The Baghdad Split

I broke up with N on a warm spring day in Zamalek, the island neighborhood that has always housed foreigners and rich people in Cairo. After she kicked me out I stood waiting for R to pick me up. It was so early not a single vehicle passed alongside the river bank. My small sliver of sidewalk felt like a Noah’s ark in the dust-filled shimmer, and I had a sense that the world was coming to an end. 

I hadn’t planned on breaking up with N, not then, not like this. It was the night of the invasion of Iraq, March 20, 2003, and the only thought I had was of American troops in Baghdad. Still somehow it happened.

There are songs about blossoms and birdsong but in Egypt spring is horribly dusty. It is yellow and dry, with heat waves worse than the worst of summer and barely a sign of nature awakening. Strange how the idea of a season can be imported, I thought, like Christmas snow in the southern hemisphere.

N lived in a dark but cozy ground-floor apartment alongside the Om Kalthoum Tower, named after the most revered figure in Arabic music. Where that tower stood Om Kalthoum’s own villa used to be, overlooking the Nile. A life-size statue of the Lady, as they call her, oversaw the traffic intersection, one hand squeezing a handkerchief the way she always did when she sang. I stared into the stone eyes and the statue suddenly came to life. Between me and you, ditching, cheating, a wound I hid in my heart, Om Kalthoum was telling me, in song. Between me and you, night, separation, a journey you will start. The sun had not come up but someone was already listening to Too Late, loud.

I’ve never liked Om Kalthoum enough to play her music, but when it cascades into hearing range like now it stops me in my tracks. This time she echoed what N said before she asked me to leave: that, even if I had not deceived her as such, I hadn’t been honest with her. I recalled that Om Kalthoum’s villa was torn down to make way for this tower round about the time I was born. The moment felt fated. 

R was awake watching Fox News when I phoned. All kinds of cable networks were live-streaming video game-like coverage of the invasion as it happened. But he seemed to find the idea of me on a street corner holding a plastic bag of my things more compelling. I figured it wouldn’t take him long to drive over from across the river.

R had moved more or less permanently to England at this point, and whenever he was in Cairo we hung out. We’d been classmates as kids but we didn’t grow close till after we graduated college. We were both skeptical and in-between. We had two languages, two value systems to choose from and reconcile. I recalled our time at my parents’ slurping Turkish coffee and dragging on opium-spiked weed, puzzling over what it meant to be from here at millennium’s end. But it made me think that all through that dark, drugged-up buildup to 9/11 I’d had a home by N’s side. There was something heart-rending about that. 

Suddenly I remembered being next to her on the balcony of one of the desert monasteries of Wadi El Natrun, drinking tea with a young monk named Father Jacob. In that memory I am thinking about the father’s loneliness while our hips touch, basking in the warmth of her body and all the pleasure and companionship wrapped inside it, the beauty of her cheek as she brings the little glass to her lips. “There is no obligation to cut all contact with your loved ones once you die to the world,” the black-robed man is saying, and there is such childlike sincerity in his voice, my gratitude for having N almost makes me cry. “It just depends on your ability to endure: whether it makes you tire of your life here to have contact. It is a cruel life: no television, no radio. There are those who tire.”   

***

R was late. He wasn’t late but I was getting anxious standing there waiting for the Flood to carry away what was left of the world. N and I were no longer together and that meant the world would have to be rebuilt. I would have to send out a dove and wait for it to come back with an olive leaf in its beak. 

N was my first real partner. She had just arrived in Cairo when we met. She was my age and she too was a journalist, but she had an American passport that exempted her from the mortification mysteries required to get mine stamped with Western visas. N could be anywhere in the world she wanted, and she was curious about many parts of the world. But she said she would be here for at least two years. She was so attractive and intelligent, so cheerful and earnest and full of energy, I could hardly believe she wanted me. We were twenty-two, going on twenty-three. And for the longest time I thought we were happy together. 

Four years later I was tramping outside her apartment like the homeless. I had broken up with her and I didn’t know how that happened. 

I had been smoking on the sofa in the hall when the dawn azan woke her and, coming out of the bedroom, she fished me out of the dark. She wanted to know what was wrong. It had been months since she wanted to know what was wrong. She must’ve noticed the way I’d been avoiding serious conversation, running in terror from any real intimacy. This morning she just wouldn’t stop asking till I said I didn’t feel we could stay together. And once I said it, there was no going back. I had sealed the fate of the world. N wasn’t mad but she was mad. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her that mad. “Just leave now please,” she said.

So I stood by Om Kalthoum’s statue waiting for R to drive me to my parents’, thinking about the Flood: how it drowns out everything, how to survive it you need to build an ark, collect your animals and wait for the dove to come back with a sign of life. 

My world was being drowned out for the second time in eighteen months—the first time I had lost myself, not N—and even though this wouldn’t be nearly as bad, I was already relearning how to live as I stood there. For the second time in eighteen months I was gathering wood for a doomsday vessel.

***

The dust was making it hard to breathe but I lit up. I turned to the sky. Pink fluff was breaking through a steadily lightening blue. Radiant orange filaments fed into it. It was like a practical demonstration of an image from the Quran that I really liked: until you make out the white thread from the black thread of dawn. Only the other day I’d heard the verse being recited and it had been magnificent. I’d listened hard, beaming because after eighteen months I could appreciate Quran recitation again. 

Recitation is basically one person singing the words of the holy text unaccompanied. At its best it’s a five-sense narrative experience, genuine synesthesia. But it is a slow art and you grow up hearing it during funerary rites. I had never liked it till hashish chilled me out enough to get past the depressing associations. After my father’s death in October 2000 I lost control of my drug taking, hashish and otherwise. The week of 9/11, a bad trip forced me to stop. That was when the waters first began to rise. By the time all the THC drained out of me, leaving me unable to eat or sleep or fuck, I couldn’t hear recitation without panic and distress. That phrase about dawn had been the first time. 

The melody the reciter had sung it to echoed in my head while I gazed at the sky, and I craved the discomfort of holding hashish smoke in my lungs till, exhaling, the rapture made my head fly. A Paul Bowles quote I’d never known what to make of came back to me: If a nation wishes … to Westernize itself, first let it give up hashish. “For Judaism and Christianity,” Bowles wrote, “the means [to achieve release and euphoria] has always been alcohol; for Islam it has been hashish.” It is true the Quran doesn’t mention hashish one way or another, so many believers argue that, unlike alcohol, it isn’t actually prohibited. Theologians have denied this for centuries but it doesn’t seem to matter. With coffee, hashish is supposed to have helped the early Sufis to stay awake for days on end, performing rituals of benediction and invocation till they could access the heavenly realms.

Maybe it was to deflect my mind from the horror of splitting up with N but I found myself thinking again about being Muslim. Smoked and ingested in that spirit, together with Quran recitation and Sufi chant, hashish had given me back the identity that dogmatic religiosity took away in my teens. 

I’d learned about the heritage since then. Part of the reason I couldn’t stop thinking about the invasion was that I’d found out about Baghdad as the seat of the Abbasid caliphate in the eighth and ninth centuries. I’d found out how, in one of history’s greatest ever libraries there, the fabled House of Wisdom, a Thousand and One Nights-famous caliph named Harun Al Rashid and his son al Mamoun commissioned Arabic translations of the entire world’s knowledge base, preserving it. I guess I was aware that, as I stood there, the satellite-guided bombs were dropping on the city. 

I didn’t immediately know quite how, but this felt deeply connected with the moment I was going through, the point I was at in my personal life.

***

When I met N I told her all about my identity issues. She was sympathetic but none of it really registered with her, I realize now, not in the way I needed it to. I told her how I lost my religion between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, how my father being areligious helped with that after my mother’s blind faith alienated me, even though she was no different in this way from anyone else in my life. The empty rituals and arbitrary rules were bad enough but it was the letter of the law replacing morals that I could not stand. You could be cruel and dishonest, you could be a pedophile scammer ruining people’s lives, but as long as you prayed five times a day you were a good man.

I told N that it was religion that drove me out of the country when I went to university in England; that it mellowed me to realize that, though secular, England wasn’t the paradise I’d imagined; and that learning about Muslim Spain—the synergy that Christians and Jews formed with Muslims in al Andalus between the eighth and fifteenth centuries—was how I came to see Islam not as a behavioral code but a world civilization. When the Catholic monarchs expelled the Jewish population from Iberia after Granada, the last Muslim kingdom, surrendered in 1492, it was the Muslim Ottomans that took them in. 

I told her how much I liked the idea of a multicultural realm where people could move across modern borders and up social pyramids no matter the race or the faith they were born into, how Baghdad, al Andalus and the Ottoman empire all embodied that idea one way or another, and how different it felt from the race-crazed, sort-and-label business of European empires, and made me rethink Islam.

Was not the earth of Allah spacious enough for you to emigrate therein? In that context the Quran’s rhetorical question started to make sense. By moving across continents, people become other people. Their identities expand and evolve. And that’s what seems to have been happening to Muslims until they became European subjects. Then, whether because of the way Europeans colonized and divested them or because of their own sense of inferiority, they started shedding the spaciousness within them. Their sense of self, the earth they emigrated in, became small. A world civilization reduced to a dress code, a dietary restriction, or a terrorist organization. It was humiliating. 

That was how, once I was back in Egypt with a job and a girlfriend, I decided to be Muslim again. But I wasn’t going to be Muslim by giving up my critical faculties the way my mother wanted me to, living by a set of dos and don’ts that felt farther removed from anything moral or spiritual than organized crime. I wasn’t going to be Muslim through the generous offices of political correctness, either, by fitting into a West-dominated world as an anachronism or anomaly. No, I was going to be Muslim precisely by living as I chose, acknowledging the Westerner I was in my thinking and my sense of right while finding the space within for my cultural and emotional heritage.

I told N all about this, one way or another, and I didn’t think I needed it to register with her in a deeper way. I understood that those things were outside her experience. N had never had a religion, to lose one. She knew nothing of Orhan Pamuk’s hüzün, the “melancholy of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy” that not only the city of Istanbul but every historically self-aware Muslim space now “carries as its fate”. She couldn’t speak much Arabic. She didn’t like hashish. 

***

By the time R’s Jeep Cherokee barreled into view it was more or less light, and the doormen who had started wiping the cars parked outside buildings clean were giving me sidelong glances. I realized I was shaking. The absolute horror of the first few weeks after my bad trip had come back to me, the despair that overtook me when I had to cut my psychic lifeline by quitting hashish.

Eighteen months on, I hadn’t found a way to tell N how unhappy I’d been since then. N tried to support me through the worst of my anxiety but I was feeling like we lived in different worlds, and for the first time since we met I grew conscious of the fact that she was American. I hadn’t mourned my father when he died a year after we got together, burying what emotions were surfacing into more and more elaborate drug sessions, and when that bad trip went down grief hit me like a nuclear stun gun.  

I grieved not just for my father, not just for those who died in Manhattan, but for the world as I’d known it, the religious identity I grew up with, and the Cairo where I’d taken my father’s existence for granted. I grieved for my stoner self, too, the way I’d read the great Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi while exploring Cairo’s Mamluk architecture, high, and my faith in Muslim scholarship as I found out about all those Arabic-speaking Persians working miracles of science while they orbited Baghdad. 

My neuro-chemical car crash happened within a week of 9/11, and to this day it feels as though, when those planes flew into the Twin Towers, something in my own life irrevocably split. A feeling of safety, a wholeness in my sense of being human, a kind of faith in the Muslim and the Western worlds being two aspects of the same reality, the way they were two aspects of the person I was: an English-language journalist with an American girlfriend in Egypt. All that was gone. Once I was well enough to focus I began to wonder whether I’d projected my need to identify with the West on someone I’d perceived to be desirable when deep down N and I had nothing in common. 

N was outraged by al Qaeda. I was outraged by al Qaeda but I was also outraged by the movement of history: how the CIA created the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, how the Iranian Revolution set a precedent for modern-day theocracy, and how the oil-rich Gulf countries sowed the seeds of political Islam only to end up being American client states. That’s how Islam became a doomsday cult in the Seventies, a dark new end-of-history ideology, and I was outraged by the Muslims who let that happen.

I was also outraged by my girlfriend having no idea how unhappy I was after my breakdown, by the thought—justified or not—that she would never understand my grief.

***

I got in next to R. I breathed. He was laughing. He found the sight of me with that plastic bag hilarious. “So you split up just as they went in?” he said as we crossed the Nile back into Tahrir Square, where within hours lines of young people protesting the invasion would stand facing whole regiments of riot police in total silence while Cairo turned into a ghost town, and for a moment I had no idea what he was talking about. Then it all came back. 

For eighteen months while putting my psyche back together I had followed the War on Terror. I’d done so for work, but also because I was half-consciously registering how history alienated me from my girlfriend, preventing me from being the Muslim I wanted to be: not a misogynist, homicidal theocrat with a warlike chip on my shoulder but an individual with the right to believe what they choose without having to disown their heritage. This was turning out to be impossible.

It was not just impossible in the objective world, where a young man like me was more suspect than ever before, but also in the loud and lively theatre of my head. Westerners were hurting my kind. Americans might think they were defending themselves but they were doing exactly as the British and the French had done before them, making decisions about what was best for us so they could use our resources, dispatching and displacing and disinheriting us in the process. In the next decade they would turn relatively secular, relatively peaceful swaths of Muslim land into sectarian killing fields. And the whole Free World behind them!

What N didn’t seem to understand was that it didn’t matter how well they justified it. Whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, whether al Qaeda was connected with Saddam, whether invading Iraq could ever be a viable solution to al Qaeda connected with Saddam with weapons of mass destruction—due process, factual evidence, backing from the so called international community –  none of it mattered. Afghanistan had been turned into a perpetual war zone and now the same thing would be happening to an Arab country. And how was the Westerner I’d acknowledged in myself, the part of me that wanted to be one with the West, going to deal with the fact?

A diary entry from October 13, 2000: “Terms under which [the Palestinian politician] Hanan Ashrawi describes American peace-process diplomacy: willful blindness, moral emptiness, human insensitivity, political cynicism and strategic ignorance. How accurate as description of N’s (quintessentially American) character, particularly in the context of my father’s illness, then death. During two out of three phone calls on the day of the funeral she interrupted my flow to state, again, how she hates her computer and to complain, again, about not having a car.”

That evening R and I ended up meeting some friends of his at the Five Bells Bar, two street corners away from N’s apartment. The invasion barely came up as I struggled with the urge to go back and knock on the door, apologize, ask for my key back. 

***

It is not spring as I come out of the Five Bells, tipsy, onto the same sliver of sidewalk. Twenty years after the second Flood. It is not daybreak either. And I can hardly point to anything different though I know everything, absolutely everything has changed. The time, the place, the world that subsumes them, even the twenty-six-year-old hero who stood here communing with a statue of Om Kalthoum, stunned into the reality of being alone while Baghdad split—all gone beyond recognition.

Neither a Noah nor an ark, the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus wrote while living in San Francisco. Something about this mixture of grief and nostalgia does feel like an infinite ocean. Salt water is welling up inside me, but then it is the only thing that exists outside. I must’ve mutated into a fish. The swell and the surf of all that’s happened since that day in 2003 is too much for anything with lungs. Yet here I am, twelve years into an Arab Spring as dry and as dead, as suffocating as the worst of the season of dust. 

Still standing and, in my own just-possible way, still Muslim.