Definitely, Insha'allah (Or How I Learned to Love Uncertainty)

jesus, take the wheel

Cheery flowers on a side street in Maadi, Cairo.

I was dozing in a dingy seat on a flight out of Cairo—forehead on the window and eyes squeezed shut against the harsh morning light—when a staticky noise jolted me awake and alerted me to the fact that I had no control over my life.

It was the pilot’s voice coming over the PA. “We will be landing in Luxor in thirty minutes, insha’allah,” he said. Insha’allah. If God wills it.

If God wills it, we will land in thirty minutes.

That was not the sort of thing I wanted to hear from the man in command of the tin can I was strapped into while hurtling through the sky. What did he mean, “if God wills it”?! Should he not have known exactly when the plane was going to land, considering he would be the one landing it? I imagined him sitting in the cockpit, throwing up his hands, and singing Jesus, take the wheel in his best impression of Carrie Underwood.

I had believed, before then, that I knew what insha’allah meant: it was what Muslims (and sometimes non-Muslims who were worldly and pretentious, like me) said about things that they hoped would happen, but were far from certain. Like insha’allah, I will be elected president of France or insha’allah, we will colonize Mars one day. I didn’t think it was the sort of thing someone should be saying about a situation they were supposedly managing—especially not a pilot in mid-flight. I had trusted this man with my life, and I wanted him to be pretty darn certain of when and how he was going to land the plane.

If he wasn’t in control, who was?

No Western pilot would say such a thing, but the phrase insha’allah is ubiquitous in Egypt. This is partially because the Quran requires it:

Never say of anything, “I will do so-and-so tomorrow,” without in shāʾ Allāh. When you forget [to say it], remember your Lord, and say, “May the Lord guide me to more righteous conduct than this.¹

In other words: good Muslims shouldn’t presume to make promises, because only God has the power to command the future. But not all Egyptians are good Muslims, and the ones who aren’t—the Christians, the secular—still say insha’allah. It’s a national mantra, uttered compulsively after anything that sounds a little too determinative. Egyptians used to kindly correct me if I forgot it. Whenever I said “I’ll see you next week” to my tennis coach or my Arabic tutor, they would wait a beat, then smile and respond “insha’allah,” covering for my cultural faux pas. 

When I first arrived in Cairo, I found insha’allah to be so prevalent that I wondered if, as a matter of linguistic drift, the phrase had shed all its dogma and morphed into a common idiom, used when you wanted to be polite but noncommittal. An Egyptian friend lent credence to my hypothesis: “Egyptians are flaky,” he said offhandedly one night over dinner. “Even when someone swears he is coming, we never know whether he will actually come until he arrives.”

Of course, that someone would have added an insha’allah when swearing that he would come. He would have said, “I will come to your house for iftar on Tuesday, insha’allah,” and if he didn’t show up for Tuesday iftar, the tacit implication would not be that he secretly hated the host, or that he was too lazy to show, or that he’d been invited to an even better iftar and gone to that one instead; it would be that God simply had not willed it. 

This theory of politeness made sense to me, given its American parallels—it seemed a bit like running into an acquaintance on the streets of New York and saying “let’s grab coffee sometime,” even if you had no real intention of following up. But then I heard a construction that didn’t fit the mold. As I was arranging an appointment, the man I was scheduling it with said, “I will meet you tomorrow at noon, definitely. Insha’allah.”

Definitely, insha’allah. I was flummoxed. It wasn’t a noncommittal pleasantry. He had every intention of arriving exactly when he said…unless, of course, something unforeseen stopped him. Unless an unsecured watermelon flew out the back of a truck and whacked him upside the head. Unless he found his route closed off by roadblocks, or by a traffic cop standing in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. Unless the road itself collapsed. 

All of the above are very real possibilities in Cairo, where life feels especially unpredictable. My experience of Egypt was that it existed in a collective fugue state, one where it was difficult, if not impossible, to know anything empirically; in contrast to the West, with its lane lines and time tables and rules that give the illusion of control, there was no veneer of orderliness in Cairo. There was only entropy. There were no lane lines at all, and the traffic lights (which I could count on one hand) were mysteriously always yellow. If I went to the same coffee shop at the same time every day, one day it would be open; the next it would be closed; the third it would be open but would have no coffee beans; the fourth there would be six baristas, none of whom knew how to operate the espresso machine; and by the fifth it would have been reduced to a pile of rubble.

Why? I’d never find out. The only answer was to stop buying into the idea that the future was foreseeable, or that I had any real say in it.

This, I began to think, was all the man had really meant by definitely, insha’allah. By saying I will be there at noon, definitely, if God wills it, he wasn’t being pious or circumspect. He was just being honest. It was a simple recognition of the human condition: that we can never know what happens next. 

A couple weeks after that first definitely, insha’allah, I found myself at a dinner party with a group of Egyptians who had spent extensive time in the West. When I introduced myself as American, they smiled knowing smiles. They asked me if I was enjoying Cairo, and I could tell they were picturing all the ways a quiet, manageable, American life would be upended there. 

I thought about it for a moment—yes, the adjustment had been maddening, but I’d become a calmer person for it. I was (and am) still far from perfectly zen, but I’d gotten better at savoring what was in front of me, and started practicing acceptance. Or trying to, at least, which was still an improvement from my days in D.C., where I had tried so hard to manage every detail of my life.

“It’s forced me to calm down and start rolling with the punches,” I said. “If I fixated on all the things I can’t control, I’d be angry all the time.”

My dining companions chuckled. “That’s good,” one said. “It’s the only way to survive here. You have to surrender to the chaos.”

Surrender to the chaos. I live by those words now. I’m happier for it. And whenever I say “definitely,” I add a silent insha’allah.

Thanks for reading Caravanserai—I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

On Tuesday, paid subscribers will get the first edition of Wandering Thoughts, a monthly series with inspiration for living an adventurous, net-positive life (please upgrade here if you’d like to follow along). I’ll be back next Thursday with a free piece on how to expand your travel horizons by rethinking biases about which destinations are safe and worthwhile.

See you for our next adventure,
Sam

1. Translation from Encyclopedia Britannica.