The Televangelist Read online

  Hatem didn’t understand what she wanted.

  Purring like a cat, she added, “What, don’t you know how to do it?”

  She decided to teach him: she suddenly came up to him and pressed herself against him, breathing heavily. With trembling fingers, she stroked his hair and his face. Hatem froze but he couldn’t help but be aroused. She undressed him and within a few minutes of him discovering the mysteries of sex and crossing the bridge from childhood to adulthood his lute teacher was standing at the door in shame. The sister picked up her clothes and Hatem sat rigid with fear. Then Ezzat went off to the bathroom in silence.

  The excited widow gave him a kick and said, “Out you get now, and come any time at night when he’s not here.”

  He went out into the night alone, although some of the studio workers were milling around him, shaking his hand just to feel close to him or greeting him to express their admiration and affection. The tenacious crowd that waited every day for him to come out of the big studio door headed to his car, which was well known, a landmark that betrayed his presence or heralded his approach. There was no escaping the daily ordeal of people asking him questions. In fact, in his ability to put up with them he discovered that he retained something of his old self—his willingness to listen patiently to stupidities and to deal with people who stared at him and stretched out their hands seeking money or asking him to intercede to get them a job. He had realized long ago that he hated them as much as he sympathized with them or cared about their needs, but along a path that was so long that he thought it would never end, he had come to understand the aggressiveness, the determination to extract something from you—money, a recommendation, a business card or even a telephone number, anything—because these people were desperate and defeated, not because they deserved it or because of anything they had done or any shortcomings on their part, but because of you.

  You were always responsible for the disparity that gave you your status while they were driven by poverty or by hardship to come to you seeking your friendship and flattering you so you would give them what was necessarily their due. Necessity gave them the strength of the desperate as well as the weakness of the beggar, the rudeness of the abused as well as the politeness of the mendicant. He could sense a cruel but suppressed aggression when he was physically surrounded by a group of people pressing their requests, seeking jobs or holding up medical reports and heart and chest X-rays. The jostling, the noise, and the size of the crowds showed him that, although they had trained themselves to appear weak, they might change instantly into ruthless troublemakers. They were torn between, on the one hand, a feeling that their dignity had been offended and that sycophancy and begging were beneath them and, on the other hand, such desperate need that they thought little of seeking alms and even thought of it as work. He could see it in their eyes, which pinned their hopes on him but did not look directly at him. They hardly ever looked you in the eye when they made their requests or when they put out their hands or told the repeated stories that they, and you, knew by heart, or when they came back to you for the fourth or fifth time citing some new difficulty or telling you how the person you sent them to had let them down, or that they had a new prescription for a more expensive medicine or that a new surgical operation was needed.

  Anything and everything. He had seen it all, heard it all, and experienced it all since becoming famous and joining the circle of celebrities. He hadn’t seen this with other sheikhs who appeared on the same programs as he did or who gave fatwas on television. The people who came with requests and those in need were experts by instinct. They could tell which sheikhs it was worth asking for charity. Some of the other sheikhs were not targets in the same way. On the contrary, they were enemies because of the way they dispensed advice to beggars, shouted at them, pushed them away, and were openly tight-fisted. But Hatem el-Shenawi ranked with those film stars, soccer players, and television presenters who were portrayed as allies of the poor and who felt deeply guilty about their fame or who begrudged themselves their wealth, because inside they feared it might be a temptation or a test, illicit or transient. They were prey to this petty harassment, the kind of siege that Hatem faced when he came out of the studio at the appointed time, known to them all. At zero hour, half an hour before the end of the program that was broadcast live, they gathered at the entrance to the studio. They managed to get past the gate of Media Production City by various means. Then they would easily find their way to the pavement opposite the studio building. There they would wait, either opening a Quran and reciting from it, to fend off anyone who tried to question them, because who would dare to interrupt someone who was engrossed in the Quran, or going over their complaints with each other, exchanging sob stories and maps showing how to reach people who gave assistance. As soon as the program ended they would rush to their positions at the door and on the pavement. When they heard that Hatem would soon come out, they surged to meet him and he could hardly hear anything from all the voices shouting over one another. With patience and experience he had worked out how to escape the circle that tightened around him, despite the shouts of his driver Sirhan to keep them away, the intervention of the security personnel, and the pushing and shoving of the studio workers. He had tried everything: silence, ignoring them, being kind and sympathetic, shouting and screaming, appealing to them, running alongside the car and then jumping in when it was already moving and driving straight off. But in the end the only fitting reaction was to surrender.

  On this occasion a phone call from Khaled Abu Hadid’s secretary gave him added impetus to leave the studio more quickly.

  “Am I monitored that closely?” he said. “I’ve hardly stepped out of the studio and turned my phone on.”

  “That’s because we miss you so much, Mawlana,” said the secretary. “And anyway everyone was watching the program, and Khaled Pasha decided we couldn’t have dinner without you, Mawlana.”

  He put his cell on speaker and put his foot on the accelerator, turning his head to see how far back he could reverse, then turned hard right to avoid the car parked in front of him.

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to keep the other sheikhs waiting for their dinner,” he answered. “Some of those guys will eat you up if they don’t get their dinner on time.”

  The secretary laughed. “I’m on my way,” Hatem added. “The driver’s on holiday, so I’m driving myself.”

  The secretary quickly feigned being upset.

  “You should have told us, Mawlana. We would have come and picked you up,” he said.

  “What for? No one ever said I was blind, and besides, it’s not far to the estate.”

  The secretary seemed to want him there instantly.

  “Do you know the short cut to al-Manashi by the desert road?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry. God’s with us.”

  He turned off the phone and concentrated on the road. He was no longer able to be alone. He avoided private meetings with himself. He wouldn’t go home till late. He would be there early only if the house was full of people, as it sometimes was because of the random hours he worked, with producers, his team of assistants, or people coming to talk about new projects. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sat down and buried himself in a book. He felt that he knew everything he needed to know, that he had memorized everything he required for his work, that he was set up like a device with a hard disk in which all the information had been filed away and could be accessed at any moment. Besides, he was fully aware that he wouldn’t be able to read if he tried. With appalling arrogance, he felt that any new writings would just reproduce the classical sources. He didn’t need any simplifications or dumbing down. The original books were a treasure trove and he had taken the gems and the diamonds. Digging for more would be torture. For many years he couldn’t put a book down till he had finished it and even memorized it. Whenever anything on paper came into his hands he would drink the ink and store away the information. He was a camel fully loaded with the wat
er of knowledge in a television desert that didn’t give the people invited to appear on screen a chance to stop to read and reacquire the ability to think. Most of the people in television had memorized the texts and taught their audiences to learn by rote, but he would die if he thought he was like them or representative of them. He felt profoundly ill at ease when he had to deal with himself, face himself, have a discussion with himself, or be self-critical. He was at an age when he could no longer bear honesty. Being honest with himself was a malignant virus and if it got inside his body it would attack the whole robust system that made him resilient. Posing questions was lethal and it would be best if the inner mirrors in which he might see himself were broken. He left the studio after the program and made his way through another crowd. It took up more of his time and kept busy the brain cells he still had.

  He put the CD of Sheikh Mohamed Rifaat in the player in the hope that it would warm him up inside. Sheikh Rifaat’s voice sounded distant and there was some interference that created a hissing that impaired the purity, clarity, and grandeur of his voice. Yet in spite of all the damage that time had done to the remaining serviceable recordings of the great Quran reader, the vigor and warmth of the voice was overwhelming, beguiling, and soothing. It seemed to reflect both the sheikh’s own mysterious history and the warm memories that came back to Hatem whenever he heard Sheikh Rifaat. For Hatem’s generation, and those before him, the radio had left a deep impression. For years the sheikh’s voice had monopolized the Quran readings in the month of Ramadan, a time when the radio alone commanded people’s attention and was often on. Sheikh Rifaat had become, psychologically and spiritually, a symbol of the month of Ramadan. If Hatem heard him at any other time of year or in anything other than a family setting, the experience would be tinged with sadness, nostalgia for family, a sense of the passage of time, and comforting memories of an innocence that was long gone. When he heard him, he metaphorically curled up in the fetal position, his mind at peace.

  When he was fuming with anger, he would go into the bedroom of his son Omar at night. It had some features that reminded Hatem of his own childhood, but he didn’t feel at ease and the washing machine in his mind didn’t stop turning—washing and wringing his thoughts, extracting the dirt stuck in his brain—until he saw Omar asleep with his chin on his knees and his legs folded up against the back of his thighs, his fists clenched, with one arm folded under his head and the edge of his shoulder and the other arm on top. Then he might move close to Omar and lie down in the clothes he had come home in after a work trip or a program or a seminar or some other horror, and curl up alongside his son, lying in exactly the same position without turning over or stretching out.

  His wife found him like that one night and laughed. That was the day they had gone to see Dr. Shehab, the marriage counselor, who was shocked when Hatem had come to see him, which undermined Hatem’s confidence in him from the first moment, because why should the doctor imagine he was above having a deep disagreement with his wife? Did the wise doctor think that sheikhs never failed or that they didn’t have feelings? Omayma complained that Hatem had run away the day Omar fell ill. She told him about Hatem’s absence while his son was in a coma, where he had gone and how he had left her alone to face the disaster. Hatem hadn’t wanted to say where he was, neither to himself nor to her, out of fear for his reputation and his programs and his money. Then she told the doctor how Hatem had come back twenty-two days after Omar had gone into a coma. She’d found Hatem sleeping like a child in Omar’s bed. Hatem put up with what she said only because the doctor realized how stupid and rude she was being. On that day she cursed and swore, insulted, broke down, wept and sobbed, slapped her head and her face. He felt more pity for her than he felt for himself, given the way she had insulted him in front of a doctor they hardly knew. She was hysterical and he tried to calm her down. He took her hand and stroked it and patted it. It was as if some demon had rented her body for an hour on the cheap. She pushed the door and went out, leaving him alone with the doctor.

  There was a silence that neither made any effort to break, but after a while Hatem said:

  “So now you know there really are such things as hysterical women.”

  They both laughed.

  “Beat them and leave them alone in bed,”1 Hatem continued. “All that stuff you hear me say on the program is indeed what God said, but he sets one condition—those who beat their wives or refuse to sleep with them have to be real men, and I’m sorry to say we’re not real men.”

  “Remember the old saying, ‘a carpenter never fixes his own front door’? Well, my door looks to be off its hinges too, doctor,” he went on, continuing to joke with the doctor. “What do you say we set up an association called the Loose Door Association for Medical Consultations and Religious Fatwas?”

  Hatem arrived at the entrance to the estate to the sound of Sheikh Mohamed Rifaat’s voice. Devious Khaled Abu Hadid was always waiting for him in his country mansion in this spot in the remote suburbs. The estate covered dozens of acres and had high, forbidding walls. They might have a bite to eat or a banquet in the garden in the summer or in the halls when winter came. But when he wanted to show his constituents that he had divine legitimacy, he would cleverly take his guests instead to a place in the heart of the town where he had his electoral campaign headquarters. He had started in a building overlooking the main square, near the mosque of the most important local saints. After a few months he had bought the whole building and turned the apartments into offices, headquarters for his staff, reception rooms for his guests, and rooms where he met provincial and municipal officials. Then he stripped the partition walls out on the ground floor and turned it into a large meeting hall for communal banquets. Abu Hadid’s main objective was achieved merely by announcing that a religious delegation was coming to visit him. As each sheikh arrived, he went down to receive him from the street entrance, where the cars were parked, and then escorted him through the crush of dozens or hundreds of local people. The sheikhs’ followers pestered them with requests and tried to get as close as possible, jostling with the guards. Then, when the whole delegation went through the square to the mosque, the scene marked Abu Hadid in the consciousness of the poor people in his constituency as someone who was blessed, because some of the sheikhs’ baraka and sanctity had rubbed off on him. Abu Hadid chose the sheikhs he invited like an impresario. Sheikh al-Ibyari, for example, was the most famous and most highly paid Quran reader in the whole country. When their food had settled and they had washed it down with a cup of tea or coffee, the sheikh’s voice would boom out with a prayer of lamentation. People recorded his voice enthusiastically, as if it opened the gates of Heaven for them, though it’s hard to imagine the gates of Heaven or even a small window in one of Heaven’s side rooms opening on top of Abu Hadid’s election headquarters.

  Hatem knew there would be at least six preachers at Abu Hadid’s reception that night, some in turbans and some in Western suits, because the man was generous. He paid them a fee for attending as soon as they arrived and they couldn’t leave without a parting gift of some kind. All of them were the stars of their channels: some were fanatics and bigots, while others were easygoing and pleasant. Abu Hadid tried to satisfy all tastes; his gatherings were inclusive and he never missed an opportunity to bring people together. He bribed people with such skill that the people he bribed never felt they were demeaning themselves or being bought off. He bribed them and then begged them to do what he wanted, mouthing religious platitudes to the sheikhs and kissing some of them on the hand and always opening his arms, usually with his head bowed, when he was speaking to one of them or seeking their favor. He always sounded deferential toward them when he spoke reverentially in front of a gathering of the people he had invited to meet his sheikhs, as he called them. He had even contacted Sheikh Galal Abdel-Muhsin before the last elections and asked him to grace him with a prayer, and the sheikh told him he was going to win the elections by a margin of three.

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p; “May God bring you good news, Mawlana,” Khaled said he told the sheikh, “but three what?”

  Khaled turned to the audience and said, “I swear, my knees were knocking during the conversation. That’s right, three what? After all that, I’d win by three votes? Or maybe he meant three hundred or three thousand.”

  “And maybe thirty thousand,” someone shouted out.

  They laughed and Khaled Abu Hadid added quickly, “Come on, how many votes are there in the constituency in the first place for me to win by 30,000 votes? Anyway, the result came out and I found there was a three in there, it was true. I had three times as many votes as my opponent.”

  “Allah, Allah!” people said in awe.

  Hatem leaned over toward Sheikh Sorour’s ear and asked, “Do you believe that story, Sheikh Sorour?”

  “Really!” Sorour replied in a rough whisper. “The man feeds us and treats us with the highest honor and you want me to say that all his elections have been rigged and the candidate he faced was from the Muslim Brotherhood so they rigged them again for double measure. Let him have his say, Sheikh Hatem.”

  Sheikh Said Sorour was a religious singer that Khaled Abu Hadid never forgot to invite. Sorour was blind and Hatem had dealt with many blind sheikhs, some of them very perceptive, from the time when he studied in the Azhar institutes, when he performed at funerals, gatherings, and saints’ days, and when he was at university. He had seen many blind people behaving as if they could see, but Sheikh Sorour was the only blind person who behaved as though everyone around him was as blind as he was. Sorour was the most powerful religious singer in the Arab world of our time, and also the stupidest person in the Arab world. That’s how Hatem had always seen him, even before Said Sorour became famous by recording a religious song with a young singer who had a contract with one of the religious stations for a Ramadan song. The singer came up with the idea of giving Sheikh Sorour a part in the song, and Sorour’s voice was in fact a stunning match for the young singer’s voice. The song was a success that astounded Sorour, especially when he heard his voice being used as the ringtone on the cell phones of passengers on the microbuses going up to Muqattam, where he lived. But Sorour’s stupidity far outmatched his vocal talent. His lack of discipline, his addiction to hashish, and his extraordinary ability to squander his money on failed marriages and loose women all undermined his credibility. The deep bond between him and Khaled Abu Hadid survived, however, perhaps because neither of them was required to put on an act for the other, so although he was a sheikh, Sorour gave Khaled an easy and legitimate opportunity to challenge comfortably and safely the intentions and consciences of other sheikhs, enabling him to vent his repressed hostility toward sheikhs that he knew were full of hypocrisy about his own hypocrisy.