Quotes from The Yacoubian Building

“الحياة أكثر تعقيدا, والشر موجود في أطيب الناس وأقربهم الينا..”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“هل يتحقق ما نريده حتما اذا ما رغبنا فيه بالقوة الكافية؟؟”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“If you can't find good in your own country, you won't find it anywhere else.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“الواحد ممكن يقضى عمره كله يبحث عن الشخص المناسب ولما يلاقيه يضيع منه ..”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“البلد دى مش بلدنا يا طه. دى بلد اللى معه فلوس.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“حاجات كتير كان لازم أعملها فى حياتى وما علمتهاش.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“Education, medical treatment, and work are the natural rights of every citizen in the world.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“الناس ساذجة فاهمين إننا بنزور الانتخابات.. أبدا.. كل الحكاية إننا دارسين نفسية الشعب المصري كويس.. المصريين ربنا خلقهم في ظل الحكومة.. لا يمكن لأي مصري يخالف حكومته.. فيه شعوب طبعها تثور و تتمرد إنما المصري طول عمره يطاطي لأجل ياكل العيش.. الكلام ده مكتوب في التاريخ، الشعب المصري أسهل شعب ينحكم في الدنيا.. أول ما تأخذ السلطة المصريين يخضعوا لك و يتذللوا و تعمل فيهم على مزاجك.. و أي حزب في مصر لما يعمل انتخابات و هو في السلطة لازم يكسبها لأن المصري لازم يؤيد الحكومة.. ربنا خلقه كده..”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“Everything that happened to you is a page that's been turned and is done with.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“كان سلوكهم عموماً إزاء أى شخص منحرف يتوقف على قدر محبتهم له، إذا كرهوه ثاروا عليه انتصاراً للفضيلة وتشاجروا معه بشراسة ومنعوا أولادهم من الاختلاط به، أما إذا أحبوه مثل عبد ربه فإنهم يغفرون له ويتعاملون معه باعتباره ضالاً مسكيناً ويرددون أن كل شئ قسمة ونصيب، كما أن هدايته ليست بعيدة على ربنا سبحانه وتعالى و"ياما ناس كانوا أسوأ من ذلك ثم هداهم ربنا وفتح عليهم وصاروا من أولياء الله"، هكذا كانوا يقولون ويمصمصون شفاههم ويهزون رؤوسهم بتعاطف ..”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“...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.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“She represents the beauty of the common people in all its vulgarity and provocativeness.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“I am according to my slave's expectations of me: if good, then good, and if bad, then bad.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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?”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“...oh that short hair, a la garcon that evokes unfamiliar, boyish kinds of sex.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“...and that spark will flash in her eyes confirming that her mind never stops working, even in the heat of passion.”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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!”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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!”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

“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?”
― Alaa Al Aswany, quote from The Yacoubian Building

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