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

sports and social club we were members of in the Gezira part of Cairo. The more courses he failed, the more observant he became. “Maybe he should pick up a textbook instead of the Quran,” my mother would tell her neighbour, the widowed wife an army captain, during one of their regular lunchtime chats.
    Our neighbour also had a son who was suddenly interested in Islam after years of secular living and education. The two mothers knew that such transitions didn’t bode well for the families involved or the country itself. I listened in on many of their conversations over the year, as I continued to seek shelter in the kitchen whenever and for however long I could. Our kitchen and the neighbour’s backed on to each other, with a little porch and the garbage chute separating the two apartments.
    It strikes me as odd that the women in our circles of Cairo were the ones who noted and expressed concerns about the men’s—usually young men’s—new directions when the most visible sign of such change in society came from women lower down the social ladder. I was floored the first time I saw a young middle-class Egyptian woman wearing the hijab at school. Education Home was a co-ed institution that encouraged equality between the sexes, so it came as a shock to the bourgeois system to have a mid-term English replacement teacher by the name of Miss Afaf assigned to our class. Today you’d be hard pressed to find a female schoolteacher in Cairo who was not wearing the hijab, but back in 1977, in my first year of secondary school, Miss Afaf caused a sensation. We’d heard of some young women donning the hijab and even saw some of them on TV as part of a current-affairs story about the lives of young Egyptians. But to have someone like her in our school was the subject of much debate among the different cohorts. She was an excellent teacher and very gentle, but we just couldn’t get past her headwear.
    Neither could some parents. It seemed that Miss Afaf did not stick to teaching English grammar and vocabulary but set herself the goal of persuading many of the young women in class—thirteen and fourteen years old on average—to cover up their own hair and follow the rules of Islam, since it was the right and only path. Her first convert was the most beautiful girl in my class: Fadwa, a petite blond Libyan-Italian stunner, who covered her hair for a few days before her mother came charging in and asked the school headmistress to keep Miss Afaf away from her child. Other parents congregated outside the school and discussed this new phenomenon. My mother didn’t get involved in the discussions, but even she didn’t like having a teacher with a hijab in school. None of this had much to do with an anti-Islam or a pro-secularity sentiment and everything to do with social hierarchy and prejudice. Mothers considered women like Miss Afaf too far down the social ladder to teach at a private school like ours. Many of the parents probably resented having to pay hefty tuition fees for the kind of teacher that staffed government schools.
    Miss Afaf didn’t return to school the next academic year. But that’s not to say she was an isolated incident. In Cairo at the time, the line between class and religion was drawn—the more affluent you were, the less religious, and the same was true in reverse. Cairo was fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of politicized Islam under the banner of the regrouped Muslim Brotherhood. The reasons for this new surge are both political and economic. After over two decades of suppression by Nasser, his successor, Anwar Sadat, released many of the Brotherhood’s organizers from jail—a political gesture that would cost him his own life when he was assassinated in 1981 by a convert to the group. Economically, Sadat’s open-market policies and pro-Western-style capitalism—symbolized by the reopening of the Suez Canal as a trading post in 1975—created huge gaps between the haves and