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Cultural clashes no match for real love

By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published December 29, 2006

ADVERTISEMENT [Courtesy of Melissa Gragert] Ahmed Hefuna and Melissa Gragert are getting married today in Egypt. Gragert's parents live in Spring Lake.

She was a Florida girl coming from dance class all sweaty and dishevelled. He was the Mediterranean-looking hunk working on his laptop. The first time they saw each other in March, there were no words but instant chemistry.

The next evening, Melissa Gragert and Ahmed Hefuna both found their way back to that Washington, D.C. coffee shop. And it wasn't for the coffee.

Their first conversation led to a dinner date, then trips to see the cherry blossoms. On her birthday in September, they rode in a hot air balloon. He proposed a few days later. She came home to Spring Lake in Hernando County for her bridal shower on Dec. 17. The couple flew to Egypt on Saturday. Today they'll ride in a horse-drawn carriage to their sunset wedding ceremony on the banks of the Nile. Afterward, they'll celebrate aboard a riverboat. That's the fairy tale.

This could have been a union of oil and water. Melissa is white, Western, and Christian. Ahmed is Egyptian. His faith is Islam.

"When people ask if he's Muslim, they whisper like it's a four-letter word," she said. "We know we are going to have to live with that."

So it is these days.

Melissa's mother, Liz Gragert, always considered herself open-minded. Still, when an Egyptian Muslim wants to marry your American daughter, it's a test. But Liz drew on her own family history. Her mother was a French Catholic war bride who was excommunicated for marrying a Protestant American soldier after World War II. She knows what that kind of strife can do to a family.

"She's truly happy," she said of her daughter. "That's how we know it's right."

But even as Liz Gragert and her husband, Michael, a supervisor for Rooms To Go, listened to their daughter talk excitedly about her upcoming wedding, they couldn't ignore the strident anti-Muslim rhetoric in their Hernando County hometown, where respectable, powerful people were demonizing Muslims.

Muslims are terrorists, she heard. And her daughter was planning to marry one. She was dismayed. She called to share her feelings.

The Gragerts lived in St. Petersburg before seeking more wide open spaces, which they found in bucolic Spring Lake in 1994. Georgia, their younger daughter, went to Hernando High. Melissa, their older daughter, had already graduated from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High in St. Pete and was off to Florida State, then Harvard. She traveled to North Africa, South America, all over. Now 30, she's a therapist who specializes in treating drug and alcohol addiction and trauma.

Ahmed, 34, came to America for an internship in 1998 after he finished medical school in Egypt. His specialty is adolescent and childhood psychiatry. He studied in Miami, Philadelphia, and now Washington, D.C., where he is doing a fellowship at Children's Hospital.

After 9/11, every Muslim man is suspect. His parents worried about their older son in America. His parents also worried about Ahmed falling into the clutches of an aggressive American girl.

"Stereotyping works both ways," Ahmed said during a recent phone conversation.

Since their first date, Ahmed and Melissa have tried to tackle those stereotypes and how they'll affect their children.

They want their children to experience both Egypt and America, to embrace their Islamic and Christian heritages, to find comfort where others see only conflict.

They'll face tough but beatable odds.

Andrew Skerritt can be reached at 813 909-4602 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602. His e-mail address is askerritt@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 28, 2006, 21:53:01]