A Cairo conversion

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on March 26, 2008
in Books, Inside Prospect, Middle east and Religion
.

In 2005, Hugh Miles moved to Cairo to work as a freelance journalist, and fell in love with a doctor. They decided to get married. There was just one problem: the Koran forbids marriage between Muslim women and non-Muslim men (Muslim men, on the other hand, can marry outside the faith, so long as the woman in question is either Christian or Jewish). Miles, therefore, decided to convert to Islam, and in this month’s Prospect he writes an entertaining account of the process. Readers may be surprised by how simple becoming a Muslim is, at least at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo (elsewhere it is more arduous). Little evidence of any religious commitment is required, and the whole thing takes less than two hours. The piece is based on the final chapter of Miles’s new book, Playing Cards in Cairo, an account of his year in Egypt (published by Abacus).  

2 Responses to “A Cairo conversion”

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  • 1 fareed elshayyal
    April 2, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    I feel sad for Hugh Miles who have spent one year in Cairo without paying any effort to read anything about the religion and culture of 65 million Muslim Egyptians, then decided to become a Muslim because he had been dating a Muslim girl for few months and wanted to marry her.
    He wasted a great opportunity by not asking the sheikh the questions which puzzle him :”I wanted to ask him why, if Islam was a religion of peace, the hairdresser in Istanbul Street—the road I lived on—divided the world into the “house of Islam” and the “house of war,” and why I knew of many young Egyptians who would die to kill American women and children. I wanted to understand why the Koran was full of injunctions to fight and why the pain and suffering awaiting unbelievers is mentioned on almost every page. I wanted to understand why men of apparently perfect faith flew planes into buildings or killed women for staining their family honour.”
    If we Muslims think the same way of Mr Miles and use his rational we would justifybly ask similar questions such as:
    why, if Christianity was a religion of peace, the Americans including the US president consider the people of the world “who are not with us” to be their enemies and why we knew of 300,000 young Americans who have been occupying Iraq for the last 5 years spreading destruction and death and killing more than 650,000 Muslim Iraqis, while more Americans are deployed for similar reasons in 36 countries all over the globe. We wanted to understand why the Bible contains detailed injunctions of how to massacre the entire population of cities which surrender to your army and why the pain and suffering awaiting unbelievers is to be found throughout its text.”
    I was ready to sympathise with his “sufferings” but I was put off by his racist remark, “… I had not even converted yet and already I was telling lies to project an image of piety. My God, I thought, I am more Egyptian than I realised.” No Mr.Miles hypocrasy and telling lies are not an Egyptian monopoly, they are very bad but liars and hypocrites exist everywhere even in the States. Miles is a natural liar and hypocite, and offers to his readers the evidence his article. When Hanafi, his Egyptian friend suggested to him to stand back behind the praying congregation he prefered to lie to the sheikh and told him that he had prayed earlier already. When the sheikh asked him why did he want to convert to Islam, he did not have enough carriage to say that it was only his desire to marry a Muslim girl and prefered to invent another reason saying to the sheikh: “Well, I suppose I don’t really believe in miracles,” [he] began, groping around for an alternative explanation. “I could never understand how wafers could be turned into the body of Christ.”
    I feel sorry for Dr. Roda (the Egyptian doctor) who fell to such hypocrite and racist liar, I hope she reads Miles’ article and gets to know his true character and the true feelings he has towards her people before marrying him and trust him as a father of their children.

  • 2 fareed elshayyal
    April 2, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    I am sorry for spelling mistakes , particularly when I used the word courage but I typed carriage instead, please correct it

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