At the university, I mixed with people from many religious groups and ideologies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and I joined many of their activities at the school. But I always made my own sense out of things. A famous sheikh whom I met with several times once said to me, “Your problem, Wael, is that you only follow your own logic and you don’t want to have a role model to follow.” It was hard for me to accept conventional wisdom. It was my nature to discuss any matter thoroughly before I could accept a conclusion with both heart and mind. This attitude in an eighteen-year-old is not always endearing. It was not just my age, however. Thanks to frequent exposure to global media and modern communication tools, many young Egyptians were slowly becoming empowered to make their own educated choices.
“So your dad lived in Saudi Arabia. For how many years? What are his religious and political views?” asked Captain Rafaat, who had to gather as much information as he could, not only about me but also about my family members, as part of his job.
My father is a typical hardworking Egyptian who comes from the slowly eroding middle class. Born in the 1950s, his generation sang praises to Arab nationalism and the 1952 revolution, when Egypt’s King Farouk was overthrown by a military coup and Egypt was transformed from a monarchy into a republic. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, was a government employee at the Egyptian Railways. He had seven sons, whom he struggled to raise and educate. My father, the oldest, graduated from medical school and immediately went to work for a public hospital.
After my father married my mother, in 1979, and I came along, in 1980, his salary could hardly cover our basic needs as a family, so he decided to leave for work in Saudi Arabia. It was a very tempting option for many Egyptians. The salary offered in Saudi Arabia was twenty times the amount he received at the public hospital in Egypt. Like millions of Egyptian expatriates, he hoped to save some money and then return home after a few years to start a private practice in Cairo. Egypt’s talented citizens were becoming its main export, to the country’s detriment.
Economic conditions at home were horrendous at the time. Every year tens of thousands of Egyptians applied to the green card lottery, hoping to emigrate to America. Others left for Gulf countries, Canada, or Europe, by any means possible, to look for job opportunities. The phenomenon kept increasing, and emigration became the common dream of scores of Egyptians. Those with fewer skills did not have as many options. Some were desperate enough to put their lives at risk by emigrating to Europe illegally, by boat, despite the risk of drowning. I still remember an Egyptian comedian’s response to a question about the future of the nation: “Egyptians’ future is in Canada.”
After spending only a few years in Saudi Arabia, my father, like many Egyptians, fell into the trap of Islamic private investment companies, which proliferated in the early eighties. These companies offered a huge annual return on investment that reached 30 or sometimes even 40 percent, as opposed to banks, which offered 10 percent or less. My father deposited his life savings with four of these companies to diversify his portfolio. The companies were founded by religious Egyptians who offered their services as an alternative to banks; various Islamic scholars deemed fixed interest rates to be usurious and consequently prohibited by Sharia law.
A few years after the enormous growth of these companies, the Egyptian regime decided to fight them. Among other things, it wanted to protect the interests of loyal businessmen and feared that these private asset management companies would control the economy and cripple the banks. All such companies were frozen by the state, and their founders were arrested for fraud and money laundering. Most of the money saved by my father after years of hard work in Saudi Arabia was lost, as was the money of many other middle-class Egyptians inside Egypt and abroad.
So my father decided to stay in Saudi Arabia for a much longer time than he had initially planned. Every time I asked him why we were not returning home, he would answer, “How can I provide for a family of five with a salary of a few hundred pounds that runs out by the fifth day of the month?” My father is typical of his generation. He is fun, everyone loves him, and back then he spoke about politics only through jokes that timidly criticized the ruling class. “Ignore, live, enjoy” was his philosophy. Whenever he could, he would ignore problems rather than face them. I don’t blame him; the 1952 revolution had this effect on most of his generation.
My mother, on the other hand, pressured my father every year to return to Egypt, start his private practice, and attempt to readapt to life at home. We finally decided as a family that everyone but my father (I now had a brother and a sister) would return to Egypt and that he would follow us two or three years later, when he had saved enough to start a business at home. (Unfortunately, this never actually happened, and my father still lives in Saudi Arabia.)
Captain Rafaat was not very interested in my father once he found out that he was not involved with any political or religious groups, and he quickly moved on to ask, “So, when did you return to Egypt?”
It was in 1994. I enrolled in a private school in Zamalek, near our home in Mohandeseen. Both neighborhoods are known to be among the best areas in Cairo. I was in the ninth grade at the time. The decision to return to Egypt was one of the happiest moments of my life, but it was not easy living away from my father. I was never very capable of expressing emotions. I missed him immensely and always looked forward to his visits home. When he came home for forty-five days of vacation every year, I accompanied him everywhere he went. I laughed at his constant jokes and loved his modesty and his openness toward everyone he met. Tears always came to my eyes when he was leaving to go back to Saudi.
My mother did her best to make up for Dad’s absence. She was fully devoted to raising her three children to become decent and responsible human beings, and I was impressed at how she selflessly agreed to be away from her husband in order to do so. Despite her incredibly strong character, she put her children first in every decision she made.
Fortunately, I quickly adapted at school. My best friend was a genius of a boy by the name of Moatasem. He always effortlessly came in at the top of our class. I tried competing with him during exams, but always in vain. Moatasem was extremely diligent. I scored 92.5 percent and ranked second after him in the ninth grade, which is a milestone year in our educational system, the final year before “secondary education.” Moatasem decided to transfer to a public high school, where he would enroll in classes for advanced students. He convinced me to leave our private school and go with him to Orman High School. “It will be very competitive for us in the advanced classes, and the teachers in these classes are some of the best in Cairo,” he said. These arguments were enough to convince me, but one more reason was to get to know the real Egypt and integrate with Egyptians from different backgrounds and social classes and not just those who could afford to go to private schools.
I missed the aptitude tests for the advanced classes because I was away on our annual visit to my dad in Saudi Arabia during the summer of 1995. Before I began traveling, an admissions employee at the school assured me that I would be able to take the aptitude test once I returned. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t keep his promise, so I found myself attending regular classes.
Orman High School gave me culture shock. It was worse than anything I had ever imagined or heard about public schools. Being an all-boys school, there was a constant surplus of testosterone in the air. Fighting in the school playground always ended with someone injured. There was a designated corner for smoking cigarettes, and sometimes hash. Skipping school was common, as long as you paid a toll — a bribe — to the student guarding the fence. The number of students in a single class was at least double what I had been used to, over seventy students in a space that had contained only thirty students at my previous school.
I quickly tried to reverse my decision by calling the principal at my previous school. He refused to take me back, in order to teach me a lesson: he had offered many enticements to keep me at the school when I announced my decision to transfer, including slicing my tuition fees in half. I was very stubborn