The Butterfly Mosque (10 page)

“Then let's not think about it now,” he would say to comfort me when we were confronted by this division. “Let's just stay here for a little while with what we already know.”

Bismillah your old self to find your real name.

—Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

I
N
E
GYPT, THE MARRIAGE OF TWO PEOPLE IS REALLY THE
marriage of two families. Omar's was not limited to his parents and brother: there was a clan of aunts, uncles, cousins, and second cousins, all living in different parts of Cairo. Some of them I met at a cousin's engagement party. Most of the family, however, was still a mystery.

They gathered together every Thursday evening at the family flat in Doqqi, a district on the other side of the Nile. Even in a country full of family-oriented people, this kind of dedication stood out. They were, as Omar put it, a tribe. Worried I would be overwhelmed by the crowd and the Arabic—aside from Sohair and Ibrahim, no one else in the family spoke fluent English—Omar kept postponing my introduction, pushing it back by incremental Thursdays. But a Thursday came when the meeting could no longer be postponed: Sohair's father, the family patriarch, had passed away quietly in the evening after saying his prayers.

“This is going to be intense,” Omar said on the way to the wake, taking my hand despite the curious glance of the cab driver. “Will you be okay? Don't be afraid if the women
get very emotional.” He looked tired, his face pale above the deep black he wore in mourning. I worried that I was a burden in an already stressful time.

“I'll be fine,” I said, unconvinced. It felt awkward to intrude on the grief of people I didn't know, but it would have been insulting not to pay my respects. Grief is different in Egypt—there is no embarrassment attached to it. Funerals are public, open to all who want to mourn the dead or console the living. I was used to thinking of death as something deeply private. Worried I would do or say something wrong, I hung back as we got out of the cab and headed down a dark side street on foot.

The family flat was situated in an alley, in the classical Arabic sense of the word: a narrow street teeming with activity. There were grocers and peddlers, a “doctor,” an ironing man, and a dressmaker, all packed precariously beside and on top of one another. Until very recently, it was not uncommon for people to be born, work, marry, and die in the same district. Omar's grandmother had lived in this alley for her entire married life. Sohair and her seven siblings had grown up in the very apartment we were visiting: boys sleeping in one room, girls in another, meals together in the middle. With the arrival of her first great-grandchildren, Omar's grandmother had seen four generations pass through her doors in the span of eighty-odd years.

As we walked down the alley I became aware of the color of my skin. Many of the people who lived here were East African, tall and slender and blue-black. I attracted appraising stares, as if I had arrived from another world. I almost felt like I had. This was a place where the raw facts
of life—birth, survival, procreation, death—were so powerfully condensed that there was room for little else. Up until now, I'd lived my life in the space wealth creates between those forces, space where art and education and ambition can exist. Here, that life felt superfluous.

Omar opened a door and ushered me into a fluorescent-lit room with high ceilings. It was full of people: men with beards, women in head scarves, younger girls who were bare-headed, and young boys who squabbled and cooed over an infant. Many of the women were crying. I shook hands with each of Omar's five maternal uncles, who smiled wearily and touched my cheek. Uncle Sherif, the second-to-youngest, asked me if I ever had a chance to meet his father. I told him I wished I had.

“I am sorry,” he said, choosing his words in careful English. “Very sorry you could not meet. He would like to meet the
khateeba
of his first grandson.”

“I'm sorry, too,” I said, without knowing what else to say. In the background, a radio had been tuned to a recitation of the Quran. A male voice chanted verses across static, in a tense, stripped, longing melody that is now as familiar to me as my bones. I saw a girl named Saraa coming toward me from across the room. We had met at the cousin's engagement party; with her wide dark eyes and expressive mouth, she was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. She had been happy then. Now when she kissed my cheek, her face was wet. I took her hand. She led me to a room where five or six other young women were sitting together. In hushed voices we introduced ourselves, giggling at the inadequate words to which we were limited.

Marwa, Uncle Ahmad's daughter, began reciting a prayer for her grandfather's soul. The other girls cupped their hands in front of their faces. I did the same. It's a strange feeling, praying to your hands, filling the air between them with words. We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it permeates the infinitely small—the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you. I spent hours there with these women and girls whose names I couldn't yet keep straight, but who were already my family. They told stories I didn't understand, laughing and weeping by turns. I went back and forth to the kitchen for tissues and glasses of water, or sat silently, hoping they somehow understood what I didn't know how to say.

After that day, whenever I went to a family gathering an arm would slip through mine and pull me away to be kissed and fussed over by the other girls. As I learned more of their language, their conversations would burst colorfully to life; they were articulate, funny, frank, opinionated about news and politics. Marwa likes to tell the story of my odd entrance into the family. “One day she danced at a wedding, the next she sat through a funeral, and on the third she was one of us,” she says, usually with a laugh. And that is how I felt.

Writing
Muslim
on employment and visa forms was harder than I expected. Modest as it seemed, this was the first public affirmation of faith I'd ever made. Finding the courage to write those six little letters took a long time. After this
small triumph, I was shocked when the forms were returned to me labeled
Christian.
Religion is not a private affair in Egypt; if you have a Christian name, the government will not acknowledge your conversion to Islam until you take the
shaheda
in front of a state-approved sheikh. I had to laugh. In a bizarre, autocratic way it reminded me not to take myself too seriously—as monumental as religion is to a believer, its public face is usually ridiculous. If I was going to survive as a Muslim in a Muslim country, I needed to develop a healthy appreciation for the absurd.

There was no avoiding it—I would have to go to Al-Azhar, one of Sunni Islam's most highly respected judicial institutions and the oldest continuously operative university on earth, for a state-sponsored conversion. I had a reason beyond bureaucratic necessity: tired of being questioned by police when we were out together, Omar and I had decided to “register the certificate,” the first of several steps necessary to formalize an Egyptian marriage. Registering the certificate, or
katb el kiteb,
refers to the drawing up and signing of a marriage contract, in which the price of the dowry is fixed, the terms of divorce decided, and the legal status of any shared property set out. In some senses
katb el kiteb
more closely resembles a western prenuptial agreement than a marriage contract; while a couple is considered religiously married after they sign their
kiteb,
they are not considered socially married—and are expected to abstain—until their wedding.

The period between the registration and the wedding is confusing for young couples, who are married in the eyes of God yet prevented by their families from spending too
much time alone. This waiting period has no basis in religion and in modern Egypt it has become an excuse to throw an ostentatious party between a couple's engagement and their wedding. Omar and I decided to register for a different reason: we wanted to travel together, which was legally impossible unless we could present a
kiteb
at military checkpoints and hotels. If I married Omar as a Christian, I would have fewer rights as his wife. If we wanted to travel together, we had to draw up a marriage contract; and before we could draw up a marriage contract, I had to “legally” convert. It was a numbingly complex set of requirements, as only an Islamic police state can demand or deliver. And it necessitated the discussion of my name.

“Call her Zeinab,” was Uncle Sherif's suggestion, because he liked me. His mother, Omar's grandmother, was another Zeinab, and his daughter another. It was a somewhat old-fashioned name, after a magnetic and fearless granddaughter of the Prophet, and unusual in a generation of Laylas and Yasmines.

“When Zeinab was a baby, the Prophet Muhammad would carry her around during prayer,” said Omar when the name was offered. “He would put her on the ground as he knelt and pick her up again as he stood.” Standing nearby, Ibrahim cradled a newborn cousin, so the scene was not hard to imagine. Though Omar was trying to be helpful, the subject of my Muslim name made him uncomfortable.

“The name Willow is not anti-Islamic,” he said, with a protective glance in my direction. “It's a kind of tree. She cannot leave her name, too . . .” The
kamen (too)
gave him away; that sentence was supposed to end,
because she left so
much to be here, she should not be asked to do this as well.
Since I was not Egyptian, it wouldn't quite be as bad as all that—I wasn't legally required to change my name, as an Egyptian convert would be. And like the other discreetly Muslim expatriates I knew, the world would go on calling me by my English name.
Zeinab
would become my name only to those who found
Willow
too difficult to pronounce.

“Zeinab is a tree as well!” Uncle Sherif pointed out. “A small tree, fragrant—”

“A tree in Heaven,” said Omar.

Though I was touched by my future in-laws' eagerness to help, I was not enthusiastic about the idea of formal conversion. It felt insulting, as though the
shaheda
I recited with God as my witness was not good enough for the dry old men in turbans who oversaw the intersection of religion and state. Whether one's Muslim name is made legal or not, formal conversion requires the convert to choose one. While the idea of taking a new name was symbolically satisfying, it also made me feel divided. I already had a second name.
Willow
was an adolescent derivative of Gwendolyn, my legal name, which was too long a word to attach to a child in conversation. Willow stuck. Adding another name seemed redundant.

“I have too many names,” I said to Omar.

“God has ninety-nine,” he said, smiling and squeezing my hand. “You'll have three. That's not so bad.”

The next morning Omar and I tried to make our way through the extensive campus of Al-Azhar. We shuttled between buildings in which we could and could not wear
shoes, looking for one
Ish'har al Islam
labeled el Aganeb, “foreigners declaring Islam.” We were both on edge. I was irritated by the whole process; it was more Egyptian bureaucracy. Had I taken a step back, I might have felt privileged to formally declare my faith in such a historic place. Instead I felt vulnerable. By the time we found the right building, I was close to panic. Conversion is a personal process, and to bureaucratize it is, I still think, a little cruel. The hours between my arrival at Al-Azhar and when I slept that night are hours I still find hard to explain.

I was ushered into a room with a sheikh in it. He seemed inanimate, smiling on a couch, a creature with the spiritual gravity of a small sun. I had never met a sheikh before. He was talking with an American woman in a head scarf who seemed to be organizing some kind of event. They finished their conversation as I filled out the requisite paperwork. (Why do you wish to convert to Islam? The question seemed unanswerable. I scribbled something complimentary and generic.) Then the sheikh turned to me.

“Hello, Gwendolyn,” he said, in perfect English.

I wish I could remember more of our conversation. He asked me a series of questions and made a few encouraging remarks. When I stood up again he was still smiling. This is what I took away from what he told me: you were put on this earth to do good, and you must remember that duty every day.

“You have chosen a name?”

“Zeinab.”

“Sister Zeinab, when you repeat the
shaheda,
you will become like a little baby. Imagine!” He laughed. “You will
start from nothing. What you do with that is between you and God.”

Afterward, I was asked to sign a ledger thick with the signatures of other converts and the dates of their announcement. Seeing hundreds of names—British, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian—I began to calm down. Until that moment, Islam had meant something very private to me—it defined my relationship with God and with Omar. I had never felt part of a world religion with over a billion adherents; during the silent inward process of conversion, I don't even think I realized that this is what Islam is. Yet here I was, looking at the names of men and women who were now
akh
and
ukht,
my theological brothers and sisters. The world seemed substantially smaller.

Now that I was an “official” Muslim, Omar and I could do our
katb el kiteb,
giving us the freedom to travel together. It should have been romantic, analogous to getting a marriage license at the courthouse, but since I was a foreigner, this, too, was tangled in bureaucracy. First, I had to get official permission from the U.S. Embassy. It was delivered with sour congratulations; they probably assumed I was a gullible woman being duped into a green-card marriage. Then Omar and I had to take this permission slip, along with my Azhar-approved record of conversion, and go to another warren of government offices. When it finally came time to sit down with a notary and draw up our marriage contract, I was hot and irritated.