The Butterfly Mosque (7 page)

“Yes,” she said. “That's what I'm saying.”

I took a breath, caught a yeasty lungful of cat, and began coughing. We continued down the road in philosophical silence.

A few days later, Omar invited us to observe a lesson at Beyt al Oud, the music school where he studied with Iraqi lute maestro Naseer Shamma. The school operated out of an eighteenth-century house built in the traditional Arab style—there was an open courtyard called a
salamlek,
where concerts and group lessons were held, and above it a screened series of rooms used for practice, formerly the harem. While Omar chatted with Naseer and his students, Jo and I explored the house, admiring the high, painted ceilings and
narrow stone stairs, and the latticework balcony where women of the house would sit to observe the men, centuries ago. We were lingering in the balcony when I told Jo that Omar and I were engaged. A lesson was in progress below us in the
salamlek,
and little melodies drifted up one by one, playful and sad. Omar chatted with Master Naseer near a dry tile fountain. Secluded behind the lattice, we could see everything without being seen. Jo squeezed my hand and said nothing. We listened to the music for a few more minutes before heading downstairs arm in arm.

When we were alone back at the apartment, the questions began.

“What about all the religion stuff? Don't you think that's going to cause problems between you?”

“I'm a Muslim.”

Jo immediately looked worried. “You converted for him?”

“No, I converted before we ever said anything to each other. He had no idea I was a Muslim until we had the getting-married discussion.”

“You converted before?” Worry became surprise. “When? Can I ask why?”

A gnawing sensation began in my stomach. I felt like I was back in fifth grade health class, when they separated the boys from the girls and taught us the Latin names for our anatomy and the mechanics of sex, all with a grim detachment that seemed Kafkaesque in retrospect. I could never quite shake this reaction to the question “Why religion?” To me it would forever feel like health class; like condensing something ineffable into a series of
events.
I
knew, also, that I wasn't really being asked to explain my conversion, I was being asked to defend it. It was this that unsettled me most.

“I tried to be an atheist,” I said plaintively. “It didn't work.”

“Okay, yeah, but why Islam?”

“I discovered I was a monotheist. Believe me, I was as unhappy about it as you are. That rules out polytheism. I also have a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or a leader who claims to be God's representative on earth. And I cannot believe that having given us these bodies, God thinks we should be virgins unless we desperately feel a need to reproduce. That rules out any religion that's against family planning or sex for fun rather than for procreation. Islam is antiauthoritarian sex-positive monotheism.”

“Islam is sex-positive?
Come on.”

I fought back my frustration. “In Islam, celibacy is considered unhealthy and unnatural. The best way for a Muslim adult to live is in a committed, sexually joyful relationship with another Muslim adult. That sounds about right to me.”

“You see the way women are treated here. You walk in the streets. It's like being a hunted animal! If that's sex-positive I'm the freaking pope.”

“I'm not arguing with that. It's disgusting and hypocritical and wrong. And I don't think there's a single Muslim cleric out there who'd disagree with you. This is not Islam. This is a society in freefall. This place is a
mess.
Egypt is at a
lower point today,
today,
than it has been in its entire history.” Tirade over, I realized my hands were clenched.

Jo looked out the window, into the street where we were harassed on a daily basis. Cairo was crawling with unemployed, furious, infantilized men who were still sleeping in their childhood beds and taking orders from their mothers. Parents of girls were demanding more and more in bridal settlements and real estate, putting marriage—and therefore adulthood—out of reach for many in this poverty-stricken generation. As the middle class shrank, marital expectations rose; by marrying well, a working-class girl could help her family climb back into a “respectable” social stratum. There was no higher goal than being
ibn i'nas
or
bint i'nas,
the son or daughter of genteel people. The stress this put on working-class men was almost unfathomable. These were the men who hunted us and hated us. In their eyes, they had been betrayed by female social mercenaries and denied their dignity by a class-obsessed society. I was marrying into a country on the verge of a meltdown.

Jo turned back from the window and studied me, sunlight illuminating her thick blonde hair. “Are you happy?” she asked.

“I'm happy,” I said. It was a lie; I was terrified. There are few things more overwhelming than love in hostile territory. Despite my anxieties, I couldn't show any hesitation. My confidence was the only thing that would convince my friends and family that this was a good idea. I had to be disciplined about my own anxieties and focus on calming the fears of others.

And know that victory comes with patience, relief with affliction, and ease with hardship.

—Prophet Muhammad

I
TOLD
J
O ABOUT MY CONVERSION JUST IN TIME: THAT YEAR, THE
fasting month of Ramadan began in October. She would have been dismayed—and maybe insulted—to discover me eating at sunset after refusing food all day. On the twenty-ninth day of Sha'aban, Omar, Jo, and I were having tea in our living room when Omar held up his hand for silence. The evening call to prayer had just gone up from the city's thousand mosques. He was waiting for the special chant that would announce the start of the holy month.

“Why don't they know when it is yet?” Jo was perched on the couch sorting through our CDs, bemused by Omar's restlessness.

“It's not an exact date—they have to see the crescent moon.” Omar shifted out of the darkened porch doorway and came to sit in the living room with Jo and me. “If they see it tonight, we start fasting tomorrow; if not, we start the next day.”

There was an electricity in the air I was used to associating with Christmas. “I think it's going to be tonight,” I said.

“Do you?” Omar smiled. “I imagine it will be then.”

A minute later we heard voices swell up from the mosques and fill the empty space between the noises in the street.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“That's it,” Omar answered, cheerful now and pulling on his shoes. “Come on, let's go shopping for
sa'hoor.” Sa'hoor
is the “late meal” eaten just before sunrise during Ramadan. In Egypt, that usually means stewed fava beans and yogurt, along with a licorice drink that helps the body retain fluids. And, for an untried westerner like me, lots and lots of water.

We went by cab to Souk el Maadi. It was crammed with shoppers carrying bags of vegetables and flatbread in their hands and on their heads. “From now until next month, Cairo will not sleep,” Omar said. “A lot of these people will just stay up until dawn tonight, sleep all day tomorrow, and then get up for
iftar
and party. They're out buying food for
sa'hoor,
like us.”

We stopped at a tiny general store to buy white cheese and bread.

“Remember to drink water tonight. Don't wait until dawn,” Omar said in the cab on the way back. He came inside the apartment long enough to kiss me, promising to be back first thing in the morning. I went to bed with the holiday feeling lingering in my mind.

At 3:45 a.m. I woke to the sound of a man singing out in the street, accompanied by a drum.
“Sa'hoor, sa'hoor,
wake,
oh, sleeper!” went his chant, echoing between the silent apartment blocks. I stumbled to the window and peered out, seeing a galibayya-clad man bathed in neon from the street lamp overhead. He swayed down the block, trailed by one of the local cats.

“Who wakes
you
up?” I asked as though he could hear me. The muffled clank of cooking pots could be heard from the flat upstairs. I went into the kitchen, feeling resolved; I drank a liter of water. This left almost no room for food, but it was the idea of going without liquid that made me nervous. Feeling slightly hypotonic, I went back to bed and slept.

I woke up again around ten a.m., dry-mouthed.

“It will pass,” said Omar, who had appeared like a mirage in the living room. Both he and Jo were irritatingly awake and fresh-looking.

“How do you feel?” asked Jo, clearing away traces of her breakfast.

“Kind of jet-lagged, actually. Like I'm trying to adjust to a new time zone.”

“The first day is like that,” said Omar, smiling with encouragement. “After that it gets easier.”

The rest of the day had a trancelike quality—sometimes I felt sleepy and sore, sometimes unusually alert. We watched
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
I drifted off again halfway through, cocooned between Omar and Jo, both of whom seemed at least partially convinced that fasting was incompatible with my Anglo-Saxon physiology. Much later, the sound of Omar's voice prompted me awake. He was reading Al Jabbar in English. “And I take
Al Haq,
the Truth,
as my birthright; as a creature I am transitory. And He said, ‘Veil this symbol, and know it, and be satisfied.'”

“I can see why we do this,” I said.

When the sun began to drop into the Nile, Jo and Omar and I took a cab to Sohair's flat for
iftar,
the meal eaten to break the daily fast. According to prophetic tradition,
iftar
should be a modest meal of dates and milk. Egyptians ignore this. Syrup-coated butter pastries round out nightly feasts of stuffed eggplant, mutton, and rice spiced with cinnamon and fat raisins; despite a day's worth of dehydration, thick apricot nectar is the drink of choice.

“Sugar for energy, and salt to retain fluids,” Ibrahim reasoned as we set the table. Jo helped Sohair in the kitchen; I heard her laugh. Outside, the call for sunset prayer rang out.

“They've started,” said Omar, handing me a glass.
“Ramadan karim!
”

“Allahu akram,
” I said, repeating the traditional response I'd learned just that morning. Ramadan is generous; God is the most generous. I raised the glass to my lips to take a polite sip.

It was the best glass of anything, ever. My senses, muted all day, clamored to be heard again, to taste and be full. The jumbled euphoria of fast-breaking—part chemical, part spiritual—was unlike any other sensation I could name. I slumped in my chair and let my head roll back.

“Oh
God,
” I said.

They all laughed. Jo poked me in the ribs and winked. I was happy with everything: the people sitting around Sohair's tiny wooden table; the drowsy, flushed desert
outside the window. I was happy, also, with myself. I had lived up to my choices. If I could fast one day, I could fast another twenty-eight—I could do it all again the next year. And the year after. For the first time since I converted, I saw a satisfying little glimmer of what the future might look like. Choosing the way you live is choosing
to
live. From that night onward, Ramadan to me was about having gratitude—for revelation, for prophesy, for the sheer joy of being human in the world.

After the food was eaten and the leftovers cleared away, we lingered over tea. Omar took out his oud and played Arabic folksongs full of quarter-tones that do not exist in western music: fleeting, wry sounds. Ibrahim showed Jo and me his electric guitar, explaining all the knobs and buttons the nonmusical have trouble understanding.

“I would like to learn to play the piano as well. I started, but,” here he gestured at an old Casio keyboard sitting on a shelf, “that thing is not very inspiring. I would like a real piano.”

“I wish there was such a thing as teleportation,” I said.

“Aeda?
”

“Making things disappear magically from one place and reappear in another.”

“Ah.” He smiled. “Why?”

“At my parents' house in Colorado, we have a huge old piano that no one can play. You would love it.”

“Perhaps if I come visit you one day.”

“You should. I want you to see our mountains.”

He grinned, then looked away with a pensive expression. “I have met many Americans and they are all friendly and open-minded. I don't understand, then, why—” I'm not sure if he finished the sentence. “I try to remember this every time I see what the United States is doing to the Middle East or I watch your news—which is very depressing—but it is hard not to be angry. To become closed. There is so much lying.”

In situations like this I always want to defend my country, and every rational way I might do so evaporates.

“The American media is much more radical than the American people,” I said weakly. This was something I couldn't control but I still felt guilty. I could see Ibrahim standing in his living room with his prayer beads in one hand and his electric guitar slung over the opposite shoulder, and think,
He proves the world isn't so bad yet.
Yet there was still Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the net closing around Iran, and the encroaching disaster in Israel-Palestine. When such ugly conflicts were so close by, who in Egypt could feel entirely safe? Looking at Ibrahim, I thought, this Middle East is either being born or dying, and which it will be depends largely on people who will never see him play his guitar.

“It would make more sense if you saw it.” I said. “If you saw America itself.”

“Someday
in sha'Allah.
”

“In sha'Allah.
”

In order to be understood, feelings that are universal—love, mourning, joy—must be expressed in a mutually
comprehensible way. This should be easy. If the feelings are universal, their expression should be as well. In reality, they aren't. In the beginning, Omar was more conscious of this than I was; he saw that the only customs we had in common were Islam and rock music, and that these intangibles had to be cobbled together into the foundation of a third culture. Religion and art aren't terrible tools to start with, when it comes to creating a peace for two in the midst of a war. But even with them, the struggle for that peace would be painful and exhausting. Sometimes it felt like I was being asked to unstring my bones and pass through the eye of a needle. The image was constantly in my mind. Everything we thought, everything we did or said or wore or espoused unthinkingly, had to be brought forth and reconciled. In the process, old symbols were given a new vocabulary. That vocabulary would become the language we spoke in the culture we created for ourselves.