom followed, as did suggestions for how to overcome homosexuality and punishments for those who embraced it. Celibacy, constant prayer and reading of the Quran constituted remedies; stoning and flogging deterrents. Not much by way of options for the naive thirteen-year-old that I was. I tried the prayer and Quran-reading combo for a few weeks, part out of fear and part hoping that my older sisters might offer me some guidance in sexual matters. I quickly abandoned that hope when, by chance, the subject of homosexuality was alluded to during a casual conversation between Faiza and one of the many house guests from Aden who for some reason always landed in our Cairo apartment. I don’t remember the context of the conversation, but it ended with my sister telling her guest that should their mutual friend ever brag about her life or show off in her annoying way, they should remind her that her husband was a scumbag who liked to bugger young boys—the lowest of the low. The image of the older man who preyed on boys was by far the most prevalent representation of homosexuality in contemporary Arab culture, followed closely by the effete decorator or florist that I mentioned earlier. Although that didn’t necessarily put me off homosexuality, it made talking openly about it to anybody in my family next to impossible. I stuck it out with religion for a few weeks. It didn’t make me feel any better or answer my questions about sexuality—but it was something.
Until Sobhi came into the picture later the same year.
Sobhi was the Man Friday in the apartment building where we lived. A working-class Egyptian about twenty-one or -two at the time and every bit the sex symbol for me. He lifted weights and was into wrestling. To me that was manliness. He always looked after me and tousled my hair on my way to and from school—sometimes making sarcastic remarks about being the spoiled youngest child and sometimes just smirking. One day in September 1977, Sobhi and I were sharing an elevator ride when he pushed the Stop button between floors. He unzipped his trousers and starting playing with his penis and encouraged me to take out mine. It was my first sexual experience and, frankly, I was confused, because I assumed that Sobhi was the kind of straight guy who beat up effeminate men on the street. As he asked me to put my hands around his penis, we heard other tenants shouting to know if everything was okay with the elevator. Sobhi pushed the Go button and we went up one floor and took the stairs to the level between the penthouse and the roof, where rarely anybody dropped by. He jerked off, explaining how much fun it was, and left it at that.
So it turned out that ejaculation was a natural bodily function and masturbation not my own private sin. I wasn’t being punished by Allah after all. “Everybody does it,” Sobhi assured me. I never told Sobhi this, and I don’t even know if he’s still alive, but he changed my life in that one afternoon encounter. Not only did I feel somehow liberated from the shackles of religious ignorance, but if manly men like him liked same-sex encounters, then I shouldn’t complicate my life. I was ecstatic. I�
��d had a sexual encounter that my friends would envy me for—if Sobhi had been a girl. I still trace the roots of my gay identity, in a social and political sense, to that day.
SOBHI SHOULD HAVE BEEN in the army, but as the only son and main provider in his family he was probably exempt from military service. As the Egyptian uprising of 2011 showed, the military is the largest public institution in that country during peacetime—so you can imagine its might and influence in 1977, when Egypt was still in a state of war with Israel over occupied territories in Sinai and around the Red Sea.
By November 1977, however, President Anwar Sadat made a remarkable visit to Israel to seek a peaceful resolution to the differences between the two countries. For every adult Arab, this turned into a historic and ambivalent moment. It symbolized hope, betrayal, weakness, strength, servitude to the American imperial agenda and independence from it. We all sat in front of the TV watching the president’s Egypt Air plane landing on Israeli soil. The only comparable history-making event in North America would be the moon landing in 1969 or the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Naturally, skepticism took over Helmi, who accused Sadat of betraying the Arab and Muslim cause, whatever that might be. Our father and, to our surprise, mother were far more optimistic and supportive. By then, Safia had seen one too many Egyptian families bid farewell to sons entering the army—some of whom never made it back alive after the 1973 war.
The state-controlled media allowed little room for debate and covered Sadat’s visit as a great and brave step forward for all Egyptians. Patriotic songs that chanted death to the Zionists instantly disappeared from the airwaves and were replaced by hastily composed paeans to the bravery of Sadat and the eternal appeal of peace. Such simple framing of the issue did not sit well with diehard Islamists and old Nasserites, who felt that the country’s place as the centre of religious scholarship and its pan-Arab national pride were eroded by this visit, and by the Camp David peace treaties that followed it.
Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Page 7
