The Evil Eye

It is a deeply engrained belief, especially in some Muslim cultures, that the envy of others has a real ability to make bad things happen to you. In places I’ve lived including Israel, Morocco, and Algeria, and places I’ve traveled to including Greece and Turkey, it is thought that if someone envies you – for your beauty, your fortune, your children, your professional success – the envy could act as a curse that strips away your successes. To ward off the “evil eye” people might post a symbol of an eye (also called an “evil eye”) or else a hand of Fatima (with an eye in it) in the the entryway of their home, wear these symbols as charms around their necks, or post the evil eye emoji on a social media post.

It is almost funny to me how much we do not have this belief in mainstream America. I can’t think of a single saying or superstition that we have around the concept of jealousy, other than our impulse when our loved ones are telling us about someone who doesn’t like them to say “They’re just jealous.” Or, in a direct rebuttal of the idea that envy has any evil powers, there’s “haters gonna hate.”

Americans, myself included, are quick to share successes (I got a new job! New house! New baby! New ride! We’re engaged!) on social media or in-person. My Afghan-American friend Atia, who never posts a picture of her kids without adding the evil eye emoji, also will comment with the evil eye emoji when her friends post online about their successes. To ward off the haters. Just in case. Americans are so quick to say “congrats!” to a friend who got a promotion, had a new baby, etc., surely some of these people posting congratulatory messages are thinking “Why them and not me?” And of course many people have ditched their social media accounts because looking at the seemingly perfect lives of others made them feel bad about themselves, and while that’s a form of envy, it’s more how it made the envious person feel, not how the envy might affect the object of the envy. The difference is Americans don’t think envy has any real destructive power to the person it’s directed at. In fact, we even flippantly refer to it as having “sour grapes” like the grapes that you just spit right into the trash and don’t think of again. So someone is jealous that you’re hot/rich/have a new boyfriend/successful at work? So what? Haters gonna hate.

Last autumn, I was very sad and feeling trapped in my attic apartment by my most recent bout of COVID, whatever number time having it that was. I went for a walk past the beautiful farmhouses and Spanish revival houses and bungalows in my treed upper northwest Washington DC neighborhood. Like now, it was getting dark early, and it was at night that those beautiful big houses really shine. I stopped and look inside these illuminated homes, judging their design choices, sure, but mostly just taking in what a lovely picture it was: a front room glowing peachy orange with all the soft lighting, a packed bookshelf, a big screen TV and a candle burning on the coffee table in front of it. It was not envy I felt at these cozy diorama-like vignettes despite my precarious living situation at the time (my husband had just left me alone in an attic apartment in a house owned by octogenerians). Just as I’d never fantasized about marriage, and how I have never wanted kids, I also have never felt the allure of home ownership. If there was envy, it was over the stability that these glowing front rooms, two Subaru driveways, and Jack-o-Lanterns on the front porch represented, when I didn’t even know where I’d be living in the coming months.

I noticed an evil eye in the grass. When I looked closer I realized it was just a sprinkler head that resembled the evil eye symbol but I felt it was telling me not to envy the people who live in these homes.Then, I thought how the concept of warding off envy must have inspired how houses are constructed in Middle Eastern countries. In places like Morocco and Algeria, it is practically impossible to get a feel for the interior of a house from the exterior, either because it’s obscured on a gate, built on multiple levels that aren’t visible from the front, or because they’re built around an interior courtyard, so you must walk inside through a door, through a hallway into the courtyard to understand the layout of the house. There’s no concept of “curb appeal” in these places. Contrast that with America, where you can generally understand the layout of a house, possibly even how many rooms it has, from walking by or driving by. We have a whole category of lighting that illuminate the exterior of your house just for the benefits of those looking at it from the outside. Just so others will say “Wow that’s a pretty house”. And now, with Redfin and Zillow, you can essentially look up any house you walk by and be privy to a video tour of the interior, and how much the house sold for.

I asked my friend Selma for her thoughts on the concept of the evil eye and she and two friends who were in the car driving to the Algiers airport animatedly left me voice note responses and agreed that this idea is integral to many aspects of life in Algeria. There, the belief that envy can derail your good fortune is so present it’s why brides-to-be tend to go dark post-engagement. “Not all people want good for you, you know?” Selma said. And sometimes a jealous person will fixate on the successes of another so much that it’s thought to create a curse called tabba in Algerian Arabic, and it is supposedly very hard to break. The religious way to break the curse is to read certain sections of the Qu’ran; the superstitious way to break the curse is to wear a hand of Fatima or evil eye charm around your neck; and Selma also suggested merely sharing the less-than-great-things in your life might cause people to realize it’s not all roses and allay some jealousy, to which her friend piped in that perhaps sharing bad things might actually attract more misery.

Muslims will often say Mash’Allah when they walk into someone’s nice home, when they see a newborn baby, or even on social media post of a friend who looks especially beautiful. It means “God wants it” or God willed it, and it’s another way to try and deflect envy or at least show the person with the good fortune that you are someone who wants good for them. It’s common to hang “Mash’Allah” in the entryway of a home so everyone coming inside pretty much as to read it/say it. (In fact, the owners of the home which contained attic apartment where I lived for a year had a little handpainted tile with Mash’Allah in Arabic hanging in the foyer. They’d lived many years in the Middle East). So maybe that worked to ward off whatever envy I might have attracted during a year where I didn’t exactly feel like I had an enviable existence. (In my current apartment, I have lots of evil eye symbols that I’ve collected from the places I’ve lived).

This one thing might be one of the larger cultural differences I’ve come across and in retrospect, I can see so many ways this played out while I was working at U.S. Embassies abroad. Americans love (perhaps nothing more than) a success story and so much of what public diplomacy embassy workers do, in particular, is try to tell those stories: “Yemeni Farmer Grows 10x Normal Cucumber Yield with New Greenhouse” “Gaza Girl Earns Full-Ride to MIT” “Algerian Teen Wins Regional Coding Competition”. But when sharing successes looks show-offy in so many cultures, or worse, might cause you to be cursed with bad fortune, who wants to do it?