From Sisters MagazineThe Ummah in Dire Straits
By Fatima BarkatullaImam ash-Shafi’ee said about travelling to seek knowledge:
“The intelligent and refined find no rest in dwelling in one place,
So leave your homeland and travel far away!
Travel and you will meet new people replacing those left behind,
And tire yourself out, because it makes life worth living!
I have seen that water stagnates when it stands still,
Yet when it runs it is sweet and pure.
And if the lion left not its land, it would not catch its prey
And if the arrow left not the bow, it would not hit its aim
And if the sun moved not across the horizon,
People the world over would have tired of the sky.”
The dusty streets, oppressive heat and sprawling populace were not the only things I had to adjust to when I arrived in Cairo. Growing up in a non-Muslim society, I had always believed, rather romantically, that the Muslim Ummah today was a force to be reckoned with; a shining beacon of light for all, the very embodiment of Revelation. Cairo was my chance to immerse myself amongst my fellow Muslims and absorb some of its luminosity for myself. What I was to discover in my first months in Egypt, shook my world.
The first incident happened whilst my father and I stayed with a friend of his who was a professor at a small-town University north of Cairo. He was a wealthy and generous man who knew my father from his visits to London. His pretty daughter was an intelligent engineer who was recently married but was not yet living with her husband. We got on famously, as she spoke English fluently and tried her best to introduce me to life in Egypt.
One day she wanted to show me her wedding video. What took me aback was that in the video, there she was: smiling, dressed in her white wedding dress surrounded by dancing men and women. The men around her could not all have been related to her. I asked her how it was that she would not observe hijab in front of those men. She looked down and said “Yes, it is wrong. But that is the norm here.” I asked her if her fiancé had objected. I couldn’t imagine a Muslim man wanting his wife paraded in public in that way. Surely his sense of jealousy and high regard for his wife would prevent him from allowing that. “My fiancé is the one who wanted me to dress like that. You know, he wants his friends to know that he has a beautiful wife. It is what he wanted.”
I very soon realised that we came from two totally different paradigms. Hijab for me was something sacred. I had grown up being the odd one out, the only girl in the school who observed hijab, until my sister joined me and became the only other. Throughout our childhoods, we had experienced the struggle, the stares, the pointing, the questions and sometimes the name-calling and jibes that came with observing hijab in the 80s and 90s in the UK. The idea of removing it so thoughtlessly, in a Muslim country where you could observe hijab easily, where it should be a part of your life, was incredible to me.
My father applied for me to live in the girls’ hostel:
Bait-ut Talibaat al-Muslimaat in a congested part of Cairo called
‘Abbasiyyah, but my admission there hadn’t been approved yet, so before leaving, he entrusted me to his professor friend’s family who lived in a narrow, poverty-stricken road in North West Cairo. The cheerful demeanour of even the poorest Egyptian family was uplifting, and I bore the difficulty of living there, knowing that my stay was only temporary.
My neighbour, Hussein was a tall, olive skinned Egyptian guy who also happened to be a tour-guide. He would try to give me pointers as to how to get to where I needed to in Cairo. Hussein seemed to encapsulate all that was not quite right about Egypt. He was a fit and healthy unmarried man who was probably in his 30s. He wore Western designer clothing, spent his evenings smoking shisha, socialising with his friends in cafes, going to the cinema, listening to Bryan Adams songs and fraternising with European tourists. He didn’t pray except perhaps on Friday and he didn’t really care. It seemed a waste. His faith was in his heart, as he saw it.
That the Ummah was in dire straits was becoming apparent to me on a daily basis. For although the striking minarets filled the Cairene skyline and the heart stirring calls to prayer echoed in crescendo five times every day, the men sitting in the market places and coffee houses which seemed to be on every street, would not budge. Prayer time came in – and went, and all the while, young and old, continued to smoke and converse, unmoved. The second pillar of Islam was being totally ignored. I was confused. On top of that, I had been reading a book by an American journalist about the hidden face of Saudi Arabia which was a depressing portrayal of a country which I had always held in high regard. Was this the real face of the Ummah? Why would Allah grant success to a people who did not fulfil the most basic of His commands? And in the months that followed and certainly by the end of my second year in Egypt, I had concluded that all that was wrong with the Muslim World was not the doing of puppet regimes and colonialists. Until the Muslim world changed its own state of being: its own condition of disobedience to Allah, Allah would not grant us an Islamic State.
