Authors: Ahdaf Soueif
The Map of Love (31 page)
‘Centuries of mistrust,’ Dr Yusuf says. ‘You cannot get out of your history.’
‘I know,’ I say.
‘Ya Doctor, history can be changed,’ Deena says, ‘it’s people who make history. The problem is that we are allowing other people to make our history —’
‘But it’s people with power who make history,’ Arwa says, ‘and we have no power. At least when there were two superpowers in the world, we could negotiate a path in the space between them. Now there is no space.’
‘We do have power,’ Deena says. ‘We’re being told we haven’t — but we have. But to use it we have to have the will. And we can’t afford to be rich against poor, Copt against Muslim —’
‘I believe the Islamists could be defused if we had a true democracy,’ Mahgoub says. ‘If everybody, and they too, were allowed to speak publicly. To debate the issues in front of the people. Put them on television, in a proper free debate with Muslim intellectuals, with the Sheikh of al-Azhar —’
‘People will switch off,’ Mustafa says. ‘Salamu
aleikum. None of this will come to anything. I have to go.’
‘What’s the rush?’ Mahgoub says. ‘Stay with us.’
‘No, I’m going. I’ll leave you to put the universe right.’ And raising his arm in a general salute, he leaves.
‘The government won’t do that anyway,’ Deena says. ‘It
opts for the security solution and it tries to outbid the Islamists in the religious stakes: we’re more Muslim than you. And so it plays their game.’
‘What popularity they have is because the people need an Idea. In Nasser’s time — for all its drawbacks, all the mistakes — there was an Idea. A national project. Now what do we have? The Idea of the Consumer? Trying to hang on to America’s hem —’
‘Where will you get a national project now?’ Dr Ramzi asks. ‘You think you can sit here and design a national project? And what is the end of Nasser’s project anyway? What is the outcome?’
‘Ya Doctor, a national project comes about as an embodiment of the will of the people,’ Arwa says. ‘Nasser’s project finally did not work because for the people to have a will it has to have a certain amount of space and freedom, freedom to question everything: religion, politics, sex —’
‘So the sans-culottes had freedom and space?’
‘No, and your revolution here will be an Islamist radical one. Because every other ideology is bankrupt. And capitalism isn’t an ideology, it isn’t something that people can live by — and in our case it just makes people discontented. Look at the advertisements on television. Advertisements for things people can’t have if they saved up for ten lifetimes —’
‘They’re for the ones with palaces in ‘Agami,’ Mahgoub says. People, I think, like TareqAtiyya.
‘You know,’ Isabel says, ‘we have that problem in the States: the widening gap between rich and poor. Some people see it as a threat already. I read an article that compared life in America now to the last years of the Roman Empire.’
‘Capitalism,’ Arwa smiles. ‘In a word.’
‘It seems to me,’ says Isabel, after a moment, ‘that people are completely caught up in trying to analyse the situation. But no one says,
“This
is what we should do.” ’
‘I don’t think anyone knows what we should do,’ I say.
‘I know some things we should do,’ Deena says. ‘We
should speak out against the sanctions on Iraq. We should put a time limit on this so-called peace process. What’s the use of sitting around talking peace when the Israelis are constantly changing the landscape — putting things on the ground that will be impossible to dismantle?’
‘And when the time came, you’d go to war?’ Isabel asks.
‘If we had to. And I would stop this charade of “normalisation”. What normalisation is possible with a neighbour who continues to build settlements and drive people off the land? Who has an arsenal of nuclear weapons and screams wolf when someone else is suspected of having a few missiles? And it
is
our business — because what’s happening to the Iraqis or the Palestinians today will happen to us tomorrow.’
‘And when America cuts off your aid?’ Mahgoub says, with a mischievous glance at Isabel.
‘What aid? Do you know that 70 per cent of what they give us feeds directly back into the American economy?
Directly
, mind you. You think they give us aid because they want to help us? Personally, I’d close the door anyway. I’d mobilise the people to get our economy straight —’
‘They can’t do that. Too many powerful people have links to the West now. Money links. Big business.’
‘There you have it!’ Deena sits back. ‘The interests of the governing class are different — are practically opposed to the interests of the majority of the people.’
‘Ya Deena ya ‘Ulama!’ A man stands by the phone, waving the receiver at Deena. She jumps up. ‘It’s my son,’ she says. ‘I told him he could call me here.’
‘Khalas ya Mahgoub,’ Arwa says. ‘It’s either Israeli domination — backed by America — or the Islamist radicals. Take your pick.’
‘Neither this nor that. We’ll keep both out,’ Mahgoub says. He turns to Isabel. ‘You know, your government,’ he says; ‘all the Americans I meet are good people, but your government’s foreign policy is so bad. It’s not good, you know, for a country to be hated by so many people.’
‘Well,’ Isabel says, ‘as I said, some people think we are already in decline. Moral decline.’
‘History,’ Dr Ramzi says. ‘This is all —’ he waves his hand — ‘nothing. Egypt has been here so long. It has seen many things. In the next millennium — it will still be Egypt.’
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand
In starless nights and wait the ’pointed hour.
John Dryden
It can’t be that bad. Surely it can’t be that bad. There must be a way, only we can’t see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves — we just can’t quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you’ve plotted your position the world around you has changed and you’re running — panting — to catch up. How can you think clearly when you’re running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you — unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.
3 April 1901
No message. No note. Nothing. We have been back three days
.
James Barrington knows something — enough. I deemed it best to remain as faithful as possible to the truth. Indeed, now that I have made the journey I do not see how an account depicting myself and Sabir travelling alone into the Sinai would be in the least believable. I did, however, omit the first section of our adventures and had us meet Sharif Pasha’s party in the Eastern Desert where, learning of our destination and being bound that way themselves, they took us under their protection
.
I relayed this amended version to Sabir, who grasped it with agility, and we rode together to James’s house better friends — I
fancy — than when we started out. James was touchingly relieved to see us, although how much of that relief was due to his fear of having to face the Lord’s music had some ill befallen us, I cannot tell. However, he forgot himself so far as to put his arm round Sabir’s shoulder and punch him playfully a few times. And having changed back into my usual costume (how strange that seemed with all the lacing and fastening and fuss) and sent word to Emily of my return, I sat down
—
without a chaperone
—
and told him of our adventures. And perhaps my account showed something more than I intended for as I came to leave he took hold of my hands and said, ‘You won’t let it go to your head now, Anna, will you?’ And I laughed and asked, ‘Let what go to my head?’ ‘All that desert and stars business,’ he said. ‘You know it won’t do.’
As for our earlier return to the old Baroudi house, it was so like a homecoming that tears of joy were in my eyes. It happened that our return coincided with the first day of the Festival marking the end of the Pilgrimage, and under what different circumstances we rattled up to the great door this time. As I slipped inside and threw off my veils, Layla came running to greet me. We embraced as sisters and she held me at arm’s length and surveyed my appearance. ‘What a handsome young man you have become — and so brown! You will have to put on lots of powder for your next English party.’ She laughed. And little Ahmad called out my name and would not be content but I had to carry him and sit him on my knee while I drank my cold sherbet and told his mother about the journey. But when I was dressed again in my Englishman’s clothes with my hat clamped firmly down on my head, Layla became uneasy
.
‘It’s still me,’ I cried
.
‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘But all the same …’
So I did a pantomime, clicked my heels and kissed the tips of her fingers, and she promised to send me a note; and indeed she has, and I am due to go with her on a visit tomorrow to some ladies of her acquaintance
.
Tomorrow I may hear some news of him
.
Cairo
5 April 1901
My dear Sir Charles
,
I have now been back in Shepheard’s Hotel for almost a week and while it is pleasant enough to have a bathroom, a feather bed and a wardrobe full of clothes, I still miss the simplicity and the grandeur of life in the desert. I am conscious that I have not yet given you a full account of that life I enjoyed for some two weeks — but it was so different from anything that has come within my experience, the scope of it so vast and grand, that I fear my letters will not do it justice
.
Now that I am returned to Cairo I find it harder than ever to sit back and listen to the complacencies uttered so uncaringly at the Agency
—
I fear I am becoming more prickly than is found becoming in a woman
.
But on a happier subject: my new friends only improve with further acquaintance. Yesterday I went out with Layla al-Baroudi to call on a lady named Nur al-Huda Hanim. I have heard the ladies at the Agency speak of the boredom of the visits they have to pay on occasion to the High Harem, and how after the greetings all the ladies sit silent in a circle and sip coffee until it is time to leave. Well, nothing could be more different from the gathering I was admitted into yesterday in a small jewel-like palace by the Nile. Nur al-Huda Hanim (being barely twenty-two) is younger than both myself and Layla, but she is very serious and formidably well educated. I found nothing in her, though, of that lightness of spirit that I treasure so much in Layla. In fact, she seemed rather sad. I learned later that she had recently consented to return to her husband after a seven-year estrangement and that this was an unwilling return undertaken only because her brother (who is older than she and whom she adores) had taken a vow not to marry until he saw her ‘safe in her husband’s house’
.
In her company we found two ladies from France: one a Madame Richard, who is the widow of a French engineer who worked on the irrigation projects. She had elected to remain in Egypt after his death and has apparently been a companion and a
kind of tutor to Nur al-Huda Hanim since then. The other is a most interesting lady by the name of Eugénie le Brun who is married to an Egyptian Pasha (well, a Turkish Pasha really) by the name of Hussein Rushdi. They make a distinction here between the Notables descended from Turkish lineage and those of Egyptian origin. She has made her home here in Cairo and, I understand, become a Moslem. The occasion of this gathering was a visit from a certain Zeinab Fawwaz who normally resides in Alexandria. She is originally Syrian and is very well thought of and has published several articles on the ‘woman question’
—
I see you grow restless immediately but I do assure you, dear Sir Charles, that you would find these ladies congenial. They uphold the idea that a woman’s first duty is to her family, merely arguing that she can perform this duty better if she is better educated. They also write articles arguing against the enforced seclusion of women and point out that women of the fellah class have always worked side by side with their menfolk and no harm has come to society as a result. Madame Fawwaz has published a book which is a collection of short biographies of ladies of note
—
apparently our own Queens Elizabeth and Victoria are among them!
All in all, I do confess, I found the company and conversation most pleasing and quite contrary to the prevailing view of the life of the harem being one of indolence and torpor
.
I shall stop now for I feel I am running on and you will start to think I am now become a ‘feminist’ while I am in truth, as ever, your loving daughter
,