Between Terror and Tourism. Michael Mewshaw
a café for orange juice, Fidehla readily agreed, and I began to suspect that this might not have been a coincidental meeting. Maybe she was one of his “hard-core” Muslim friends, a fundamentalist with radical leanings. But that was difficult to believe as she joshed and giggled.
We sat under an arcade thick with flies drawn by the aromas of a cooking brazier. A waiter waved sticks of incense to cut the smell and the smoke, but that didn’t disturb the flies that landed on our lips and eyelids. A blind man, hand in hand with his daughter, waited wordlessly at our table until I pulled a bill at random from my pocket. The daughter grabbed it and hurried her father away, and Fidehla and Michael broke into laughter. “You gave the guy six bucks,” said Michael, howling. “He can afford to retire.”
Suddenly, the café convulsed in frenzy; everybody shoved a palm out for baksheesh. The waiter rattled a sheet of paper claiming that he had serious medical ailments and needed money for an operation. I promised a big tip, which mollified him. He refolded the document and fetched our orange juice.
With minimal prompting, Fidehla recounted that she had been born into a devout Muslim family; all the women wore headscarves. She didn’t consider this extremist. To the contrary, she believed in dialogue between Christians and Muslims and planned to return to England to bridge the gap between communities.
I mentioned Martin Amis, one of England’s most prominent novelists and essayists, who currently taught at the University of Manchester. Fidehla had never heard of him or the controversy over his supposedly anti-Islamic sentiments. This was surprising, since some of the most strident accusations against Amis had been leveled by a fellow faculty member at the university.
I knew Martin Amis and considered him a friend. He was no racist or right-wing rabble-rouser. But he had made some ill-judged comments about Islam. In 2006, he told the London Times: “There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.”
Fidehla promised to look up Amis online but said she thought she already understood his position: “Probably he wanted to provoke discussion.” She saw his comments in the context of the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings in London. The English referred to the attacks, which killed more than fifty commuters on the Underground and on a bus, as 7/7, a date that resonates in the UK as 9/11 does in the US. Fidehla said she understood why people were scared and why they lumped together everybody who appeared to be a Muslim. She had been scared herself, twice over because she was in jeopardy both from random terrorism and from indiscriminate reprisals against Asians.
I had been living in London at the time of the Tube bombings and remembered the tension—the sense that a lethal virus had invaded the city and might sicken and kill anybody, everybody. In the newly flat world, it wasn’t just goods and services, trade and opportunity, that circulated freely. Personal grievances and ideological conflicts festered in obscure corners and then insinuated themselves throughout the globe. Everyone with a gun, anybody with a bomb and a willingness to die for an idea, had the opportunity to make his point—even a point nobody could comprehend.
I confessed to Fidehla and Michael that in the aftermath of 7/7, I had eyed every Middle Easterner with suspicion. “I’d catch a bus with my wife and notice a brown person with a backpack and wonder whether it was racist of me to be afraid-and whether it would be worse, a terrible insult and sign of cowardice, if I got off the bus.”
“Well,” Fidehla said, “at least you didn’t force them to get off. I’m all for tolerance. I don’t support any type of prejudice or violence. Killing innocent people violates the Koran. So does suicide. You know, those men with bombs on their belts, that’s not Islam.”
The small circle of Fidehla’s face showed lively eyes, a prominent nose, a generous mouth without lipstick. She had a disarming smile and a warm, extroverted manner. She stressed that she didn’t subscribe to the concept of takfir, the conviction among jihadis that immoral acts, such as the killing of innocents, were permissible in defense of Islam. “I believe in being strict on myself, not on other people.”
She and Michael suggested that we get together again, with Muslims from their student residence. Fidehla had a roommate named Helima who was more devout than she. A Salafi’ist, the girl was part of a group dedicated to reestablishing the radical practices of early Islam. She had forsaken all idle amusement. No music, no movies, no videos, no photographs.
“Where shall we meet?” I asked.
“At a restaurant,” Michael suggested.
“Brilliant,” Fidehla said. “I haven’t had a good meal since I went to Fuddruckers at the Green Plaza Mall and got sick on a cheeseburger.”
Fuddruckers! The word, the concept, the image of an Anglo-Indian Muslim girl in a hijab eating fast food at an Egyptian mall was enough to give me the bends.
Later that day, with hours to kill, I toured the final resting place of thousands of foreigners who had died in what they regarded as Europa ad Aegyptum. In the neighborhood of Chatby, a series of graves, segregated according to national origin (British, Greek, Armenian) and religious affiliation (Orthodox Greek, Protestant, Jewish, Coptic Orthodox), lay in separate cemeteries along rue Anubis. While the street, named after the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the afterlife, might suggest that in death we’re all equal, the subdivided tombs showed how varied in life were the citizens of colonial Alexandria.
The Greek Orthodox graveyard was half botanical garden, half sculpture park, and a gardener-cum-guardian insisted on guiding me to its highlights. If he hadn’t, I might have overlooked the flat stone inscribed with Cavafy’s name, the date of his death (but not of his birth) and a single word, POET.
Nearby, nobody with a capacity for wonder could have missed the marble extravaganza commemorating la Famille Nader Chikkani. Rhapsodically described in Lucien Basch’s study Les jardins des Morts, the tomb featured a cascade of roses swirling around a beautiful couple who embraced “for eternity in a spiral without end; Eros and Thanatos forever inseparable.”
By comparison the grave of Victor Khouri was a monument of restraint. Khouri’s widow expressed her lapidary sorrow in French: “Mes larmes retombent en rosée rafraichissante sur ton âme, chéri” (“My tears fall down like refreshing dew on your soul, my darling”).
The Old British Protestant Cemetery also had an attendant. It was hard to guess, though, when he had last done any gardening much less any guarding. The entrance was a trash-strewn staircase leading to a desolation of brown grass and desiccated palms. Most gravestones had been leveled like a forest cross-cut by a giant scythe. Was this the work of vandals or of marble thieves?
Still one tomb stood tall, that of Knight Bachelor Henry Edward Barker, commander of the Orders of St. George and St. Michael, who was born in Alexandria in 1872 and died in 1942. Its English inscription sounded slightly hollow in these circumstances: “Proud of his country and a staunch believer in her destiny of service to the world, he spared no effort to bring to Egypt and specially to his birthplace, Alexandria, some measure of the blessings Great Britain herself enjoyed.”
The Coptic Christian cemetery offered no such grand sentiments. Nor did it have a gardener/guardian. Copts, who numbered more than eight million in Egypt, played important roles in the nation’s financial sector and Hosni Mubarak’s wife was said to be sympathetic to them. When Coptic pope Shenuda III was made to pass like a peon through security at Heathrow Airport, Mubarak’s government declared that all British officials, regardless of diplomatic rank, would henceforth be searched when entering Egyptian territory. But the power and wealth of the Copts were nowhere apparent here.
A pyramid of discarded bottles and wadded up plastic bags marked the entrance to a slum cemetery. Chairs, tables and benches barricaded the paths between tombs, and families lounged under shade trees eating a late