Prayer

Doaa, my name, means prayer in Arabic – just prayer. It is a very Islamic name. It is not the female version of Mohammed, for that would be first-degree close affinity to the prophet, like Fatma or Khadiga. But I would say it is the female version of Hussein, Ali – second or third degree, yet still discriminably Islamic to the Arabic or Muslim ear.

To Muslims, my name is a bullhorn. To everyone else, it’s just a name with two guttural sounds absent from the Latin alphabet. It’s a neon sign flashing across my forehead.

These were the exact words I told an Australian man in my regular coffee shop in Berlin, where I currently reside, two days ago when he asked me about my name as I was preparing to write this piece.

‘Are you from a different ethnic group in Egypt? Are you Coptic? I never heard this name before in Egypt,’ he asked.

‘No, Tony, my name is very Islamic. I was born during the 4 a.m. call to prayer: Du’aa el Fajr. But then my family decided to call me Donna.’

They never called me Doaa; it was just for official purposes. Why always baffled me, which might explain why I ended up as a cultural anthropologist critical of taken-for-granted societal assumptions people keep passing down to others as Mosalamat, an Arabic word for givens.

Mosalamat, the noun, comes from tasleem, the verb – to pass from one hand to another. To deliver without an explanation, to pass it along and assume that you will fit into ...