The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (9 page)

The Salafi laboratory was Cairo, a living museum of Islamic civilization whose architecture tells a story unfolding over a millennium. Ibn Tulun Mosque was completed in A.D. 879 and named after the
Abbasid commander whose Mesopotamian origins are commemorated in the mosque’s most salient feature, its ziggurat-shaped minaret. Sultan Hassan Mosque, finished in A.D. 1363, is one of the masterpieces of Mamluk mosque building, including separate schools for each of the four major traditions of Sunni thought—Shafi, Maliki, Hanafi, and Hanbali. Al-Azhar, the mosque and university complex, was established in A.D. 975, when the city was under the Fatimids, a Shia dynasty that named the structure after the daughter of the Prophet of Islam, Sayeda Fatima al-Zahra, thus Al-Azhar. The Citadel of Saladin, high atop the Muqattam, was fortified by the Ayyubid ruler famous for defeating the Crusaders and, just as important, for wresting Cairo from the Shia and bringing Egypt back under Sunni control, where it has remained ever since.

Cairo is the flesh and blood of Islamic civilization, from the eternal structures of the pharaohs to the urban sprawl of Nasser City. The Salafis wanted to return Islam to its origins, but there is too much history in Cairo, too much unruly humanity, too much life in the streets, people, ideas, song, smell, music, Islam, sex, beef, lamb, sugarcane, mangoes, guavas, voices, dirt, sand, and animals—a pack of camels idling through traffic on the way to the camel market; the indefatigable, noble donkeys pulling the garbage and remainder carts; the weathered mares and geldings dragging the knife sharpeners’ wagons; cats, Cairo’s lithe and desperate one-eyed predators; and wild dogs.

Dogs had overrun the garden of a large deserted villa across the street from my apartment. A few months after 9/11, I had moved into an eight-story building a block from the Nile where, a neighbor told me, you used to be able to see as far as the Pyramids in Giza. But with the construction boom of the past few decades, now not even the river was visible, though we were easy pickings for the mosquitoes generated in its shoals a block away. The dogs were at the other end of Pail of Milk Street, a pack of semi-feral strays the same golden brown as the Pyramids and the decaying colonial-era villa they
inhabited. They stretched out lazily on the roofs of parked cars under the hot midday sun, and after dark owned most of the small street from sidewalk to sidewalk. But even when the animals were most affable, they were a problem for observant Muslims.

“They are filthy animals,” said Muhammad the doorman, or
bawwab
, of the building I lived in. “It’s in their saliva.”

The
bawwab
is one of the central figures in Cairo life. A good one can make your life comfortable and a bad one difficult, and Muhammad was both. Squat, powerful, and walleyed, he had been a tae kwon do champion in his enormous working-class neighborhood that journalists nicknamed the Islamic Republic of Imbaba, where many of the Islamist cadres were semi-reformed street toughs adept in Asian martial arts. Muhammad was in his late thirties and like much of the city’s working class supported three generations: his parents, his wife, and three children. His education was minimal, though he could read and write Arabic and knew several other languages, like the Polish he had picked up working on an Eastern European construction crew in Libya. He’d risen to manager of an auto shop until a run-in with a superior cost him his job. Now he was reduced to this, he said, pointing to his light blue
galabeya
, a long cotton robe almost like a nightgown, the traditional garb of the fellah and the uniform of Cairo
bawwabs.
Most
bawwabs
don’t give the robe a second thought, but Muhammad hated the garment. “I used to wear a shirt and pants to work.”

He had slid back down the few rungs it is possible to climb in Egypt, and believed that learning English would help him back up. We sat in front of the building at night trading verbs, one English for one Arabic, sharing a piece of watermelon or a pastry from one of the neighborhood stores, while he kept his one good eye on the dogs across the street.

“They have dirty bacteria in their mouths,” he explained. Of course, all the Cairo bestiary was steeped in the same dirt and refuse, and if it is not clear why God had gone to the trouble of creating an
existence that by its very nature was unclean, Muhammad the doorman explained his hatred of them by citing Muhammad the Prophet of Islam. “It is a filthy animal,” Muhammad the doorman said Muhammad the Prophet said. “It says so in the Quran.” In reality, the bad reputation of the dog seems to come from a hadith of questionable transmission.
¹

The hadith, or the sayings or traditions of the Prophet, is one of the sources of the sunna—in Arabic the word means “the way” or “the path”—and the basis of what over the years has become Muslim orthodoxy, Sunni Islam. Each hadith consists of two parts, the text itself and the chain of transmission by which that text has come down from one source to another, or
isnad—
that is, A said B said C said D said X—which establishes the genealogy and probity of the hadith. The
isnad
is something like a game of telephone, and Muslim scholars know that many links in the chain of the approximately 600,000 hadith were less than credible. The two most reliable collections of hadith, both known as
al-sahih
, or “the genuine,” were assembled by two ninth-century scholars, al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, who whittled down the numbers to get the most authentic specimens. Bukhari ended up with more than seven thousand hadith, and Muslim some nine thousand. Their editing task was surely made yet more arduous by certain hadith like the one that has Muhammad saying: “You must compare the sayings attributed to me with the Koran; what agrees therewith is from me, whether I actually said it or no.”
²
As this patently self-referential example suggests, hadith were frequently forged years after the death of Muhammad to advance different political and religious agendas.

The nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan claimed that unlike other religions, Islam “was born in the full light of history.” Renan, one of Edward Said’s favorite Orientalist targets, was famous for his biography of Jesus, the difficulties of which he must have had in mind when he wrote of Islam, “The life of its founder is as well known to us as those of the Reformers of the sixteenth century.”
³
The analogy is imprecise, for while there certainly is a lot of material about the early days of Islam, much of it is of questionable veracity and unlikely to stand up to the rigors of Western scholarship.
⁴
And yet it is clear why Renan, critical of all revealed religion, would want to cite the Protestant Reformers.

Even in Renan’s time, the notion that Islam was in want of a reformation was a commonplace. It is not quite accurate to liken the Salafis to the sixteenth-century Protestant movement that sought to loosen the Catholic Church’s authority and the grip of its clerical establishment and return the gospel to the people for whom it was intended, but the Muslim reformers did chip away at the past, in order to throw into greater relief the Prophet of Islam and the Quran, God’s last and perfect message to mankind.

Al-Quran
means “the recitation.” Muslims believe it is a holy text that descended to Muhammad from God by way of the angel Gabriel, not at once but bit by bit. According to Muslim tradition, it was only after Muhammad’s death, during the reign of the caliph Uthman, that the text of the Quran was compiled and bound in a book, or
mushaf
, which is said to be the same edition we have today. The book opens with an invocation, or opening prayer,
al-fatiha
, and is thereafter laid out in no apparent order except that the longer chapters, or
surat
(sing.,
sura)
, are at the front of the book and the shorter ones at the back. There are 114
surat
, some of them believed to have been composed when Muhammad was in Mecca, and others when he was leading the first Muslim state after he brought his followers to Medina. It was during this period of governance that the majority of verses, or
ayat
, dealing with legislative matters appear, including
al-baqara
, “The Cow,” the second and longest
sura
, with many famously violent passages. The Quran is further divided into thirty parts, the last of which is where children usually begin their first attempts at memorizing the book since these
surat
, all Meccan, are shorter, as are the verses, many of them rhyming, like the chapter
al-rahman.
That was Muhammad the
bawwab’s
favorite.

If it is thought inappropriate to value some parts of the Quran more than others—it is a sacred text and not a songbook—the reality is that
al-rahman
is widely cherished as one of the most musical of all the chapters in a text famous for its ability to enchant listeners. Many Muslims know the book not as a written text but as a recited one, with many of the most famous reciters enjoying a status somewhere between religious figures and pop stars.
⁵
Sometimes Muhammad would break into impersonations. “This is how Tablawi sounds,” he said, reciting a verse in the style of that Egyptian sheikh. Then, changing the pitch and rhythm, he rehearsed the same verses in a different manner. “And this is Abd el-Basset,” he said, shutting his eyes and riffing on his hero like a Mississippi bluesman.

I listened to Abd el-Basset’s version of
al-rahman
until I knew not only the
sura
by heart but also every modulation of the man’s voice and where it most dangerously tempted song. For even the most poetical passages of this
sura
, or indeed of the entire Quran, are expressly neither music nor verse. Rather, they are written in a rhyming prose called
saja’
, and the edifice of Islam rests on this distinction between poetry and revelation.

Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad was illiterate, the point being that since he could not have written the Quran, nor could he have read from the Torah or the Bible to copy it, he was not the author of a text but the vehicle of a revelation. And yet in the Arabic tradition, poets also were inspired by external forces, like desert spirits, jinn. So, to prove that Muhammad was not merely a poet but a prophet—a man spoken to by God and not by a desert spirit-passages in the Quran challenge any man, or jinn, to compose a
sura
like those found in God’s final and perfect message. If the style of the Quran can be copied, then Muhammad is at best a poet; and if Muhammad is not a prophet, then the Quran is not a revelation. The inimitability of the Quran is proof of Muhammad’s prophetic vocation as well as Islam’s central miracle. God is one, says the
shahadah
, the Muslim profession of faith, but his message and his prophet depend on each other, like the rest of the world, as in the
al-rahman
sura
, where all is in manifest balance, pearls and coral, sun and moon, jinn and man.

Muhammad the
bawwab
had never seen a jinn, but he fought once with an afreet, a smaller and less menacing desert spirit, when he was in the Libyan Desert. “One night I was in my tent reading,” he said, “and I felt this hand hit me in the back of the head.” He reen-acted the drama, throwing himself forward, reeling, and staggering a few steps on the sidewalk. “I turned around to see who did it,” he said, his head pivoting and eyes widening. “And then I got slapped in the face!” His head jerked back, and he grabbed at the front of his own robes. “Then it shook me and I tried to push it away, and finally it let go and I ran out of the tent.” I asked him if he saw it. He looked at me as if I were crazy—did I really not know that it is because the afreet is invisible that makes it an afreet? Hearing my account of Muhammad’s encounter with the afreet, my Quran teacher rolled her eyes. “You’ve never seen an afreet?” Dalia asked, tilting her head and smiling. “Are you sure?”

Dalia was in her mid-twenties and strikingly beautiful. She had sharp Turkish, aristocratic features, was fair and slender, with pale olive skin, a strong, aquiline nose, long, elegant fingers, and a smoky, tremulous voice that held the attention of her male students as long as she liked. She was veiled and wore long, colorful embroidered robes that fell past her ankles, allowing a glimpse of the high heels she’d matched to her outfits, a seemingly different veil-and-robe combination for every class, a wardrobe that included every conceivable hue of green, the color of Islam. Her glamour reflected her confidence in her ability to put Islam’s most modern face forward to Western students.

I tried to memorize as much of the Quran as I could muster, starting with the thirtieth and final part of the book, as a child would. Dalia brought me a recitation of the entire Quran recorded on a few dozen cassette tapes by a Saudi sheikh. “It is much more modern than the Egyptian reciters,” she said.

Still, I much preferred the Egyptians, even as I understood why
Dalia liked the sharp and austere Saudi rendition. It was a version that was the product of a purified, intellectual, and urbanized Islam that was meant to replace what the Muslim reformers came to criticize as an emotional and superstitious faith that subscribed to folk beliefs, feared dogs, and believed in the reality of jinn and afreet—in other words, Muhammad the
bawwab’s
Islam. Dalia, on the other hand, was a Salafi.
⁶

 T
wo hundred and fifty years ago, the apostle of the Islamic reformation walked out of the Nejd, a province in what is today Saudi Arabia, no less passionate, bigoted, and God-delirious than Martin Luther. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) is the very sheikh critics of Islam, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, typically blame for everything that has gone wrong with the religion. Those who follow his instruction chafe at the term regularly used in the West to describe them, “Wahhabi,” and opt for
muwahhidun
, or those who observe
tawhid
, the “unity of God.”