The Butterfly Mosque (17 page)

I should have trusted Omar, who has a faith in the persistence of goodness that fate tends to reward; he can find poetry anywhere. He took me to pray at Sultan Hassan, an enormous medieval mosque in the Old City, just below the citadel built by Saladin in the twelfth century. During the week it is open to tourists before the sunset prayer, but on Fridays it is packed with the faithful and closed to casual observers. We parked the car a few blocks away and approached on foot, pressed along in a crowd of people—a thousand, maybe more—going to pray. At the threshold of the mosque, the entryway towered several stories above us and we took off our shoes. A wide corridor of stone led to the central courtyard. Like many mosques in arid parts of the Muslim world, the main prayer space of Sultan Hassan is open to the sky. The effect is of a cathedral without a roof: a square, tiled courtyard bordered on each side by a beautifully detailed half-dome, one for each of the four schools of
Sunni law. The half-dome directly opposite the imam is reserved for women; men pray in the open courtyard. Since the dome provides shade and the stone platform beneath it is raised, allowing a good view of the imam who leads the prayer, Sultan Hassan is one of the rare mosques in which the women's space is actually better than the men's. When Omar and I arrived, men and women were arranging themselves in neat lines, waiting for the prayer to begin. The noon sun baked the tiles of the courtyard; they were warm under my bare feet. Swallows dove and swirled in the half-domes, catching insects that had sought the shade. Omar let go of my hand.

“I'll be down here with the men,” he said. “I'll meet you at the edge of the women's platform when the prayer is over.”

I looked up at him, feeling anxious. “I'm afraid I'm going to do something wrong,” I said.

Omar smiled. “If you do, they'll take care of you.”

“Who are ‘they'?”

“Your sisters.” With that he turned and waved to Uncle Sherif, who was standing in the men's section dressed in white robes, and who, seeing me, grinned and pressed one hand to his heart. I smiled back before moving to stow my shoes at the base of the women's platform and climbing up to take my place there. I stood next to a woman who looked just a little younger than me, and who was wearing a gauzy pink head scarf that hung down her back. Another woman, whose dark lashes framed startling pale green eyes, came to stand on my left. The perfumes of the two women next to me met under my nose: lotus oil and something that seemed
like Chanel but probably wasn't. The scents mixed with the coppery smell of dust became an integral part of my first memory of that place.

The call to prayer went up, vibrating across the courtyard. Without a word, the woman on my right pulled me closer, so that my shoulder touched hers. The woman on my left reached over to gently rearrange my scarf, veiling an exposed stretch of my collarbone. There was nothing condescending, irritated, or even fully conscious about their gestures; they were simply closing a gap in the line. They would expect me to do the same for them, if their scarves slipped or they absentmindedly stood too far from their neighbors. For me, the ritual of prayer was transformed by this physicality. As I bowed and knelt and stood, there were shoulders against my shoulders, knees against my knees, the back of another hand against the back of my hand. The line levels everyone. No Muslim is exempt from it; a saint must stand shoulder to shoulder with a murderer if a murderer is who he finds to his right.

On an ordinary day, the people around me refused to line up for anything—not bread, not bus tickets; if you wanted something you had to wade into a mob. Yet here in the mosque they fell in line with organic precision, taking great care that no one stand an inch ahead of his neighbor. The voice of the imam filled the courtyard, yet in the strange acoustic space of the half-dome, I could hear the women beside me breathing. Below us in the men's section, Azhar students from east and central Asia stood side by side with the ironing men and fruit vendors who usually grumbled that foreigners didn't tip well. European Sufi converts with
red or blond beards and blue embroidered vests stood next to their natural adversaries, the short-robed conservatives, in a moment of fellowship. I began to see what filled that empty ideological space between the fundamentalist mosque and the butterfly mosque: a living tradition that could be dynamic, could evolve and be touched in brief but valuable moments—the words I loved. There were things in that line worth saving.

The sheikh who gave the sermon that day was someone I had met, sort of, at a family wedding several weeks earlier. That evening I had been feeling confident: I wore a red embroidered tunic and a head scarf draped in a style that was popular, and finally had a handle on everybody's name, all of which made me hope I looked less out of place than usual. I circulated between tables of guests under the supervision of three or four of Omar's youngest cousins, lively giggling girls who had appointed themselves my guardians. After the banquet was over and people began drifting to the dance floor, the girls' mood changed: they held an urgent whispered conference, and then started pulling on my sleeve. It took me a minute to decipher that someone important had arrived and we needed to get out of the way. Others were already clearing a path near the door. The girls tried to pull me along behind them but I stumbled on the edge of my skirt and limped a few steps before I could untangle myself. In the midst of this drama, I realized I was about to trample on the edge of someone's well-tailored galibayya. I looked up in alarm.

It was Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, looking as startled as I was.

He had been appointed to his position only a week or two earlier, promoted overnight from his professorship at Al-Azhar University to one of the most prominent positions in the Muslim world. Before his promotion he had instructed some of Omar's maternal uncles in religion, which explained his presence at the wedding. His appointment was a source of renewed hope for Sunni moderates, embattled for years by the advancing wave of fundamentalism coming out of the Gulf. As mufti of Egypt—the highest religious office of the most populous Arab nation attached to the oldest institution of Sunni law in the world—Dr. Ali, as he was affectionately called in Cairo, could and would wield a considerable amount of power.

I filed away my brief encounter with Dr. Ali as a good story and forgot about it. A week or so after that first Friday prayer, however, Omar announced that Uncle Ahmad had arranged something special for me. “You have an interview with the mufti next Sunday,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“An interview. With the mufti.” Omar grinned. “Does that make you happy?”

It took me all week to come up with the right questions.
I might never have an opportunity like this again,
I thought, so I wanted to make the most of it. I had been reading Irshad Manji, whose infamous complaint
The Trouble with Islam
had just been published. By and large, I hated it. I saw
Manji as the Janus face of the fundamentalist imam in Tura: both were self-appointed experts who disemboweled Islam in order to politicize it in a particular way. But Manji's book voiced real grievances, and I wanted to see what the traditional Sunni establishment would do with the ideas it put forward.

My first question was simple: In the West, where there is no entrenched hierarchy of trained clerics, do ordinary Muslims have the right to practice
ijtihad?

The word
ijtihad
comes from the same root as jihad—the root itself means roughly “to strive.” But whereas jihad refers to physical and psychological striving,
ijtihad
refers specifically to interpretation; striving to correctly interpret the will of God through the Quran, the Sunnah, and the hadith. For centuries the official power of
ijtihad
has rested in the hands of sheikhs versed in Islamic jurisprudence. Such sheikhs are called
mujtahids.
Typically, one has to go through something like a seminary school to become a
mujtahid.
This is where the newest Muslims—the Muslims of the Far West—take issue. Many activists in Europe and North America believe that all Muslims should have the right to practice
ijtihad.
Islam, they argue, has grown larger than the Fertile Crescent, and the opinions of a few old men in Medina have little relevance in Los Angeles. This idea was the crux of Manji's book. “Open the gates,” was starting to become a rallying cry among those who believed that each Muslim should be free to interpret and apply Islamic law according to his own intellect.

My second question dealt with religion and culture. With the debate over Islamic dress boiling over in France
and elsewhere, I wanted to know how much cultural leeway the mufti thought Islam permitted when it came to clothing and socializing. What should a Muslim do in a non-Muslim country to reconcile Islam with local cultural norms?

The third question was the most abstract and, in fact, more than a little insolent. It was prefaced like this: In Islam, the will of God is supposedly absolute. As stated in the Quran, “Nothing occurs which He does not will.” This was a verse often used by gay and lesbian Muslims to defend their sexuality as natural and normal. Since conservatives often declared homosexuality “against the will of God,” this created an interesting contradiction. How would the mufti respond to and resolve it?

On the day my interview was scheduled, Omar and I arrived at Al-Azhar mosque right before
maghrib,
the sunset prayer. We took off our shoes and padded barefoot across the marble courtyard to the oldest surviving section of the building, which had been constructed in the tenth century. We met Uncle Ahmad in a long hall containing a series of classrooms that had been added in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one room for each dialect of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian spoken by Azhar University's medieval students. Today, the classrooms are used as offices.

“Habibi!
I love you!” A robed sheikh crossed the hall from one of the offices and kissed Uncle Ahmad on both cheeks. After everyone was introduced, the sheikh ushered us into the office from which he had appeared.

“Itfaddali,
” he said to me, motioning to a chair. I looked around, tugging at the unfamiliar drape of my head scarf, which I had worn in a particularly conservative style for the occasion. The office was roomy and tall, whitewashed, with a small antechamber that served as a waiting room. A chart on one wall was covered by a list of names in calligraphy—a religious lineage, Omar told me later, linking the mufti with his sheikh, and with his sheikh, and so on, all the way back to the companion of the Prophet who is said to have initiated the mufti's Sufi order.

“Would you like something to drink?” the sheikh asked me in Arabic, rummaging in a small refrigerator.

“Yes, thank you.” I sipped the Pepsi he handed me, feeling slightly out of place. I had no idea when the mufti would appear or what I was expected to do when that happened. The sunset prayer saved me for a short interim as everyone separated to perform it; afterward I found Omar and together we negotiated our way back to the office through the enormous crowd that had gathered. The cheerful sheikh we had met—who was, I now gathered, the mufti's public liaison—opened the door just wide enough for us to bypass the crowd and squeeze through. The mufti sat behind a desk at the far end of the room, rifling through a stack of papers. On the coffee table in front of him sat my Pepsi, looking a little idiotic. The sheikh offered seats to Omar and me and left.

Putting aside his papers, the mufti looked up.
“Salaam alaykum.
” He politely avoided meeting my eyes.

“I'll translate for you,” Omar murmured. He turned to the mufti and began phrasing my first question. Even though I was skeptical of the idea that
ijtihad
was the silver
bullet of Islamic reform—dependent as it was on individual perspective, it was just as likely to produce fringe cults as enlightened visionaries—I thought it would be pretty wonderful if I was the source of the “opening of the gates.” I congratulated myself for being a revolutionary. But as Omar spoke, I realized my self-aggrandizing was premature. I had left the mufti a simple way out of the question.

“It's unnecessary for all western Muslims to practice
ijtihad.
There are some very good
mujtahids
in the West,” said the mufti according to Omar. “In many of the United States, in fact.” He began writing names down on a piece of paper. Among them, I noticed, was Hamza Yusuf, a young American sheikh who had gotten press for his thoughts about the reconciliation between Islam and the West. “Not everyone is qualified to make the decisions of a
mujtahid,
” the mufti continued. “There's a lot to learn—history, language, the passages of the Quran, how to use the hadith—it's a study in itself. If everyone were to take this bit or that bit of the law and interpret it for himself—use it to justify his desires—there would be chaos.”

“You have to understand,” Omar would tell me later, “in the West, you see
ijtihad
as a way to make Islam more open, more diverse. Here we see it as how we got fundamentalism.
Ijtihad
is the excuse the fundies use to project their corruptness onto Islam.”

Omar moved on to my second question—reconciling non-Islamic culture with Muslim social mores. He cited the veil and the fear it inspires in most westerners.

The mufti paused. It was clear from the expression on his face that he had thought about this a great deal. “In a
non-Islamic culture, you are an ambassador of Islam,” he said finally. “Our religion teaches that it is bad to isolate yourself from your community, from the people around you. To push them away. It is important to present Islam in a good way, in a way that those around you can understand. Islam is bigger than the veil. The veil is important, but Islam is bigger than the veil. If wearing the veil in a non-Muslim country will only bring hostility toward you, don't wear it.”