The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (20 page)

Whereas Arab nationalism had taken its cue from nineteenth-century German nationalism, liberal nationalism followed the school of thought that originated with French and English political philosophy, from Locke to Rousseau and Mill. Where the Germans believed that the nation existed independently of the state and of the choices people made, the French and the English tradition held that nationalism was chosen and consensual. In the liberal tradition, nationalism begins with the state, or those legal and political institutions that a given people chooses to form; and nationhood, the people’s sense of belonging to a nation, is a consequence of the responsibility they take upon themselves to uphold the commonweal.

The problem was that even though the liberal nationalists had a theory, the British occupation meant that they had few of the independent political institutions that could embody it. They justified, or endured, the British presence by reasoning that under the guidance of London’s enlightened despotism those independent political institutions would eventually be created and by assuming that it was only a matter of time before the crown granted Egypt full independence and sovereignty. The liberal nationalists may have deluded themselves about the intentions of their imperial overlords, but given the choice between being ruled by London and being ruled by the Ottomans, they opted for Europe as their model future. Many of them had lived in Europe, like Hussein, who studied in Montpellier and Paris as Europe was in the throes of World War I.

Once Hussein returned to Egypt, his first job at what is now called Cairo University was to teach a course in Greek history, of which geography was a central fact, but how could a blind man
describe how Greece looked? His wife showed it to him, in one of the most beautiful love scenes in all of modern literature, East or West:

This is a perfect cameo of the Platonic ideal, and it’s no accident that Greece is its topos, a site where the East and the West, a man and a woman, eros and intellect, all meet and are bound as one in love. “The dominant and undeniable fact of our times,” Hussein would later write, “is that day by day we are drawing closer to Europe and becoming an integral part of her, literally and figuratively.”

In Hussein’s view, Egypt was an essential part of the classical legacy. The land of the Nile had been subject to both the Greek and the Roman empires, and hence much of its history was written in Greek and Latin. Moreover, Egypt was the mother of civilization,
umm al-dunya
, one of the foundations of Greek art, architecture, and philosophy. Hussein’s Egypt was therefore already of the West as well as the East, part of a larger Mediterranean culture, and it was only a matter of time before it was wholly reintegrated into the Europe that it had been a part of for thousands of years.

 H
ussein the autobiographer saw unities everywhere, but the novelist chronicling the progress of an ancient civilization
becoming a new nation also captured the rifts in the social fabric, and much of his work dealt with one of the most difficult issues in Arab Muslim society, namely, the role of women. In one story a daughter turned modern woman in the capital comes home to the countryside to bury her mother, whose heart was broken when her husband brought a second, younger wife into the family home. And in Hussein’s most famous novella,
The Nightingale’s Prayer
, the central event is an honor killing.

The Nightingale’s Prayer
opens with three women, a mother and two daughters—the youngest, Amna, is the narrator—who must leave the village because their father has been killed after he was caught with another woman. As the three move from town to town trying to scrape together a living, the elder daughter finds work at the house of an engineer. He seduces her, another in a series of his conquests, and soon dismisses her. The women again pick up and leave, pursued ominously by an uncle from their old village. He surmises that the girl has dishonored the family and slaughters her in front of her mother and sister. Amna vows revenge, not against the uncle, but against the engineer, who had effectively sent her sister to her death. Concealing her identity, she secures her sister’s old job in the engineer’s house, where she plans to kill him. When Amna realizes she is incapable of taking the man’s life, she plots what she believes is an even worse fate for him—to make him fall in love with her until he is so miserable in his unrequited ardor that he is compelled to kill himself. Naturally, it is as she is withholding her affection from the man that she begins to fall in love with him in earnest. As soon as she reveals her identity to the engineer, the uncle reappears to finish off yet another female child destined to shame the family’s honor.

It was no coincidence that Hussein made one of his protagonists an engineer, for engineering had become one of the signature professions of modern Egypt’s rising middle class, showing that the country was no longer entirely dependent on the West for technical skill and the ability to design its own future. (An entire Cairo neighborhood,
Al-Mohandiseen, was named for the engineers who realized Nasser’s visionary project, the Aswan High Dam.) In the movie version of
The Nightingale’s Prayer
, released in 1959, a year before construction on the dam began, the engineer hurls himself against the symbolic maelstrom of ignorance and violence of the traditional countryside to take the bullet meant for the beautiful young girl.

The book, however, ends a little differently. An Egyptian woman read it to me in its entirety one afternoon. When she was done reading, I looked up to see tears streaming down her broad cheekbones. She rose from the couch and started gathering up my things, handed me the book, and told me to leave.

Lana and I had met for the first time during Ramadan when we sat on a hotel roof overlooking the city at night as cars sped from one
iftar
meal to the next, and feluccas and large riverboats lit the dark Nile below. The waiter demanded her passport, and I vouched for her that she was a foreigner, since state law prohibits Egyptians from drinking alcohol in bars and restaurants during the month of fasting. We sat and talked through the night as tobacco smoke and a second, sweeter smoke, like burning garbage or rotted crops or 9/11, filled the evening air along with the music of Umm Kulthum. “I wish you could understand every word she’s singing and what it means to me,” Lana said. She translated a line: “Bring your eyes close so my eyes can get lost in the life of your eyes.” As I walked her back to her apartment in the early morning hours, I leaned in to kiss her good night. “No, don’t,” she said, pulling away. “I want you to, but I don’t want the policemen to see.”

There were policemen everywhere in Cairo, many of them merely self-appointed guardians of Muslim morality. “Eighty million people in this country, and every single one thinks they are the Prophet of Islam,” Lana said. It was customary for men to walk down the street holding each other’s hands, but if a man and a woman did so, male passersby walked in between to break them up or called out bravely from afar,
“Whore.”

Lana took pity on the real policemen, most of them country kids in shabby white uniforms that hung on them like
galabeyas
, and so overwhelmed by the customs of the big city they could not help but look down at the feet of pedestrians. They had never seen so many shoes. Lana was a doctor and these were her favorite patients, the fellaheen, poor, hardworking peasants. “Their eyes,” she said, “are wrinkled in the corners from so much time in the sun. It’s like their eyes have a permanent smile.”

A childhood illness had permanently damaged her spine. “I spent most of a year unable to move, and my parents would come into my room and tell me what a lucky little girl I was,” she said. “God must love me since he blessed me with such good parents who have money to make me better. ‘Look at all the other sick children who weren’t as lucky,’ they’d say. I didn’t feel lucky lying on my stomach for a year. And if God thought I should be grateful, then I didn’t want anything to do with him. But I couldn’t tell my parents I didn’t believe in God anymore. It would’ve hurt them, so I kept it to myself.”

I wondered if the handicap that had thrown her back so far inside herself and alienated her from those closest to her had also played a part in making her moral intellect whole and clear, as the solitude of blindness had with Taha Hussein. Unlike those of most Egyptians, Lana’s affections were neither restricted to her family nor so abstractly expansive as to encompass all the
umma.
She loved Egypt and she loved Egyptians, and criticized and cursed her country and its people—and then despised me for giving her so much room to say whatever she wanted about Egypt. She knew the rules dictated that she wasn’t supposed to say such things in front of a foreigner. She wanted to know why I liked her. Was it vanity, because of how she openly criticized the Arabs and praised the West? Did I just want an Arab to mirror my thoughts back to me? Sadness covered her face like a gloved hand and forced her eyes shut.

“Of course I want what the West has to offer,” she said. “Freedom and all the things that come with it, but why can’t I have that in my
culture, my language, my city? Sometimes I just wish Arabs could stop thinking about the West,” she said. “I wish we could be alone to figure out what we’re doing. But the Westerners I’ve known have been like a lifeline to me. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be cut off.”

Lana attended a private German-language secondary school in Cairo (German was her second language, English her third) and then medical school. She took a job in a large hospital where a colleague courted her by announcing his interest in German philosophy, Nietzsche in particular. “Then one day,” she said, “he started talking about Islam, and he sounded like a fundamentalist. So I asked him how he could reconcile Nietzsche with Islam. He said he wasn’t about to, and that he didn’t care for Nietzsche at all. He used Nietzsche to get my attention and to lead me back to Islam—where all the answers are. He wanted to save me from myself.”

More often, it is women who must save men from themselves. Women do not veil to protect their own virtue, but to take responsibility for male desire. The veil’s purpose is not to render women modest before God but rather—as the one instance of veiling in the Quran shows—to manage male sexuality and keep men from succumbing to their animal instincts. As such, men are accountable not for their own actions, say, for rape, but for safeguarding honor, the family’s, the tribe’s, the nation’s, and their own. Honor killing and Arab nationalism have the same taxonomy: as the honor of a clan takes priority over the life of an individual woman, the rights of the individual human being are nothing next to the honor of the Arab nation.

Women without close male kin to ensure that the family name remains honorable are both vulnerable and dangerous, like Amna and her sister in
The Nightingale’s Prayer
, and like Lana. Lana’s father had died several years before, leaving her, her mother, and two brothers, who were powerless to ward off undesirable suitors, like an American. The elder brother suffered from a drug addiction, and the
younger was a high-school student only old enough to want answers to questions he had not yet learned to ask. Lana overheard cassette tapes of fundamentalist preachers coming from her younger brother’s room and wanted to talk to him, to guide him, but her mother, fearing the deracination of another of her children, warned her off. She was protecting her son to doom him.

Masculine energy is a powerful force. It creates civilizations and destroys them. In every society there are only two internal checks to the inchoate charisma of its young men lest they lose themselves in free-floating violence that takes everyone down with them: there are the male elders, and, even more important, there are the women, mothers and wives. Every society must decide how to best use its manhood to create, govern, and defend itself; none can afford it when either the elders or the women urge their young men to take them to the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, it isn’t just the male elders who have been pushing young men to violence. Perhaps the unhappiest fact of the Arabic-speaking Middle East is that Arab women have been as well.

A 9/11 joke: A woman sees a man coming out of a men’s room in Cairo (or Riyadh, or Damascus, or Beirut, or Baghdad) and asks him, “Are you Osama bin Laden?” “Why, no,” says the man. “Why would you think such a thing?” “Because,” she says, “he’s the only man left in the Arab world.”

It’s just a joke, but it gets at something important about the Middle East, which is that often Arab women hold men in contempt if they are not willing to kill and die for Arab honor. Arab women are complicit in the violence of Arab societies, and so it should come as no surprise that of late Arab women have picked up the mantle of martyrdom and chosen to suicide themselves while killing innocents. After all, many have been sending their men to their deaths for years. “The womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon,” Yasser Arafat is supposed to have said.
⁴
Arab women are victims of outrages like honor killings and female genital mutilation, and also
victims of the law, but they are not innocent, or no more innocent than the infant boys that they raise to adolescence and manhood. This is why the education of Arab women is so controversial, because the guardians of tradition want them to become stronger, healthier, and smarter reproductive factories of Arab resistance. Arab liberals have had a very different project in mind.