Now They Call Me Infidel Read online

  My father had been killed by a parcel containing a bomb specifically targeted for him. It was brought into his office by a Palestinian courier, who was also injured in the blast. My four-year-old brother witnessed the whole event but was only slightly wounded. My father had been taken to the hospital after the blast but died of his injuries hours later. He was only thirty-five years old.

  My father was hailed a shahid.

  My mother, a young and strikingly beautiful Egyptian woman with her whole life in front of her—a woman with five children, the youngest only six months old—was suddenly widowed. We children were disoriented and confused. Even though I was the second oldest of the children, at eight years old I did not really comprehend the finality of death.

  The funeral for an Arab military hero—a shahid—is an elaborate and long-drawn-out event with an intense mourning period lasting forty days. We children were taken to a neighbor’s house during the Cairo funeral, which was held at my grandparents’ home in a large tent decorated with Koranic inscriptions. The grown-ups did not want us children to hear the wailing or see the intense mourning common for funerals in Egypt. Being the kind of child I was, I resolutely refused to go to the neighbor’s house. I wanted to stay with my mother; clearly she needed me. Furthermore, I wanted to be part of what was going on, even if I couldn’t understand it. This was, after all, my father. But in a culture where children are to be seen and not heard, the family insisted that I be sent off, so I was practically dragged kicking and screaming to the neighbor’s house.

  In the days following, a steady stream of people, many of them military officers who had worked with my father, flowed in and out of my grandparents’ house, as they came to pay their respects to our family. Repeatedly they would tell us children how proud we should be for being the family of a shahid. How lucky we were that my father was now guaranteed a place in heaven forever, they would say. It all washed over me for it made no sense. I didn’t want to be the daughter of a shahid. I just wanted my father back.

  In the midst of this mourning period, we moved into an apartment in Heliopolis while we waited for the family villa to be completed. One day a representative of the presidency came to us to announce that President Nasser was coming to visit us. That day, the excitement in our neighborhood was palpable. Word had circulated that he was coming, and the street was full of security personnel. Then President Gamal Abdel Nasser arrived at our home to extend his condolences to my mother. I remember sitting on his lap as he praised my father as a hero and promised that Egypt would retaliate. Then he, or perhaps it was one of his officers, turned to us children—we ranged in age from nine years to six months—and asked which one of us would avenge our father’s death by killing Jews.

  For an instant, the room fell silent.

  Nasser was a very popular leader. People adored and worshiped him. I remember everyone cheering for the Egyptian leader as he ceremoniously walked down the street after leaving our home. Nasser’s visit was considered a great honor by my mother and the whole family, one we would cherish for a long time. He handed my mother a medal, the Star of Honor, the highest military award, in recognition of my father’s services. To this day, it remains in my mother’s closet.

  The Egyptian president then traveled to Gaza to attend an elaborate military funeral ceremony held there for my father. We did not go but were told that large crowds of the Palestinian people were weeping, wailing, and chanting my father’s name. He was much loved and adored by the Palestinians of Gaza, and to this day there is a high school there named Mustafa Hafez, as well as a street that bears his name. The death of a martyr always has the same effect. The anger in Gaza and Egypt seethed, and the culture of retaliation was intensified by his death.

  On July 26, 1956, Nasser addressed the Egyptian nation and spoke about my father’s death, passionately elocuting his plans for retaliation against Israel. In that same speech, a very famous speech, he nationalized the Suez Canal, an act that led to the major war in 1956 of Egypt against France, Great Britain, and Israel.

  But I didn’t comprehend or care about the ramifications of my father’s death. All I knew was that my father was taken from me. I resented the “honor” of martyrdom, I resented the heaven he had gone to. We needed him more than heaven did. It wasn’t fair. At the same time, I felt intensely guilty about these feelings, since God expected us to embrace jihad. So I kept those feelings buried deep inside myself.

  The fortieth day after death is marked by another gathering and round of mourning. Once again, family, friends, neighbors, military comrades of my father, and all manner of other well-wishers paraded through the house. On that day, my grandmother, who had functioned as the pillar of strength through the last forty days, began to quietly cry while talking to me about my father’s death. And since I still could not comprehend the meaning of death, I asked her, “But when will he be back?”

  And then my grandmother wept even harder.

  A Koranic verse describing how Allah gives life and sustenance to martyrs was repeatedly recited during my father’s funeral, at his burial site, and again at this forty-day commemoration. It would also be repeated on each anniversary of his death. Translated, it is as follows:

  But do not think of those who have been slain in God’s cause as dead. Nay, they are alive! With their Sustainer have they their sustenance. (3:169)

  Recited in Arabic, this verse is very powerful and poetic, and reassured us that my father was in good hands in heaven as a martyr. I always cried hearing it, especially when recited by Muslim sheikhs in their beautiful, hypnotic, classical Arabic. It gave me a feeling that heaven is a beautiful place and better than life.

  I am eight years old. We do not talk about my father—the tragedy is still too painful. It is as if he never existed. I try to hold on to his memory. But I remember less and less about him. Many nights in our new home I cannot sleep. I awaken in the middle of the night and steal out of my bed and slip into the living room. Alone in the living room while everyone else is sleeping, I look at a picture of my father on the wall. It is a very official-looking military portrait of him in his uniform. He is looking straight at me. I move to the right. His eyes follow me. I move to the left. His eyes follow me. I run back to my room, and I am crying quietly, trying not to awaken anyone. When I finally fall asleep, I slip into a dream—a recurring dream in which my father is on a train pulling out of some unknown station. Does he see me? I don’t know. As the train gains speed, I am chasing after it, calling for my father. But no matter how fast I run, I cannot catch up with the train. It disappears with my father into the landscape.

  Two

  Growing Up in Cairo

  Life was suddenly very different without my father. We now lived in a temporary apartment in the crowded city of Cairo while we waited for our villa to be finished. The villa, a project that my father had been so excited about, was being built in an exclusive new neighborhood in Heliopolis reserved for military officers.

  A few months after my father’s death, the people who had crowded our home congratulating us for our father’s heroic sacrifice and fawning over our exalted shahid status disappeared. They were nowhere to be found. We felt so alone. No father, no security guards, no drivers, no army-provided cooks or servants, none of the military pampering we had grown accustomed to. All we had of my father was the Star of Honor, tucked away in a closet, given to my mother by President Nasser when he visited us, and a large photograph of my father on the wall in the great room. My mother gathered us around and explained to the five of us—all girls with the exception of my four-year-old brother—that because we were living in a home without a man we could no longer do many of the activities that we used to do when my father was alive. I did not really understand what that meant.

  As my mother became withdrawn and severely depressed after my father’s death, we children were cared for by two live-in maids. One of them, by the name of Awatef, had come with us from Gaza. My mother would sometimes disappear into her room for
days without coming out. It was a depression that would consume her for much of the rest of her life. Nasser’s—and indeed my whole culture’s—obsession with destroying Israel had deprived me not only of my father but also of my mother.

  In the beginning, as the family of a shahid, we received a generous pension from the government that enabled my mother to send us to the best private schools. She enrolled my sisters and me in St. Clare’s College, a British Catholic school in the heart of Cairo run by English nuns. There was no stigma attached to going to a Christian school; in fact, it was quite the opposite. St. Clare’s was an exclusive school favored by Cairo’s upper classes. Half the students were Muslim. The nuns provided the usual British education—literature, science, math—and in the afternoons, while the Catholic students received their religious instruction, an Islamic teacher came in to teach us the Koran. The Islamic teacher made us memorize and recite verses from the Koran and told stories of how Allah brought victory to Muhammad in his battles against the infidels. And then we returned to our regular classes, where the kind, sweet, “infidel” nuns resumed their instruction.

  Before Nasser’s revolution, Egypt had many first-class private schools run by English, French, and German educators. However, within a few years, Nasser would nationalize these schools, give them Arabic names, and send the nuns packing. I was privileged to catch the last years of this great British education.

  I remember that first day at St. Clare’s. My mother was very touched, and, in fact, broke into tears when the nuns, aware of our family’s great loss, told her they were praying for her. From the first day, I felt very comfortable and surrounded by love there among people who spoke a different language, with a different religion, and who came from a foreign land. They showed us a peaceful kind of love that wants nothing in return. It was a great comfort.

  St. Clare’s was very different from Egyptian public schools and the Gaza school I had attended. Unlike at Gaza schools, at my private British school we were never taught hatred. A bad word was never uttered about any group or any religion. Instead, we were taught subjects such as Shakespeare and English poetry.

  St. Clare’s uniform was similar to the attire of the French children’s book character Madeline. We wore blue skirts, white blouses, straw hats in summer and wool hats in the winter. Our day was very structured. When we arrived in the morning, we lined up, and with a polite curtsy began the day by saying “Good morning, Sister.” Then we deposited our hats on our designated shelf and filed quietly to our desks. We were always very polite and proper. I loved the structure. In retrospect, it probably helped me get some control over my shattered life and chaotic feelings of loss.

  One of the great shocks to my system was the terrible poverty I saw around me in crowded Cairo. Egyptian society has a small, powerful, privileged class and a middle class that is poor by Western standards. But the vast majority of the population is poor, and many are extremely poor—the kind of poverty that breaks one’s heart. Beggars are very common on Cairo streets. Many of them are children; others are old, handicapped, blind, or missing limbs. None had a wheelchair. The handicapped beggars would lie helpless on the sidewalk with hands outstretched.

  Poverty in some parts of Egypt was worse than what I’d seen in the refugee camps of Gaza. We were told that the Jews caused the poverty in Gaza. But what about the poverty in Egypt, I once asked my mother, was that also caused by the Jews? I don’t remember what she answered. It did not matter how rich or privileged one was, if you lived in Egypt you could not avoid seeing and dealing with extreme poverty daily. As a child, I used to cry to my mother and grandmother when I saw children begging, without shoes or adequate clothing and malnourished. I remember a school function when I entered the kitchen and saw the waiters eating the leftovers on our plates. It suddenly struck me that the people serving us were hungry.

  Living in a society that had this degree of poverty has an impact on everyone, rich and poor. The rich had to go through elaborate behaviors to protect their wealth from petty theft, burglary, and, even more important, from the evil eye. When out in public, at restaurants, hotels, shopping areas, or even simply out on the street, one would often be approached by people who wanted to help for bakshish, meaning “tips.” Beggars surrounded mosques especially, because they knew people were more likely to give to the poor near a mosque.

  My mother was always very touched by the poverty she saw around her. She frequently gave food and clothing to the poor. When my mother gave old clothes to poor women, they wanted to kiss her hands. One time my mother made a large batch of sandwiches for the poor and sent us with a driver to the famous Sayyedna El-Hussein Mosque. As the driver handed out sandwiches, people on all sides suddenly surrounded our car. Some were knocking at the window for food. After the driver finished distributing the sandwiches, he started slowly driving out of the crowd. I was afraid we might hit someone, since people were still circling the car. I remember looking out the back window behind me at the crowd of hungry people as we drove away and saw an old woman in black running behind our car with her hand extended in a desperate gesture. A small child behind her was calling out that she did not get any food. This scene of human suffering made an indelible impression on me. I cried uncontrollably all the way home. Even today I vividly remember the old woman running after us.

  Our family buried our pain in those first few months after my father’s death by not talking about him. However, we visited my father’s grave site in the national military cemetery regularly, especially on Muslim feast days. My mother would prepare a large basket with baked goods, and we would head to the cemetery to spend a half day there. My father’s family would sometimes meet us there and give each one of us money, a custom during Muslim feasts. While we were at the grave site poor children would come to beg or sell us something—always very politely, respectful of our mourning—and temporarily I would forget my loss, and my heart would ache for them. My mother always gave them money and baked sweets.

  This fenced-in military cemetery is surrounded by a larger cemetery, now known as the City of the Dead, because today it is filled with squatters, destitute people who have moved into the mausoleums, creating a dense district of poverty and crime.

  There were some moments of respite from our loneliness and feelings of isolation in that first year. One day a man from Gaza came to visit us with gifts. We were very excited to see him. I saw a tear in his eye when he greeted us. Our old faithful Egyptian driver and cook from Gaza also visited my mother and offered their services. And they began to come by occasionally. Their presence was a great comfort to my mother and was greeted with great excitement by us children. Our old cook, Mahmoud, was promoted to head cook at the home of the head of the Egyptian military, Mushier Abdel Hakim Amer, who was a friend of my father. Mahmoud often told us stories of how Nasser and Amer were like brothers and gathered on holidays with their children, and he cooked for them all. But despite his important new position, Mahmoud managed to come and cook for my mother for special events. On those occasions, I was overjoyed to see him and spent hours in the kitchen helping—mostly for the purpose of talking to him. For me, it was somehow a way to be a part of my father. Mahmoud was a part of our family all his life until he died a decade ago. I was especially happy when our old driver would also visit and take us in a van to one of the small branches of the Nile River and let us run loose. It reminded me of the good old days when they took us to the beautiful beaches of Gaza to play. Their visits were bittersweet.

  Not everyone had forgotten about us.

  We had been in Cairo only a couple of months when the 1956 war broke out. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal—in that same speech in which he had praised my father’s sacrifice. The move shocked and angered the British and French, who were part owners of the canal. Nasser’s bold move held the potential to throw the whole world into crisis. If Nasser began denying access to the canal, international commerce was in jeopardy. Much of the oil the West depended on traveled down the Suez Cana
l. France and Great Britain attacked. Furthermore, Israel joined the war against Egypt in an attempt to end the Egyptian-led fedayeen raids into its territory.

  Our apartment was very close to a military airport, and the shelling and bombing began. It was Gaza all over again, but without the protection of a father and his ever-present military security detail. My sense of safety was shattered. No place on earth felt safe to me anymore. I remember my mother gathered us five children on a prayer rug in the middle of the living room and started praying. We could hear the shells hitting our building as her desperate pleas to Allah resonated in the room. The next morning we saw several holes in our building. An air force plane, shot down during the battle, lay in pieces in the middle of the street only a block from our apartment.

  In the weeks to follow, due to pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union, the British and the French withdrew, their demands unanswered by Nasser. Israel did achieve its goal of ending the fedayeen attacks on its border, and in return, the Israelis withdrew from the Sinai desert. As part of the settlement, United Nations troops were placed on the borders between Gaza and Israel to prevent further fedayeen attacks from Gaza.

  President Nasser then declared the negotiated end to hostilities a glorious “victory” over the three evil imperialist nations. No mention was made on the Arab street that the United States and the Soviet Union had actually orchestrated the withdrawal. Nor were we told that Egypt’s casualties had numbered in the thousands. Nasser’s hero status increased among all Arab nations. His lack of compromise was regarded as a symbol of Arab power against the West.