The Butterfly Mosque (24 page)

I was suddenly exhausted by all the things I couldn't say: I hadn't told them that Sameh had become a friend, that his unspoken sympathy and determination to see me succeed
had helped propel me through hard times. But because I said nothing, they heard only “Arabic tutor,” and treated him as they thought an Arabic tutor—an Arab tutor—must be treated in order to be kept honest.

“What did you say?” I asked Sameh. My distress must have been evident on my face, because he smiled.

“I let them. I gave them a ten percent discount.”

“Why? You'll teach them bad habits! They shouldn't—”

“It's all right,” he said. “Don't worry about it. Did you do your homework?”

We worked for forty-five minutes then broke for tea and biscuits, as was our custom. The heavy twilight air poured in through the garden door. In an apartment on one of the floors above, a parrot complained to itself.

“Ana roht lilkaraoke night fi club fi wust el balad imberah,
” said Sameh.
“Wahid sahbi kan beyishrab, w'ana kunt zalen minu.
” (“I went to karaoke night at a club downtown last night. One of my friends was drinking, and I was upset with him.”)

“Why?” I asked. “I thought you could drink.”

“Who do you mean by
you?
”

“Copts.”

“Oh, no. You can't talk to God when you're drunk. But some people drink anyway.”

There was a knock at the outer door of the center, and a loud voice called for Ustez Sameh, Ustez being an honorific for teachers and superiors. Sameh caught my eye, telegraphing the need for silence. He left the room, closing the door behind him. I strained to listen but heard only murmurs; a few minutes later, I saw, out the garden door, a line
of men's shoes retreating along the sidewalk, screened by the outer hedge of the garden. Sameh returned.

“I apologize,” he said. “They are students of mine from the Delta—they come to Cairo on weekends for tutoring. They aren't used to being around young women. I didn't think they were ready to see you.”

It was a mark of affectionate respect; something a brother would do to shield his sister from undignified staring or impolite advances. The more cherished a woman is, the more inaccessible she is made. I felt mingled appreciation and restlessness; I was so loved, so protected, and so cut off, bundled into the vacuum between East and West. It did not seem fair that this should be necessary, or that I should have to tell two educated Europeans to treat an educated Arab with respect. So much of life seemed to be about separating the people who would hurt each other.

All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immoveable, those that are moveable, and those that move.

—Benjamin Franklin

T
HAT SUMMER
, I
PREPARED TO FLY BACK TO THE
U
NITED
States to see my family. I had kept my promise to myself: it was July, a full year since I had arrived in Egypt. If I could stay put for one year, I could stay put for two, three, indefinitely. I could get on a plane confident that I would come back. Assuming, of course, that my government let me.

I planned my trip around the premise that I would be detained. FBI agents had been waiting for Ben at his port of entry into the United States, so I made sure mine was Denver. If I was going to be arrested, I wanted it to be within sight of my mountains. The alternative—being rounded up with the usual suspects at JFK International Airport in New York—depressed me. I carefully organized all the documentation of my trip to Iran: boarding passes, receipts, itineraries, phone numbers. And I made up a call list. Every journalist and public intellectual working in the Middle East has one: a list of people for a trusted family member or friend to call in the event he or she disappears. The people on this list are usually the journalist's friends in the media or politics,
people who could focus enough attention on the disappeared to keep anything truly terrible from happening. People who could buy time.

I was barely enough of a journalist to deserve the name, and I was not going to some desolate backwater. It was depressing to have to make such a list before traveling to the U.S.A.
The U.S.A.
In fighting the Middle East we had become the Middle East, a place where people could be detained for writing letters, for speaking forbidden languages, for thought crimes. Omar and Ibrahim and Sohair were so used to living in a restrictive political environment that they weren't even fazed when I told them I was under investigation. They were surprised that I was so shaken. Surely I expected it? I was a convert and a liberal. Several of Sohair's siblings, my aunts- and uncles-in-law, had spent time under surveillance or even in jail for subscribing to forbidden ideas such as secular feminism or democratic change, or to anti-secular religious beliefs. To them, the refuge and freedom I had taken for granted was a luxury. It was something they had never had, and never aspired to; in Egypt hoping for these things can shatter a person.

The day I left, Omar and I drove to the airport before dawn. Smog had not yet settled on the city for the day, and the horizon was pale, promising the lemon-colored sunlight for which Egypt is famous. When we got to the international terminal and unloaded my bags, Omar kissed me on the forehead.

“Call me when you get there?” he asked.

“Of course.” I smiled at him.

“Call me every day after that?” He smiled, too, though his eyes belied how tense he was. He didn't mention the FBI, thinking it would be bad luck, but I knew he would go home and perform extra prayers for the safe arrival of his wife in her country.

Landing in Denver, I felt a surge of euphoria. It was partially fear, and the strange high that comes from arriving changed in a familiar landscape. I reminded myself I had nothing to hide, but even with that knowledge I couldn't shake the political instinct I had learned living in a dictatorship: sometimes that doesn't matter. Sometimes the people in power are less interested in catching the bad guys than they are in making examples of convenient targets, thereby frightening the bad guys into line. It's a strategy far more efficient than real justice. As I walked down the gangway, dusty and exhausted, lugging my laptop and a carry-on, I had a sense of déjà vu: I remembered standing at the threshold of the shrine of Fatima in Qom, looking suspicious for almost identical reasons, and asking to be let in. I was walking that same fine line between an ideal and trouble of an unbelievably serious kind.

I still don't quite understand what happened next. I stood in line at passport control with the rest of the passengers from my flight, lamenting the fact that I wasn't wearing any makeup; I didn't want to be hauled off looking sloppy and pale. As I stood there, a man in a camel-colored trench coat walked by, like some noir archetype, and without pausing took a picture of me with his cell phone. For a split second our eyes met and I wondered if I should say something.
But he turned away and continued briskly down the corridor. It was so bizarre I wondered if I had imagined it. I was still feeling dazed when my turn came at passport control. I handed my documents over to the man working at the booth in front of me. He ran my passport, looked at the computer screen, frowned, looked up at me, looked back at the computer screen, and said, “Whoa.” I felt a stab of nausea: this was it. But the man simply asked me a series of questions about my residency in Egypt, stamped my passport, and let me through.

I was free.

I have never undergone such a sudden reversal of my politics: for that moment, and for many moments afterward, I didn't give a damn about my right to privacy. What I assume happened is this: some intelligence agency or other dug through my e-mail, sifted through my records, interrogated some of my friends (Ben, Ireland, and eventually Mehdi were all questioned by the FBI), listened to a few phone conversations, and decided I was not a threat. They did all this while I was still in the comfort of my own home and going about my daily life. I far, far preferred this arrangement to sitting at Gitmo, waiting for them to get a warrant for information I would gladly hand over myself. This is not to say that the Bush regime's invasive approach to security in America was right—it wasn't right, it wasn't ethical, and it wasn't worthy of a free nation—but it was preferable to something far worse, and staring that thing in the face, I didn't even think of quibbling about my privacy.

However, the incident that began with an overambitious snitch in Cairo would have a lasting, hurtful impact on the
other innocent people it involved. Though he was never formally indicted on any charges, Mehdi would be put on an automatic search list, subjecting him to embarrassing extra security procedures every time he tried to fly—possibly for the rest of his life. Ben would have ongoing visa and tax problems. I was the only one who escaped unscathed. I would never know why. Ben raised red flags because he traveled back and forth from the Middle East on a teacher's salary, and Mehdi raised red flags because he was Muslim; I was both Muslim and traveled back and forth from the Middle East. Was it because I was so openly antiextremist? Because my husband was a Sufi, a Muslim minority known to be persecuted by extremists? It would remain a mystery. Ben occasionally talked about requesting the official records of our investigation but always hesitated—best to let sleeping dogs lie, he said. Maybe in a few years, when all this has calmed down. When the country is more like the one we grew up in again.

Maybe then.

Boulder had not changed—I love Boulder because it never changes. Its residents are absurdly proud of the city, though people who move there or visit from the coasts never understand why: it's small and insulated, uptown and downtown run into each other after just ten minutes of walking, and strangers greet each other in the street in a way that seems to make city dwellers claustrophobic. There are no buildings over five stories high. Almost everyone owns a dog. Small as it is, for the American interior Boulder is a triumph
of urbanization: it's neither a boxy bleak suburb nor a farming community nor a tiny mining outpost—the three forms of settled life that dominate the rest of the Great Plains and the West. It's a real
town,
the kind that grew up as a frontier whistle-stop and settled into prosperous middle age. Lying in a cupped palm between the mountains and the high prairie, it felt enfolding and safe—it was home.

I spent three weeks regressing into adolescence—meeting old friends and going to old coffee shops, with no earthy potatoes to scrub and no fruit to sort through looking for the tiny holes that belied maggots. I told no one how exhausted I was, or how much it exhausted me to answer questions. I found it particularly hard to talk about Omar.

“What's he like?”

I was sitting in a café called the Trident, where I had practically lived during high school, talking to a couple I knew who had been dating on and off for several years. With a white ceramic mug of tea in front of me—one of the un-namable and indistinguishable teas in which Boulder specializes, made from herbs that turn bright yellow in hot water—and the same jazz CD that had been playing for ten years wafting from speakers in the corner, it felt almost as though I had never left.

“He's tall. Quiet. Quietly funny. Very smart, but not in a condescending way.”

When I didn't go on, the male component of the couple, whose name was Josh, changed track. “What about Cairo? Do you go out? Are there things to do?”

“Sometimes. There are things to do, but they're a little bit different than the things to do here. There's less . . .
subculture, I guess. People are kind of expected to do and think and wear similar things. You mostly visit people's houses—sometimes you go to movies or concerts. But there's no going out as in bar crawling or clubbing or partying, unless you're from a very westernized social class. And even then, your responsibilities to other people are much greater than they are here, so there's way less room to fuck up.”

“It sounds a little stifling.”

“It is a little stifling.”

“Are you happy?” He pursed his lips.

“Hmm. Yes, but it's a different kind of happiness than the kind we're taught to expect here.”

“In what way?”

I had never articulated it before. “I think . . . there's a kind of sanity that comes from making most of your life about other people. You have less time to spend with your own neuroses. Even though there's an awful lot of bullshit to deal with, in some ways people in Egypt seem mentally healthier than people here. There's a greater willingness to—” I fought for the right words. “People are so comfortable with the word
love.
It's okay to tell your friends that you love them—friends of your own gender anyway—really passionately love them. It's not considered weird.”

They took a moment to digest this. Josh's girlfriend, Katie, pursed her lips: it was an attitude I would encounter often, an earnest effort to comprehend a way of living that really had to be experienced to be understood.

“But I'm having trouble with—I don't know how to put this,” she said. “You can't go out with guys?”

“No. Not without Omar or someone from his family.”

“Can you go out by yourself?”

“You mean to a café or something? Yes, and I do some-times—but it's unusual to see a woman sitting in a café by herself.”

“But you can't be alone with a guy.”

“God, no.”

“And you can't, like, go out dancing.”

“Nope.”

“Or to parties on your own.”

“It depends.”

“I'm sorry, that's misogynist.”

She was surprised when I laughed.

“Come on,” I said, “you don't see what's wrong with that equation? There are only two genders here. Creating a rule for one necessarily creates the same rule for the other. You could just as easily have asked whether Omar could go out with another woman or be alone with her, and I would have given you the same answer: no. When he wants to see his female friends, he has to bring me. What? You thought there was some mysterious pool of women who are somehow exempt from the rules, and who appear out of nowhere to run around with guys for the sole purpose of creating a double standard? If girls can't go out alone with guys, who's left for the guys to break the rules with?”