The Yacoubian Building

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

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.

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.” The words slipped out from Zaki Bey, but he felt that they were ungracious so he smiled to lessen their impact on Busayna, who had stood up and was saying bitterly, “You don’t understand because you’re well-off. When you’ve stood for two hours at the bus stop or taken three different buses and had to go through hell every day just to get home, when your house has collapsed and the government has left you sitting with your children in a tent on the street, when the police officer has insulted you and beaten you just because you’re on a minibus at night, when you’ve spent the whole day going around the shops looking for work and there isn’t any, when you’re a fine sturdy young man with an education and all you have in your pockets is a pound, or sometimes nothing at all, then you’ll know why we hate Egypt.

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

I lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the evening—the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the Gezira Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and drinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most of the people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threw them out in 1956.” “Why did he throw them out?” “He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners got scared 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 a hero 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 damage he did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nasser taught 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 did well out of him. The Free Officers were a bunch of kids from the dregs of society, destitutes and sons of destitutes. Nahhas Basha was a good man and he cared about the poor. He allowed them to join the Military College and the result was that they made the coup of 1952. They ruled Egypt and they robbed it and looted it and made millions. Of course they have to love Abd el Nasser; he was the boss of their gang.

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

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

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?

Sheikh Bilal had taken him aside the day before the wedding and spoken to him of marriage and his wife’s rights in the Law, stressing to him that there was nothing for a Muslim to feel shy about in marrying a woman who was not a virgin and that a Muslim woman’s previous marriage ought not to be a weak point that her new husband could exploit against her. He said sarcastically, “The secularists accuse us of puritanism and rigidity, even while they suffer from innumerable neuroses. You’ll find that if one of them marries a woman who was previously married, the thought of her first husband will haunt him and he may treat her badly, as though punishing her for her legitimate marriage. Islam has no such complexes.

He had worked out long ago that police officers evaluated a citizen on the basis of three factors—his appearance, his occupation, and the way he spoke; according to this assessment, a citizen in a police station would either be treated with respect or despised and beaten.

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

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

rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their thrones

God has made it incumbent upon us to struggle to raise high His word. Gihad is a pillar of Islam, exactly like prayer and fasting. Indeed, gihad is the most important of those pillars but the corrupt rulers dedicated to the pursuit of money and the pleasures of the flesh who have ruled the Islamic world in times of decadence have attempted, with the help of their hypocritical men of religion, to exclude gihad from the pillars of Islam, knowing that if the people cleaved fast to gihad, it would in the end be turned against them and cost them their thrones. In this way, by eliminating gihad, Islam was robbed of its real meaning and our great religion was transformed into a collection of meaningless rituals that the Muslims performed like athletic exercises, mere physical movements without spiritual significance. When the Muslims abandoned gihad, they became slaves to this world, clinging to it, shy of death, cowards. Thus their enemies prevailed

daughters, our rulers claim that they are applying the Law of Islam and assert at the same time that they are governing us by democracy God knows they are liars in both. Islamic law is ignored in our unhappy country and we are governed according to French secular law, which permits drunkenness, fornication, and perversion so long as it is by mutual consent. The state itself in fact benefits from gambling and the sale of alcohol, then spews out its ill-gotten gains in the form of salaries for the Muslims, who as a result are cursed with the curse of what is forbidden and God expunges His blessings from their life. The supposedly democratic state is based on the rigging of elections and the detention and torture of innocent people so that the ruling clique can remain on their

Islam and democracy are opposites and can never meet. How can water meet with fire, or light with darkness? Democracy means people ruling themselves by themselves. Islam knows only God’s rule. They want to submit God’s Law to the People’s Assembly so that the honorable representatives may decide whether God’s Law is worthy of application or not! A monstrous word it is, issuing from their mouths; they say nothing but a lie. The Law of the Truth, Glorious and Sublime, is not to be discussed or scrutinized; it is to be obeyed and implemented immediately, by force, unhappy as that may make some

the task before Muslim youth today is to reclaim the concept of gihad and bring it back to the minds and hearts of the Muslims. It is precisely this that terrifies America and Israel and with them our traitorous rulers. They tremble in fear at the great Islamic Awakening that gains greater momentum and whose power becomes more exigent in our country day by day. A handful of warriors from Hizbollah and Hamas were able to defeat Almighty America and Invincible Israel, while Abd el Nasser’s

Millions of Muslims humiliated and subjected to dishonor by the Zionist occupation appeal to you to restore for them their ruined self-respect. Youth of Islam, the Zionists get drunk and commit fornication with whores in the forecourt of your Aqsa Mosque!

Our time-serving, traitorous rulers, servants of the Crusader West, will meet their just fates at your pure hands, cleansed for prayer, if God so wills!

you will not achieve true devotion in one go. The gihad of the soul, Taha, is the Greater Gihad, as the Messenger of God—God bless him and give him peace—called it.” “What should I do, Master?