SIDE A

Creep, Radiohead (1993)

Losing My Religion, R.E.M. (1991)

Wind of Change, Scorpions (1990) 

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Guns N’ Roses (1990)

7 Seconds, Youssou N’Dour & Neneh Cherry (1994)

SIDE B

What’s Up, 4 Non Blondes (1993)

The Man Who Sold the World, Nirvana (1993)

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Saxon (1988)

Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve (1997)

Wonderwall, Oasis (1995)

(1)

It was the winter that lightning struck. Five hundred dead by heavenly assault. In Upper Egypt the thunderstorms were so intense that when an oil depot near Assyout caught fire, flash flooding carried the biblical blaze right into the closest village, Dronka. Fifteen thousand tons of fuel aflame. To this day five hundred remains the highest record of people killed by lightning at any one time anywhere in the world.

Back in Cairo, I was was listening to Radiohead on my Discman—feeling like a creep who didn’t belong, just as the song says. I pictured a ball of fire the size of the Great Pyramid rolling, leveling palm trees and razing houses, vaporizing vegetation. The image might have put the fear of God in me. But the next time I remember the song echoing in my head—two months after the tragedy—I was telling my mother I would never pray again.

It was one of those mercifully cold Ramadans when thirst doesn’t have time to work on you before it is time to break your fast. But I wasn’t fasting anyway. I don’t remember how the conversation started. It was around noon on a Friday, so Mama must’ve asked whether I was going to attend the Friday group prayer or pointed out how long it had been since I set foot in a mosque. 

I date my religious change of heart to the release of R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. By then I had found out about both sex and philosophy, and I rightly intuited that, without grievous risk and likely humiliation, it would be hard to seek out the mental stimulation and physical freedom I envisaged for my young adulthood in Egypt. So rebellion had been coursing and pooling in my head for four years. As if whisked by the same freak winds, now—totally unexpectedly—it brimmed over. 

“But if it doesn’t even help with stress relief,” I found myself saying, “what’s the point of a mindless ritual like salah? Huh? You keep saying how wonderful Ramadan is but you know as well as I do. All this fasting business is just an excuse for people to be obnoxious during the day, only to gorge themselves on the pleasures they pretend to be renouncing once the sun goes down. Tell me it’s not true!”

I was eighteen. Nearly thirty years later I can see Mama’s face as she listened, dead still. Fundamentally, it was the look she still gives me when I voice objectionable views. A kind of doting mockery, like someone telling you they’re disappointed that you’re so stupid but they love you anyway—they’re sure you will come round. 

That day I slammed the door behind me with the vengeful intention of smoking in public: the worst transgression I could think of during fasting hours. Linda Perry’s vocal magic swirled round my enormous headphones as she confessed to crying in bed, complaining that she felt peculiar. And, my afro bobbing to the rhythm, I stalked the asphalt glaring at people, shaking with all the paranoid rage of my adolescent apostasy.

(2)

Every time the phrase losing my religion is uttered, even in my head, I hear it the way R.E.M. sang it—with uncanny timing for my life’s trajectory—in 1991. I know it can mean simply losing it. Maybe that’s how it is used in the song. But in my case, even though I was scoffing at the consequences, this was a literal and traumatic break. 

If you grew up middle-class in eighties Cairo, you grew up convinced that religion was the way the world worked. The narratives, the rules of religion were not a matter of right and wrong. They weren’t even a matter of belief or disbelief. They were common sense. To pass your exams you had to study. To stay healthy you had to eat and sleep. And to be a good person you had to perform the rituals of worship. There were no more whys about it than the laws of physics. Except it turns out the precepts of the faith are not nearly as useful or inviolable. If you don’t seal off this part of your brain once it is washed in childhood, sooner or later the truth will out:

Not worshipping could never hurt your health or career. It could, of course, but only because worshippers might actively fuck you up or find a way to prevent you from graduating. People talked about the hereafter, heaven and hell, but it took less than a minute’s reflection to realize that if these things existed it was very unlikely they would depend on dogmas that were as petty as that. There were people to whom those dogmas remained unknown because they weren’t born into the same creed. Why would God judge them differently? How could an all-good, all-powerful, all-present Being not see past the superstitions and hypocrisies of one group? 

That it was wrong to kill or steal: no one questioned that kind of thing. It was the arbitrariness of the rules that I found repugnant. The way absolutely everything had to be either halal or haram: permissible or prohibited. All those peremptory edicts felt like inconveniences and anachronisms. Some, like the fact you couldn’t eat pork while beef and chicken were okay, felt absurd. Others, like a man being able to have four wives or a sister getting half her brother’s inheritance, felt downright wrong. Considering what the creed was supposed to be about, they also felt contradictory. 

In its essence Islam is the story of emancipation from ignorance: how Revelation liberated people from the tribalism and magical thinking to which mortal minds had condemned them for millennia. That is why the pre-Islamic age is called Al Jahiliyyah, which can be translated as The Not-Knowing. It is also why the only tangible thing held to be divine is the text of the Quran itself. But the more I thought about them, the more the precepts of the faith felt like enslavement to some of the most ignorant human minds imaginable. A way to impose tribalism and magical thinking on every breath. 

It was the one thing Mama couldn’t help me with. That must be why I was driven to confront her. An only child, you could say I was a mama’s boy, and I held onto the idea of the caregiver as a faultless superwoman. Every issue I’d had with the world—pudginess, puberty, police intimidation, popularity at school—she had walked me through, unconditionally supportive. And she was never just practical but always reasonable, persuasive. The fact that she had neither a rational nor a sympathetic response to this crisis had to feel like a cosmic letdown. 

Outside of religion Mama was open-minded and skeptical, someone who sought evidence and arrived at her own conclusions. It was her down-to-earth reassurance that I needed most. But for seven months all I got was that disapproving look and casual comments to the effect that she felt sorry for me. That didn’t help with the subconscious horror of no longer knowing who I was. Because if I wasn’t Muslim the way I’d been brought up to be—that was a question I hadn’t thought of—what was I? 

In the 1970 David Bowie song that Curt Cobain performed in the early nineties, The Man Who Sold the World, a young man runs into an earlier version of himself and doesn’t recognize it. There is a specific, splitting-into-two-people angst that comes with inner transformation. In a matter of days it tears you down the middle, but you don’t heal enough to start feeling whole again for years. In Cobain’s voice, The Man Who Sold the World instantly summons back that angst.

(3)

My father was a former communist, completely areligious, so it might’ve made sense to take my problem to him. But he was always busy working and being depressed. He communicated through a fog of slowness that I’d grown to interpret less as distraction than distress. If he contributed to my upbringing at all it was through the occasional, noncommittal heart-to-heart. 

Baba couldn’t really have helped because it was to Mama that my emotional life was bonded. His background might’ve spared me the decade-long journey through which I stumbled back to my identity, if I had joined something like the Egypt branch of the Revolutionary Socialists for example, though I’m not sure it existed then. Marxism might conceivably have replaced Sharia and I would’ve known who I was.

But I’d read enough to know that in Marxism people are just a reflection of their background. They can only embody the material interests of their social class, and even at eighteen that felt like an even smaller cage than the dogmas of the faith.

It had been decades since Baba was a communist and, even if he still respected Marxist philosophy, he wouldn’t have wanted me to be one anyway. But the day my art teacher caught me humming the lyrics to Wind of Change—“Happy about the fall of the Soviet Union, are we,” he said in his Glaswegian brogue, and moved on—it was one of those rare occasions when Baba was eager to talk. 

In 1990 I definitely didn’t have a Discman, so it must’ve been on cassette tape that I played the song for him, translating what he didn’t understand of the lyrics—about the two sides of the Iron Curtain coming together as brothers. By now Baba was an admirer of Gorbachev. He was delighted with the triumph of liberalism. But you could still hear a note of mournful anxiety in the way he talked about the end of the whole experiment. 

“So now, in the Eastern Bloc, the people went out to demand their freedom,” he told me when he was done with his potted history of the Cold War. “And they got it. For thirty-five years they’d lived under communist governments that lied to them and made them spy on each other. They were poor and oppressed. They couldn’t speak their minds or elect their leaders. They couldn’t read the books or watch the films they wanted. They couldn’t chew Wrigley’s gum or drink Coca-Cola, because products from the other half of the world were banned. They couldn’t even practice the religions they were born into. 

“You know I’m not a huge fan of religion, Comrade Youssef, habibi,” Baba wrapped his arm around my shoulders for this. “But if you want to live and worship a certain way no one should have the right to stop you. Just as long as you don’t stop other people from living the way they choose. Right? Now play me another one of those jarring, jangling catastrophes of sound you like to listen to.”

Just as long as you don’t stop other people from living the way they choose. It sounded unremarkable at the time, but it was a statement I would remember. 

I would remember it while clinching my renunciation of the faith in the wake of the Dronka village tragedy, when I kept saying to myself that it just wasn’t true. You couldn’t be a sincere believer and look on unbelievers without disapprobation. Tolerance and inter-faith dialogue and all that was designed to hide the fact that you just couldn’t believe the dogmas of one creed and think it right to live by any other. 

I would remember it in 2001, less than a year after Baba died, when I had a mental meltdown coinciding with 9/11: the moment when “Islam”, already unnecessarily burdened by all kinds of premodern abominations, became synonymous with terrorism.

And I would remember it again in 2011, when I joined protests in Tahrir Square thinking of protests that brought down the Berlin Wall, twenty years earlier. People lost their lives to oust a president who had remained in power since 1981, but the democratic transformation they brought about turned out to be a Trojan horse for political Islam. Within months what our newfound democracy reduced to was precisely the religious will to stop people from living the way they choose. 

I’m not sure which other song I played for Baba that evening. I wanted to show him that my music had political substance. So it might’ve been that relatively obscure 1988 track by the British metal band Saxon which, talking about a divided city where the walls come down following popular protests, accurately foretold the events of 1989.

(4)

For months after my confrontation with Mama, listening to the Guns N’ Roses cover of Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, I would catch myself weeping and not know why. I didn’t realize how far losing my religion had separated me from the well-adjusted schoolboy I had been. Like the officer in the song, I had accidentally killed that boy and was now dying in my turn, losing access to the badges and the guns that were my birthright. The difference was that no one realized what was going on. Not even me.

What brought about this state of affairs wasn’t just the authoritarianism and unreason that, justifiably or not, I still reflexively associate with religion. In the Egyptian middle class there was enough conformism for several earth-like planets full of people. But it was my bibliophily that brought things to a head: the fact that I let the words in books change me, and used words to deal with being in the world. 

Later that Ramadan Mama remarked, snidely, that it had been a mistake to send me to an English school that she and Baba struggled to afford, where I also felt socially inferior to my classmates. She didn’t regret the money, I was sure. She valued education above everything else and so did the man she married. But she could see that school was where the little storm that exploded in her face had gathered—while I mingled with British teachers who discussed books with me and treated me like a peer. 

At school I was neither a geek nor a popular kid. But I was held back by feeling unattractive. Neither my looks nor the way I talked got me the attention I coveted. I was aware that my parents and I lived in a small, basic apartment on the frontier of a slum, that certain bourgeois items of furniture were missing from our house, that we only had one unremarkable car, were not members of the Gezira Club, and didn’t dress or eat as expensively as some of my classmates. It compounded the feeling.

By sixteen or so I was smoking and drinking. I had older girlfriends and drug-taking buddies from the city’s bottom, as the newspapers always called the rougher neighborhoods. But nothing corrupted me worse than reading. 

From What Is It Like to Be a Bat? and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to The Selfish Gene and Cosmos. And from science fiction—my way into all kinds of narrative delight—to the Seamus Heaney poem I inadvertently learned by heart while studying for my English O Level, “Digging”. Reading confirmed my sense that there were endless ways to live past and beyond the borders that had sheltered me. And none of them were allowed in Egypt. 

That is how, picturing a glittering world of ideas and relationships—a world, in some ways, closer to downtown Cairo than the postindustrial British backwater where I actually wound up going to university—I first thought of leaving the country. I couldn’t hope to be who I wanted while immured in this materialistic aviary, permitted to mix only with my kind. Difference was closely monitored and punishable by ostracism or worse. There would be nowhere to go without being hunted down. What the hell was I really doing here, anyway—creep that I was?

I was so tormented by the thought that when I finished my IGCSEs I didn’t agree to enroll in Cairo University until I’d applied to as many places in the US and the UK as I could, and no sooner did I set foot on campus than I was choked by the parochial atmosphere, the rote learning, the herd-like attitude of most students and the sadistic condescension of most teachers. One evening I sat both my parents down and gave a speech:

“I’m happy to give up any resources you might be setting aside for my future—if you just let me get a real education. Abroad. You know I can be an ace student, but that’s going to be impossible at a school where I can’t even deal with the academic system, where I can’t even bear the atmosphere. Those professors are psychopaths! Anyway, no amount of savings will be as valuable as getting the degree I want, right? If I go to a genuinely good school, I can eventually make my own money leading the life I truly want.” 

And so while I died to myself I really was knockin’ on heaven’s door. Heaven wasn’t just a better place to have a college education but also a new person to become. In The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony, the speaker talks incoherently about whether or not he has changed, concluding that he’s a million different people at the same time. Later, as a second-year student in the UK, the whole ordeal came back to me one night at the student union bar while I danced, timidly, to that song.

(5)

It was the winter that lightning struck. Five hundred dead while Radiohead played on my Discman. I pictured a ball of fire the size of the Great Pyramid rolling, erasing the world as it went—giving me the chance to build a better one. 

Youssou N’Dour’s 7 Seconds was barely six months old that day in Ramadan. I don’t remember hearing it then, but it feels like the soundtrack to the rest of my time in Cairo. For seven months rather than seven seconds, I really would be waiting, as the song’s refrain says. I’d be waiting to leave the country. 

Sometimes I wonder whether I would’ve had the courage to stand before my mother and declare myself an infidel if my parents hadn’t already agreed to let me go. 

I can eventually make my own money leading the life I truly want. That actually has come to pass, even if the life I truly wanted isn’t what I thought it would be. Losing my religion was how it started, while I listened to all kinds of Nineties rock. I listened obsessively, never suspecting that, in memory, that music would become the vehicle of my journey from belief to unbelief and eventually kind of back. Because it was to the sound of those songs that I had known things and started to ask questions.

Knowing things and asking questions were the gift of reading. Of course I didn’t realize that having that gift meant periodically dying the way I died when I lost my religion, imploding and having to put myself together again. But, even if I did, I don’t think I would give them up. They made me feel too good about myself for that.

In the four years building up to the last winter before I left, books also showed me there were other ways to judge human worth. Wealth wasn’t the only pyramid, just as athletic good looks weren’t the only way to be wanted. There was taste, humor, openness. Charm. There was dynamism and the capacity for feeling. There was intelligence and the sheer power of self-confidence. Each of these things could be its own pyramid and most were more interesting than class. 

Even now I can say with confidence that nothing in my life ever liberated me as much as this realization. Just as I could be virtuous without being religious, I didn’t have to tick the material boxes to be worthy of a place in the world. 

By September 1995 I was settling into my room in one of Hull University’s halls of residence, outside the village of Cottingham. The North of England wasn’t the heaven where I’d envisaged being reborn, but in terms of education at least it was an improvement on Cairo. I never allowed myself to acknowledge my shock at first, but this brave new world was more alien than anything I could’ve imagined while dying in the old. 

I remember being excited but also taken aback—baffled. There was no religion here, at least none that had any control over me. But how on earth was I going to survive three of those sullen winters? Everywhere I went I could hear the Oasis club anthem Wonderwall, and in the part about winding roads and blinding lights, it felt as if Liam Gallagher had made the song specifically to taunt me.