Dust and Ashes

Copyright © 2016 Al Kalima.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1 (877) 407-4847

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5231-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5233-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5232-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904105

Balboa Press rev. date: 04/07/2016

Contents

Introduction

Antecedents

Normal Times

The Good Old Days

The Upheaval

The Turnaround

A New Beginning

Training

Married

Stresses

Asibi

On The Move

A Mission Field

Ramadan

Memuna

Qasim

Pregnant

Camp Of The Mothers

Mothers And Babies

Miriam

Amira II

Winds Of Change

Hope

Escape

The Cost Of Freedom

End Of The Road

Glossary Of Non-English Words

Acknowledgements

He throws me into the mud

And I am reduced to dust and ashes

I cry out to You O God

But You do not answer

I stand up but You merely look at me

-Job 30:19 & 20(NIV)

DISCLAIMER

This book is a work of fiction but it is based on real events that happened in the past and continue to happen even now. The major characters in this book are fictitious except for historic figures like Presidents Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak and his wife, Suzanne. Coptic Pope Shenouda is also an actual historical figure as well as the major characters in the Denshawi Incident and a few other people. The Denshawi Incident really happened, and The Egyptian Bread Riots of 1977 took place. The rest are fiction couched in fact and are meant to illustrate the author’s lesson.

Al Kalima

INTRODUCTION

I wrote this book because I feel there is a need to address what is happening in the world now. The events described in this book continue to happen, perhaps even escalating. The aim of this book is not to arouse animosity against Moslems or to showcase how lily-pure, righteous, but oppressed, Christians are. Far from it!

What I intend to show in this story is how both sides have their heroes and their villains; but whereas the Moslems tend to be more militant in their beliefs these days, especially as much as it focuses on fighting jihads, Christians seem to have lost sight of what they really believe. Many Christians are more conversant with modern and ancient fables than with the tenets of their faith. Only a very small percentage of Christians nowadays have read the Bible, can navigate through it, or are willing to stand by their beliefs, to live by, or to die by them! Someone once put the picture this way using the events of Genesis 3: God put enmity between the woman and the serpent. The serpent never forgets this but the woman does not seem to always realize this!

It is not an equal battle when opposing sides do not equally realize the gravity of the issue at hand. I am not advocating that Christians go to fight jihads or anything like that. This is not a call to the return of the crusaders. No. It is a call to return to faith! What I am advocating is that Christians become more aware, better grounded in their faith, and more tuned to what they believe and what they should be doing about their beliefs so that even in adversity, they would find something to hold onto, and keep growing.

Many people in the so-called developed areas of the world believe the battle is so far removed from them. Not anymore! It is nearer now than ever. Teenagers born and bred in the West, often with Christian parents are converting to Islam and going off to the Middle East to fight in Islamic wars because they are given something to believe in and to hold onto. Home-grown Terror is taking root and very soon, kidnappings might be happening in our big cities. Jihad Training camps might soon be holding in our remote villages. How is a Christian to react to all of these?

I do not advocate meeting fire with fire though a firefighter explained once to me that one needs to fight some fires in this way. What I advocate is that Christians train themselves, and insist on teaching their children the fundamental doctrines and values of their faith so that not only will they be able to stand under fire, they will also have enough light in themselves to overcome the terrible darkness around them. Beyond that, they will hopefully switch on the light in other people around them.

If these pages inspire as many people as read it to dig deeper into their faith and have a more meaningful relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, then I have not written this book in vain.

Al Kalima (The Witness)

ANTECEDENTS

D o you know how difficult it is to kill a human being, even oneself?

It is very difficult. I should know, I have tried, and seen others try it as well. I know some people may disagree with me but I am speaking of things I have seen firsthand; yes, things which I have experienced. Like so many experiences in life, killing a person goes through stages. In the first stage one thinks about it like a passing thought; and then the thought takes hold like a log smoldering after it has caught the flame of a fire.

In the second stage one actually begins to plan how to carry out what had been going through the thoughts. Some people plan in very organized manners, some others have vague and scattered plans but there is that planning phase; and it is very essential. This phase might be as short as minutes or seconds even. More often it takes hours, days, weeks, months, or even years. Of course a lot could happen within this phase including honing of plans, change of tactics, or a decision not to go through with the thought after all.

Finally there is the stage when that plan is carried out. Not many people get to this stage. More often than not, the people that do are those who did not spend a lot of time on the first two stages. More often than not, these are the ones who do not succeed. Those who spend time on the first two stages often, invariably, and irrevocably succeed. Most of the attempts that I saw failed, and often with more dire consequences than before the attempt was even considered. Many times the failure of the attempt served as a more powerful deterrent than any other thing to those who witnessed it, to those who were still at the earlier stages of thinking about it or planning on how to carry out their thoughts. At the end, we felt it was better to live from day to day in despair than to contemplate suicide or murder. Some might call this a cowardly decision but they were not in our shoes, and might not react any differently if they ever got in them.

On the very few occasions when the plans succeeded, it was often fraught with regret, especially when it was already too late and there was no recourse to any remedy.

But death is just one possible outcome to all these phases. My mother once said to me that when anyone fell down, there were three things the person could do from that point. The person could stay down and be trampled by others; stand up and keep moving with the tide; or get up fighting, more determined than before the fall. This is the lesson of the challenges of life in a nutshell, and that is partly what this story is about.

When does a story begin?

Does a story begin merely with the events which happened a few hours or days before a crisis? Mostly, the catalysts for the crisis arose from events which occurred years, decades or even centuries earlier. Should those not be the beginning of the story even as the roots of a tree are the beginnings of the plant? But even before those roots were the seed, the soil, the rock that made the soil, the climatic conditions, and the weather changes. Parts of life are just like a continuum in a line of eternity and still begs the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg. We all come on stage as Shakespeare said, play our parts and leave it for others to come and go. Past events have ways of influencing whatever current events which led up to a story, if only one had the courage and the time to connect the dots and create the linkages. And a story does not always end in how the prince and the princess got married and lived happily ever after. A wedding is often just the beginning of a marriage, of a family which is about to be formed, tried, tested, grown, face its own challenges, sometimes triumph, and sometimes fail in woeful disgrace. Where we live and breathe are often infinitesimal sections of eternity, and in the face of eternity, our times are often meaningless, and when we tell our stories, it is often one segment of it that we choose to tell. To us, it might be our triumph, but to our predecessors, it might be the destruction of all they ever fought and gave their lives for. The triumph we crow over now might be seen as an impedance of progress by those who come after us, and they have the rights to change their lives and their decisions to influence the beliefs they have at the time they would be living after we are dead and gone, sometimes sooner rather than even later.

My name is Prisca. I am an Egyptian and this is a segment of my life. I am happily dying. The doctors say so. Of course doctors have been wrong about these things in the past but I very sincerely hope they are not in this case because you see, I really want to die. I have wanted to die for over forty years but God chose that I should remain alive still, and that, for a reason. I think my work here on earth is done and it is time for others to take over. I look forward to that blessed rest promised to the saints.

In the past, and for the bulk of my life, I have answered Briska. From birth I was Priscilla, but Mike calls me Prisca and that is what most people know me as for these past few years. I know some people refer to me as That old woman and that is what I must seem even though I am just fifty-five years old. At an event last week, I met a couple of other women who were about my age, give or take a few years, and they seemed about two decades younger compared to me. My skin is swarthy. My back is stooped. My neck has become so stiff that to turn around I have to move my whole trunk. And then there is my face! My face is full of scars and wrinkles. I like the wrinkles because they hide most of the scars, even though they make some of them more livid and gruesome. Mike says my most remarkable features are my eyes and my smile. Mike is usually right, especially about such things. The friends I have made over the past few years tell me that I look frightening at the first meeting but that when they take time to look into my eyes and see my smile, they feel totally at peace. Perhaps so, the eyes are said to be the windows of the soul after all and I have complete peace in my soul. It has not always been like this but this story is about how I became as I am.

People also get startled when I say I am Egyptian. Muriel exclaimed the first time I told her, An Egyptian? I would have taken you for a Spaniard even though your accent is very difficult to place! Muriel, I should say, has made a lifetime hobby of traveling all over the world, meeting people and making friends so she is quite an authority in such things.

However, her observation is not surprising at all. What really is the prototype of an Egyptian? That cradle of civilizations has seen so many races pass through its dry barren sands and its lush, fertile oases. She has nursed people from the very dark-skinned Nubians to the very fair-skinned Greeks. In between there have also been the Arabs, the Turks, the Romans, the Portuguese, the English, the French, and so on. My mother tried to outline our lineage to my brothers and me once. It was not just the contamination of one dominant race or two but a thorough admixture of so many races. I even had some Jewish cousins whom we used to visit on special occasions until they were suddenly transplanted to Israel and we lost all contact with them. The memories of them dimmed like a dream fades with daylight. So to be mistaken for a Spaniard was not a big deal at all. I have also been mistaken for an Indian, a Syrian, a Kenyan, and once for an American Indian!

So where should my story start? Perhaps it should begin from the Denshawi Incident even though there were years, decades or even centuries of events which led up to that particular point in time but in modern Egyptian times, the Denshawi Incident is still reported with a capital letter I as an epoch-making event.

The Incident really happened even though in the telling and the retelling of it, it has grown out of proportions and seems like one of those myths and legends of ancient times. It is also always retold with a lot of bias depending on who was doing the telling. In our elementary school history class, the teacher began by telling us this was what led to the fight for Egypt’s independence from the colonial masters of Britain. Later in High school, we discovered that the fight for independence had been on for quite a while before then but the Denshawi Incident served to garner support and sympathy worldwide, even from the British overlords. It had inspired so much discontent and bred courage among the nationalists that it renewed their courage and gave them a further rallying point to push home their arguments and sentiments.

The bare facts of the Denshawi Incident were that some English gentlemen deployed to Egypt decided to relieve their boredom by going bird-hunting. Most of the wildlife described from ancient times was long gone from Egypt by then. At the most only very few wild animals were left except in the zoos. Nevertheless, these men went to the village of Denshawi to hunt. Seeing no wild life there, they decided to shoot at the pigeons which they saw. Now, these pigeons were more or less domesticated and often served as the only source of meat for the impoverished villagers. They were not afraid of human beings as such and could not have proven much of a challenge to the hunters. When the villagers saw their source of livelihood being decimated for sport and without as much as By your leave, they were angry and frightened at the same time. They dared not protest to the overlords who were holding loaded guns, but they could not just stand by and do nothing while the pigeons were wiped out. What they did instead was to try to gather indoors as many of the birds as they could, out of reach of the British. It became a contest of which side would be faster in getting the birds, especially as the pigeons in question were not taking sides and did not know what was required of them.

Apparently, the frantic actions of the villagers added excitement to the hunt for the bored Britons. They took up the challenge. In the ensuing melee a village woman was shot and wounded. That was the breaking point! Suddenly, the subservient villagers could not take it anymore. Their anger overcame their fear and they attacked the hunting party which was made up five Britons and two Egyptians. Whereas the villagers had sticks, stones, domestic implements, or just their bare hands waving articles of clothing as their own weapons, the Britons had guns and live ammunition but they were overwhelmed in number. They shot into the crowd. Some people were seriously wounded but the villagers just kept coming. They were fueled by anger and fear. In desperation, the Britons set fire to a nearby wheat field which was almost ready for harvesting, hoping to divert the villagers.

If the villagers were incensed to begin with, they were now very much inflamed. Killing the pigeons had meant no meat with their food. Burning the wheat field meant no food at all! What was more? This was a farm almost ready for harvest. It was the end-stage result of weeks and months of backbreaking labor, patience, and hope. It was all going up in smoke, literally! They overpowered the hunting party, disarmed them, and beat them very severely. If not for the intervention of the village elders, the mob really meant to kill the Britons and their native attendants. But the village elders intervened and spoke some sense into their people. In fact, after the beating, some kind villagers took the wounded men in and nursed them despite their own losses.

Two of the white men managed to escape however. One of them got to an army outpost to report what had happened. The other man died of his wounds and the abominable heat of the desert. A peasant from a nearby village found him wandering in his fields and tried to help him. The man was beyond the help of an ordinary Good Samaritan. When the peasant saw that he was beyond help, he set off to find other Britons to report the death and perhaps get some reward.

The following day, the British cavalry arrived at Denshawi. En route, they met the would-be Good Samaritan coming to look for them. Through an interpreter, the peasant told them what had happened. The wounded man had stumbled up to him in his field; he had tried to help him but could not do much more than give him all the water in his skin bottle. This had not helped much and the poor man had died anyway. He led them to where he had kept the corpse, all the time reassuring them, Your friend did not die alone in the fields like a mere animal, and without human contact. I tried my best to comfort him and make him comfortable with all I had. I tried to keep him alive but he was too far gone to return.

Later, the interpreter would keep emphasizing the fact that he did a good job and that the peasant’s message did not get lost in interpretation. It will never be clear if the British Cavalry were too angry to understand the peasant’s story, or that they just disbelieved him. In any case, the reward they gave him for his kind deeds was to execute him there and then. They left his corpse in the fields while they sent the corpse of the Briton back to their army base.

They then marched on to Denshawi with vengeance in their hearts. No proper inquiry was made nor any investigation carried out. They set up a kangaroo court for the incidence of the previous day. The primary concern and mandate of the court was that the insult on the Britons be avenged, and any insurgence put out. These men were here as your guests and you did not honor them, the presiding commander said. You received them by beating them, and chasing them around until one of them died! What kind of hospitality is that?

What kind of guest goes about wiping out your means of livelihood? one of the elders asked. What kind of guest takes pleasure in shooting at your women and children? When strangers behave in this manner, we do not call them guests because they do not seem to have kind intentions towards us in any way!

Now I don’t know if anyone said these actual words or if it was just a figment of our teacher’s imagination but we all had to memorize those quotes verbatim!

The British soldiers rounded up the villagers. They disregarded the testimonies of the villagers, and the Egyptian members of the hunting party. They selected the people whom they felt were the leaders of the insurrection and sentenced them to death or to live-imprisonment. Abdelnebi, who was the Mosque leader and the titular head of the Moslems at Denshawi, was sentenced to life imprisonment. This was so unfair because his wife had been the first shooting victim. It was his field which had been set on fire. Almost all his pigeons had been wiped out.

Mafouz was the oldest man in the village and therefore the chief of the elders. A gallows was erected in front of his house and he was hung from there as an example to the other villagers. All his pigeons had been shot. The British hunters had started with his and he had not been able to take them in. He had shouted for others to gather in their own pigeons and was seen by the kangaroo court to have in this way roused the sentiment of the other villagers resulting in the eventual Riot. When Mafouz saw that the hunting party was taking it as a game and firing among the women and children who were trying to gather in the pigeons, he had hit one of the soldiers with his walking stick and told him to stop doing such dangerous things. For hitting a white man with a stick, and for inciting the villagers, Mafouz was strung up as an example to the people of what they should not be, and what they should not do.

Four other people were hanged with Mafouz. Perhaps, the most humiliating punishment was having all the elders of the village flogged in front of their wives, children, and all the other villagers as a lesson against insurgency. Even the ones who were hanged were first flogged. These lessons were very appropriately degrading as the Britons had calculated them to be. Native Egyptians revered, and still revere the elderly. In a culture that believed in ancestral worship, the elders were close to being gods. As everyone inevitably grew to be elderly and would soon come to the point of also being revered, old age was not just respected, it was venerated. Flogging an elder was the highest of all sacrilege. The Britons knew this, and that was the real aim of this object lesson. The Denshawi villagers, and indeed the whole of Egypt learned a lesson all right but not the one the British Cavalry wanted them to learn.

Our teachers told us that the Egyptians in the hunting party really tried to speak up about the injustice of it all but they too were flogged and put in prison for not protecting their commanding officers. Later, amidst criticisms, the British pointed out that there were also some Egyptians in this kangaroo court. If this was meant to appease, it only inflamed the people even more. They pretended to give us a voice but instead they actually muzzled us more! They punished us, trod on us, and expected us to respectfully thank them for being so condescending and so oppressive! Our history teacher cried passionately at this point. I actually saw tears and some of us wept right along.

Apart from the rest of Egypt, the rest of the world, the British parliament, and even the ordinary man in Britain were incensed by this incident at Denshawi. It lent credence to, and became one of the rallying points in the events which eventually led to the Egyptian independence about sixteen years later in 1922. Independence for the rest of the British colony in Africa as a whole followed eventually.

Of course people would conclude that is how it passed into history but there were other forces at play which were never considered. Up till then, Moslems and Christians had peacefully coexisted in Denshawi. There were minor skirmishes and expected competitions from time to time but that did not prevent them from coexisting as tolerant neighbors. They did business together and even intermarried despite petty squabbles. A Christian in Denshawi was likely to have Moslem cousins and vice versa. Religion was important but not anything to die for until the Incident. In the aftermath of the Incident however, a very great Moslem-Christian conflict ensued. I have heard some West Africans in Mike’s circle argue that the white man came to their countries with the Bible in one hand and the slave chain in the other. He stole their land, their sweat, their crops and produce, and even their young men and women. And then with the Bible he shut their mouths so that they would not protest, promising them their rewards would be in heaven in the afterlife.

That is basically how people were taught to see the presence of the white man even in Egypt of that era. Inevitably, the early colonial masters were linked to Christianity; and Christianity was linked to the British. Christianity is from the West, and everything from the West is Christian! To be anti-West is to be anti-Christian, and to be anti-Christian is to be anti-West!

In actual fact, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all originated from the same loins! It is just that whereas the Moslems trace their ancestry to Abraham through Ismail or Ishmael, the Jews and Christians trace theirs to the same origin through Isaac! Jesus Christ of the Christians, and Prophet Mohammed of the Moslems both walked under the same Eastern skies and baked in its sands. Both Christianity and Islam were cradled in Egypt. To this day, the Coptic Cathedral said to have been established by Saint Mark in the first century, is still in use for worship, and as a Tourist attraction in Alexandria. So also is the Al-Azhar Islamic University established six centuries later when Islam was still in its infancy. Islam is a relative newcomer to Egypt compared to Christianity, and Egypt was Christian long before the so-called Western World caught any whiff of it. Jesus Christ lived in Egypt as an infant!

In any case, the white man might have come for the commerce. Like good businessmen, they maximally exploited the opportunities they saw. They brought in their soldiers with their superior weapons to help lord it over the natives but the missionaries spoilt the show for them. The truth is that they might have got away with so much inhumanity if not for Christianity. That is my own heartfelt opinion. The missionaries came with a quest for educating and enlightening the natives. This group of white men saw the natives as people, people with souls, people with potentials, and people in whom God had an interest. They agitated both in their native countries and on site with the natives to get them educated. I have listened to lively debates which said that the education