The Butterfly Mosque (23 page)

As often as I saw Am Mahmoud, he still looked at me as an outsider, a
khawagga.
One day I arrived to find the yellow-painted metal cages empty—his supplier hadn't yet arrived from the farm outside Cairo where the chickens, ducks, and doves he sold were raised.

“No chicken today?” I asked him in Arabic.

“Not yet,” he said apologetically, spreading his hands.

“Okay, no problem.” I swept my skirt aside with one hand to keep it from trailing in the dust, and turned away.

“Wait!” Am Mahmoud motioned to me. “You have other shopping to do?”

“Yes—”

“Come back in half an hour. I'll have a chicken for you.”

“All right. Thanks.” I smiled, bemused, and went to buy a kilo of zucchini from a stall in the next street. When I returned, Am Mahmoud gave me a bag containing the largest chicken I'd ever seen; it looked pale and naked in the half-inch of pinkish broth that had accumulated underneath it. I looked up at him. “Where did you get this?” I asked.

“A friend.” He grinned.

It was only when I got the thing home and examined it that I realized he had sold me a turkey.

The next time I walked in the souk, I passed by Am Mahmoud's stall without looking at him.

“Madame . . . madame!” I heard him call after me.

“You sold me a turkey,” I snapped.

“Yes,” he said. “Not a good joke? Turkeys are only for New Year.”

“Good-bye.” I shook my head and kept walking, hiding a smile—it was too funny not to laugh a little. Egyptians find it hilarious that westerners are so divorced from their food that they can't tell poultry apart; I had lived up to the stereotype with admirable ignorance. I stayed away from Am Mahmoud for several weeks, pointedly buying my chicken from another
fararghi.
The marketplace is a test of social intelligence—if you have been cheated or tricked, the very worst thing you can do is pretend nothing has happened. It sets a precedent: you are an idiot, and every good merchant knows that idiots are easily parted from their money. After a suitable amount of time had passed, I went back to Am
Mahmoud, who greeted me with new respect. He never sold me another turkey.

One morning, a group of about five American or Canadian tourists were walking through the souk as I was doing my morning shopping. They passed me as I stood in front of Am Mahmoud's stall with a bag of greens balanced on one hip, talking to his mother or aunt (I never discovered which) while my rooster was cleaned. When I looked up, I saw that the tourists were staring—not at the bloody progress of the rooster, but at me. It was clear they couldn't place me. That I was a westerner must have been obvious; there is nothing ambiguous about the color of my skin and the shape of my features. But I was dressed in a scarf and a long skirt and speaking Arabic, and shopping for my dinner while it was still alive. I blushed and stared back, unsure of what to do.

Am Mahmoud's relative reached out and took my hand in hers, pulling me back into the shadow of the corrugated metal overhang that protected the stall. At the same moment, Am Mahmoud himself, cleaning his hands with a cloth, stepped between me and the street, screening me from the view of the tourists. Since his back was to me I couldn't read the expression on his face—he said nothing. The tourists moved on.

The incident passed without comment. Am Mahmoud finished cleaning the rooster and his mother or aunt fussed with a plate of feed for the doves that sat in a wicker cage at her feet. As I walked home and mulled the scene over in my
mind, I realized that my status in Egypt had changed. I was still a foreigner, but I was no longer
simply
a foreigner. The word
khawagga,
the term most often used to describe a westerner in Egypt, is dismissive, even a little derogatory. It isn't as neutral as
agnabi,
the classical word for
foreigner.
But its original use was far more complex. Until about fifty years ago, a
khawagga
was a naturalized Egyptian; an émigré, typically a member of Egypt's vanished Greek, Armenian, or Turkish minorities. A love song from the forties speaks wistfully of a
“khawagga
brought up in Cairo,” whose long braids have captivated the heart of the singer.
Khawagga
in its intended sense was not an epithet but an origin, and I had passed from one kind of
khawagga
to another. Am Mahmoud had protected me from exposure and embarrassment as he would an Egyptian girl.

In the years to come, many an auntie or uncle or family friend would proudly call me “the old kind of
khawagga
” when impressed by my diligence in learning the language or correctly observing some very Egyptian custom of mourning or celebration. Coming back one day from an errand in the souk, Omar laughingly told me that a fruit vendor had asked him, “Is Sir the husband of
el khawagayya?
” Baffled, Omar gathered he could be speaking about no other foreigner—I was the only white woman he knew who shopped at the souk with any regularity—and said that he was. The market had passed a favorable judgment. I had become
el khawagayya,
the rough, nonspecific masculine of
khawagga
feminized and made particular.

And God is on your side
dividing soldiers from the fishermen;
Watching all the time
dividing warships from the ferryboats.
—Wolfsheim, “The Sparrows and the
Nightingales”

D
ESPITE MY PROGRESS
, I
WAS ALWAYS CONSCIOUS OF BEING
an outsider. I assimilated Egyptian habits without ever feeling Egyptian. I dried mint and coriander in bundles at the kitchen window, and began to wear a long cotton galibayya around the house; I began, also, to understand the psychological difference between living in a foreign country temporarily and living in one indefinitely. Jhumpa Lahiri calls living in a foreign country “an eternal pregnancy”; an uncomfortable wait for something impossible to define. As the months passed, I realized how astute that observation was. My days fell into a pattern—I would get up, shop for the day's meal in the souk, then work on articles or research until midafternoon, when I prepared lunch and ate with Omar after he arrived from school. In the evenings I took Arabic lessons with Sameh or visited friends and relatives. Despite the routine, I had a constant feeling of anticipation—for what, I couldn't say; it vanished if I thought about
it too long. Looking back I think it was the expectation of normalcy. It remained just out of my reach, inevitably scuttled by a bewildering social situation, a mistake, an unexpected event or responsibility. While bartering for a taxi ride, a bargaining tactic I had been using for weeks would suddenly backfire and cause unintended offense to the driver; in company I would say something people found shocking or hilarious, and their kind reassurance only made me feel worse—more idiotic and clumsier, so maddeningly
foreign.

Yet most of my friends and family were surprised when I admitted my frustration, and told me I was better integrated than they would have expected after such a short period of time. I thought, cynically, that I seemed well-integrated because most western expats and tourists in Egypt weren't integrated at all. Many lived in wealthy enclaves, spoke little or no Arabic, and sported shorts of a length no Egyptian would consider wearing in any kind of weather. In other words, they were guilty of the same failure to make basic cultural adjustments that immigrants in much more difficult circumstances were censured for in the West. It was not the hypocrisy that bothered me as much as the absence of reflection: the inability or refusal to compare their behavior to their standards. More and more, I avoided what few Americans, Canadians, and Britons I knew.

In doing so, I ran the risk of falling into a particular category of white converts: those who are ashamed of the lives they led before Islam, and who try to erase their pasts by flinging themselves headfirst into Arab or Pakistani culture. Because Al-Azhar University is headquartered in Cairo, the
city plays host to a large cadre of converts with this sensibility. I sometimes saw them in line at the
duken
or coming out of the mosque: the women were veiled up to their eyelashes and the men sported unkempt, vaguely pubic beards. In lieu of Arabic, they adopted fake foreign accents in their English. Though they were all undoubtedly serious and dedicated Muslims, from the outside it seemed like they were playing an elaborate game of dress up, aping Arab ways without understanding or self-awareness. My anxiety about meeting other westerners stemmed from something very different from these converts' cultural amnesia. Sometimes I missed my own culture and my own country. There were moments when the wind shifted and smelled almost green, replacing the metallic desert air for a few hours, and when that happened I would almost collapse with homesickness. I wanted the company of other westerners, but what they inevitably became in Egypt was too alarming and embarrassing for me to watch.

People almost always arrived with the best intentions. They want to learn, to see behind the stereotypes they were presented with on television. They are willing, they think, to follow unfamiliar rules, though they can't really agree to a contract they've never seen. They come here and find that many of the stereotypes they don't want to believe are perfectly true: there is an uneasy segregation between men and women, and it does lead to animosity and dysfunction between the sexes. Women are stifled in the mosques and harassed in the streets by men reduced to the behavior of idiots by poverty and despair. Though Pew polls have determined Egyptians are the most religious people on earth, piety has
not stopped endemic dishonesty in business dealings large and small. Egypt is an ugly, dirty, hungry place. It is easy to stop at this conclusion and decide there is nothing more.

The doors to the country's quieter and more human beauty are locked: Egyptian life revolves around the family, and if you don't have one, it's difficult to participate. Shut out and bewildered, cheated in the marketplace, alternately flattered and sneered at in the streets, too many of the westerners I knew turned to a variety of casual racism. No amount of education could withstand it. It manifested first in language: a refusal to speak Arabic. Simple enough, and easy to attribute to laziness, but there was something malicious and contradictory about it—the American or Brit or Canadian would order a shopkeeper around in English, assuming he understood, then insult him or joke about him, assuming he didn't. It was a pattern I saw repeated over and over again until I came to expect it; each time I was so shocked that I assumed there had to be some excuse, some mitigating reason.

One incident that stands out in my mind occurred in a taxi: I was headed to a café with a group of American students who were doing a year abroad at the American University of Cairo. The group was all girls, and after telling the taxi driver where to go (and observing that he would probably take the long way and ask for more money), they started talking about their sex lives, half-shouting to be heard over the deafening traffic. One complained that her Egyptian boyfriend, culled from one of the self-consciously westernized upper classes, wouldn't go down on her. With an arch sneer, another girl said that Egyptian boys were so
sheltered and segregated that they had no idea what to do with a vagina. I leaned my forehead against the window, watching the passing cars shimmer in the heat, and said nothing. The driver, a bearded man in his forties or fifties, probably didn't understand the conversation in full, but in this age of the internet
vagina
is universally understood. He shook his head, muttering, “God forgive us all,” over and over again. I couldn't look him in the eye. I faked my way through the chatter at the café and went home. I never saw the girls again.

After it conquered language, the racial ugliness sometimes degenerated into something much more frightening. For western men, this commonly meant abusing local women. At one of the few expat parties I ever attended, I heard a German engineer brag that he was solving the Darfur crisis by patronizing Sudanese prostitutes. Cairo was home to a large community of Sudanese refugees and many of the women were war widows and orphans without any source of income but their bodies. A couple of Americans who were listening—intelligent, sensitive, educated people—laughed, and turned around to repeat the joke to those who hadn't heard. At home, these were the sorts of ‘liberals' who would rather drink ipecac than utter a racial slur. A few mosquito bites, a couple of unpleasant tour guides, and their principles had evaporated.

Most of my Egyptian friends and all of my Egyptian family lived lives far removed from the breaking point between locals and expats—I was the only westerner most of them were close to, and for a few of my younger and more sheltered cousins-in-law, the only westerner they had ever
met. But occasionally someone I knew and cared about would bruise under the pressure of that bitterness, and when it occurred there was almost nothing I could do.

It happened to Sameh. Two Brits I knew, both converts, needed an Arabic tutor, so I gave them his number and a glowing recommendation. A week or so later, at one of our lessons, I asked him whether they had called.

“Yes.” He paused, tapping the tabletop with the end of his pen.

“Are they going to start taking lessons? Did you work something out?”

“Yes,” he said again. He didn't quite look at me. “They bargained with me,” he went on, keeping his voice neutral. “They said I was asking for too much money.”

My face felt hot. “God, I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't think they'd—I'm sorry.” One of the trickiest things to learn in Egypt is when and when not to bargain, but one rule is clear: you don't bargain with friends. Bargaining implies dishonesty. In the marketplace, dishonesty is expected; there, bargaining is a test of both the seller's and the buyer's abilities as storytellers. The seller claims his scarves are pure silk and imported from India, and the buyer claims he has seen the same scarves in Attaba for half the price. By bargaining with Sameh, my British friends had snubbed him, implying he was from a lower social category than theirs, that he was a menial to inspect and suspect as they would a driver or a cleaning lady.