Letters to Allah (First letter)

November 2007 (somewhere)

Ya Allah

I am a humble believer in my good forties. My knowledge of Islam goes back to what I have been tought in my childhood, back in the 60s, where I was attending the German School of Bab-el-Louk in Cairo.

Our religion teacher, a middle aged lady, did neither wear a hijab nor a niqab, she lively entertained us with stories about Mohammed, Jesus, the virgin Mary and the Arabian desert. Sometimes we had to learn a surate or two and that was about it. At home, things went on as smoothly as they were at school: my Moslem father did not pray nor fast, Egyptian television broadcast remarkably often belly dance shows.

Faiza Kamel, the famous national singer, was urging you, ya Allah, in her songs, in a daring décolté by the way, to keep an eye on Egypt and to protect her. I wonder whether the décolté did bother You, ya Allah. Nobody was distressed to perform your prescriptions in one way or the other, or to follow them at all. If people felt like praying, they did, if they didn’t, nobody would bother them. I hardly remember having ever seen a lady covering her hair. Even the rural women in my father’s native village in the Nile Delta were wrapping their bodies in a sexy “milaya laf”, a black cloth charmingly outlining their feminity. People rarely discussed or argued about religious matters. No lectures were offered in the lavish Maadi club, the part in town where we used to live, or elsewhere. In the morning you would be greeted by a flowery “sabah al ful” or “sabah al ward” followed by a “masa’ al ward” in the evening. The lovely word “saida”, the Egyptian version of “hello, salut, ciao, hola” was yelled out of taxi cabs and was common between friends. Only in my grand father’s diwan, him being the “omda” of the village, men would respectfully use “As salamu alaikum wa rahmat ullahi wa barakatu” in it full length. On Fridays, men would join in for prayers, if they wished and these were exclusively performed within the mosque area itself. It was not yet the custom to transmit the Friday sermon all over the place through potent loud speakers. After all, “khitab al goma’, was meant to be a time for meditation and spiritual recreaction.

Ya Allah, I go back to these days with a smile on my face. This was what I perceived about Islam in Egypt where I spent a happy childhood, a country undergoing tremendous social and political changes. It was Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, the Egypt of the victorious Republicans against the “ancient régime” of King Farouk. I am not pretending at all that it was paradise. Many problems we are facing today have been worked out during that period. But this is not the topic of my letter. I am reporting to You about religion, about Your religion, about Islam, about how it was and how I perceive it now, as a woman in my forties. Honestly, religion was handy, light and sympathetic. The message simple, doable; it focused on good behaviour, social welfare, charity and honesty, “do good and be good”. You were easy on us. You did not burden us with minute rules structuring almost every second of our daily life. Slowly but surely this “divine” situation changed. What happened?

Did You get angry? Did You feel abandoned? Could it be that You were less happy then, in the good old days when You left us to determine the kind of relationship we wanted to have with You, or whether we wanted one at all? Could it be that You needed more attention? That You wanted us believers to look up to You with more respect, even with fear? Ya Allah, You only know the answer. First of all we, the women, were pushed to wear the hijab. The Egyptian hijab consisted and still consists of a piece of cloth covering the hair. We were told so by a couple of old men, pretending to talk on Your behalf: the hijab would suit us better, was written in the Coran, was honourable to a real Moslem women, particularly for her appearance in public, women were “awra” and men had to be protected from her temptational potential. Well. To be honest, the teenage girl in me in the late seventies was quite astonished to see her aunts, who used to care about the latest fashion, all of a sudden deliberately exchange their fancy clothes with undefined all over sort of tissues. First step. Second step. Men showed up with hairy faces, following the prophetic fashion, even Mohamed – that’s what they said – and his followers rarely shaved. OK. What next? It went on very rapidly. I even can’t recall it one by one. In nearly no time, all Egypt was uniformed. People went to religious lectures, Stella beer was banned from public coffee shops, the city was spotted with praying areas – even at Ramses station’s main hall, carpets are spread out for praying -, tv broadcast religious programs, the President – peace be upon him, ya Allah – saw to it that he was broadcast in praying pose surrounded by all the holy men of Al Azhar. All the important issues, be it culture, films, philospophy, day to day life, social topics, marriage, education, were analysed from a coranic perspective: is this or that behaviour or law or whatsoever “halal” or “haram”. So far, so good.

And this is where we stand today, so much closer to You, ya Allah, than ever. We execute every single move You want us to, because we want to make sure we shall gain a place in paradise. We hereby trust men scholarly and untiringly preaching to us how we should do what, how many times, at which period of the day, the week or the year, in which circumstances. We do so much more for You, ya Allah, what do You do for us?

a humble believer
(To be continued)

elsonbati@freesurf.ch

* Basel- Switzerland