Inshallah We’ll Get That Permission by Nadia Kamel
Translated by Brady Ryan and Essayed Taha
an excerpt from Born: The Story of Naela Kamel, née Marie Elie Rosenthal
Tante Aziza and Nana came over to our house on Naim Street and said that Saad wanted to marry me. We sat around the dinner table, which was a square table in the middle of the living room. Our house was very humble – no salon, not even a sitting room – but that didn’t matter to me.
They weren’t happy, not Tante Aziza and Nana Mounira, and not my father and mother – there was a sense of hesitation. But we were present, Saad and me, sitting next to each other, waiting for our folks to come to an agreement. We didn’t get involved in the discussion, but we made it clear to them that we wanted to get married. And that’s how it officially happened: they asked for my hand on the basis that we’d work out the details later.
Saad left with Tante Aziza and Nana Mounira. He came back another day alone, at my father’s request. This time around, my father pushed back strongly, narrowed his focus, and cornered Saad:
“There’s the issue of religion.”
“We’ll solve it.”
“Muslims’ reputation is that they marry more than one woman and divorce easily.”
“Where do you see that?! We don’t do that in my family. My father has been married once, and my uncle as well. Our family life is quite stable.”
“Okay, and the issue of living expenses? One has got to think it through.”
“I’m not a child. I’m twenty-eight years old, going on twenty-nine, and I know full well what I’m doing.”
“The economic situation isn’t easy these days. How will you manage?”
“I’m a law school grad, and I work as a lawyer with Fathi Radwan.”
In reality, Saad had left law and started working as a journalist at Akhbar Alyoum and Akhir Saea, but when he proposed to us, he presented himself as a lawyer with Fathi Radwan because he was in fact a law school graduate and had worked with Fathi Radwan.
“We’re going to look for a house and we’ll furnish it little by little, and we’re going to get married.”
Every time my parents objected to something, the two of us tried to solve the issue, but Saad especially took the lead in trying to reassure them. He was better than me at that, a good lawyer.
“Okay. We’ll see.”
My father wasn’t happy about it; I mean, he was worried. It wasn’t easy to reassure him.
But we started preparing for marriage anyway, Saad and me, with his friends’ blessing, especially Youssef Idris, Hassan Fouad, Youssef Helmy, and Ceza Nabrawi, who gave me an early wedding gift: a hand-made lace tablecloth. And there was Enjy Aflatoun and her husband Aboulela, too.
For the parents, it was a shock.
From my mother and father’s perspective, religion was a major barrier because of the common perception among the khawagas, the foreigners, that Muslim husbands were bad, with the easy divorce and polygamy. So of course, my father and mother wouldn’t have liked me to marry a Muslim, and an Arab at that. From the time I got out of prison, they were trying to introduce me to Italian guys and trying to get me to travel to Italy. A four-year interruption had made continuing my education difficult, but they would’ve loved for me to go to Italy, work, and meet an Italian Italian. But they weren’t successful, because from the moment I told our Italian friends, ‘I’m Egyptian, and I’m staying in Egypt. I’m not leaving,’ that was it. It was a decision I made, and I haven’t changed my mind for one second since 1948. And throughout all that’s happened since then, that conviction has stayed deep in my heart all the way to the end. And the government deporting the foreigners and the khawagas wasn’t on my mind at all. I would say to myself, ‘That doesn’t apply to me. I don’t have Italian citizenship or any other citizenship. I was born in Egypt, my father was born in Egypt, and my parents live in Egypt.’ Plus, I liked the environment I found myself in after prison; I was up to my neck in Egyptian public life. I used to tell my parents, ‘Saad isn’t like the men who divorce their wives easily and marry more than one woman. Not all Muslims and not all Egyptians are alike.’ I said that from the bottom of my heart, just like I’d say, ‘Not all Jews are like my father, and not all Christians are like my mother.’
It was an uncomfortable situation for Saad’s parents, too. Because, on the one hand, I was a communist with a political history, and they would have preferred that their son marry a girl who’d distance him from those dangers – what confirmed this for me was when I found out later that they had their eye on one of his relatives for him to marry. Plus, ‘They’re foreigners and Christians,’ they’d say, ‘we wouldn’t be able to communicate with her parents very easily.’ They preferred to marry amongst themselves, people they knew, so-and-so’s daughter and so-and-so’s son. To a certain extent, that way is more comfortable. For example, Amina Radwan, Saad’s aunt, married Mostapha Morad – their parents knew each other. Also, with a foreign wife, they wouldn’t know her customs, not like with one of their girls. As for social class – though they never said it – they were from what we’d call the middle class. They owned a bit of land, they had a certain kind of jobs, and it’s true they weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor either. We were living on Naim Street, a very humble house and an unacceptable area for Saad’s family. As for inside the house itself, the furniture in Saad’s house came in complementary sets: a dining room, a salon, armchairs and dressers. The difference in social class was clear as day. I think they would’ve preferred that Saad marry someone more economically secure, especially because he wasn’t financially stable and didn’t have a stable job.
Tante Aziza confirmed to me what my father told Saad:
“Of course, people want to get married, and when you love each other you say, ‘Whatever we have will be enough.’ But when you run a household, there are necessities that you can’t ignore. I mean, a house needs soap; it needs oil. It’s not about furnishings or jewelry or a dowry – those are things you really can go without. But daily life isn’t easy.”
I don’t remember what I said to Tante Aziza in response. Later I learned that in the Arab-Islamic tradition there are some stories where it’s no problem for the woman to be wealthier and support her husband, like Eshatter Hassan, who married the princess – he was a clever man who deserved the princess’s wealth. And like the Prophet Muhammad – Sitt Khadija was socially powerful and wealthy, and because she trusted him, she put him in charge of her trade. And in return, he kept on loving her and didn’t upset her her entire life, and he didn’t marry any other women while she was alive. I got the sense that there was a culture of women buying their husbands’ cleverness. He’d win her trust, and she’d buy his talent. Maybe that’s not limited to Arabs and Muslims.
Anyways, all that was theoretical talk about marriage, but in practice, as soon as they were faced with our intentions, the two families made a big effort to take our wish and decision seriously. And on our end, the first step we took was to try to please my mother with something tangible. Getting married in the church wasn’t possible except by permission from the Pope in the Vatican, because Saad’s a Muslim, and the church can’t bless the marriage of a Christian to a Muslim. But Saad told my mother:
“Inshallah we’ll get that permission.”
So, we went and met the priest at my mother’s church, Our Lady of the Vine Church, which was next to the house:
“No, that’s not possible.”
The priest’s name was Father Luigi, an old man who had been there since the war days. Saad replied firmly:
“Yes, it is possible, and I need you to tell me what the required procedure is. I’m a lawyer, and I know there’s got to be a way.”
“Fine, go to St. Joseph’s Church on Emad Eddine Street and ask for a meeting with the representative from the Vatican. Tell him your story and see what he says.”
So, we went to St. Joseph’s Church and sat there waiting. We waited a lot. It was 7:00, a little after sunset, when we finally got in to meet the Vatican’s chargé d’affairs. I explained things at first, of course, but it was Saad who was always taking the lead to have a discussion to try and convince whoever was in front of him. The last thing Saad said to try to make the priest understand was:
“I want to be serious. We’re going to get married. There’s no question about that. But we want to get married with your approval, all of you. There’s no problem for us in the Islamic religion; a Muslim man can marry a woman from any other religion. The problem comes from the religion of my future wife, and I want her to be comfortable and convinced. I don’t want to do something she’ll look back on later and regret.”
He convinced him!
He convinced him to write to the Vatican, requesting permission for us to get married in the church the Christian way: a Catholic marriage. We’d go back and check with the priest, and he’d say, ‘come back later.’
We carried on with our lives. We were so happy – I don’t know how to describe it. We were living well, happy with the people around us, with our friends, and they were happy with us. We were waiting for permission from the Vatican and waiting for a response to my request for citizenship.
Nadia Kamel is an award-winning Egyptian filmmaker and author. Born in 1961 in Cairo to journalist parents with a long history of political activism, Kamel grew up in a house steeped in progressive politics and a passion for the arts and popular culture. After working as an assistant director to leading independent filmmakers in Egypt – Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah, and Ateyat El Abnoudy – Kamel eventually concluding that to address the daring, often taboo topics that she hoped to engage with in her work, she would need to take the risk of producing her own low-budget films. She is most known for her first film, the prize-winning Salata Baladi (An Egyptian Salad), which explores Egyptian identity through her own family history and explores visits to her mother’s relatives in Italy and Israel. Kamel made her debut as an author with Al-Mawluda (Born), which became a bestseller and won her the Sawiris Cultural Prize in 2018. Her work is published in English translation in Words Without Borders. She is currently working on a hybrid genre film about Egyptian youth of the early eighties.
Essayed Taha lives in Alexandria, Egypt where he received a BA in English Literature. His Arabic translations of The Time Machine, The Man Who Would Be King, and The Shadow Line were published by Dar Dawen. He has worked on several translation projects with Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Taha also writes poetry in Arabic; English translations of his poems are published in Lock Raven Review.
Brady Ryan is a PhD student UCLA, where he researches Arabic literature. He has subtitled videos in Classical, Modern Standard, and Moroccan Arabic with the UCLA subtitle project. Additionally, he translated the lyrics to the 2019 album Daba into English for the Moroccan singer OUM. Ryan met Taha while participating in a workshop for Arabic teachers at Alexandria University, where their translation partnership began. They have a joint translation published in Words Without Borders.
Love having a read of your work at last! Interesting story and I look forward to reading more.
Thank you so much! – yes, it’s very interesting.