Authors: Craig Parshall
G
ILEAD
A
MAHN WAS ASLEEP
for the last leg of the trans-Atlantic flight. He awakened as the Egyptian Air pilot announced they were preparing to land at Cairo International Airport.
Gilead rubbed his eyes and glanced out the window. As the plane neared the airport, Gilead surveyed the outstretched Egyptian metropolis that housed some seventeen million inhabitants.
After the plane landed, he pulled down his single piece of luggage from overhead, shuffled slowly behind the passengers down the aisle of the jumbo jet, and finally, descended the metal staircase to the tarmac. He knew the significance of that moment.
It was the first time he had set foot on Egyptian soil since he was a boy. Since the time his father had moved him to the United States, he had never returned to Egypt. Until now.
For Hassan Gilead Amahn, his appearance in Cairo, Egypt, at this time and under these circumstances was slowly becoming an overwhelming, even staggering reality.
He knew what it meant. He hoped that his appearing, at that time and place, would be like the first spark that is set to dry kindling.
Gilead hailed a cab. He was picked up by a dented, older-model yellow Mercedes. It dodged in and out of the horn-blasting, weaving, and bobbing mass of vehicles that were passing through the downtown of Cairo. He drove past sights that had been long forgotten, but that were now rekindling old memories.
Past the blocks of five-story-high square, unadorned red-brick apartment buildings, separated from each other by streets full of rubble, trash, and refuse. Children were playing amid the broken concrete between the buildings. They occasionally passed carts pulled by donkeys, which were piled high with alfalfa or onions.
Gilead gazed through the dirty cab window at the streets of crowded shops selling raw meat and vegetables hanging from hooks, baskets, and trinkets. Some of the shops had small, makeshift hibachis constructed out of metal buckets, with burning coals in them.
And everywhere he saw the robed adherents of Islam. The men in their fezzes and headscarves, and the womenâa few in modern dress and driving vehiclesâbut many, if not most, walking like human silhouettes along the roadside, draped in the black burkas of traditional Muslim dress.
This was Cairo. It had been his home. And it had also been the scene of his mother's cruel murder.
And now, at last, he was here again. This was the beginning.
Gilead asked the driver to take him to the Citadel, in the Islamic quarter of Old Cairo.
“You wish me to take you to the front gateâ¦for the tourist's trip?”
“No, not there,” Gilead replied. “Take me beyond, to the Salah ad-Din Square. Just outside the Citadel. Drop me off there.”
The Citadel, a mighty fortress of Islamic power, with its domed top, huge mosque, and two towering spires on each side, surrounded by battlements and walls from the thirteenth century, had initially been constructed by Salah ad-Din, known to Westerners as “Saladin.”
Saladin, Sultan of Egypt, had left Cairo with his Muslim army and attacked Jerusalem in the fall of the year 1187. His goal was to drive the Crusaders of Christendom out of Jerusalem forever. After an eighty-eight year occupation by the Crusaders, on October 2, 1187, Saladin's forces finally breached St. Stephen's Gate in the outer wall of Old Jerusalem, invaded the city,
vanquished the Crusaders, and broke their grip on Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
The cabbie pulled the dented yellow Mercedes to a stop at the curb at the perimeter of the Salah ad-Din Square, and turned around, reaching out his hand.
Gilead paid him fifty Egyptian pounds, grabbed his bag, and exited the taxi.
In the open square leading to the mammoth Citadel, Gilead surveyed the army of pedestrians. Tourists from Europe, pilgrims from Africa, Muslim worshipers from around the world swarming to the Citadelâa symbol of ancient Islamic domination.
Gilead walked approximately thirty yards into the square, then put down his bag and zipped it open. He grabbed a handful of small pamphlets. Then he closed his eyes, lifting his hands to the sky, and said a silent prayer.
Then the young man opened his eyes. With his hands still outstretched, and in a voice loud enough for passersby to hear, he said,
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oilâ¦
“D
O YOU SPEAK
E
NGLISH
?”
“I do some,” the Swedish tourist replied. He was standing with his wife in front of Gilead Amahn, in the Great Square of Salah ad-Din.
“Do you come to see the Great Citadel? And the mosques?” Gilead asked.
The Swedish man and his wife nodded.
“Have you read about the great Salah ad-Din, the Muslim warrior who built the Citadel?”
The man nodded again.
“The great Salah ad-Din, the Sultan of Egypt, followed one whom he believed was greater than he. He followed the Prophet Muhammad,” Gilead continued.
As Gilead was conversing with the tourist couple, an older man, sporting a bushy moustache and wearing a long black robe and red fez on his head, passed through the tourists, business-people, and Muslim worshipers in the square and stopped a few feet short of Gilead, staring at him intently.
Gilead ignored him and pressed on.
“But there's One whose coming has been foretold. There is One greater than Salah ad-Din. And greater than Muhammad. He shall establish a new kingdom and shall rule the world with a rod of iron.”
“What are you saying?” the man in the fez asked in Egyptian Arabic.
Gilead quickly turned to the man and answered him in the same dialect.
“I am preaching the coming of God's Anointed One. The One who is greater than Muhammad. One whose coming has been prophesied from age to ageâ¦the One whom you have rejectedâ¦the One who is
not
worshiped in all your great Islamic mosques. The One whom the Quran has spoken aboutâ¦but both it and you have not understood. You hear, but you do not listen. You see but you are still blind⦔
The man in the fez threw his arms out in a frantic plea.
“It is forbidden! You must not say these thingsâ¦you defile this holy place!”
Gilead turned from the man in the fez back to the wide-eyed Swedish couple and handed them a pamphlet. Its cover read,
THE ONE WHO IS
GREATER THAN MUHAMMAD.
The Egyptian man continued to yell. Then he bent down, snatched off his sandals, and began striking Gilead in the head with the heels.
“You are accursed!” He continued to strike Gilead in the face and on the head.
Within moments several worshipers, a few local businessmen, and an imam of the local mosque had gathered around Gilead. After learning of his “blasphemy,” they too removed their sandals and began slapping, punching, and kicking him with the heels of their shoes.
Tourists and passersby quickly fled the ever-increasing ring of angry Muslims.
And in the middle was Gilead, covering his head as he was pummeled.
Soon, Muslim worshipers from the el Azhar, Bab Zuweila, and Emir Khair Bey Mosques nearbyâand from as far as the El Hakim Mosque, a full three kilometers awayâwere streaming into the
streets and running toward the Square across from the imposing fortress walls of the Citadel.
Three Egyptian squad cars and several blue-jacketed Egyptian police on foot arrived at the scene and began swinging their batons at the crowd to break it up. The commanding officer at the scene, using a bullhorn, instructed the crowd to disperse immediately.
But without waiting for a response, one of the officers lobbed a tear-gas canister into the mob. Robed men collapsed to the ground coughing and gagging.
The captain with the bullhorn set it down, put on his gas mask, and waded into the crowd swinging his baton left and right, hitting heads and torsos. When he came to the vortex of the mob, where Gilead Amahn had fallen to the ground bleeding from the nose and blinded by the tear gas, coughing and gagging, the captain grabbed him by the neck and dragged him out of the center of the now disorganized crowd, off to a curbside.
When Gilead tried to sit up, he was struck on the back with the officer's baton and collapsed down to the ground again. In a few minutes, after the tear gas had begun clearing, the captain removed his gas mask, wiped the sweat from his face, and then knelt down next to his captive.
“What is your name?” The officer was rifling Gilead's pants pockets and removing his wallet.
“Hassan Gilead Amahn,” Gilead gasped out.
“So, you speak Egyptian Arabic. Are you Egyptian?” the officer asked.
Gilead nodded.
“Are you a Coptic Christian?”
Gilead shook his head no. The officer studied Gilead's passport and driver's license as he was still recovering.
“You live in America?”
“Yes. From the time that I was a boy,” Gilead said, clearing his throat.
“Why did you leave Egypt?”
“My father took me. He got a job in America. I went to school there.”
“You're not a Muslim. You're not a Coptic. What are you?”
Gilead lifted up his right hand. It was wrapped around a small pocket Bible. He handed it to the officer, who glanced at it.
“What you've done is forbidden,” he snapped. “You are a fool. Now lie down on your stomach. Face down. Arms at your sides. Stay in that position until I tell you to get up.”
The officer rose to his feet and flipped on his walkie-talkie.
“And if you move,” he warned Gilead, “then you will die a fool's death.”
G
ILEAD HAD BEEN DRAGGED
in handcuffs to the Egyptian police station and finally to the small cement-block interrogation room. He was seated in a metal chair that had been bolted to the cement floor. While he waited for his interrogator to appear, one of the jailers brought him his wallet.
Gilead opened it and, not surprisingly, found that the small number of Egyptian pounds that had been left there had been removed.
After five minutes a captain of the Egyptian police nonchalantly strolled into the room, a man in his early forties with a well-trimmed moustache and carefully combed hair, which had been dyed black to cover the gray.
He wore the black Egyptian police department uniform with gold epaulets at the shoulders. His coat was unbuttoned in the front, revealing his black police tie and white shirt. He was wetting a finger and applying it to a small coffee stain on his shirt.
Sauntering over to a metal desk, he wheeled the small chair from behind the desk to a position immediately in front of Gilead. Then he sat down and lit a cigarette.
After taking a long draw and blowing it up into the air, he held out his pack to Gilead.
“Cigarette?”
“No, thank you.”
“Do you know why you're here? Do you know why you were arrested?”
“I'm not sureâ”
“Because you committed the crime of contempt of religion. You slandered the heavenly religion. Under Egyptian law that is a serious offense. You should know that. You are an Egyptian also. Is that not true?”
Gilead nodded.
“Your passport shows you are an American. Why are you here in Cairo?”
“I'm here as a messenger of God,” Gilead said quietly in Egyptian Arabic.
The captain leaned back in his chair and took another long draw from his cigarette. He blew several smoke rings, and then waited until they dissipated before he continued.
“Messenger of God. Yes. Cairo sees many of those. The caliphs and the muftis. But there is only one great messenger of God. There is only one true prophet. His name is Muhammad. And you have come here to Cairo to insult him. In front of the Great Citadel. In the square named after our hero, Salah ad-Din. You came to that sacred place to insult us?”
“I came to insult no one,” Gilead replied.
“But you're not a Muslim?”
“No.”
“And you're not a Coptic Christian?”
“I am not a Coptic.”
“Well,” the captain said, picking something from his teeth with his fingernail, “ninety percent of us, as you know, are Muslims here in Egypt. The other ten percent are Coptics. That doesn't leave much room for outside prophets like yourself.”
Gilead studied the captain but did not reply.
“Do you believe you're a prophet?”
Again silence.
The captain rolled his chair up so that he was only a few inches from Gilead's face. The captain placed the heels of both of his patrol shoes down onto the toes of his prisoner's feet and began to press down hard.
“I asked you a question. I need to know whether you are a prophet.”
“You have said it,” Gilead replied cryptically.