For nearly two months after 9/11, every time I woke my bad trip would begin again. A little Jahannam churning through my body, as if I hadn’t spent every conscious moment battling the jitters and the doom till I could fall asleep. Neither therapy nor pharmaceuticals, the supposed solutions to the recreational substances that brought on damnation in the first place, could do anything to break the cycle.

This was a job for God, I decided. For His kindness and His mercy. The quality of God I have always believed in the most is mercy. But God didn’t seem to be responding to my entreaties. He was silent, as unreachable as He usually is, which in normal circumstances would be fine. Except now I needed Him so urgently I resolved to follow your implausible advice, dear father. To visit Sidi Omar, in his ancient tomb in the old, endless cemetery known as the Qarafah, and ask him to help connect with me with God.

Omar ibn al Farid, aka the “Lovers’ Sultan,” was one of my favorite poets, as you know, dear Father. “Hold onto the tails of passion and shed shame,” was the line I remembered most often, “and leave the hermits’ way no matter how grand.” His grave was half an hour’s drive from where Mama and I lived in Cairo. I thought it especially lucky he should also be a saint.

“Mama,” I announced on my way out on October 12, 2001. “I’m leaving. Hani’s going to drive me.” Hani was the garage attendant’s son, a freelance chauffeur. “I don’t want to end up lost on the way to the Qarafah.”

In normal circumstances neither Mama nor I would consider asking a man who died in 1235 to have a word with God on my behalf. Visiting a shrine to seek intercession isn’t exactly orthodox. It is superstitious: “every innovation is misguidance,” as the fundamentalists’ favorite Hadith will tell you, “and every misguidance is in the Hellfire.” But in her eagerness for me to embrace any worship regime, Mama, the only religious authority in my life, gave her blessing.

“May it be mercy and light on your father,” she said out loud, even though it wasn’t your grave I was visiting. But as I opened the apartment door, I could hear her mumbling: “and may your heart heal, ya habibi…”

*

When, seeing me brain-fried and grieving, Mama had sat me down and said, “Look, ya Youssef, the way to recover your bracing heart and your comfort of spirit is to return to God.” The word return had felt wrong.

“But I never went away from God,” I objected.

I was twenty-five, and, thanks to your example, ya Baba, the rites and rules, the dogmas and doctrines she was referring to hadn’t been part of my life since my early teens. But I didn’t have the energy to argue that even when disregarding those rules, I’d never left God.

For once, I wanted to follow Mama’s advice, but I knew that pretending or acting out of desperation was never going to work. Not with something as unorthodox as what I suspected this was, anyway.

“Mama, could this be a—”

“Shush,” she snapped, biting her lip. “Don’t say it.”

“Okay,” I sighed, understanding from her terror she suspected it too: someone had cast a spell to ruin my life and buried it where it could not be found. Sidi Omar was going to help me. More precisely, he was going to get God to help me, by granting me the knowledge of where to find the spell and how to undo its evil.

Of course, magic was even less sanctified than intercession—one wasn’t supposed to believe in either as an avenue to God—but now I knew Mama did believe. I was no Marxist like you, ya Baba, though I’d always considered myself the rationalist to her dogmatist. But magic wasn’t the only irrational thing growing in me since the light of the world went out.

Even the decision to visit the shrine on the first anniversary of your death came out of something unsanctified.

*

All your life you were a closeted atheist, but you’d already visited me twice. One night when I’d barely fallen asleep and was dreaming of frogs, the rustling of your night galabeya between my bedroom and the bathroom was enough to wake me.

You used to make this diabetic journey several times a night, dear Baba. If I was awake, I would squint through the crack in my door to see you shuffling zombie-like with the hem of the galabeya in your hand and your mad-genius hair glowing in the night light. This time, too, I could see you clearly, though I wasn’t sure if it was because I was longingly remembering you. Since my bad trip I had experienced the loss and the guilt of your death as if it had only just happened and I was seven years old.

“If thou hast nature in thee,” the Ghost dares Hamlet, “bear it not.” The chill in my chest told me this was my version of that scene. You were back from the hereafter not to demand revenge—no one had murdered you to marry Mama—but to reprimand me for being pathetically “unnatural.” I had failed to help Mama through your final illness, to be by your side at the last moment, or even to grieve you properly until the drugs forced me.

The second time, you spoke. You were a floating head in the psychiatrist’s waiting room, otherwise empty. You looked well-cared for: cleanshaven, with your soft silver hair combed back. And you wouldn’t stop moving around the room, slowly but ceaselessly. For as long as you were there, I kept swiveling my neck to maintain eye contact. At first you were so vivid against the light green walls you were almost corporeal. An angelic smile sliced your face as you suggested I think of a shafi’ to help me.

“A shafi’, ya Baba?” I knew what the word meant—a person who intercedes with God to save another, like the Prophet Muhammad is said to do for the whole Umma—though I would never have imagined hearing it from your mouth.

“You have nothing to lose but your chains!” You started to laugh but ended up coughing, your expression suddenly changing. You were already beginning to fade when I remembered your hacking fits. You’d be behind your enormous desk in the apartment’s narrow hall, fully dressed in a suit and tie on your thirtieth cigarette of the day, files stacked in front of you. You’d have a Turkish coffee cup in your hand and a pair of coffee-stained clown’s lips around your stubble-spattered mouth. You looked so fragile then, hanging onto life by a thread, but at the same time impossibly dignified.

“But weren’t you a dialectical materialist?” I don’t know if I asked you out loud or just mentally. I was more astonished than scared, too engrossed to worry what my talking and swiveling might look like to a third party. “I didn’t think you believed in such things at all.”

“I love you enough that when it comes to your well-being, I believe in anything.” In some barely remembered interaction between us, you had really uttered those words. “By the way,” you said, pointing with your chin, winking, so faint I could barely make you out now, “do you see that horseman over there?”

Immediately, inexplicably, I thought of Sidi Omar. It was the first time he came up in connection with the spell. “A horseman?”

“He knows everything.”

“Baba?”

When Sidi Omar’s ghost appeared to the Sultan Qait Bay’s son-in-law in 1470—two centuries after his death—Sidi Omar was not himself on horseback, though Ali ibn Khass Bay was. The scene transpired in the same Cairo Qarafah where he’s buried, along with practically anyone of importance in Egypt’s Islamic history. And I had always imagined him riding away into the darkness of the Moqattam Hills, which flank that city-sized cemetery.

“Making up stories again?” my psychiatrist had opened the door and stuck her head out to call me in. She was a Soviet-educated, child-free woman whose questions and analyses redoubled my anxiety, every time. Your floating head had gone.

It took a while to reorient myself, but by the time I got up and moved toward the door I knew who I would ask to be my shafi’.

*

Alleyways packed full of tombs and mosques, mosques and tombs. And, in the form of dark, sprawling hills, the unbearable shadow of Islamic history looming over graveyards that double as housing for the living. Stunning architecture mostly covered in dust. The Qarafah’s distinctive image is a tomb that looks like a mini mausoleum with two flat, ornate stones jutting out of it like sentinels. I could see it everywhere.

It was past evening-prayer time. The lampposts were few and far between, but there were occasional incandescent gas lamps in the distance. In my memory the sky is a luminous cobalt blue, the ground and the buildings a glowing orange-brown. Two small children ran past me on the sloping curve, and the dust that trailed them looked like a swarm of fireflies. But otherwise, the way to the mosque was desolate, a barely audible chant or fight the only background noise.

The presence of the dead might have been spooky, but, if nothing else, I felt they kept me company. I walked slower and slower, picturing you, wondering what you had meant by a horseman. I had always imagined Sidi Omar’s ghost riding away on a horse, but he wasn’t exactly known for being a knight. I called on you to tell me more, or to give some indication of your presence. Nothing.

There was no one at the mosque door, but as I removed my shoes, I took the fact that it was open as a sign. Immediately on stepping inside, I saw the pole over which the green turban of the Sufis had been placed, a shawl beneath it suggesting a human figure standing in front of the ornate tomb covered in calligraphy. It was all behind metal bars, as Muslim shrines always are. No way into that cage without a key.

Trembling now, I stretched my hand and held onto the metal while I recited the Fatiha once for you, another time for Sidi Omar. I had prepared a formal supplication, but I could barely find my voice. Looking up at the faceless turban, I begged Sidi Omar to be my shafi’, citing my love of his poetry. Again, I willed myself into sensing a response—nothing.

*

When a thuggish young man in a tracksuit stopped me on my way out of the alleyway, ya Baba, my muscles stiffened, ready for a fight. No anxiety registered in my body as I noted that he probably had a knife or box-cutter on him. I was coolly weighing up whether to tackle him when it turned out he was simply asking for a cigarette.

“Will you be coming to the moulid, then?” he said as he lit up, and it struck me how distinctively high his voice was. It evoked some specific animal or machine, I just wasn’t sure what. “Sheikh Yassin,” the voice screeched. “He’ll be here all night.”

He meant Yassin el Tohamy, the legendary munshid who performed Sidi Omar’s odes, among other chants. Every year on the eve of the saint’s birth, he gave a free concert where devotees swayed and entered trances. It hadn’t occurred to me the moulid might be soon.

“When is it?”

“The twenty-fifth of January,” the thug screeched, disappearing before I could ask him his name.

*

It was cold in the alleyway leading up to the empty lot where a ramshackle stage with enormous speakers had been set up at one end, and threadbare rugs spread over the sand. Once one joined the smokers and tea drinkers, many of them already high on bhango or pills or whatever it was they got high on, standing or lounging about in small groups while the musicians tuned their instruments, it started to grow hot. As always at musical events in Egypt, the sound was terrible. But this was my first time listening to Sheikh Yassin live.

Within minutes the lot was so full of Sidi Omar devotees there was barely room to stand. “You took my heart and that is part of me,” Sheikh Yassin was chanting, accompanied by a slow fiddle. “So what harm could there be in having the whole?” It wasn’t long before he sped up his tempo. The tabla and the riqq broke free.

From the quiet enchantment of people standing around to listen, the space turned into a kind of techno dance floor. People swayed front to back or right to left. Entranced, they leapt up and down. They shrieked. Some performed complex motions specific to the rites of tariqas unknown to me. Using the subtlest suggestive gestures, others mimicked animals or folk tale characters that seemed to have taken over their bodies. I knew who they were from what their relatively sober companions called them: Leopard, Pharaoh, Camel of the Burdens…

And, despite the deafening static and claustrophobic sweat—rude odors invading pores, smoke and dirt clouding vision—I was able to lose myself in the beat. I didn’t sway much, there was no room, but I shook my head and breathed rhythmically, eventually closing my eyes.

I don’t know when I became aware of him, the thuggish young man who had stopped me as I left the mosque the first time I went. I didn’t recognize him at first because, instead of the tracksuit, he was now in an elegant, Upper Egyptian galabeya. With glazed eyes, evidently unaware of his surroundings, he had his arms half stretched in front of him and was performing a sort of fluid squat as he lurched forward in what space there was, muttering inaudible statements over and over again.

No one yelled the name of this particular spirit-creature, but while I gazed at him edging closer, I became aware of the word “horseman” mumbled in the vicinity. It was at this moment my body started shaking so violently that two of my companions had to take hold of me to prevent me from falling and being trampled.

“By the blessing of Sidi Omar, come closer,” one of them was saying. “The Horseman wants to tell you something.”

I have no way of knowing, for sure, ya Baba, if you had anything to do with this or, if you did, whether it was voluntary. But I need to convey my gratitude anyway.

As I was propelled forward, unseeing, I heard the familiar, strident voice. “I am the witness,” it kept neighing. “The spell was broken when you came here. The spell was broken when you came here. I am the witness. The one who told you is your shafi’.”

*

Nothing came of my initial pilgrimage, my entreaties to Sidi Omar himself. But through the rest of the winter, Jahannam slowly eased off. The blessing of the saint, Mama suggested. Your prayers. Mama has always insisted that not only were you no atheist, ya Baba, but that you were devout. But neither you, nor your ghost, ever came back to me. Eventually I convinced myself that your visits had been daydreams or hallucinations, freak feats of my overexcited imagination.

A week or two after the moulid, my psychiatrist told me she was leaving the country to be with her husband, a professor who was teaching Arabic literature at some British university. Perhaps the pharmaceuticals she’d prescribed only worked in her absence?

Nothing was said in so many words, but when I got better, Mama and I decided there probably had been no spell. A couple of times, she performed a ruqya over my head just to be on the safe side. The ruqya was lawful enough, after all. She moved a lighted incense burner in a circle as she muttered prayers, and I no longer dreamt of frogs.