Between Terror and Tourism. Michael Mewshaw

Arab men.”

      “Would you accept an arranged marriage?”

      “No, no.” Sarah laughed. “I wouldn’t accept his having more than one wife either.”

      Fidehla and Helima rejected polygamy, too, but had no compunctions about arranged marriages. “You can learn to love anybody,” Helima contended. “My sisters had arranged marriages, and they’re happy.”

      “I don’t want to sound jaded,” I said. “But it’s been my experience that you can learn to hate someone you once loved.”

      “How many times have you been married?” Fidehla asked.

      “I’ve been married to the same woman for forty-one years.”

      “That’s longer than my mother’s been alive,” Michael crowed.

      But the girls were enchanted and asked how I’d met my wife, how old we had been and what our parents had thought. They listened intently to a PG-rated version of my first blind date with Linda when I was twenty-two and she twenty-one. Her parents hadn’t been thrilled that I was a grad student and planned to become a writer. But we married a year and a half later.

      “That’s so romantic,” Sarah sighed.

      “You were so poor and young,” Helima marveled. “You were brave and lucky.”

      “And the way you met,” Fidehla said, “it wasn’t much different from an arranged marriage.”

      “Sure it was,” I said. “Our families didn’t bring us together. We were free to choose.”

      “We’re free too,” Helima said. “We don’t have to marry a man just because our parents introduce us.”

      “But you don’t go out on dates and get to know each other in different situations. What possible basis,” I asked, “could you have for accepting or refusing a proposal?”

      Helima giggled again. “The man has to be good looking.”

      “To me,” Sarah said, “it’s more important to marry an Arab who has a British passport.”

      Fidehla and Helima agreed that a British passport was crucial. Helima planned to move to Saudi Arabia after graduation and teach women or children. But she wouldn’t marry a Saudi unless he had U.K. citizenship.

      After dinner the three girls moved over near the pianist to listen to the music. I stayed at the table with Michael, who was as surprised as I was that Helima had joined in this idle pleasure.

      I liked all three girls, but the two Believers filled me with the kind of anxiety and sadness with which fatherhood had acquainted me. They seemed so naive, so unformed. During my teaching stints, I’d sometimes had the same reaction to American students. But with them, change and growth were inevitable. I could picture Michael, for instance, going in a dozen different directions. He might become a spy or a priest, a professor or a writer.

      But Helima and Fidehla appeared forever fixed. Everything in their family history, everything in their psychological makeup suggested that they were now what they would always be. Maybe they’d claim that that was the point. In a world where whirl was king, they intended to follow the path their religious upbringing had laid for them. And who knew? They might be happier for that.

      An hour later, as we filed out of Santa Lucia, past the doorman in gold livery, Sarah exclaimed, “Isn’t it amazing? Here we are still in Egypt.”

      On my walk to the hotel, her words rang like a bell clapper in my skull. Still in Egypt. Still in Egypt. But then it struck me that I needn’t stay in Alexandria. The Libyan border lay four hundred miles to the west, a faint scribble in the sand near the town of Sallum. I could cover the distance in stages, stopping along the coast or at the oasis of Siwa. I could check in by telephone with my contact in Tripoli, then rush to meet him at the frontier once my visa was ready.

      At the Cecil, digesting my meal and the evening’s religious discussion, I switched on the TV. CNN reporters were grilling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic front-runners for president, about their Christian faith and the role it played in their lives and political beliefs. As they vied to replace George W. Bush, a born-again Christian whose favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ, they sounded less like citizens of a secular society based on the separation of church and state than like ... well, like Fidehla and Helima and hundreds of other fervent Muslims I would meet.