It was no easy task to cope in the new environment. Blending in was more challenging to me than performing well in class, and I regained my balance only after I began to adapt. At the beginning of my Orman experience I hated it so much. Yet at the end I loved it just as much. That school exposed me to social classes I had never mixed with. I learned how to relate to all kinds of people. I later became extremely interested in psychology and sociology, not least because of these years.
In my first year, I received my worst grades ever. The threat of failure has always motivated me to fight back. I decided to focus all my time and effort during the next year — the eleventh grade — to excel, in order to join the advanced classes with my friend Moatasem in twelfth grade, the last year at high school. Mission accomplished: after a year of very hard work, I received a grade of 95 percent and was able once again to sit at a desk with Moatasem, as we used to do in the ninth grade.
Nevertheless, no amount of success could make me forget some of the things I saw during the first two years at Orman. The teachers tried to maintain order by means of violence and beatings. In return, the students enjoyed intimidating and harassing the teachers. There were daily battles in those classrooms of seventy, among whom were a fair number of troublemakers.
Like other government employees, public school teachers in Egypt receive a monthly salary of no more than a few hundred pounds, which does not cover their basic family needs. As a result, private lessons have become teachers’ main source of income. Teachers can generate thousands of pounds by visiting students’ homes and tutoring them in a far better environment than at school. A survey carried out by the Egyptian cabinet’s Information Center in 2008 revealed that 60 percent of parents sought private lessons for their children. Many families were spending up to a third of their income on these lessons.
Like a cancer, the phenomenon of private lessons quickly spread everywhere in the country. Teachers began marketing their services on leaflets that can be found in every street of every city and town. They give themselves catchy titles like “the emperor of physics” or “the colonel of chemistry.” The real shame is that most teachers, along with the government’s textbooks, emphasize rote memorization rather than any genuine understanding. Students and parents have to find their own ways to learn how to solve problems. Many students rely on supplementary texts. Egyptians spend over one billion pounds ($200 million) every year on them. I resisted private lessons adamantly until my final and decisive year in high school, when math and chemistry were so challenging that I simply could not grasp them from the classroom instruction.
One of my elected courses was psychology. I chose to study it because, like many adolescents, I was interested in understanding human nature. I decided to take private lessons with a university instructor whom I will never forget: Mr. Ehab. We used to spend hours more than the scheduled time discussing many interesting topics. Mr. Ehab taught me how to deal with various people and situations and helped me realize that a large number of conflicts result from pure miscommunication, like what Aristotle said about the importance of defining terms to avoid unnecessary disagreement. It was quite a good experience for someone of my age.
The corrupt educational environment also encouraged cheating. Teachers who supervised without allowing cheating were described by students as “bothersome.” Some mothers used to wish that the proctors of their children’s exams would let them cheat. It is not surprising that cheating and fraud gradually became everyday activities in Egypt, making their way from education to business and commercial transactions, and ultimately to elections.
I graduated from high school with a total grade score of 97 percent. I was going to attend Cairo University to study engineering, but first I searched for a job. My primary reason was to pay my phone bill, which had soared for a reason my father might never have imagined: dial-up Internet access. I spent hours exploring the Internet, browsing websites and chatting anonymously with people I did not know from around the world, using mIRC (a famous chat client at the time) to make virtual friends. I remember when my dad stormed into my room during the summer after high school to express his anger at the size of the phone bill. He confiscated the computer and locked it up in a closet, explaining that I was irresponsible and that my relationship with the computer had to end. As soon as he left the house, I broke open the closet and reclaimed the computer. When he returned, I begged his forgiveness and declared that I would get a dedicated phone line and the bill would be my responsibility. Luckily, my father always tried to treat his children as responsible near-equals. He often told us to be careful what we wished for. This time, after hearing me out, he said, “As you wish.” It was the beginning of my life online, and the beginning of my financial independence, as I started earning a steady income from working in a video gaming store and as a freelance website developer.
Working and spending long hours online was a real challenge to my studies. After passing the preparatory year at the engineering school, students were expected to choose a department to enroll in. The number of seats was limited in some departments, making them very competitive. I scored badly during my preparatory year in 1998. As a result, I initially enrolled in electrical engineering instead of my first choice, computer engineering. Nonetheless, I quickly determined that I really wanted to work with computers. A friend of mine had said that if I failed my first year in electrical engineering I could submit an appeal to the dean explaining that my life’s dream was to study computer engineering, so I proceeded to Student Affairs, where I learned that my friend’s information was accurate enough but success depended on the number of transfer requests submitted.
I took the risky decision to skip that year’s exams and submit an appeal at the end of the year. As usual, my parents were surprised by my decision and tried all forms of dissuasion, but I insisted. After few months my wish came true: only one other student requested a transfer, and we were both admitted to computer engineering.
Life was different inside my new department. There were no more than forty students, and the professors and teaching assistants knew each one of us by name. I tried to compete with the top students, but I was always behind, thanks to the countless hours I spent online. I remember one teaching assistant, Ahmed, who paused during one of his lectures and singled me out. “Wael, do you understand?” When I said yes, he responded, “Thank God — then I’m confident that everyone else has understood as well.” That was one of the reasons I hated the educational system in Egypt. I was very defensive and believed that it was the system, not me, that was blocking my progress. Yet even though I was losing at school, I was winning somewhere else.
Earlier, during the summer of my preparatory year at the university in 1998, I had created a website to help Muslims network with one another. It was pretty much like a simple version of YouTube. There were three fundamental differences, however: it was a website for audio material, not video, since video quality was not as advanced as it is today; content uploading was restricted to me and a schoolmate, since the content was religious in nature; and, finally, the website administrators had to remain anonymous. The webmaster could be reached only via an e-mail address that did not include his real name. I named the website IslamWay.com.
State Security would have immediately targeted me if it had discovered that I was the creator of an Islamic website, no matter how moderate it might have been. When I received the call from Captain Rafaat, I prayed that it would have nothing to do with my IslamWay days. Luckily, he never mentioned it during the interrogation, so I didn’t either.
It wasn’t too long before IslamWay became one of the most popular Islamic destinations on the Internet. During its early years, the website contained more than 20,000 hours of audio recordings of religious sermons, lectures, and recitals of the Holy Qur’an. Over 3,000 hours of this material I had digitized myself. In addition, the website relied on more than eighty volunteers, the true identities of most of whom remain unknown to me to this day, to collect and digitize content from existing cassette tapes.
Two years after the launch, the website had strong traffic from tens of thousands of daily users. I wanted it to serve as a kind of public library featuring a complete range of moderate Islamic opinions. When the English version launched in 1999, it spread strongly among Muslims who did