The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson Page B

I had never met a sheikh before. He was talking with an American woman in a head scarf who seemed to be organizing some kind of event. They finished their conversation as I filled out the requisite paperwork. (Why do you wish to convert to Islam? The question seemed unanswerable. I scribbled something complimentary and generic.) Then the sheikh turned to me.
    â€œHello, Gwendolyn,” he said, in perfect English.
    I wish I could remember more of our conversation. He asked me a series of questions and made a few encouraging remarks. When I stood up again he was still smiling. This is what I took away from what he told me: you were put on this earth to do good, and you must remember that duty every day.
    â€œYou have chosen a name?”
    â€œZeinab.”
    â€œSister Zeinab, when you repeat the
shaheda,
you will become like a little baby. Imagine!” He laughed. “You willstart from nothing. What you do with that is between you and God.”
    Afterward, I was asked to sign a ledger thick with the signatures of other converts and the dates of their announcement. Seeing hundreds of names—British, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian—I began to calm down. Until that moment, Islam had meant something very private to me—it defined my relationship with God and with Omar. I had never felt part of a world religion with over a billion adherents; during the silent inward process of conversion, I don’t even think I realized that this is what Islam is. Yet here I was, looking at the names of men and women who were now
akh
and
ukht,
my theological brothers and sisters. The world seemed substantially smaller.
    Now that I was an “official” Muslim, Omar and I could do our
katb el kiteb,
giving us the freedom to travel together. It should have been romantic, analogous to getting a marriage license at the courthouse, but since I was a foreigner, this, too, was tangled in bureaucracy. First, I had to get official permission from the U.S. Embassy. It was delivered with sour congratulations; they probably assumed I was a gullible woman being duped into a green-card marriage. Then Omar and I had to take this permission slip, along with my Azhar-approved record of conversion, and go to another warren of government offices. When it finally came time to sit down with a notary and draw up our marriage contract, I was hot and irritated.
    â€œName?” he asked briskly. He spoke in slow, formal Arabic so that I would understand.
    â€œGwendolyn Wilson.”
    â€œWhere were you born?”
    â€œNew Jersey,
Al Willayet Al Mutaheda Al Amrikaya.
”
    â€œYoo Ess Ayy.” He abbreviated my sarcastic elongation and smiled, eyes twinkling. “Dowry?”
    â€œOne Egyptian pound.” Enough to buy tamarind juice when this is all over, I thought.
    He nodded, jotting away on a series of forms. “One Egyptian pound now, two in case, God forbid, of divorce.”
    Omar took a pound note out of his wallet and presented it to me with a grin.
“Itfaddali,
” he said,
You are welcome to it.
    â€œHow much cash do you have on you?” I said. “I should have asked for more.”
    The notary, revealing a decent grasp of spoken English, laughed.
    Omar and I signed all four marriage contracts—one for him, one for me, one for the government, and one for Allah knew who—and with a few official stamps, we were husband and wife in the eyes of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The contract laid out the terms of our marriage: I was entitled to a slew of things if Omar took a second wife (Egyptian men can legally marry the Islamic four), my dowry reverted to him if we broke things off before the wedding, et cetera. As the almost-wife of an Egyptian, I could be fast-tracked for a long-term resident visa or citizenship, if I liked. I suddenly had rights in Egypt, not as a member of the foreign elite, but as a demi-Egyptian.
    Omar and I left the Ministry of Paperwork and walked into the