novelists-from-egypt

"When Sa’ad Zaghloul, the leader of the Egyptian revolution, just freed by the colonial authorities, he travelled to Paris in March 1919 to attend the paris peace conference and to push for egypt independence he was totally ignored by the Allies. The French newspapers did not even write a word about his presence in France. In order to elaborate this sticky point in official Egyptian-French relations, al-Hakim presents another Egyptian student in Paris and makes him narrate something more sympathetic about the French people as symbolized by a known writer…"

"He imagined that crossing the threshold he had left the earth or been raised to another atmosphere with its own perfume and light…and here too there was the same reverence which shook his soul when he entered the mosque of the Lady Zaynab in Cairo. The same serenity, the same darkness in corners, the same thin light hovering like souls in the air: God’s house is God’s house in every place and age."

"He couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He still hadn’t forgotten the days of the revolution, the revolution of 1919. During those days he had seen a sight he would never forget, a British soldier standing alone surrounded by revolutionaries who surrounded him and one of them struck him with a rod of metal on his head, and he fell with blood over his face…and then the British soldiers appeared armed with their machine guns and the revolutionaries scattered."

"Are there women everywhere in France teaching children hatred of the Germans? And who knows probably all the women of Germany teach their children hatred of the French…whatever the reason, what right to they have to bring their children up on hatred? But he too was brought up on hatred, hatred of the British."

"Christianity as it bean in the East is love and the moral example, the soul of Islam is faith and order, but the new Christianity today in the West is Marxism, while the Islam of the West is fascism, and it too has the look of faith and order, faith not in God but in a leader, and order not for social balance through humility and charity, but an order enforced by terrorism…these are the religions which the West was able to come up with when it decided to join the East in making religions for the world."

"There had been a time when she had regarded Gamila with a touch of disdain. She had considered herself stronger than Gamila, than her aunt, than her father - and stronger than their beliefs, their rules , their traditions. She had laughed with a certain superiority when her mother had said, 'The one who knows the fundamentals does not suffer.' Yes, she had existed for a time in the shadow of this silly illusion. But in truth it was she who was silly, trivial, conceited, and despicable. She was the doormat beneath people's soles."

"In the novel, I aimed at crystallizing three levels of significance. The first one deals with the development of the female protagonist, and its related to the second which deals with developments in Egypt at that period. As for the third level, it incorporates a commentary on the values of the middle class and its practices and how they prevent the country from a take off."

"I trembled with feelings of powerlessness, of misery, of oppression, as the bullets of the police killed fourteen demonstrators that day. I screamed for my inability to act, I screamed for my inability to go down to the street to stop the bullets from coming out of the black guns. I shed the child in me and the young woman came of age — prematurely — for I encountered knowledge that went beyond the home to include all of the homeland. My future fate was decided at that moment."

"I love you, and I want you to love me. But I do not want you to lose yourself in me, or in anyone. Nor do I want you to draw your self-confidence and your trust in life from me or from anyone else. I want you to have your own individual, independent self, and the confidence that can only spring from the self, not from others. Then -When you have achieved that - no one will ever be able to crush you."