Alaa Al Aswany Quotes

A fascinating book and a great pleasure to read: Betool Khedairi is a talented new voice in fiction.

A racist is just an ignorant man afraid of people who are different from him.

Our love of beauty is merely a trick produced by the way we look, and the broader the vision grows the clearer the wrinkles are seen

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.

A mother loves her children unconditionally. However they wrong her, she'll carry on loving them.

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

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.

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 wer

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

Nationalities are a facist way of thinking aimed at forcing people into a narrow and stupid sense of belonging. It makes some people feel superior to others and perpetuates hatred and war.

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

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.

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.

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.

With a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence
a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.