Chapter One
A House of Learning
The Delta
Nearly all of Egypt’s 65 million people are squeezed by the great
surrounding deserts onto thin ribbons of arable land strung along the
length of the Nile River. This savannah, made fertile by the regular
flooding of the river, has been populated for tens of thousands of years
– far beyond the range of human memory. North of present-day Cairo, the
river splits into two main branches – the Rosetta and Damietta – and
innumerable smaller ones, a spiderweb of streams crisscrossing between the
two larger channels. From there north, 100 miles to the sea, the river
feeds a broad, improbably lush delta. These northern reaches of the Nile
endowed one of the great civilizations of the earth long before the
powerful realms of the western world were even the faintest of far-off
dreams, when, as one Islamic scholar put it, “northern Europeans were
still sitting in trees.” The Delta’s abundance has forever remained the
source of the enormous wealth and talent Egyptian civilizations have
produced. Presidents, poets, and revolutionaries have all been shaped in
its villages.
Today, the Delta remains Egypt’s breadbasket. Its markets overflow; the
roads are jammed with pickup trucks and donkey carts. Tractors are
rare – most of the work of the fields is still performed the way it has
always been, by hand and hoof. The Delta is thick with people, too. Women wear
veils or scarves; many men wear the long cotton tunics called galabiyas,
muddied at the hem from hard work on wet ground. The last village is
seldom out of sight before the next slides into view. Between towns, the
fields, small and irregularly shaped, jigsaw across the tableland.
Billboards for the latest Nokia cell phones straddle irrigation ditches
teeming with trash. Women bathe and wash dishes along the dirty shores.
Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta was born here in 1968 in the
northernmost delta province of Kafr el-Sheik. His father, Mohamed el-Amir
Awad el-Sayed Atta, came from a tiny hinterland village, and his mother,
Bouthayna Mohamed Mustapha Sheraqi, from the outskirts of the provincial
capital, also called Kafr el-Sheik. As was, and is still, customary in
rural Egypt, the elder Mohamed and Bouthayna met and married by
arrangement of their families. At the time of the wedding, Mohamed
el-Amir, as he was known, was already an established local lawyer, having
taken degrees in both civil and sharia, or Islamic, law. Bouthayna was
only 14, but as the daughter of a wealthy farming and trading family, she
came from several rungs up the social ladder and was a good catch for the
ambitious Mohamed. They soon had two daughters, Azza and Mona, then a son
named for the father.
They hadn’t many relatives on the father’s side and maintained a cool
distance from Bouthayna’s family. This was according to Amir’s wishes,
Bouthayna’s family said. The father was regarded by his in-laws as an odd
man – austere, strict, and private. He was and remains a bluff, forceful
fellow who permitted little disagreement.
Village life in the Arab world offers much the same degree of privacy as
village life elsewhere, which is to say, very little at all. Egypt’s
crowded geography further insists that life be communal and shared. People
are piled on top of one another. To resist the weight of the centuries in
which life has been spent and shaped this way takes real effort. Amir, a
stubborn man, was willing to expend it.
“The father is alone. There are no brothers, one sister maybe. We never
met her,” said Hamida Fateh, Bouthayna’s sister. “Here, the families are
all very close. But even here, the father was separate.”
Fateh’s family is prominent in Kafr el-Sheik; they own farmland, an
auto-parts store, and a six-story commercial building. The family lives
unostentatiously above a cobbled, dusty street in a cramped walk-up with
whitewashed walls, plain rugs, overstuffed furniture, a Panasonic boom
box, and a 19-inch Toshiba television. It is unairconditioned and the
apartment’s balcony doors hang open to let the inevitable afternoon heat
escape.
Fateh wears a head scarf, more out of habit than belief, she said; neither
her family nor the Amirs were particularly religious. They were part of
the secular generation that grew up in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, when
the country’s future did not seem as bound to the past as it does today.
They were the generation that would remake Egypt and reclaim its glories.
We are educated people, Fateh said, people from the country but not
country people. Fateh studied agricultural engineering at university; her
husband studied electrical engineering.
The senior Amir was ambitious, too, and exceptionally focused. His law
practice thrived in Kafr el-Sheik, but he was not satisfied. “He moved to
Cairo,” Fateh said. “He wanted to be famous.”
(Continues…)
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-058469-6
Excerpted from Perfect Soldiers
by Terry McDermott Excerpted by permission.
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