The Televangelist Read online

  Bestselling Egyptian author Ibrahim Essa is a renowned journalist, TV personality, and political commentator. He has written numerous novels and other books, and he lives in Cairo, Egypt.

  Translator of the winning novel in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and winner of the Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, Jonathan Wright was formerly the Reuters bureau chief in Cairo. He has translated Alaa Al-Aswany, Youssef Ziedan, and Hassan Blassim. He lives in London.

  The Televangelist

  Ibrahim Essa

  Translated by

  Jonathan Wright

  This electronic edition published in 2016 by

  Hoopoe

  113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

  420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

  www.hoopoefiction.com

  Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press

  www.aucpress.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Ibrahim Essa

  First published in Arabic in 2012 as Mawlana by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publications

  Protected under the Berne Convention

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Wright

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978 977 416 718 8

  eISBN 978 1 61797 718 3

  Version 1

  THE MAKE-UP ARTIST DABBED POWDER on Sheikh Hatem’s forehead with the finesse of a professional.

  “That’s perfect, Mawlana,” she said, looking to him for approval.

  “God bless you, Georgette,” he replied with a laugh.

  Anwar Othman made the same lame remark he’d been making all year long, ever since he became the host of Hatem’s program.

  “All those people you lead in prayer, your disciples, the people who ask you for fatwas, how do you think they’d feel if they saw you putting on make-up before filming?”

  “The Prophet used to henna his hair and put kohl on his eyes. For God’s sake, enough of these silly questions of yours, Anwar,” Hatem replied, firmly but cheerfully.

  Sheikh Hatem had found Anwar unbearable from the first time they met, when the Dunya channel suggested him as his partner in a new program. The channel had persuaded Hatem to change the format of his program to broaden its appeal. Instead of standing among the audience or having young people sit in front of him on stands while he told stories or preached, he now had a daily program in which he took questions from viewers of all ages and social classes. In fact the channel’s argument never really convinced Hatem. The people who came to hear his sermon in the Sultan Hassan mosque every Friday were ordinary people too, and they filled every inch of the mosque, which could hold several thousand people, not counting the ones who sat outside. And when he went to his father’s house near the Citadel on Tuesdays, hundreds of men and women came seeking baraka and blessings or asking for fatwas or for money. He deferred to the owners of the television station because the fee they offered him was tempting, but right from the start something about Anwar had reminded him of an insect.

  “He’s like a pesky fly that gets inside the car when you’ve put the air conditioning on,” he once said, “and you keep opening the window to get it out but it doesn’t go, and then it buzzes against the window and you think it’s planning to get out, but as soon as you open the window it goes and lands on the back of your neck.”

  They laughed. Hatem spoke with such solemnity, recited the Quran so eloquently, and was so quick with sayings of the Prophet and stories from the Prophet’s life that it came across as a contradiction when he spoke in a way that didn’t conform to the usual image. It took people by surprise but, at least as far as Sheikh Hatem could see, they approved of the fact that a preacher who gave fatwas was a man like them, a man who sometimes spoke rudely, who had material demands, and who liked to say outlandish things. They seemed relieved that sheikhs were closer to them than to God. He knew that the image people had of him was shaken when he sprang a joke on them. People would no longer treat him with the respect due a sheikh or a mufti. Oddly he liked that, to see their reaction, because deep down he wanted to subvert the image people had of sheikhs, which television perpetuated.

  He still remembered clearly how one day, at a time when he was finding his way out of the cocoon of adolescence and thinking hard about his aptitude for the role in life he had chosen, he had been sitting on the second floor of his father’s house near the Citadel. They had turned the room into a large hall where dozens of visitors would come and sit, each with their own objective—to get a look, to obtain a fatwa or charity, to ask Hatem to intervene with an official, or to seek a recommendation for a job. In a quiet period after a long night, when those who were left were about to go to dawn prayers, his father took him aside in a private room at the end of the hall and sat him down in front of him. They were both exhausted and his father’s face had a mysterious look that he couldn’t decipher. Between them stood a barrier—the painful memory of his father taking a second wife, a divorcee twenty-five years younger than Hatem’s father. His father remarried when Hatem was just starting out in the media. At the time he was only a preacher in a government-run mosque but he had caught the attention of congregants through the quality of his sermons. The mosque would fill up and people recorded his sermons on cassettes. Hatem suppressed the pain of his father’s second marriage and neither of them had said a word about it for all those years. They had never confronted each other on the subject, or even thought of doing so, even when his mother, humiliated and pushed aside, told him that his father’s new wife was pregnant and that his four sisters had decided to boycott their father’s house. None of them ever took their children there again. Hatem had said nothing. He just hugged his mother, in that intense and natural way typical of a son’s relationship with his mother. But as if something was amiss in the order of the world, his father’s second wife gave birth to a boy that died the moment it was born. When they told Hatem, he was in a studio recording his program.

  “We have all this medicine and science,” he had told the audience, which was paid to attend. “Yet there are still children who die coming out of their mother’s wombs. Yes, folks, God sometimes likes to remind us that we are nothing.”

  His father was entering his eighties in good health but he was willingly turning his back on the world. There in that room, just before dawn prayers and after the gathering had broken up, on the occasion of this rare meeting that his father had requested, Hatem felt that destiny was knocking on the door and something new or unexpected was about to happen in their lives.

  “What’s wrong, Hatem?” asked his father.

  “Nothing, Father.”

  “Why can’t you believe you’re a sheikh?” his father replied.

  He was stunned by the remark, not because it was a surprise, not because it was correct, but because it came from someone he thought had been content just to look on for the past five years.

  “But am I a sheikh, Father?”

  “What else? If you’re not a sheikh, then what are you? You know the Quran by heart and you know how to recite it, you lead people in prayer and give sermons, you’ve memorized fatwas and you give fatwas of your own, and you have a wealth of stories about the Prophet. All that certainly gives you a place among the sheikhs. In fact your success with people gives you a leading place among them.”

  Hatem sighed and revealed something he had never before revealed candidly or comfortably, even to himself.

  “Does that make a sheikh! That’s a civil servant with the rank of sheikh. You know what I am, Fa
ther? I’m a merchant of learning.”

  Then he wrapped his arms around his father and muttered, “Come on, Father, let’s go to dawn prayers. Would you like me to recite the Yassin chapter for you during the prayers?”

  “No,” his father replied earnestly. “I want the dawn supplication in the second prostration, because you say it so beautifully.”

  Proud of his father’s opinion, Hatem had laughed and said, “Very well. I should do a request program for people who are about to pray.”

  The lights went up and the make-up woman finished powdering Anwar’s forehead and cheeks while he did up his buttons.

  “Medhat,” he asked the director, “is my tie straight? Could you check?”

  Sheikh Hatem no longer had stage fright, those palpitations in his rib cage or the cramps in his guts before the live feed began. The director and his assistants were sitting in the control room, along with the producers who would grunt into Anwar’s ear through the small earpiece attached to a wire strapped to his back, prompting him, encouraging him, or calming him down. Sheikh Hatem shouted to them through the glass:

  “Hey guys, could someone put my picture on the monitor so I can check it, or else I’ll lay a curse on all of you.”

  They burst out laughing.

  The picture came up and he checked everything was in order. Then he heard the director’s voice:

  “Everything’s ready. Anwar, Sheikh Hatem, we’re going on air. Three, two, one, action.”

  Anwar smiled. He looked nicer than he looked in real life.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening,” he said. “Peace be upon you and the blessings of God. Welcome to a new installment of our program. Today we have with us the preacher and Islamic scholar, his grace Sheikh Hatem el-Shenawi.”

  He turned to Hatem and the camera panned out, showing Hatem smiling as he bowed his head.

  “And good evening to you too, Anwar. Let’s hear your questions, sir, and see what traps you’ve set for us tonight.”

  They both laughed.

  Whenever Hatem saw the red light that lit up on the camera, he went on alert like a performer ready to perform. The red light activates latent powers of adaptation. You change from a human being to a televised creature on display, cheerful even if you’re annoyed, serious when you’re feeling flippant, dignified in the midst of a farce, respectable even in the face of lewdness. Hatem had quickly adapted to this style of performing. Many people needed time to get used to the red light as the signal for adopting a persona or a voice that was not theirs and to become completely captive to the magic light, whereas Sheikh Hatem was a trained creature almost from the first moment. It was as if he had lived by the red light all his life and it was with him wherever he was—in the pulpit, giving a lecture, posting on his Facebook page or on his website, among friends, with his followers, in a restaurant, at a wedding, in his car when people noticed and greeted him, shook hands with him, praised him, asked him for baraka or blessings, or asked him a question like someone asking a famous comedian that they happened to meet on the corner to tell them the latest joke. People were so inquisitive they would even ask for his latest fatwa if they saw him in the bathroom at a fancy fish restaurant. When he got out of his car and went to the elevator, the security men and the doormen would crowd around him, savoring his presence, seeking a memento of having shared a space with him so that they could tell their families or friends about it. His whisper, his laugh, the way he knitted his brow or the way he walked—everything was monitored and followed, so he put on his own red light, somewhere between his mind and his body.

  This imaginary divide, or interface, confused him and forced him to constantly obey the red light, because one never knew who might be watching. Often he even caught himself staring at the ceiling of his bedroom, waiting for the red light to flash on so that he could assume the persona he adopted when performing. His real self seemed to have gone missing or been dissolved. He had started to find his real self strange or had forgotten what it looked like, so he would resort to the self that he had trained himself to adopt and that he felt at ease with. Because of this, those close to him—the rare ones who retained old ties to him—thought he was silent and aloof. They thought it odd that a man who was usually so talkative should be silent. He was also surprised by his silence, but he saved his energy so that he would be ready when the red light came on. He needed to be in perfect health and on the alert so that when he received an order he could obey and when he was summoned he could appear. One day he discovered that in the company of his father and his sisters he was the trained red-light creature and not his real self. He had reached the point where he was no longer certain who he was. He no longer knew if he was a new version of Hatem el-Shenawi, different from the old one that was no more, or whether he had changed into something that combined the human being he used to be with the training and skill of the person who obeyed the red light. All this put the relationship between him and his wife Omayma on ice for years, during which time neither of them ever thought of taking it out of the freezer and putting it under the hot water tap to thaw out. Their feelings were preserved in ice to keep them from going bad but they were never taken out to reinvigorate their marriage. What they had in common was this sense of being adrift as they sought out their true selves. Fame and luxury had changed him, and he had changed her. On the rare evenings when he wasn’t caught up with the television programs, the recordings, the soirees or the sessions with businessmen, producers, and sponsors, they would sit together. But the atmosphere would soon chill and the conversation would wither. The links frayed but never broke, and the two of them largely kept their distance.

  “God damn the red light,” he said.

  He could hear the music of the commercial break after Anwar’s dreadful introduction. No ringmaster in any circus could have done better. Hatem thought of the peddlers who used to come round with toys.

  “Put it on its chest it lights up, put it on its legs it lights up, it lights up red,” the peddlers cried.

  “Welcome back. I can tell you that this episode will, God willing, be very important and very serious, and we’ll pose many of the questions you have in mind about religion and the world. Our telephone numbers and email addresses are on the screen as usual and you can also send SMSs to the number on the screen. Sheikh Hatem el-Shenawi, I welcome you again and I’d like to ask you about the saying that wealth and children are the adornment of life in this world. How can we turn this adornment into something that serves God Almighty?”

  Hatem checked that the red light had switched to him this time so that he could start. He followed the light like a sunflower follows the sun. When it came to him it was time to react to what the anchor had said. He smiled, nodded, and sighed to the camera as if Anwar had spoken pearls of wisdom, though what he had said was really quite naive and trivial. Hatem knew that Anwar had hardly read a verse of the Quran and the last book he had read was the textbook of the last subject he was tested on in university. He knew for sure that Anwar didn’t pray. Anwar worshiped the red light, a true devotee. Before he came he always memorized the Quranic verses he was going to cite in the conversation and he would jump in whenever there was a gap and recite the verses as if he had been born in a minaret. As a result many people thought he had memorized the whole Quran, and not just the script for the program.

  Hatem leaned his head back and held out his hands in front of him with his prayer beads. His vocal cords received orders to sound solemn and impressive. The words came out of his mouth into the microphone attached to the edge of his suit jacket.

  “Look, Anwar, what does the verse say? It says ‘wealth and children.’ So wealth comes first, because if you have children but not wealth that means poverty and want, which you don’t want. Then it says ‘the adornment of this life.’ What are we to understand from that?”

  Mischievously, playfully, yet with true professionalism, he pressed Anwar to respond.

  “Go on then, what do you think?”
/>   Then with a smile:

  “Are you only clever enough to ask questions? Come on, what’s your answer, brother?”

  Anwar laughed and looked into the camera lens as though the exchange was part of a script they had worked out months earlier.

  “We should read it as meaning that wealth and children are the most important things in the world,” Anwar finally volunteered.

  Hatem broke into the end of Anwar’s sentence with a laugh.

  “No, my good man, it means that wealth and children are not this life. They are just an adornment, and not the essence of life. They are not life. Isn’t it the All-knowing and Almighty who says in His noble book We have adorned the lower heaven with lamps. ‘The lower heaven’ is the sky that we see, rather than the rest of the seven heavens, and the lamps are the stars in the sky. The sky has a role and the stars have a role. The stars appear one day and not the next, but does the world come to a halt? Not at all. If the stars disappeared the sky would continue. Its role lies in rain, sun, the atmosphere, and the ozone layer before they make holes in what’s left of it. And this exactly parallels the relationship between this life and wealth and children. They are an adornment like the lamps, and notice that we use the same word to describe the two—we say ‘the lower life’ and ‘the lower heaven’—because we know that there’s more than one heaven and more than one life. So wealth and children are an adornment, a veneer, a brooch on the lapel of your jacket, dye for gray hair, like the couple that I have.” He stroked his head to get a smile from Anwar, and Anwar complied immediately. The camera moved from Hatem looking at Anwar and stroking his hair, to Anwar’s smile, and when he was sure that the director had caught it, he took his hands off his temples and continued. “Money and children are all well and good but they’re not the issue. They are the crème Chantilly on this lower life, a cherry on the cake but not the cake.”

  Theatrically, Sheikh Hatem broke off there.

  “It looks like you’re hungry with all this talk of cake,” he added.