The Map of Love

The story turns back to Anna in March 1901. She records her journey through the vast desert, her growing friendship with Sabir, and Layla’s affectionate help in designing her disguise. This disguise is quickly tested on the first leg of her journey, when she finds herself on the same train as some of her British acquaintances. She can suddenly see them as strange, in their own bubble, apart from the people and landscape around them. Anna enjoys the freedom and anonymity of her own disguise as a fully veiled Egyptian woman.

When she gets off the train, she changes her disguise to that of an Arab man, and meets Sharif, who is in similar clothing. Together with some of his friends, they mount camels and ride out into the desert. Anna is struck by the desert’s stark grandeur, and as she listens to her companions saying their evening prayers, she feels that she may at last be coming close to some peace of mind.

We return to Amal’s voice in July 1997. She feels frustrated by the unrest in Egypt and wishes to escape further into Anna’s world. She goes to ask her old friend Tareq’s advice about the troubles with the school, and he offers to speak to the governor about it. While they wait for a return call they go to lunch, and Amal is shocked to find that Tareq has hired Israeli laborers to fix up his own farmland. While Amal argues that doing so is counter to Egyptian interests, Tareq says that she’s stuck in the past and that his use of Israeli expertise only strengthens Egypt. His call to the governor works; the school and its attached medical unit will be reopened, provided that the government can vet the teachers.

When Amal talks to Isabel about this later, Isabel doesn’t understand why this vetting might be a problem; Amal, remembering past government abuses of such conditions, changes the subject back to the past. Together they go to visit the museum that’s been made of Sharif’s beautiful old home, where he and Layla first met Anna. While they admire this building’s beauty, Isabel tells Amal that she’s going to go back to New York; she wants to see Omar and Jasmine. Amal imagines Isabel’s past life, when Isabel told Jasmine that she was going to leave her husband. Isabel, Amal recounts, was taken aback at how unsurprised Jasmine was to hear about the divorce.

The second half of the chapter is devoted to Anna’s journal of her travels through the desert. She recounts a lavish dinner the travelers share with a troupe of desert nomads (which Amal juxtaposes with the racist account of Bedouins found in Anna’s Thomas Cook travel guide). Anna is moved by the magnificent desert landscape: ancient quarries, vast expanses, huge flocks of birds alongside the Red Sea. Sharif notices her enchantment and offers to take her on a more scenic route; they will, however, must go alone, as it can only be traversed on horseback and they only have two horses. On this solitary leg of their travels, Anna thanks Sharif for the perspective on the desert that she’s getting through this unorthodox journey.

They stop at an ancient monastery where they are honest with the monks about Anna’s identity. Dressed in their normal clothes, Anna and Sharif meet in the monastery garden, where Anna tells Sharif about how she came to Egypt: her love for the paintings, and her husband’s death. She tells Sharif that she has concluded that the most important thing is self-knowledge; Sharif, in reply, calls her both wise and beautiful.

Amal reflects on her own memories of her ex-husband, comparing them to Anna’s garden encounter with Sharif and thinking about how impossible it is to predict the future of a love affair from its beginning. From this, her thoughts turn to Isabel’s determined (but, Amal worries, impracticable) love of Omar.

Amal takes Isabel to the Atelier ‘am Ghazali, where they meet with some of Amal’s old friends. They discuss the political situation in Egypt, from the beginning of the country’s involvement with colonial powers to the present situation in which the country is uneasy about America’s alliance with Israel, the government’s impotence and increasingly oppressive policies, and the rise of fundamentalist Islamic forces in the impoverished countryside. Isabel is rather naïve about the complexity of the situation within the country but listens carefully. Amal and her friends in the educated upper classes feel frustrated and helpless in the face of their country’s complex political problems. The conversation ends with a direct address to Isabel’s nationality: one of Amal’s friends says that, while he’s never met an American he didn’t like personally, the global hatred for America’s foreign policy can only spell danger. Isabel replies that some think America is on a parallel track to ancient Rome: that is to say, it’s on its way toward a fall.

Amal reflects on her intense involvement with the story of Anna and Sharif: what’s nice about the past, she says, is that it stays still and doesn’t change. It’s more difficult to think clearly and understand one’s own mutable life in the present.

We dip back into Anna’s diary of her return to her English friends and her reunion with Sharif’s family. She tells a fairly truthful version of her story to James Barrington, who warns her not to get carried away by the romance of the adventure she’s been on. Layla, meanwhile, greets her like a sister.

Anna sends a series of letters to Sir Charles and to Caroline, which only hint around the edges of her desert trek. She describes instead her growing impatience with English ignorance about Egypt, a trip to the theatre to see the great Sarah Bernhardt, and a visit to the High Harem at which she unexpectedly has a stimulating conversation with a group of thinkers who are advocating for better education for women. She also records a visit to a Princess’s intellectual salon at which people from many countries gather to discuss the events of the day. She writes of developing a clearer and clearer sense of Egyptian national identity, which makes her understanding of colonial condescension that much more acute.

Amal notes that Anna seems enlivened, in no small part because of Sharif; many of Anna’s diary entries record waiting for news of him, or turn over their experiences together, looking for significance. We get a look at Layla’s records, as well. She records her delight at seeing Anna again and her sense that Anna and Sharif might have fallen for each other. As Sharif doesn’t get in touch, Anna increasingly despairs, believing herself to have imagined the connection between them. At last, a letter arrives from Sharif, declaring directly that he has fallen passionately in love with Anna.

Amal reflects that she is trying to construct a picture of her own great-uncle from many different people’s ideas of him: her own, her family’s, and Anna’s. Regardless of the difficulty of this portraiture, she moves into narrating the story of his life again, beginning with his struggle over whether to confess his love to Anna. She portrays him sitting in the same village that Amal and Isabel visited. He thinks about the school he’s going to found, discussing it as an attempt to help create educated citizens who can look out for their own rights.

His good childhood friend, Shukri Bey al-’Asali, arrives for a visit. He, like Sharif, is good-looking, confident, and charismatic. (Amal looks forward and notes that he will be hanged in 1915 for his part in the Arab Revolution.) They discuss the difficult political situation of 1901: the Turks, the Zionists, and the British uneasily poised to fight over Egypt.

Later, he goes into Cairo to discuss plans for a museum, an art school, and a university with his fellow intellectuals. He’s frustrated at the British refusal to fund these kinds of good cultural works. He’s also distracted by the thought of Anna, whom he knows is also in the city. He discusses the difficulties in his good works with his friend Prince Yusuf, whose plans for the art school are being stymied by religious authorities’ allegations of kufr, infidelity to Islam. Sharif suggests that the Prince should debate these accusations , but Yusuf is unconvinced; logic, he says, does not work in these situations.

Sharif thinks about his parents: his father, in hiding from the consequences of political dissidence, has become a magzub, a religious hermit, and has not emerged from his hiding place in a shrine for 18 years. Sharif is worried for his mother. He is continually distracted by thoughts of Anna. At last, he discusses his love for her with another friend, Ya’qub Artin, who encourages him to marry her: joy, he suggests, is intense and fleeting, and one must take it where one finds it.

Sharif goes to see his father in the shrine and tells him that he wants to marry Anna; his father does not respond except by praying. So Sharif instead sits down for tea with his mother. She has long wished for Sharif to marry, but she is shocked and doubtful about his desire for Anna. She cautions him that, though she likes Anna, such a marriage will cause major problems for them both.

An old family servant comes to read Sharif’s tea leaves and sees a mysterious approaching man (young and slender—rather, one notes, like Anna in disguise), an open clearing full of light, and a child. At last, Sharif speaks to Layla, who encourages him to follow his heart regardless of the consequences. The chapter ends with a leap forward to Anna and Sharif discussing their love. They conclude that it was, all along, fated.