The Butterfly Mosque (15 page)

All this could have been avoided: an Egyptian woman would have learned very early how to distinguish between a good tomato and one infested with maggots. Through a network of neighborhood women she would have identified cheap, good butchers (having no such network, Jo and I simply didn't eat meat); through her mother she would have learned to hang her carpets in the sun once a week to kill germs and insect eggs. She would have put
feneek
and kerosene under the door to keep away roaches and ants, and put her bread in the refrigerator to keep it from growing mold overnight.

I, too, learned to do these things, but much later than my situation required me to know them. Omar was sympathetic but confused. To him, Tura was the natural state of the world; he couldn't imagine why anyone would be unable to function in it. Jo and I were too proud to ask Sohair for help, and she was too sensitive to our need for independence to interfere. Years later, when I told her about the way we had been forced to live, she felt so dismayed and guilty that she became visibly upset. I tried not to bring it up again—understanding, by then, why my confession had caught her off guard. To her, a buffalo carcass hanging in a butcher's window looked like cuts of meat for stew and kebab; to me, it barely looked like food. There is almost nothing to say when instincts are so mismatched. She could not have known how helpless we were.

In the meantime, I learned a lesson that was as crucial as it was debilitating: all the formal education in the world, at the best universities and under the best authorities, cannot teach you to understand an environment you've never seen for yourself. I have come to see the concept of
expertise
as something of a myth; there can be no Middle East expert who has never lived unaided in the Middle East. Using academic theory to explain and predict the behavior of real human beings under stress is at best shortsighted. Living in that concrete box of an apartment in Tura, what I knew intellectually became less and less useful to me, and what an ordinary Egyptian knew practically became more and more so. A tolerable understanding of Safavid art, an appreciation for Arabic grammar? I would have traded my entire education for an insect-free house and three square meals a day of clean food.

The proximity of the fundamentalists, who hated us, and of ordinary Egyptians, who feared us, did have one upshot: it helped me understand the difference between the kind of antiwesternism that gives rise to terrorism and the kind that doesn't. In the years since 9/11, theories have been proposed linking Islamic terrorism to the poverty of many Muslim countries—despite the fact that the 9/11 bombers came from upper-class backgrounds, the terrorists in the July 7, 2005, London subway attacks came from middle-class backgrounds, and the activity of
poor
terrorists has been limited to Muslim-on-Muslim (or on Jew) nationalist campaigns in Israel-Palestine, Pakistan, and postwar Afghanistan
and Iraq. One might argue that it simply takes more money to fly a 747 into a skyscraper than it does to load a homemade bomb into a produce truck, which means only wealthy extremists can engage in international acts of terror and that poor ones would if the opportunity arose. But the fact remains that violent extremists have been culled from every imaginable economic background.

Clearly, the catalyst is something more complicated than income. Jo's and my neighbors in Tura did not hate us for religious reasons; they hated us because they saw us as a danger to their security. Their antiwesternism did arise from economics, but it had no jihadist element whatsoever. In fact, I think that if we had been physically threatened, our neighbors would have rushed to our defense. Trouble with a western government was something they wanted very much to avoid.

I think this holds true on a larger scale: of the Middle Easterners I have met who resent the West (and specifically the United States), the vast majority resent it because they perceive it to be a military and economic juggernaut bombing whole countries into rubble, putting local industries out of business (though this title is slowly passing to China), and succeeding and succeeding where the Middle East fails. Religion never enters the discussion.

On the other hand, the fundamentalists we could see from our bathroom window hated us for very religious reasons. It became clear to me, living in the shadow of that brainless minaret, how little the anger of our local extremists had to do with military America. While the situation in Iraq gave them political legitimacy and direction, and a
dangerous amount of emotional leverage with average Muslims, it was not the
reason
they were angry. They hated the America that exports culture. They were aghast at the suggestion that enlightenment could be bought on tape, and that right and wrong were fluid and could change from situation to situation. They hated being made to sympathize with adulterous couples in American movies. They hated the materialism that was spreading through Egypt and the Gulf like a parasite, turning whole cities—Dubai, Jeddah—into virtual shopping malls, and blamed this materialism on western influence.

I would struggle to explain to Egyptian friends (for this alarm was not limited to extremists) that consumer culture functioned in a surprisingly complex and sophisticated—arguably unhealthy, but still sophisticated—way in the West, playing on subculture and social memes and giving rise to an entirely new system of symbols. Because materialism, in the sense that we mean the word today, arose in the West, it is at home there; a retrovirus sitting quietly in the genetic makeup of the civilization without doing monumental harm. But the Middle East is peopled by cultures that struggled for centuries to rid themselves of anything iconic or graphic or unnecessary; there, materialism acts as a kind of cultural smallpox, leaving mindless ostentation and artistic sterility in its wake.

What seemed to threaten the fundamentalists most, reading between the lines of their rhetoric and behavior, was the sheer
accessibility
of western culture: the fact that everything a person could want, from consumer goods to emotional highs to sex to spirituality, was public and available
to anyone. Nothing was hidden, nothing required serious effort to attain. In the West, anything that must be hidden is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes irreconcilably with Islam as it is practiced in the Middle East, where the things that are most precious, most perfect, and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman's body, Heaven. The fundamentalists, in their own way, were mourning the loss of legitimately beautiful ideas. They knew they could not make the ritualized, morally appraising culture of traditional Arab Islam—in which one must be worthy of truth, love, and God to attain them—more attractive than the lifestyle endorsed in the West. So they demonized attraction itself.

I thought a lot about extremism on Fridays, when I listened to our neighborhood imam give sermons. I would stand in the doorway of our bathroom and look out at the minaret that rose beyond it like a bony finger, and beyond that, at a graceful bend in the Nile fronted by green rushes. I could only follow small portions of the
khutba
or sermon; Omar and Ibrahim often filled me in on the rest. A typical
khutba
by the Hammer of the Infidel, as my mother would christen the imam, was limited to quotidian things: the correct way to behave in communal prayer, the length of one's garments, even the foot with which one should enter and leave the bathroom. But every few weeks, angry, it seemed, at the religious fatigue of the men who were required by Shari'a law to attend Friday services (women could go or not as they chose), the imam would let loose: heaping gory and imaginative curses on the American soldiers in Iraq, condemning the immorality of Muslims who did not abide
by stringent Wahhabi codes of conduct, orating self-contained monologues about the dangers and sins of the material world. He was careful never to say anything critical of the Mubarak regime or to explicitly endorse violence, and managed, somewhat miraculously, to avoid unpleasantness with government security forces.

In self-appraising moments, I think about whether or not I would have stayed in Egypt without Omar to keep me there. I spent so much of that year exhausted, isolated, and sick; even though Omar's family did everything in their power to make me happy, having grown up in this environment they could not understand why it remained so persistently alien to me and frightened me so much. Even in love, bolstered by the support of Omar's family, and half married, I consciously kept myself from visiting home until I had been in Egypt a full year. I knew, though I didn't breathe a word of it to anyone but Jo, that if I left there was a chance I would not have the strength to come back. Despite my best efforts to hide it, there were some in Omar's family who sensed this. Uncle Sherif, who had given me my Muslim name, had a way of looking at me with worried sympathy and silent assessment. It was as if I was a wilting flower and he was trying to decide whether I needed more sun or less, more water or more heat, to survive in this foreign climate. I did not want to tell him or any of my family-by-marriage what I did need, because they could not have given it to me, and this would have made them unhappy: I needed to be able to walk in the street without being harassed, to be able to
sit in a café by myself, I needed protein, I needed books. I did not believe that the color of my passport entitled me to these things in a country whose own people could not have them, and so I could not in good conscience move among other expatriates. I was stuck between two kinds of silence: the silence that kept me from telling the people who loved me what I needed, and the silence that kept me from seeking the sympathy of westerners.

But what a silence. I had become a true believer: I had seen something larger than culture, and my faith in it was feverish, unchanged by anger and opposition. To me, faith in human potential is intertwined with faith in God and inseparable from it. Privately, Omar and I—and increasingly our families—could flourish in our third culture, which over the months and years developed its own truths, its own language almost: Arabic and English bent and cobbled together to express a broader set of ideas. Publicly, our worlds were still divided. But the existence of this private revolution fueled a new hope: I began to believe that similar things were possible in the public sphere. Once I had seen connectivity between the hemispheres, I could not unsee it, even when I was at my weakest and so desperate for familiarity that I felt I might not have the willpower to continue.

For the first time in my life I became more passionate about what I had to do than about what I wanted to do; whether this zeal for duty came from Islam, or from wanting to fight for Omar, or from having seen through to something more persistent than the cumbersome civilizations between which I moved, I don't know. There is infinite space within a human life. What I had to do was make my
life work in Egypt and I stuck to this with a diligence I did not realize I had, and which manifested itself in ways I could not have anticipated.

One day I was riding in the women's car on the subway and as the doors closed I heard a girl scream: a high-pitched, frantic sound, the sort she might make if she was being threatened or attacked. “What's going on?” I asked a middle-aged woman standing nearby. She conferred with another passenger; in the meantime the girl stopped screaming and was surrounded by impromptu nurses who pressed her to take handkerchiefs and water and candy. “Her hand got shut in the door,” the middle-aged woman reported back to me. “She got it out. She's fine now.”

I realized that I had, unthinkingly, risen from my seat and taken two or three steps toward the girl when I heard her scream. Had there been a real problem—if it had been a thief or someone with a knife—I would have walked right into the conflict to intervene. For a moment I felt dizzy. I thought of a similar incident on the subway in Boston several years earlier, when a girl had screamed on a packed rush hour train. She had only been squeezed between two other passengers as people crowded into the car, but when she screamed I flinched, cowering instinctively in my seat. Something had changed in the intervening years. I realized that despite the bewildering number of behaviors I had had to alter to survive in the public sphere in Egypt, I was not less myself—in fact, I was becoming a better self. I didn't know I was capable of growing into the sort of person who stands up and walks toward a fight. As the metro clattered on, I felt, for the first time in months, like everything was
going to be all right. I had gained so much more than I had lost.

I was reminded of the reverse situation: when Mohammad and Namir stood up for me without thinking, for no other reason than that they believed it was right. I realized what it meant: to do the right thing you must sometimes defend people who do not understand you, or who fear you, or who are angry at you. There are times when you have to operate purely on faith and continue to trust human decency even when it is no longer visible. It did not matter that there were Egyptians who were afraid of me because I was American, and that there would be Americans who were afraid of me because I was a Muslim; what mattered was that when I left the room, they loved their husbands or wives, they joked, they mourned their beloved dead, and they struggled to provide for their children. There was nothing so great that it could not be built on that commonality.

As unexpected as the events in my recent life had been, in my eyes they were connected by a straight line. It ran from the mountains of Colorado through the atrium in the World Financial Center, through the scent of soap on Omar's hands, through the butterfly mosque, through the moment on the subway. If these things could not be honored and defended together it spoke to a failure far greater than a clash of civilizations. The struggle for the Islam I loved and the struggle for the West I loved were the same struggle, and it was within that struggle that the clash of civilizations was eradicated.