Alaa Al Aswany

“It became clear to her that all men, however respectable in appearance and however elevated their position in society, were utter weaklings in front of a beautiful woman. - The Yacoubian Building, p. 42”

“Sheikh Bilal had takenhim aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriageand his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothingfor a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not avirgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be aweak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He saidsarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity,even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that ifone of them marries a woman who was previously married, thethought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat herbadly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam hasno such complexes.”

“Ilived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairowas like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were wellmannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I wasdifferent too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were ofa certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend theevening—the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the GeziraClub. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties anddrinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most ofthe people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threwthem out in 1956.”“Why did he throw them out?”“He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners gotscared 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 ahero 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 damagehe did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nassertaught 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 didwell out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids from the dregsof society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. Nahhas Basha was a goodman and he cared about the poor. He allowed them to join the MilitaryCollege and the result was that they made the coup of 1952. They ruledEgypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions. Of coursethey 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 thebasis of three factors—his appearance, his occupation, and the way hespoke; according to this assessment, a citizen in a police station wouldeither be treated with respect or despised and beaten.”

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

“Illiteracy does not impede the practice of democracy, as witnessed by the success of democracy in India despite the high illiteracy rate. One doesn't need a university diploma to realize that the ruler is oppressive and corrupt. On the other hand, to eradicate illiteracy requires that we elect a fair and efficient political regime.”

“What led to September 11 is that most decision makers in the White House thought like you. They supported despotic regimes in the Middle East to multiply the profits of oil and arms companies, and armed violence escalated and reached our shores.”

“The concept of the benevolent dictator, just like the concepts of the noble thief or the honest whore, is no more than a meaningless fantasy.”

“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.”

“The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.”

“Later he would ponder the relation between our extreme desire for something and our ability to realize it- was what we wanted inevitably brought about if we wanted it enough?”

“Everything that happened to you is a page that's been turned and is done with.”

“If you can't find good in your own country, you won't find it anywhere else.”

“...and that spark will flash in her eyes confirming that her mind never stops working, even in the heat of passion.”

“I am according to my slave's expectations of me: if good, then good, and if bad, then bad.”

“She represents the beauty of the common people in all its vulgarity and provocativeness.”

“...oh that short hair, a la garcon that evokes unfamiliar, boyish kinds of sex.”

“Oh God, how did he get to be sixty? How quickly the years had passed! His whole life had passed before he realized it, before he began. He hadn’t lived. What had he done in his life? What had he achieved? Could he measure his happy times? How much? How many? Several days, a few months at best? It was not fair to advance in years without realizing the value of time, not fair that no one drew our attention to the time that was slipping through our fingers by the moment. It was a clever trick: to realize the value of life only just before it ended.”

“She had lost her compassion for people and a thick crust of indifference had formed around her feelings - that disgust that afflicts the exhausted, the frustrated, and the perverted and prevents them from sympathizing with others.”

“Education, medical treatment, and work are the natural rights of every citizen in the world.”

“يقاتل الجندي أعداءه بضراوة، يتمني لو يفنيهم جميعاً...لكنه إذا قدر له، مرة واحدة، أن يعبر إلي الجانب الآخر ويتجول بين صفوفهم، سيجدهم بشرا طبيعين مثله، سيري أحدهم يكتب خطاباً لزوجته، وآخر يتأمل صور أطفاله، وثالثا يحلق ذقنه ويدندن... كيف يفكر الجندي حينئذ؟... ربما يعتقد أنه كان مخدوعا عندما حارب هؤلاء الناس الطيبين وعليه أن يغير موقفه منهم.. أو.. ربما يفكر أن ما يراه مجرد مظهر خادع، وأن هؤلاء الوادعين ما إن يتخذوا مواقعهم ويشهروا أسلحتهم حتي يتحولوا إلي مجرمين، يقتلون أهله ويسعون إلي إذلال بلاده...”