The Butterfly Mosque (28 page)

She didn't bat an eye. “That's because it's not,” she said. And that was how I discovered my dutiful, conservative upstairs-neighbor was an Al Ghad party member. The demonstration had been organized in support of Nour, a man to whom the state-owned media had no intention of
giving free publicity. Claiming it was an Ikhwan stunt was their excuse to stay away. This information was essential to the article I wrote, and I had learned it not on the streets, but in the women's car.

The women's car was a moveable, segregated hothouse—a determined peace prevailed there, and produced a miniature society. I began to write an essay in homage to the women's car, picking out narrative threads that I thought might help a western reader understand its subtler implications. I sent the essay to the
New York Times Magazine.
When it ran, I showed a cutting to Sohair.

“I enjoyed this,” said Sohair after she'd read it. I watched her anxiously for signs that she was just being polite. “It was very human. You did a good job.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I'm just happy they printed it. Usually the things you read in magazines about women's society in the Muslim world are anthropological—scientific, I mean, like the writer is studying the behavior of monkeys instead of human beings.”

When several furious responses were published a week later, full of blistering language about gender apartheid, I was totally unprepared.

“But you generated controversy,” my mother told me over the phone in an attempt to cheer me up. “You got people talking. That counts for something. Just imagine the Manhattanite ladies who lunch who read this and were absolutely scandalized, so scandalized that they actually
wrote in
to the
New York Times
to complain about it. It's worth it just to piss them off.”

“I don't
want
to generate controversy,” I said, feeling desperate. “Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can't communicate anything meaningful. I want
consensus.
And I didn't do that. I did the opposite of that. I didn't say the right things. I wasn't trying to defend the women's car in and of itself—just to show that these little human connections can happen anywhere. You can't stamp them out. Culture doesn't blunt them, language doesn't blunt them. It doesn't matter whether these people agree about the veil or gender or anything—all I wanted to do was make them
see
that, see that when they talk about Islam they're talking about real people who can feel affection for a stranger on the subway and that it
means
something.”

This argument sent everyone I used it on into a short meditative silence. Controversy is seen as the best thing for a writer's career short of actual success, and the fact that I was so upset by it must have been a little baffling. But I didn't want to be fashionable, I wanted to be accurate. I didn't understand the literary economy that had built up around Muslim and ex-Muslim writers in the West: there was a market for outrage and anyone who created it, whether by condemning Islam or apologizing for it, was considered in vogue. It was a formula in which truth and consistency were secondary. Staying complicated—refusing to tell incomplete stories with pat moral endings, and remaining a Muslim professional rather than a professional Muslim—was going to be a challenge.

Later that week, Sohair asked me why I was so upset. I had been trying to hide my frustration from her and
Omar—revealing its source would mean showing them how hated they were in the West, something I tried very hard to downplay.

“You look pale,” was what she said to me, mixing something on the stove in her apartment as I hung in the doorway of the kitchen.

“I'm always pale,” I said.

“You look paler than usual, and also unhappy.” She fanned herself with one hand: this was the time of year when the kitchen became stiflingly hot.

“There were a bunch of letters in the
New York Times Magazine
attacking my essay.”

“No.” She seemed genuinely shocked. “How? What was wrong with it?”

“I don't know. It frightened people. I should have said things differently. They didn't understand what I was trying to say.”

“What kind of attacks? What was in these letters?”

“They said—well, one said it was the saddest defense of a dysfunctional culture she'd ever seen.”

I can't forget the look on my wonderful, secular, educated mother-in-law's face when I said this: it was dismay mingled with pain, a momentary loss of confidence. It was her women's car, too. She didn't agree with it; she thought men should be expected to behave themselves in the presence of women, making a women's car unnecessary, but it was part of her history. She'd argued theology in it, commiserated over the rising price of meat, helped mothers wrangle mischievous children—this was the point; there was not
nothing
going on in these spaces westerners did not
understand or inhabit. There were universes in these spaces, whether their existence was just or not. But I hadn't communicated that properly, leaving the door open for an anonymous American woman to negate my mother-in-law's relationship with her own history.

A week later, Japanese officials announced that a women's car would be added to the Tokyo subway to protect female commuters from inappropriate male attention; precisely the reason the women's car had been implemented in Cairo. The Tokyo car was hailed as a step forward for women's rights. The discrepancy would stay with me for weeks—it was the final proof that I had underestimated the amount of fear and prejudice surrounding Arab culture in the West. In my mind the week of mercy that had come after 9/11—the week when one of my Muslim friends was approached in a grocery store by a tearful man who said he hoped no one blamed my friend for what those evil people had done—was eternal. People in my own life had made a titanic effort to accept me after I converted. Sometimes the effort failed, but I appreciated it nonetheless. I had no idea that things were getting worse around the greater United States, and did not understand why.

But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps

—Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son”

L
AILA WAS ONE OF THE FEW CONVERTS WITH WHOM
I
FOUND
common history, and who I admired and loved; her wry, serene pronouncements on the nature of religion and human nature made it into several of my essays. Though half Egyptian, she looked European, and had been raised in Stockholm by her Swedish mother. Because of her heritage, she had always been conscious of Islam—I, on the other hand, could not have told you what Ramadan was a bare four years before I converted—but was brought up without religion. Like me, she had been a reasonably happy, productive western subculturette, playing drums in a goth-punk band called Dark Lords of the Womb and reading Kant as a teenager, until one day, as she described it, “I woke in the middle of the night, thinking I heard someone call my
name. Immediately, my heart began to race—I was having a panic attack.” She paused.

“What happened then?” I prompted.

Laila wore a sybil-like expression. She first told me this story while we sat in a café near Tahrir Square, having ditched a mind numbingly bad performance of
Madama Butterfly
at the Opera House and walked through the evening filth across Qasr el Nil Bridge to have coffee. Wrapped in formal, jewel-toned silk veils—neither of us had much opportunity to dress up so we had taken advantage of the occasion—we were the object of many semibenevolent stares. They bothered her less than they bothered me.

“The panic attack stayed for months and months,” said Laila. “It didn't go away until I converted.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. And then the panic attack went away, but I was a mess—you know how it is, at first after you convert you cry every five minutes.”

I laughed. “It's so true! You get so
sensitive
—”

“See something sad, cry. See something happy, cry.”

“There's this Donna Tartt novel,” I said, referring to
The Secret History,
“that calls becoming religious ‘turning up the volume of the inner monologue.' She's talking about the Greeks, but the principle is the same.”

“Turning up the volume . . . yes, that's what it was like. A very strange experience.” She smiled. “And here we are.”

A few weeks after my Ali Gomaa profile ran in the
Atlantic,
Laila called to tell me some women from her Sufi order were planning a day trip to the north coast to visit a reclusive and admired Sufi
sheikha
named Sanaa Dewidar.
Sheikha Sanaa and her family lived most of the year in Syria but summered in Egypt. If I was interested, the
sheikha
had consented to an interview. I didn't need to be asked twice: I packed a notebook and a tape recorder, and on a morning thick with smog took the subway downtown to meet Laila and her friends. They picked me up in a blessedly air-conditioned Hyundai.

We drove along the Alamein Road, which runs northwest out of Cairo toward the Mediterranean. A friend traveling through Egypt once asked me how hard it would be to drive to Libya from Cairo, and I answered: easy. Drive north and when you hit water turn left. There are so few roads through the Sahara that it is literally this simple. The Alamein Road is one of the prettiest and most surreal: it is surrounded by an empty wasteland, which continues uninterrupted until just south of the Med, where it becomes a stubbly plain of low brush and olive plantations. A portion of the road, the bit that runs through featureless desert, has an incongruous median of well-manicured baby palms and hibiscus. This two- or three-mile strip of civilized greenery is miles from the nearest town—not that there are really towns in that part of the Sahara, only dilapidated tea shops adjoining gas stations—and how it is maintained was long a mystery to me. As we drove to meet the
sheikha,
I found out: two men, barefoot and with long garden hoses attached to some unseen source of water, were out among the palms. There was no vehicle parked nearby, no obvious way they could arrive or leave. It was as if they'd sprung out of the earth when no one was looking. They stood straight and watched as we sped by. To me, the image was slightly unreal, but
no one else in the car seemed to notice anything unusual. We drove on without comment and the men receded in the distance, another Egyptian incident seemingly without cause or consequence.

After driving too far along the coast road, drinking tea, and turning back, we arrived at the house of Sheikha Sanaa. It was a flaking plaster building painted in faded pastels. The dignified decay, along with a sloping view down to the pale shoreline of the Mediterranean, lent the house a kind of poetry. I stood considering it, half-asleep from the motion of the car, when a middle-aged woman dressed in a brown scarf and robe approached me with a knowing smile. She was, like so many Middle Easterners, indulgent of reverie.

“As-salaamu alaykum,
” said the woman. “You are the writer?”

“
Alaykum salaam
—yes,” I responded.

“You wear
hijab.
”

“Yes.”

“Mash'allah.
”

I smiled.
Mash'allah
literally means “by the grace of God,” but is used to signify admiration. The woman introduced herself: she was one of Sheikha Sanaa's daughters—and, I gathered, the
khalifa
or presumptive heir to her mother's leadership position within their order. She led me into the house, where a woman with clear unlined skin and simple black robes sat at a plastic-sheeted table: it was Sheikha Sanaa. Though her face was remarkably youthful, her hands, which were pale and lined, suggested she was much older than she looked; I guessed her to be in her sixties.

I've never met a spiritual leader by whom I felt overwhelmed—I can't quite empathize with the stories other religious people tell about weeping at the feet of their sheikhs and pastors. I can't imagine giving a single person that much power over me, and losing my ability to be skeptical. So I felt no aura of sainthood or especial blessedness around the
sheikha,
but through her immediate and welcoming smile, she did give the impression of earnest goodness.

She rose to greet me and we exchanged the traditional kiss on each cheek. As Laila and the other women greeted her, I realized I had made something of a faux pas. They all kissed the
sheikha
's hand instead, as a sign of deference; she in turn protested and tried to pull her hand away, to show that she felt unworthy of the honor. It was a game of courtesy I'd seen many times, but only among men and male sheikhs. Never before had I been in a religious situation mediated entirely by women.

During rounds of tea, coffee, and sweet and salty snacks, Sheikha Sanaa talked with us. I had come with a few prepared questions but let the conversation evolve organically, changing course to pursue interesting topics Laila and the others brought up. We spoke in Arabic, with sporadic bouts of English, French, and parenthetical translations by her daughters when she said things too complex or abstract for me to understand. I focused on what I knew would be most informative to a western audience: the tradition of female leadership in Islam. I asked her why this tradition was declining in the modern age.

“There are as many women sheikhs in the East today as there were in the past,” she said. “In westernized countries like Egypt and Lebanon, people don't accept female religious leaders. But in Syria it's something natural.”

“Westernization has made it
worse?
” This was the first time I had heard the suggestion that the relaxed western attitude toward gender was having a negative impact on Muslim women.