If you can’t find good in your own country, you won’t find it anywhere
else.”
The words slipped out from Zaki Bey, but he felt that they were ungracious
so he smiled to lessen their impact on Busayna, who had
stood up and was saying bitterly, “You don’t understand because
you’re well-off. When you’ve stood for two hours at the bus stop or
taken three different buses and had to go through hell every day just to
get home, when your house has collapsed and the government has left
you sitting with your children in a tent on the street, when the police
officer has insulted you and beaten you just because you’re on a
minibus at night, when you’ve spent the whole day going around the
shops looking for work and there isn’t any, when you’re a fine sturdy
young man with an education and all you have in your pockets is a
pound, or sometimes nothing at all, then you’ll know why we hate
Egypt.

...he was one of the great intellectuals of the 1940s who completed
their higher studies in the West and returned to their country to
apply what they had learned there—lock, stock, and barrel—within
Egyptian academia. For people like them, “progress” and “the West”
were virtually synonymous, with all that that entailed by way of positive
and negative behavior. They all had the same reverence for the
great Western values—democracy, freedom, justice, hard work, and
equality. At the same time, they had the same ignorance of the nation’s
heritage and contempt for its customs and traditions, which they considered
shackles pulling us toward Backwardness from which it was
our duty to free ourselves so that the Renaissance could be achieved.

I
lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo
was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well
mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was
different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of
a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the
evening—the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the Gezira
Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and
drinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most of
the people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threw
them out in 1956.”
“Why did he throw them out?”
“He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners got
scared and left. By the way, what’s your opinion of Abd el Nasser?”
“I was born after he died. I don’t know. Some people say he was a
hero and others say he was a criminal.”
“Abd el Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt.
He ruined the country and brought us defeat and poverty. The damage
he did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nasser
taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites.”
“So why do people love him?”
“Who says people love him?”
“Lots of people that I know love him.”
“Anyone who loves Abd el Nasser is either an ignoramus or did
well out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids from the dregs
of society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. Nahhas Basha was a good
man and he cared about the poor. He allowed them to join the Military
College and the result was that they made the coup of 1952. They ruled
Egypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions. Of course
they have to love Abd el Nasser; he was the boss of their gang.

He had worked out long ago that police officers evaluated a citizen on the
basis of three factors—his appearance, his occupation, and the way he
spoke; according to this assessment, a citizen in a police station would
either be treated with respect or despised and beaten.

Egyptians are like camels: they can put up with beatings, humiliation and starvation for a long time but when they rebel they do so suddenly and with a force that is impossible to control.

Sheikh Bilal had taken
him aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriage
and his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothing
for a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not a
virgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be a
weak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He said
sarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity,
even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that if
one of them marries a woman who was previously married, the
thought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat her
badly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam has
no such complexes.