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  Dr. Hani agreed and bought in her name a luxury flat with three bedrooms and a living room in the upscale Tourelle neighbourhood. Then he demonstrated his generosity by paying her a fifty-thousand-pound bride price and buying her, as an engagement gift, a ring with a solitaire diamond. Vows were exchanged at her home at a splendid party that was limited to relatives and close friends. Dr. Hani persuaded his first wife that he had taken on additional responsibilities at the college, which required that he work every day until evening, and at the same time reorganised his lectures so that they were all over early. He would go daily directly from the college to Nourhan’s flat, then be home at the end of the day. The newly-weds were of one mind on everything, except one.

  Dr. Hani liked whisky but Nourhan resolutely banned it, because alcohol, being forbidden by religion, drives the angels from the house, as mentioned in a Noble Tradition. Dr. Hani yielded to her wishes and made do with drinking with his friends every Thursday. He spent such happy days with her that one day, after he had drunk too much with his friends, he burst out, “Boys, I’m in seventh heaven! Anyone who hasn’t been married to Nour El Huda Muhammad Bayoumi has never been married at all!”

  How happy he was then! But when did happiness ever last, and for whom?

  Nourhan graduated with honours, her husband having put in a good word for her with his fellow professors. He then worked hard on the president of the university and had her appointed as a teaching assistant. Their life continued as usual, and one day he went to her, they ate lunch, and they made the most marvellous love. Nourhan went into the bathroom, returned with a rosy face, and put her white cashmere dressing gown on over her bewitching body. She sat down in front of him and smiled. Then she said, in a completely normal tone of voice, “Congratulations, darling! I’m pregnant.”

  Dr. Hani was taken by surprise and said nothing for a few moments, staring into thin air as though he didn’t believe it. Then he reminded her, in a gasping, unsteady voice, that they’d agreed not to have children. Nourhan responded immediately, “You and I wanted to prevent a pregnancy, but when Our Lord, Glorious and Mighty, wants something, ‘He says, Let it be, and it is.’ ”

  At this, Dr. Hani exploded in a rage such as she had never seen before, and started yelling at her and threatening her, accusing her of being a liar and evil and of having tricked him. Nourhan smiled sadly and meekly and didn’t answer him back with even one word (since, as a Muslim wife, she was commanded by religion to bear her husband’s anger and meet abuse with charity). Dr. Hani disappeared for ten days, during which Nourhan made no effort to contact him, then returned. But when she went to embrace him, as was her custom, he pushed her away and sat down on the living room sofa. Lighting a cigarette, he said, avoiding looking at her, “I’ve arranged with a colleague at the Faculty of Medicine for you to go in on Monday and have an abortion.”

  In that instant, Nourhan was transformed into a raging lioness, and she yelled, “You want me to disobey Our Lord, Great and Glorious, just to suit you? Impossible! Our Lord has commanded me to obey you in what’s right, not what’s wrong. No creature may be obeyed if that creature demands disobedience to the Creator!”

  He tried to say something, but she cut him off in a voice that echoed off the walls of the love nest: “Listen, Hani! I’m going to say a few words for you to ‘wear like an earring.’ I’m a Muslim woman and will never do anything to anger Our Lord. You’re not going to be of any help to me when I’m thrown into the grave and held to account for my sins! And I’ll have you know that, even if you divorce me, I have ways to make sure the child in my belly gets its rights. Like they say, ‘No one leaves the bathhouse the same as he went in,’ my dear sir!”

  Dr. Hani submitted to the fait accompli after arguments and quarrels and failed attempts to convince her from his side, and yelling and weeping and slapping of her cheeks from hers, and Nourhan gave birth to a beautiful boy child whom she named Hamza (in memory of the uncle of the Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace), and when they celebrated his first birthday, she asked Dr. Hani to secure the child’s future. This time, he made no objection and opened Hamza a bank account in which he deposited a million pounds, and he also gave him a large orange orchard, which he registered in his name. With Hamza there, it was no longer possible to keep the secret and the news made its way to his first wife (via a brief telephone call from an unknown well-wisher) and Dr. Hani was forced into a confrontation with her that ignited a war to the death against both him and Nourhan, who bore the injuries done her by her co-wife patiently and in the hope of heavenly reward, as befits a Muslim woman. Dr. Hani’s children joined their mother’s side and would have nothing to do with him, to the point that the eldest, who was a medical student, was impertinent to him, describing him as “a skirt-chaser.” Dr. Hani couldn’t bear all these problems. His blood pressure rose and he suffered a blood clot in the brain that led to hemiplegia. He was taken ill in Nourhan’s flat, and she spared no effort in looking after him, staying with him for three whole days in the hospital, during which she consulted a number of sheikhs of proven reliability, all of whom ruled that the best thing for Dr. Hani, given his severe medical condition, was for him to be with his first wife and grown-up children.

  Nourhan acted in accordance with the opinion of religion and contacted his first wife, asking her to come and look after her husband at the hospital, then quickly departed, to avoid embarrassment. A few months later, God’s will was made manifest and Dr. Hani’s fated end overtook him. Nourhan then demanded her legal share of the inheritance, which she obtained after a number of problems and court cases with his first wife, all of which she won.

  Such was her history with Dr. Hani El Aasar, God rest his soul, and in what way, pray tell, can Nourhan be said to have committed any sin or violated religion’s code? Would it not be better for those who spread rumours about her to fear God and have some shame?

  4. They say Nourhan is a dangerous woman, who messes with men’s minds and uses sex to gain mastery over them, then does with them what she will.

  Good gracious! Are merits to be turned into faults? Blessings into punishments? What fault is it of Nourhan’s if men like her? Are we to punish her for her beauty? Does she have to be misshapen and repulsive for us to accept her? All her life, Nourhan has dressed respectably, followed the rules of religion, and not allowed any man who was not her husband or a close relative to lay even a fingertip upon her, even when she was fully clothed. As for the sex, would that every Muslim wife would put on half the show that Nourhan would put on for her husband! Is not the Muslim wife commanded by the precepts of religion to please her husband in bed using every method (the two forbidden acts, namely intercourse during menstruation and penetration of the anus, excepted)?

  Do not the greatest scholars of religion call on the Muslim wife to be an “obedient whore” in her husband’s bed, so as to satisfy his sexual appetites and preserve him from vice? Nourhan had been a naive, inexperienced girl who knew nothing of sex, so she laboured and toiled to acquaint herself with it. She read a lot and watched dozens of instructional films on the internet until she had learned the arts of the bedroom and practised these (in religiously approved fashion) time after time, until she perfected them. She learned to pluck out the hair on her body (front and back), moisturise her skin using the Moroccan Mixture, clean her intimate areas and fumigate them with incense in the Sudanese manner, and then rub them with a fruit-flavoured perfumed oil (apricot or apple). Had she not learned to arouse her husband (in religiously approved fashion)? How to turn off the bedroom lights and light candles and then burn benzoin resin in order to prepare her husband psychologically for love? How to direct a grave, passionate look at her husband and then bite her lower lip to indicate her desire? How to wear a revealing nightdress and then lean over in front of her husband, apparently without meaning to, to bewitch him with the sight of her breasts? She had bought a belly-dancer’s outfit for an exorbit
ant sum and learned how to dance in front of him with lascivious and loveable abandon. And she had learned, in bed, when to moan, how to whisper thrilling words in her husband’s ear, and how to play with “the seven erogenous zones” of his body, driving him crazy (since we are speaking of religiously sanctioned pleasures, there is no call for prudishness or embarrassment). Nourhan had learned how to give her husband pleasure using her plump, soft behind without performing the forbidden act of penetration. She had learned how to suck her husband’s phallus slowly and smoothly—as religion permits her to do—and indeed had even begun offering him fruits, cinnamon syrup, and pineapple juice long enough ahead of intercourse to make the taste of his semen in her mouth more palatable. Are we to blame Nourhan for her efforts and her prowess in the area of sex? Are we to blame her for satisfying her husband and keeping him blameless of sin? Should we not rather blame the Muslim woman who withholds herself from her husband, or neglects him in bed, causing him to fall, God forbid, into vice? Nourhan is a virtuous Muslim woman (we give precedence over God to none!) who abides by the teachings of religion and has never deviated from them by so much as a finger’s breadth.

  Finally, the only thing remaining where such rumours are concerned is Nourhan’s relationship with Eng. Essam Shaalan.

  Nourhan was a widow before she was thirty. Alone, she bore responsibility for her son Hamza. True, she had a large monthly income from her share of the inheritance, as well as her salary from the university and her late husband’s pension, but she felt that Mansoura had become too small for her and wanted to raise her son in the capital, where everything was better. She therefore laboured persistently until she was transferred to Cairo University. She rented out her flat in Mansoura and lived in a “new rent” flat in El Giza, then exerted herself until she got a job as a presenter on the People’s Radio station, and when the cement crisis hit two years ago, the head of the station charged her with the task of holding interviews about it. She conducted a one-on-one with Essam Shaalan, manager of the Bellini cement factory, and so impressed him with her efficiency that he offered her a job as the factory’s media advisor at an attractive salary, with easy working hours that would not conflict with her work at the university and the radio. Nourhan accepted the position and did her best to carry out its responsibilities in a way pleasing to God. Unfortunately, however, the same old story repeated itself. Essam Shaalan imagined that she was an easy woman and tried to seduce her, but she taught him a harsh lesson in morals and quit the job immediately. Essam pursued her but she ignored him totally. He then offered to marry her, but she refused and informed him that she had dedicated her life to her son Hamza. All the same, he persisted, striving to persuade her that their marriage would be in Hamza’s interest because Essam would be a surrogate father to him. In the end, Nourhan accepted, on two conditions: that he buy her a flat in a suitable area of Cairo where she would live with Hamza, and that it be a common-law marriage, so that she would not lose the late Dr. Hani’s pension (Sheikh Shamel had given this arrangement his blessing from the religious perspective).

  Essam married her at the office of a friend of his who was a lawyer, and bought her the flat she now lives in in the Sheikh Zayed neighbourhood, then used his influence on her behalf so that she could take unpaid leave from the university and be transferred to work as a presenter on TV.

  What exactly is wrong, or sinful, about what Nourhan did? She married twice according to the custom and practice of the prophet and messenger of God. So far as the age difference is concerned, the True Religion does not forbid marriage between a Muslim woman and a man twenty or thirty years her senior. And then, isn’t it possible that Nourhan really loved Essam? Isn’t it possible that she was impressed by his determination to marry her, or perhaps trusted him and felt he was capable of protecting her and taking care of Hamza?

  What is certain is that Essam Shaalan is attractive to women. At first glance, he looks strange, off-putting, outside the norm. But—and bear in mind that he is past sixty—he still has a strong, slender body with no flab, thick, entirely white hair, and a dark brown face with hard, rocky features; to these characteristics may be added his loud, gruff voice and the sceptical, searching looks he directs at whomever he’s talking to, as though questioning their veracity. This rough, confrontational nature (so often attractive to women) he may have acquired while in prison camp, where a defiant response is the only alternative to being broken, or may be due to the effect of alcohol, as he never goes to bed without first drinking half a litre of whisky. At the same time, as a Marxist since his youth, he despises false, bourgeois refinements and is always completely frank, calling things by their names even at the risk of people considering him insolent or foul-mouthed. He is quite capable of interrupting whomever he is talking to, whatever his position or status, and saying in peremptory tones, “You have no right to say that!” or “You’re just repeating lies. Shame on you!”

  Essam Shaalan had been a leader of the student sit-ins of 1972. The protesters had demanded that President El Sadat come to Cairo University, but instead he sent the minister of youth to negotiate with them. When the students demanded democracy and freedom, the minister was at a loss and said, “My dear children, it’s not my decision to make. I’m just a postman. All I can do is pass on your demands to His Excellency the President.”

  Silence reigned for a few minutes, and then suddenly the gruff voice of Essam Shaalan rang through the hall: “We thought you were a minister and capable of taking responsibility but you say you’re a postman. We don’t need postmen. Please be so good as to leave.”

  Immediately, the students started chanting “Out! Out!”

  The minister left to the accompaniment of mocking comments and the incident came to be remembered as a glorious deed, one that was recounted to prove the courage of Essam Shaalan, who had thrown out a minister sent by El Sadat. Shaalan had never married because he’d spent years on the run from the security apparatuses. By the time his situation was normalised, he was getting on in years and had grown accustomed to being alone and free. He could no longer tolerate life with a wife to hold him to account or watch over him (he considered his relationship with Nourhan a temporary companionship, not a marriage). At the same time, his conscience would not allow him, at his advanced age, to have a child and then leave it to face the evils of the world while still young. Essam Shaalan withdrew from the political struggle and worked his way up until he became manager of the Bellini cement factory. His material circumstances also improved, though he continued to be influenced by Marxism and was a member of several NGOs for the support of freedom of thought and the combatting of religious fanaticism. He scrupulously signed statements of solidarity with writers whose works were confiscated or who were put on trial because of their writings. He refused to buy a Mercedes because of its bourgeois associations and made do with a spacious recent-model Peugeot. He never wore a tie and wore a safari suit in the summer, with a roll-neck pullover under it in the winter.

  * * *

  One day, Engineer Essam left the factory at 7 p.m. Madany, his driver, took his briefcase, which was stuffed with papers, and, as soon as he had settled into the car’s back seat, the engineer said, “Take me to Sheikh Zayed, Madany.”

  As though he’d been given a secret password, Madany drove till he was through the factory gates, then stopped in a side street, lowered the curtains over the windows, opened the boot, and took out a bottle of whisky, an icebox, and a cup full of pickled cucumbers, placing everything on the table attached to the back of the seat in front of Eng. Essam, who swallowed a Viagra, so that its effects would be felt at the right time. Essam spent the time on the road from Turah to Sheikh Zayed drinking and listening to the songs of Umm Kulsoum. Throughout the year and a half of their relationship, he had failed to persuade Nourhan to allow him to drink in the flat. He respected her piety and avoided discussions of religion with her so as not to anger her, and he’d agreed to a common
-law marriage for her sake, but he didn’t think she had the right to prevent him from drinking in a flat he’d bought with his own money. Essam believed in God, but after extensive reading had been assailed by doubts about all religions and no longer believed that God, the highest, absolute power, could have chosen people like us to speak in His name. Often he wondered whether there really was another life after death. No one had died and returned to tell us what happens. Wasn’t it possible that death was just an extinguishing of the consciousness, after which the body would be transformed into some other form of matter? He shared these opinions only with a few of his old socialist friends at their drinking sessions. He’d say to them, sarcastically, “There are a million rational people in the Rastafarian sect who believe that Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, is God Himself and who worship him with utter devotion and sincerity. Note that Haile Selassie has been dead for fewer than forty years. Imagine this creed after four hundred years. There will be millions of people worshipping Haile Selassie and ready to defend their religion to the death.”

  Essam viewed religion as follows: all religions begin as folklore, and with time acquire sanctity because people need to have faith in the unknown in order to put up with their hardships and sense of injustice.