Free The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson Page B

a force of nature; he couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong and his actions were indiscriminate. The woman could distinguish between right and wrong, and had chosen to put her own life in danger for an inadequate reason. If her husband, who was responsible for her physical and emotional happiness, had neglected her, then he was at fault for encouraging his wife to seek happiness elsewhere.
    I realized why the Egyptian teachers were so bewildered by our western anger: in their eyes we were arguing that cheating on one’s spouse is not wrong and that a husband has no emotional responsibility to his wife. But our argument was about personal rights, not social responsibilities. To us, both the husband and wife had the right to make their own decisions. If the husband decided his career took priority over his marriage, that was his prerogative; if the wife looked for emotional fulfillment elsewhere, that was hers. Spousal responsibility never entered the argument.
    In the end we settled on a compromise. The madman was slotted at number one for wielding the knife, the wife at number two for knowingly endangering her own life, thehusband at number three for encouraging her to do so, the lover at number four for being a general bastard, the ferryman at number five for being uncharitable (a sin in Islam), and the friend, whose motives were questionable, at number six. We had argued as though the characters in question were waiting outside the door for our verdict. I was surprised that it took so little to divide a group of intelligent people straight down the middle, precisely along cultural lines, without exception. While everybody laughed about it afterward, and talked about the incident for weeks (“The ferryman! The ferryman!” was a standard greeting for a while), it was clear we were all unsettled. Everyone knew this compromise was not limited to the hypothetical.
    This was not the last time Omar and I would look at each other from across a bewildering gap. It would open up suddenly, beneath our feet. Alone, our origins didn’t seem to matter, but as soon as we found ourselves in a group he became an Egyptian and I became an American. It was automatic. Aside from love—which made us more sensitive to cultural differences, not less—there was nothing we could take for granted. When I talk about those early months, most people still make the optimistic assumption: surely there were things to build on. Surely at some point the expectations of two cultures must intersect. And I am forced to say: no. There was nothing. Violently, utterly nothing.
    Jo was often the only one who understood what it was like to navigate this interworld, the little fissures between East and West where no clear common values held sway. As the weeks passed, we developed the shared rituals of outsiders. The most hallowed of these was Punch Fundie.It was a game modeled on Punch Buggy—wherein you slug the person next to you if you spot a VW Bug while you’re driving—but modified to fit the more common roadside appearance of a fundamentalist. According to the rules, a fundamentalist was anyone with the telltale beard but no mustache and a galibayya that stopped short of his ankles, or a woman who wore the all-encompassing black
niqab,
leaving only her eyes visible. All car rides were fair game. One smoggy day in a cab downtown, I felt two hard punches slam into my right arm just above the elbow.
    â€œWhat the
hell?
” I turned to glare at Jo. Her eyes were wide. She pointed out my window.
    â€œPunch Fundie
and
Punch Buggy,” she said in an awed voice. I looked: sure enough, cruising alongside us was a fundamentalist driving a yellow VW Bug. He frowned into the oncoming traffic, sporting a calloused prayer bruise and an unkempt beard that crept up his cheeks like Spanish moss. We gaped out the window, unable to speak. When the car pulled away we pressed our hands over our mouths to keep from laughing,