Read Online The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

of Ramadan began in October. She would have been dismayed—and maybe insulted—to discover me eating at sunset after refusing food all day. On the twenty-ninth day of Sha’aban, Omar, Jo, and I were having tea in our living room when Omar held up his hand for silence. The evening call to prayer had just gone up from the city’s thousand mosques. He was waiting for the special chant that would announce the start of the holy month.
    â€œWhy don’t they know when it is yet?” Jo was perched on the couch sorting through our CDs, bemused by Omar’s restlessness.
    â€œIt’s not an exact date—they have to see the crescent moon.” Omar shifted out of the darkened porch doorway and came to sit in the living room with Jo and me. “If they see it tonight, we start fasting tomorrow; if not, we start the next day.”
    There was an electricity in the air I was used to associating with Christmas. “I think it’s going to be tonight,” I said.
    â€œDo you?” Omar smiled. “I imagine it will be then.”
    A minute later we heard voices swell up from the mosques and fill the empty space between the noises in the street.
    â€œIs that it?” I asked.
    â€œThat’s it,” Omar answered, cheerful now and pulling on his shoes. “Come on, let’s go shopping for
sa’hoor.” Sa’hoor
is the “late meal” eaten just before sunrise during Ramadan. In Egypt, that usually means stewed fava beans and yogurt, along with a licorice drink that helps the body retain fluids. And, for an untried westerner like me, lots and lots of water.
    We went by cab to Souk el Maadi. It was crammed with shoppers carrying bags of vegetables and flatbread in their hands and on their heads. “From now until next month, Cairo will not sleep,” Omar said. “A lot of these people will just stay up until dawn tonight, sleep all day tomorrow, and then get up for
iftar
and party. They’re out buying food for
sa’hoor,
like us.”
    We stopped at a tiny general store to buy white cheese and bread.
    â€œRemember to drink water tonight. Don’t wait until dawn,” Omar said in the cab on the way back. He came inside the apartment long enough to kiss me, promising to be back first thing in the morning. I went to bed with the holiday feeling lingering in my mind.
    At 3:45 a.m. I woke to the sound of a man singing out in the street, accompanied by a drum.
“Sa’hoor, sa’hoor,
wake,oh, sleeper!” went his chant, echoing between the silent apartment blocks. I stumbled to the window and peered out, seeing a galibayya-clad man bathed in neon from the street lamp overhead. He swayed down the block, trailed by one of the local cats.
    â€œWho wakes
you
up?” I asked as though he could hear me. The muffled clank of cooking pots could be heard from the flat upstairs. I went into the kitchen, feeling resolved; I drank a liter of water. This left almost no room for food, but it was the idea of going without liquid that made me nervous. Feeling slightly hypotonic, I went back to bed and slept.
    I woke up again around ten a.m., dry-mouthed.
    â€œIt will pass,” said Omar, who had appeared like a mirage in the living room. Both he and Jo were irritatingly awake and fresh-looking.
    â€œHow do you feel?” asked Jo, clearing away traces of her breakfast.
    â€œKind of jet-lagged, actually. Like I’m trying to adjust to a new time zone.”
    â€œThe first day is like that,” said Omar, smiling with encouragement. “After that it gets easier.”
    The rest of the day had a trancelike quality—sometimes I felt sleepy and sore, sometimes unusually alert. We watched
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
I drifted off again halfway through, cocooned between Omar and Jo, both of whom seemed at least partially convinced that fasting was incompatible with my Anglo-Saxon physiology. Much later, the sound of