Now They Call Me Infidel Page 4

  After the war ended, the bunkers near our apartment were left open for months. With few safe places to play except for some small grassy areas in the center of the street, we neighborhood children commonly played next to the bunkers. While playing hide-and-seek one day, I fell into one of the bunkers and hit my forehead on a rock. I apparently was unconscious for a few minutes. I had to endure several stitches to my bleeding forehead, without anesthesia, and to this day bear the scars to remind me of it.

  Eleven months after arriving in Cairo, our lovely new villa was finished, and we finally moved in. To live in a villa—the Middle East’s term for a detached, freestanding family dwelling—was very unusual in Egypt, something only the upper classes could afford. Our neighborhood was filled with important people. The head of Egyptian intelligence, Salah Nasr, was our next-door neighbor. He held the post my father had been promised before his assassination. The neighborhood was mostly made up of army officers, who in Nasser’s Egypt had become the most privileged class in Egyptian society. They were given their own neighborhoods, country clubs, and many other economic perks.

  Our street was named after a martyr who had fallen in the 1956 war. One day, shortly after moving in, as I was walking in the neighborhood, I noticed that all the streets had been renamed after martyrs. I was by then aware of and had visited a major commercial street in Alexandria named after my father. And suddenly it hit me. I recognized that behind each street name was a grieving family such as ours. I was filled with horror as I ran through the neighborhood. Burning in me, something I usually kept hidden, was a deep resentment against the very idea of jihad, for it had taken my father from me. Jihad also took the life of all these men and orphaned and widowed their families. I wondered if any of them felt as I did.

  My mother had always been dependent on my father and military drivers for transportation. At some point, fed up with our isolation, she did something very brave and gutsy. In the 1950s very few Egyptian women drove cars, but my mother was no ordinary woman. She started taking driving lessons. Then she bought a small German-made car. She would load us—four young children plus an infant—into the car and take us places. Unfortunately, Egyptian society at that time was critical of a young widow of a shahid driving. Even some family members disapproved. My mother was hurt by the criticism and the gossip that ensued, but that did not deter her. And we children did not care, since we loved the freedom the car gave us. We immediately went on vacation to Alexandria and even took our cat with us. The cat was terrified under the seat of the car.

  The car was too small for all of us, and my mother had to stop to stretch many times along the desert road to Alexandria. But we kids did not mind being jammed into the car. We were so excited to be on our way to Alexandria, a great vacation spot. On that trip, as well as many other outings to follow, male drivers would honk at my mother, and some would even shout out compliments. My mother would pay no attention. She quickly learned to hold her own in the crazy streets of Cairo, where no one follows traffic rules. That was the first and last car my mother owned for a long time.

  That summer of 1957, when my mother packed us into the little car and headed to Alexandria, she rented—and would later buy—an apartment by a beach called Miami. We spent the whole summer vacation there and returned almost every following summer. My mother still owns this apartment. Our yearly trip to the beach was an act of defiance and bravery. My mother was determined that she would give her girls and young son a semblance of normalcy.

  But she did not claim any of that for herself. After my father’s death, she was expected to sacrifice her life as well. Society expected the widows of martyrs to live to please society and their children but never to pursue personal happiness. There was no actual prohibition against a widow of a shahid remarrying. It was just that society looked upon it as somehow inappropriate, as if it would dishonor the memory of the martyr. She was to have no life of her own other than that of being a mother and a keeper of the home. Unmarried women are not to mix with men, date, or engage in any fun activities. Single women, widows, and divorcées are looked upon with a critical eye by neighbors and acquaintances. Their honor is everybody else’s honor, especially their male relatives’. Martyrdom was not just on the battlefield or against an enemy, but became a Muslim lifestyle for many women who struggled to refrain from doing anything to bring shame to the memory of their martyred husband or his children. An aunt once mentioned an Arab saying, “The back of a man is stronger support than the back of concrete.” She complained to us of how her status in society was diminished after her husband died. My mother struggled very hard in a difficult period of Egyptian society in the 1950s and ’60s, trying to please society. This took a toll on her happiness. I remember my mother remarking to other women while they watched their children swimming on Alexandria’s Miami beach, “Don’t you wish we could be a kid again so we could put on our bathing suits and swim all day?”

  One woman replied, “We wish, but if we did, we’d all be divorced tomorrow and even strangers would look down upon us as loose women.” All they could do was walk along the shoreline fully clothed, wetting their feet in the waves and wishing for what they could not do. None of these women were able to swim with their children.

  Despite her occasional sparks of independence and defiance, my mother remained alone and emotionally vulnerable much of the time. In a clanlike, family-oriented society, practically no social structure of support exists for widows outside their families. One’s strength and social life comes only from family and especially from male relatives whose role it is to serve as protector. My mother had only one brother, and he worked far away in Kuwait, and her father was too old to help much. And for reasons I cannot even today comprehend, my mother kept her distance from my father’s family.

  Despite the crowded cities of the Middle East and the closeness of living conditions, people—especially women—are isolated from one another by strict codes and rituals of behavior. There is no genuine social cohesion. People were more concerned with appearances and impressing one another than with genuine interaction. For one thing, the culture is dominated by the idea that “I will be cursed by people who will envy me” to the point of paranoia. People have to keep their distance, sometimes even from their own family members, in defense from the evil eye. We often heard the saying, “Dari ala shametik te kid,” meaning, “Hiding your candle will keep it bright.” Because of the fear of the evil eye, we rarely heard people expressing happiness over an event. The lyrics to the most famous wedding song in Egypt are, “Ein el hasoud fiha oud ya halawa; Aris amar we arousto nakawa; We ehna elleladi kidna el aadi,” meaning, “May the eye of the envious be poked, hallelujah. The groom is beautiful and bride well chosen; Tonight we have teased the enemy and the envious.”

  While one is continually reminded that envy is mentioned in the Koran, it is never discussed as a sin that hurts the person who is envious, but as a curse that one has to be on guard against. Some even went as far as keeping good news secret and wearing blue beads as protection from the evil eye. My mother, despite her Westernized attitudes, often burned incense called bukhour in our house to ward off the evil eye.

  A second factor preventing social cohesion arose directly from Muslim marriage laws. Relationships among Muslim women outside the family are superficial and extremely competitive, because according to Islamic law, sharia, husbands can have up to four wives. Befriending a woman outside of your family—especially a young, beautiful widow—could bring temptation to one’s husband. So the wives of other army officers who were once my mother’s friends disappeared. Just when she needed it the most, all the emotional support was jerked out from under her. She was now a threat to other women.

  Polygamy is accepted practice in Islamic society. However, unlike in Saudi Arabia, where taking multiple wives is common and open, in Egypt second marriages are usually in secret. And they tend to be more common among affluent men. This religiously sanctioned polygamy utterly destroys women’s trust in on
e another, depriving them of a mutual support system vital to women generally, and to a new widow in particular.

  It worked both ways—women fearing other women might become rivals for their husbands’ attention, and for those women who did not mind marrying married men, it justified their going after another woman’s husband. Such women would defend it by saying, “It is a man’s right in the eyes of Allah.” Therefore, trust between women was utterly destroyed, as husbands are available and fair game for seduction by other women.

  In the Middle East a woman’s reputation is everything. Neighbors will watch her every step—where she’s going, what time she comes home, who visits her. My mother’s every move became the subject of scrutiny and gossip. That’s why the independence she derived from driving a car fueled speculation and suspicion. My mother endured this her whole life. And as we daughters grew into young women, we were increasingly placed under the same cultural microscope, even by our own family.

  One day when my uncle’s wife learned that I was taking ballet lessons, she was shocked and asked in front of the whole family, “How can you dance ballet when I see boys carrying the girls and touching them?” Taken aback, I tried to explain that boys did not touch the girls in my ballet class. But I was hurt and feared that I might not be able to continue ballet lessons, an activity I loved. In addition to dancing, I excelled in making clay figures, drawing, and geometry. My grandparents, uncle, and his wife always praised my artistic talent as unique. I don’t know if that was just to be nice to me, but it did bolster my self-confidence. I often helped my cousins in their drawing and art projects.

  Another time, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old, my aunt saw me trying on a new bathing suit and commented that it was not proper for girls to run around wearing bathing suits. She was not trying to be hurtful, but simply repeating what she herself had been told. Nevertheless, I felt hurt. When she saw my reaction, she softened her criticism by joking, “You look like British women—no breasts and no butt.” Neither the impropriety of “running around in bathing suits” nor my lack of curves stopped me—or my sisters—from wearing bathing suits all day during our vacations in Alexandria or Suez.

  My aunt—my mother’s only sister—and her husband lived in Suez, near the Red Sea, and some summers we would vacation there. Her nickname was Zouzou. She herself often joked that she was going to wear shorts and walk on the beach like Western women. But she never did it. Like my mother’s, hers was only wishful thinking. Her husband was a businessman who owned a trucking company and bakery, and he was always generous with us. My aunt’s family loved the oysters that were sold on carts on the beach. As a child, I could never understand how anyone could eat this disgusting food. Zouzou would rent a cabin on the Red Sea’s Sokhna beach for the whole summer. Our visits there are one of my best memories of Egypt. We would stay on the beach all day until midnight, acting as if we owned the place.

  Another relative, my mother’s aunt, was especially dear to me. We called her “Batta,” meaning “ducky.” She was a lot of fun and always called us children by funny names, some even nasty, but we loved it. She lived in a huge beautiful villa in the Cairo neighborhood of Hadaek Al Kubba with a maid’s quarter and a mango tree. We managed to climb the tree and pick mangoes. In addition to visiting her home, Batta would visit us frequently, often spending the night at our home. Since she had no children of her own, she treated my mother as her daughter. Batta once talked about the strange subject of tahara, circumcision of girls. The word tahara literally means “cleanliness.” In Aunt Batta’s generation, and my mother’s as well, all girls at around age seven had to go through tahara. Batta was laughing while describing how for days young girls could not walk because of the pain between their legs. It did not seem to me like something to laugh about. I noticed that my mother was uncomfortable with the subject and tried to steer the conversation away from it. Fortunately, my mother and much of her generation and class stopped doing this to their daughters. I was relieved that tahara was not something that would be forced on me. However, a large number of the uneducated lower classes still practiced this genital mutilation on their young girls in my generation, and tragically, it is still practiced to this day in many Muslim and African countries.

  Growing up female in an Arab culture was fraught with complications and contradictions. The whole society imposed very strict standards—no dating, no partying, no mixing with boys, and, above all, no sex outside of marriage. Dating or any kind of relationship—casual or otherwise—between men and women who are not related was simply forbidden. Like most Egyptian girls, I was very conscious of the strict codes of behavior and made every effort to follow them. It wasn’t hard or heroic to stay out of trouble. I never smoked, never drank, and had never even seen drugs. And as for sex before marriage, that was out of the question. It never even crossed our minds. Sex was something mysterious that happened in the bedrooms of married couples. Most Egyptian girls I knew were like me. Boys never pushed us to do what an Egyptian good girl should not do. The boys I knew were probably as naive as we were. They knew girls were off-limits.

  I remember I could not dare to even smile back at boys when they smiled at me in public places. Yet, despite these taboos, it was common to hear Egyptian men whistle and shout praise and words of admiration (some humorous, some embarrassing) to women in Cairo streets. Women walking on a street without men were considered by some men as easy and fair targets. In fact, some Egyptian men would go as far as pinching and rubbing against women in crowded public buses and on downtown Cairo streets. Their behavior was expected and almost condoned. For us to respond—in any way—was not acceptable and could result in further humiliation. A woman my mother’s age told us of an incident that happened to her in downtown Cairo. When she felt a pinch on her behind, she turned around and slapped the man on the face. He slapped her back. She said she was totally humiliated and walked away speechless. A woman without a man in her presence is vulnerable in the Muslim world.

  Perhaps the incident that most exemplified these conditions occurred one day when I was fourteen. While waiting on the street after school for my mother to pick me up, a boy attempted to talk to me. He stood some ten feet away. I did not look at him or respond to his questions, even though he was merely being friendly and in no way trying to bother me. As I stood there embarrassed, not knowing how to respond, my mother drove up, sized up the situation, and ordered me into the car. Then she yelled at me, saying, “Don’t you care about your reputation, having no father and a boy talking to you on the sidewalk?!”

  My mother continued her tirade all the way home. “Isn’t it enough, what they say when they see me driving a car?” she screamed. “And then you have to go and shame me by allowing a boy to talk to you on the street?” Her biggest concern was “what would people say,” a common refrain in the Egyptian language and psyche—that ever-present notion that appearance is more important than reality.

  I was hurt and very angry with her then, not understanding that for her the incident was symbolic of something more. Her anger, while directed at me in that moment, was not really because of me at all. Her outbreak was the culmination of the tragedy of her life as a single, widowed young woman in the Muslim world.

  Nevertheless, it was me, not the culture, who was grounded.

  Despite of all the challenges and contradictions in Muslim society, there is one aspect in the upbringing of girls within the upper and middle classes that I personally remember with a warm feeling—the sense of being sheltered and protected from the harsh realities of life. Parents and educators did not rush to burden children with complex adult realities, forcing them to grow up too fast. As a matter of fact, within our social class, the innocence of children was protected, sometimes perhaps too zealously. However, on the upside, when adults value the preservation of their children’s innocence, they end up setting a better example, and that produces a stronger child.

  During my childhood, my best times were those I spent with my mater
nal grandparents, who were themselves first cousins originally. It was the tradition in Egypt at that time for cousins to marry. They actually called each other “cousin” at home. My grandmother was a strong woman, and my grandfather, a gentle, quiet man. He wore a British-style hat, carried a cane, and often spent hours at a nearby coffee shop. I loved spending the Ramadan month with them as they faithfully celebrated the long-held traditions of Ramadan, complete with all the wonderful foods associated with the feast. I recall baking cookies in my grandmother’s kitchen. At night, along with all the other neighborhood children, we would parade in the street, carrying the traditional Ramadan colored lanterns while singing “Wahawy Ya Wahawy.”

  Islam has two important feasts. Byram is the feast that marks the end of Ramadan. The second, and the larger feast of the two, is Daheyah, which involves the killing of a lamb to commemorate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. In this story, at the last minute God allows Abraham to sacrifice an animal instead.

  Two weeks before the Daheyah feast, my mother and grandparents bought a live lamb, and we played with it until the first day of the feast when it was time to slaughter it. Some people slaughtered the lambs in their homes themselves. It was regarded as a blessing to the home, but our family left the act to a butcher. On that day, the butcher would come to our house early in the morning, take the lamb, and begin reciting “In the name of Allah, the merciful, Allahu Akbar.”

  While older children might stick around to witness the ritual slaughter, I could not, despite my curiosity. I would scream and run hysterically into the house, venturing out only when the butcher had finished. We followed tradition strictly: half the lamb went to the poor, and the other half was used to make our family feast. During the various years of my childhood, we celebrated the Daheyah feast, sometimes in my mother’s home, other times in my grandmother’s home. Both my mother and grandmother had a backyard where the lamb could be kept in the days before the feast. But when my grandparents moved to an apartment, they kept the lamb for a week on the balcony, as did other apartment-dwelling neighbors of theirs. The butcher would come to the apartment and slaughter the lamb in the bathroom while everyone watched. Even when I got older, I could never bring myself to witness the slaughter. I do remember on one occasion returning to the bathroom to see what had happened to the lamb. It was already beheaded but the body was still moving in spasms. I started screaming in horror, but the butcher and my grandparents insisted this was a blessing to the home.