I got an e-mail from Ben not long after this. He announced that he was leaving the States, and would be back in Cairo the following week. He intended to study Arabic to try to get a job in government intelligence when he went home. Omar and I were nervous about Ben’s arrival. He was a mutual friend—it was through him that we knew one another—but though he was respectful of cultural differences he found Arab restrictions on personal freedom absurd, and had said as much to me. Omar and I worried that Ben wouldn’t understand what we were doing—really, what I was doing. We decided to tell Ben we were dating. He wouldn’t believe for long, since Omar didn’t date, but it would give him time to get used to seeing us together. I also decided to postpone covering my head for a couple of weeks.
We met him at the airport. He was easy to find, wearing his signature newsie hat and black-rimmed glasses, like a latter-day Ernest Hemingway in the Cuban bush. There was a bit of old-school expatriate in him, I thought; the sort that had rejected the ruling race mentality but still carried the safari aura around with them wherever they went. He greeted us in heavily accented Arabic.
“It’s good to see you,” said Omar, reaching out to hug him.
Ben gave a long sigh and shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m back in Cairo,” he grinned. “What happened?”
“Are you glad to be back?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you after I’ve had some shisha,” he said. “These are for you.” He handed me a stack of comic books. I suppressed squeals of delight and Omar gave me a funny look; he had yet to learn about my comics habit.
“Here such things are only for children,” he said.
“Not where we come from,” responded Ben. In a semi-prescient second, I knew how things would progress from there, and I was afraid.
Omar looked uncomfortable. By the standards of the Middle East, rules had already been stretched; Ben’s gift to me in public made our relationship ambiguous. Was he my brother? Or perhaps Ben was the fiancé, and Omar a guide or chauffeur? But Ben didn’t realize his transgression; he was only aware that something had gone wrong, and looked concerned. None of us knew how to proceed.
“What?” asked Ben.
“Nothing!” I assured him, smiling maniacally.
“We should go,” said Omar.
“What did I do?” said Ben.
“Nothing,” Omar repeated.
Ben looked at me with an expression that said, So it’s started already. I could see that Omar also felt apprehensive—it was not that the simple act of gift giving bothered him, it was only that such a situation (man gets off plane, hands unrelated woman stack of comic books) would never have reason to occur in the Arab world. There was no protocol for it. He didn’t know how to react, and so he was nervous. Both of them needed reassurance, and needed it from me, but I could only stand there without speaking, sure that it was going to get worse.
The next day, I agreed to meet Ben for breakfast at an expat café in Maadi. I had to run an errand at Al-Azhar afterward—I didn’t tell him I was going there to pick up the English translation of my “official” conversion documents.
“You’ve converted,” he said as we sat down at a booth. The wood floors, the ads for hamburgers and fries, and Ben in his glasses, all made me feel as though he and America had conspired to stage this breakfast as an intervention.
“Yes,” I said, surprised. “How did you guess?”
He sighed. “Why else would you need to go to Al-Azhar? There isn’t much of a happening scene there aside from Islam.”
There was a pause. “Well?” I asked finally.
“I guess it’s not shocking,” he responded, in the same tone he had once used to tell me I was drinking too much. “I mean, you did get that tattoo.”
“Ben,” I said, “half of the religious texts I own come from you. When you came home for Christmas the first year you lived here, you brought me, like, six Qurans.”
“Yeah, but I was under the impression that you were basically an atheist,” said Ben. “I didn’t think—anyway. So you’re a Muslim. Why?”
“I have a different answer for this every week.”
“Pick the best one then.”
“I like Islam.”
He smiled and seemed more like himself. “That’s good. That’s reassuring. I might not have believed you if you said anything else.”
My tea arrived and I took a long swallow; it was hot and hurt my throat.
“So no more drinking and lechery? Aren’t you going to miss it?” asked Ben, looking melancholic.
I felt a twinge of sympathy. It was through Ben that I had gained a detailed appreciation for whiskey and Tom Waits, the combination of which had seen me through many mishaps. “Of course I’ll miss them. The drinking, anyway.”
“Fair enough.” He paused. “What are you going to say to everyone back home?” Though he meant our college friends, the word everyone unsettled me: in my mind it expanded beyond the question, taking in people I knew from old internships and sublet apartments. Everyone. I let my head loll back against the booth. “I don’t know. It’s terrifying.”
“Do you think it’ll be that bad?” he asked in a way that suggested he was no more optimistic than I was.
“I’ll be lucky if it isn’t worse. You’ve lived in a Muslim country and you haven’t been jumping up and down with enthusiasm, so I can only imagine what the rest will be like.”
He looked hurt. “I just worry about you,” he said.
“I know. Believe me, I wouldn’t tolerate this kind of cross-examination from people who didn’t have a right to worry about me.”
“What do you think they’ll say?” he asked.
“They’ll say I’m a hypocrite,” I said flatly. “Because Islam is about stoning gays and chopping off body parts, as we know. They’ll say I’m a hypocrite, and there won’t be a damn thing I can do to change their minds.” It was as if I could protect myself with cynicism; as if by being sarcastic and diffident and pretending to expect the worst, the fear and embarrassment that were coming would hurt less. It wouldn’t occur to me until later that my friends—perhaps even my family—would think my conversion was an unfavorable judgment on their own values and lives.
A few years later I would meet a girl in Cairo whom I had known for a single weekend in New York, a friend of a friend with whom I’d gotten heroically intoxicated and wandered into the atrium of the World Financial Center at midnight. After September 11, pictures would circulate of the atrium’s pale ruins, the palm trees broken and white with ash. “It seems like another lifetime that we were there,” the girl would tell me in Cairo, dark-eyed and a little shy. She saw only clashing lifestyles: then I had had short pink hair and held my liquor, now I was a practicing Muslim. She couldn’t see—and I could not have shown her—that for me there was a larger story in which those two ways of living were vitally connected, one that embraced not only that evening and this, but the atrium, the ash covered palm trees, the emerging imperative that certain things be understood. Though she dressed and spoke the same way she had that night in New York, she had left the atrium, but I, in some sense, was still there. Every day my life was affected by what had happened on 9/11; every day I had to get up and negotiate the boundaries between that tragedy and my religion. Every day.
Ben was silent for a minute, considering something. “Maybe,” he said, “I don’t know. You might be surprised. I can help—I can play backup. People will be less worried if I’m there to tell them you’re still sane.”
“Thanks,” I said, too tired to bristle. “So, do you want to come to happening Al-Azhar?”
“Sure,” said Ben.
We paid the check and caught a cab outside, and I rehearsed the things I now knew I would have to say to the people I had left behind.
Arrivals and Confessions
Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes, so that you might come to know one another.
—Quran 49:13
I DIDN’T EXPECT ANYTHING MORE SUPPORTIVE OR ENTHUSI astic than Ben’s reaction to my conversion. Keeping it a secret clearly was not a practical long-term solution. Living in a Muslim country, I felt even guiltier about my secrecy; Omar’s family knew, but I hadn’t told my colleagues at school, and wasn’t even sure that revealing my religion wouldn’t put my job in jeopardy. This was the main reason I had put off my decision to wear a head scarf.
I was as afraid of the reaction of Muslim friends to my conversion as of non-Muslim ones. I didn’t want to be special and symbolic any more than I wanted to be feared; I wanted to be a regular Muslim, for whom Islam was a matter of course, independent of either censure or reward. I was too exhausted by what Omar and I had undertaken to even handle praise; I wanted only normalcy.
There would be no avoiding the crisis when it came, so I decided to force it. I ran up the flag, so to speak, by putting on hijab. The first scarf I ever bought and wore was apple red, a color that ensured my ultraconservative colleagues would be as shocked as my non-Muslim ones. The first day I walked into school “swathed,” as Jo put it, the principal stopped in her tracks, wide-eyed, and without a pause asked “Is this a veil I see before me?”
For a second I couldn’t get words to come out of my mouth. “It’s a permanent religious bad hair day,” I said finally. She laughed. The moment of tension passed. I kept up this attitude throughout the day; when people were surprised, I was cheerful and neutral, which left some puzzled, some amused, some alarmed, and some delighted. I had achieved what I set out to do, which was to avoid philosophical conversations with those who were not Muslim, and clichéd spiritual raptures with those who were.
Looking back, the way I chose to “come out” taught me something vital: anything undertaken with honest intentions can be justly defended. I never by word or action claimed to possess a higher or a universal truth, only a very personal one; I think this was one of the main reasons I was able to slip quietly into “ordinary” Islam, without the fanfare that accompanies conversion. I never tried to become a mascot; I was just a person, with the usual quirks and faults, who was now Muslim.
My moderate Muslim colleagues and friends—moderate is a terrible word, since many of them are very passionate about their religion—accepted me without a batted eye. No one went into ecstasies about the God-given blessings of conversion, no one cross-examined me about my theology. They simply began to greet me with as-salaamu alaykum instead of “hi,” and included me in the silent wry glances that would go around the room when secular or western cowork-ers launched into critiques of religion. The men began to treat me with the same protective chivalry they extended to other Muslim women; the women, typically put off by the androgyny of western girls, stopped treating me like a man. The transition was silent but complete.
Ultraconservative teachers, of which there were a few, became guarded and uneasy when I began to wear a head scarf. Converts are a favorite prey of fundamentalists; they are often isolated, confused, and in need of reassurance, which radical Muslims are only too happy to give. In my case, they were confused. The way I wore my scarf, and the colors I chose, made it clear I was not crying out for help or seeking support. Mainstream Islam is too abstract and ordinary a thing to offer much comfort to the average initiate; it demands belief quietly and without celebration, offers few indisputable answers, and requires one to draw on inner spiritual resources far more often than communal ones. It must have been disturbing to radicals that a convert could find mere Islam more appealing than their tight-knit community. This is the death knell of radicalism: Muslims who have achieved a personal understanding of the religion can inspire doubt in extremists simply by standing in front of them. It’s a simple fact, but one with the potential to change the world.
To my friends and immediate family in the United States, I wrote a letter. With them there was no space I could occupy besides that of a convert; Islam for the average American was never ordinary, could never be ordinary. The day I wrote and sent this letter via e-mail is cast in sharp relief in my memory, all the more painful because it is something I would rather forget. Later, I would pick the letter apart, grafting its contents into these pages, a line here, a paragraph there. It was the first and most honest explanation I made for my faith, painful as it was. A Muslim writer friend once asked me why this kind of apologetic writing is so awful to us.
“I think it’s because it shouldn’t be necessary,” I said. We were trying to decide why our best work, rather than giving us confidence, brought on bouts of depression. “It shouldn’t be necessary, and the fact that it is means something is terribly wrong.”
It seems an obvious thing to say; of course there is something wrong. One need only watch the news to see it. But I was not talking about the obvious wrong, the cycle of war and jihad, but about the emotional reality created by it: the fact that we now demand proof of common humanity. To provide that proof is to give away your dignity as rent to the ideal of peace. Using your own history to explain some trivial difference between East and West, or getting a reader to empathize with someone he believes to be his enemy, does not bring happiness—only a degraded sense of having been useful.
I could not have put this idea into words when I wrote the letter announcing my conversion to the people I loved back home. The ability to articulate the kind of pain it caused would come later. But I felt it, acutely, overwhelmingly, like vertigo. I could almost see the distance I was putting between myself and my past and the people who inhabited it. How could I explain to them that I had not deviated, but was walking in a straight line, as true—truer—to myself and my principles as ever? I did the best I could, but the letter could only have been bizarre to those who read it; I have not read it in full since the day I sent it.
Replies were slow to come, leaving me to invent worst-case scenarios in my mind. I was crippled by my own stubborn refusal to talk to Omar about my fears. Someone had to remain unhurt by my inconvenient life. It was a deluded way of thinking, but I clung to it, and waited.
Everything around me seemed muffled, colorless. I was slow to respond to questions and to go about tasks. My life unrolled in front of me, blank: I am not the sort of person who can walk away from the people she loves, or even the people she has loved. I could not imagine moving forward without them.
But I didn’t have to.
Timidly, as though I might break, my family and friends began to speak up. My parents were supportive in a weary and slightly self-recriminating way, as if my decision to do something this terrible resulted from a defect in their parenting. They didn’t say so, but guilt flowed between the lines. Guilt and acceptance were better than fear and denial, however, so I began the months-long process of reassuring them that I had not been brainwashed, and that Islam was a fourteen-hundred-year-old spiritual tradition, not a result of bad parenting.
A few of my friends recognized that my conversion was the result of a process that had begun years earlier: that my steady accumulation of Islamic texts, my extracurricular interest in Arabic, and the infamous tattoo were not coincidences. One, a guy I had known at BU, even said, “Anyone who didn’t see this coming wasn’t looking.” Most responses fell somewhere in between. In subsequent years, the conversations that my letter provoked have been revealed to me bit by bit, often by accident; people did react with the mingled fear and disgust I had anticipated, but undercutting this was a current of tenderness I did not expect. They didn’t want me to sense the nega-tivity, and made an effort—sometimes collaboratively—to be kind. The reaction was, given the state of the post-9/11 world, extraordinary.
I wrote using a more intimate vocabulary than ones employed to describe political affiliations and absolutist theologies and strategy, one that put our relationships at the center of the dialogue rather than our ideologies. I did not ask them to understand Islam, but to understand me. It was a plea that put too much trust in what had already been established—mutual affection and mutual vulnerability—to be ridiculed. When I dev
iated from this attitude a few months later, sick from the onslaught of misinformation and emotional sterility I saw in the media, and began to lecture them about my religion, I was pulled up short. “Who salted this earth?” a friend asked me in an e-mail, “We are fine. We love you. You can stop playing information nanny.”
I was over the first hurdle. The weight of the secret I had been keeping was gone, and I felt physically lighter; I would not be irrevocably cut off from my home and I could keep the people I loved. There remained, however, the issue of my marriage, and as December crept closer a nagging tension returned to the back of my skull. My parents and younger sister, Meredith, were coming for Christmas. Omar and I planned to announce our engagement to them when they arrived.
“What if they don’t like me?” was Omar’s constant question.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t veil when they’re here,” suggested Sohair. In the days before my family’s arrival, she and I were trying to arrange things to be as nonthreaten-ing to them as possible. They should be isolated from the shrieking fundamentalist imams on Fridays, protected from harassment in the streets, kept in as clean and orderly an environment as possible. It struck me that both she and Omar were very aware of how frightening their city was to westerners—the noise, the pollution, the women without faces, the soldiers with semiautomatic rifles. They were resigned to it; had been brought up with the knowledge that they were seen as exotic at best and at worst, barbaric. If they had been hurt or sad, I could have reassured them, but resignation is unassailable.
“What should we avoid talking about?” Sohair asked at one point.
“Israel,” I said immediately; here at least was a tangible issue. “Anything having to do with World War Two, actually. Better to avoid the whole era.” Omar had strong opinions about Churchill.
“Do you really think World War Two will come up in conversation?” Sohair asked doubtfully.
“If it shouldn’t, we can assume it will.”
The Butterfly Mosque Page 9
