the preoccupation even of the poorer Moslems with the pilgrimage to Mecca and to
almsgiving, which is necessarily less apparent and private. Also, the spurning of alcohol
by former consumers and especially the covering up of women has fascinated me. More
so because it has taken place with the fullest approval of the female population. It is a sort
of complacent and masochistic self-classification of their sex to an inferior category to
men. All this, quite apart from the growth of fanaticism, extremism, fundamentalism and
terrorism.
What is it that manages to distort the human mind and lead it to these extremes of
belief and behavior? That keeps it forever obsessed by the concept of God, His
requirements, demands and rewards? I believe it is the unholy alliance of ignorance and
poverty with an emphasis on poverty as the main cause because ignorance is very much a
result of it. I have lived and worked in the midst of poverty. In the midst of ignorance.
When I returned, Egypt was firmly anchored in the thralls of socialism. I had
come from another socialist country, England, ruled these last few years by a socialist
Labor Government. There should not have been much of a difference. I am not referring
to wealth. There could be no comparison. I was thinking of the spirit, the quintessence of
socialism. But, alas, it was another world. Egypt seemed to have concentrated in its
political and social landscape all of socialism's evils. To start with, it was a dictatorship.
Gamal Abdel Nasser was firmly on the saddle. He was not a murderous Stalin but he did
have a fearful security network, a fair amount of torture, some 'desaparecidos' and one
was not apt to express one's opinions too freely or too loudly. He did have concentration
camps but these were far away from us as we were not involved in any subversive
political activities and had no manifest affection either for communism or for Moslem
brotherhoods.
We, the governed, just experienced the ordinary everyday miseries, the petty and
not so petty corruptions all around us, the unending rumors that a managed press
generates, the long queues outside the cooperatives and waiting lists to buy the shoddy
products of our nationalized industries. To suffer the arrogance of our rulers and army
officers who were far better able to oppress than defend their countrymen, as history has
shown. Above all, the progress which was nothing more than a gradual but steady
downward slide in the material and moral circumstances of the country and resulted, two
decades later, in the government's desperate recourse to capitalism to redress the ills of
socialism. But was it not already too late?
It is ridiculous to try to compress the processes of decades in a paragraph and
perhaps it is also unfair. It obviously needs many tomes of historical detail and analysis
by a dispassionate historian. Can one be dispassionate after fifty years of the 1952
Revolution? Perhaps not. In any case, I make no such claims and I am out just to give
some personal impressions and relive and take stock of the early days after my return
from England to enter my father's business, which he was no longer able to manage due
to illness and old age. It is my life that concerns me, that dominates my memories. And it
is my memories that engross me at this stage of my life. Why this contemplation of the
past? I do not rightly know for, in truth, I do not count. I do not matter. I have not made
the slightest mark, nay, the faintest trace in history. What history? I have not made the
slightest mark even in my milieu. I have not been admired or noticed much. I have
achieved nothing remarkable. So why am I so anxious to put my life down in writing?
Let the story decide.
