Free Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes by Kamal Al-Solaylee Page B

politics. It outraged young Egyptians and the Muslim groups, which until then had been relatively quiet. I wish I could say the ideological shift in Helmi was gradual, or that our parents had time to wean him off it. The truth is that one summer day in 1976, he woke up to tear down the posters of movie stars in his room (including a gorgeous one of Clint Eastwood circa 1973 that I secretly adored), rearranged his bedroom to make space for a prayer mat that faced Mecca, and just like that found Islam.
    Even though Helmi’s notion of a return to Islam would be called moderate by today’s standards of militarized hard-liners, my father—ever the secularist—became deeply concerned about this conversion. For one thing, it meant that Helmi was mixing with young men beneath his social status, and for another, it became a case of a son trying to control family destiny while the father was still alive and well. Islam undercut Mohamed’s authority as a patriarch. He did try to change Helmi’s new direction. He’d often challenge him on his notion of Allah as a furious, punitive force. To my father, Islam was more about ethics, compassion and charity. It had nothing to do with banning belly dancers or censorship of art and culture. And it certainly should not interfere with how money was made or interest rates were determined. “Why would God throw me in hell,” he argued with Helmi, who would reply, “Because you don’t pray five times a day or fast at Ramadan.” Mohamed would counter by saying that he went about his business and raised eleven children, and raised them well. That to him was more important than praying or fasting.
    But if Helmi’s change of direction was fought on a symbolic and ideological level with his father, it was the beginning of an oppressive time for my sisters from which they have not yet recovered—and which long ago eroded their will to resist.
    MY FIVE REMAINING SISTERS in Cairo—Farida, Ferial, Hoda, Hanna, Raja’a—were very much integrated into Egyptian society. That meant coming and going as they pleased, wearing whatever they thought was fashionable and appropriate, including miniskirts, and applying as much or as little makeup as the occasion demanded. I loved that about my sisters and my parents back then. The family pictures of the time stand as testaments to the last great wave of Arab social liberalism and secularism.
    For young women like my sisters in the Cairo of the early 1970s, the idea of wearing a hijab was unthinkable. To young Egyptians, it symbolized poor and uncultured country folks—the kind who were to serve as maids and not as fashion models. (The hijab’s association with oppression of women is a newer, Western phenomenon.) Egypt’s large cities—Cairo and Alexandria—had gone through a great period of modernization starting in the 1920s, during which women adopted Western dress and abandoned traditional garb. That came to an end in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
    Nothing symbolized the freedom we had as a family as much as our annual summer vacations in Alexandria and the bikini-shopping ritual beforehand in downtown Cairo, which brought out the fashionista in me, even at the tender age of ten or eleven. I looked forward to it every summer and spent the weeks before going through women’s magazines and cutting out my favourite designs. I have absolutely no recollection of the men in the family raising any objections, although I suspect that my parents were secretly concerned about indulging this feminine side. Egyptian cinema featured several distressing stereotypes of the effete (never explicitly described as gay) fashion designer, florist or dance instructor. By the end of the movie these figures often got humiliated by the macho leading man. I wonder if my mother thought I was headed in that direction—which I certainly was.

    My father dressed in a suit even for a day at the beach with his children. This photo shows our last family trip to