Nazneen Sheikh
Two captivating memoirs by women who embrace love and Islam in North Africa reaffirm the bounty of the inner life. Moon Over Marrakech is by Toronto writer Nazneen Sheikh, who last appeared with the delectable culinary memoir Tea and Pomegranates. In Moon Over Marrakech, Sheikh recounts two labyrinthine love affairs, both of which unfold in Toronto and Morocco, and both of which ignite with a bolt of passion and dissolve just as precipitously into emotional nightmares.
Sheikh, 46, meets Cesar, a psychiatrist, at an outdoor party in Toronto in 1991. Dark and handsome, a Dominican of Spanish descent, Cesar catches her eye across the yard. It is her first social outing since the demise of her 26-year marriage. She and Cesar are soon inseparable. They buy a home in Yorkville and marry in the living room before their closest friends and a fireplace teeming with roses. They honeymoon in Marrakech, a city that appeals to Sheikh's sensuous nature and her love of fairy tale, the narrative into which she shapes her erotic, impassioned existence.
Cesar hires a guide named Khadim. The trio explores the city's mosques and souks. Distinguished, with impeccable manners, Khadim favours Western dress and speaks fluent French. Yet he treats Sheikh with a subtle irony that pricks at her lapsed Muslim faith. He reminds her of the subordinate place of women in her native Pakistan. Everywhere around her, Sheikh sees women uncomfortable in their own skins, and men who smother them with protection or prey on them like wolves.
A decade into a blissful marriage Sheikh's fairy tale turns horror story: Cesar disappears without a trace. Despair and a shocking disclosure leads Sheikh back to the Koran, which she peruses nightly in her search for divine guidance. Years later, she returns to Marrakech and tumbles into an affair with Khadim. He quickly proposes and, despite the disparity in culture and class, Sheikh prepares to become the wife of a traditional Muslim man.
The author of several novels, Sheikh originally planned to disguise these events as fiction. But her agent recognized the ring of truth and encouraged her to write autobiography. The book's path from make-believe to reality describes the trajectory of Sheikh's evolution. Although I can't help but hope she hangs on to her vibrant imagination, as well as her ability to live and love full out.
The cover of Moon Over Marrakech shows the same "little silver slipper of a moon" Amanda Wingfield observes in The Glass Menagerie. Sheikh shares Amanda's preoccupation with Cinderella-style romance. But for her, the crescent moon also denotes her faith, marking, among other things, the beginning of Ramadan.
In her excellent memoir The Butterfly Mosque, G. Willow Wilson collects such spiritual facts. Wilson, an American journalist, converts to Islam in August, 2003. Her story parallels a passion for her adopted faith with her love for an Egyptian man.
In her mid-twenties, Wilson has already established an enviable career writing on the Middle East for publications such as Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. Her memoir, simultaneously released in 10 countries, deserves the attention; not just for the clarity of her style and her shrewd observations, but for her sincerity and courage in following her own truth.
All the same, Wilson cannot decide whether it was courage or madness that moved her to convert to Islam after the horror of 9/11. Raised in an upper-middle-class American family, she was taught that God was "a racist white guy" in the sky: Atheism became a moral imperative. But Wilson finds it impossible to embrace. Atheism denies her awareness of a spiritual creative force; it fails to acknowledge the intricate mysteries of the universe. At university, Wilson studies Arabic and collects copies of the Koran and books of Sufi poetry. By the time she accepts a teaching position in Cairo, she knows she will convert. On an airplane somewhere over the Mediterranean, Wilson calls God Allah for the first time.
In Cairo, Omar, a fellow teacher, shows Wilson around the city. The two draw close. They laughingly recall a similar teenage experience involving black T-shirts, ankh necklaces and heavy-metal bands: Both are intellectuals and voracious readers. Their situation is tricky; as unmarried man and woman, they cannot go about without chaperones. When they declare their love, they are as good as engaged. Omar is the first person Wilson tells she is Muslim.
The couple constructs a cozy private realm that easily accommodates their cultural differences. In public, however, conversations and customs force them to their respective corners. The position of women represents the largest barrier to understanding. Residents of their poverty-stricken neighbourhood eye Wilson and her American room-mate with hostility and suspicion. They despise Westerners, and women who live alone and exhibit independence. An atmosphere of sexual menace prevails. Religious activity centres on the area's harsh, fundamentalist mosque, which Wilson compares to the ancient, jewel-like structure rising above the walls of the nearby prison. She calls it the Butterfly Mosque. It is this unexamined "moderate" Muslim territory - between the elusive Islamic past and the increasingly extremist present - that Wilson aims to convey to Western readers.
Wilson writes a profile of Egypt's Grand Mufti that raises a stir. He suggests that Muslims in the West forgo the veil if it creates enemies of Islam. Her New York Times article depicting Cairo's segregated women's subway car infuriates some women. They condemn her in a series of scathing letters to the editor. Wilson is depressed for weeks. She seeks consensus, she says, not controversy. We are reminded that she is young.
Sometimes her discussion of women's roles sounds both earnest and mendacious. We wish she would simply admit she has happily adopted a religion in which women enjoy considerably fewer rights than men. It is her decision. Just own it.
Wilson pops up on the FBI's watch list. Agents monitor her e-mail. She is suspected of terrorist leanings. She is terrified of losing her U.S. citizenship. Nevertheless, she refuses to alter her life. A journey to Iran goes ahead as planned.
Wilson often admits to a "clash of civilizations" within her soul. She worries her beloved Omar might suddenly mutate into the monster Muslim husband of Not Without My Daughter, or that Osama bin Laden's Islam is actually the "true" faith. At the same time, she recognizes these attitudes as the result of exposure to a lifetime of negative images of Muslims. She is shocked how little her expensive education taught her about Islam, the world's second-largest religion.
And after reading this memoir, the average Westerner will feel the same way. In this shrinking global community, we really ought to be better acquainted with our neighbours.
Donna Bailey Nurse is a Toronto writer and editor.