I had dinner tonight at a Moroccan place near Finsbury Park Station. The waiter there was from a town called Ouijda, which is on the north coast, near the Algerian border.

Now my friend from Jordan lived in Ouijda, because he went to university there. He told me that the people of Ouijda are the best people you can ever meet, and that they had real values.

He told me a story that happened to him. He was moving out of his apartment, and needed to store all his furniture and belongings over the summer. A man offered to move all his stuff into a storage place and keep it for him for summer. When my friend asked him how much money he wanted in return, the man said, “whatever you want to pay.” Now my friend wanted to give him money but realized that he only had very little left. And when I say little, I mean little. Something like 10 dollars worth. The man saw that, took it, and said, “This money, it will go away. But rujoolah (manliness), that will stay.”

You see, this man uttered the words “as much as you want to pay”, and he was willing to uphold that word, even at the cost of losing a lot of money and exerting a lot of effort. He lived by the code of true man- the man of principle.

But the waiter, having lived here in London, had a different outlook on life. As soon as I started telling him all the good things I head about Ouijda he started saying apologetically, “But Ouijda does not have civilization like here in London. For example, women there can’t smoke in public, because that would be held shameful.”

Maybe that’s a good thing, I said.

“The people of Ouijda,” he continued, “are like the people of Upper Egypt (Sa’eedis) in Egypt”.

“I much prefer the people of the Sa’eed to the rest of Egyptians” I replied.

One of the horrible things about Egypt is that the entire bureaucracy is in Cairo, so if anyone anywhere in Egypt wants to do any kind of paperwork, they have to come to Cairo. And so, you get to see a lot of people from Upper Egypt walking the streets of Cairo, or riding the underground metro. They stand out from the rest, not just from their distinctive dress, but because they stand tall and proud, and you can tell from their hands and faces that they have toiled and worked hard all their lives. They are also the only ones who do not fear the Egyptian government, and they’re willing to go to war against the government at any time if they feel any encroachment on their rights, while the rest of Egyptians simply accept the fact that they’re living in a police state, under corrupt politicians and military rule.

The man of the Sa’eed is master- he bows to no one but Allah. You can feel his pride and his power- you can see it in his posture, in his limbs, in his rough tongue. But the Cairo city dweller strikes you as weak. If you pay any attention to the expressions and words of the Cairene Egyptians.. you will notice that they are all words of subservience and servitude. I once discussed this with my friend… we thought it must have been the fact that the Egyptian people have always been slaves to foreign powers for thousands of years, that their language is a language of docility and obedience. Everyone is addressed as a master. No one dares call anyone of any importance by a singular “you”, but only by the plural, or by addressing them with “Your Presence”.

But for the Cairo city-dwellers, the Sa’eedis are too “stubborn”, and are the butt of their jokes.

I remember in my Gym in Cairo, there was this French convert, who was on a loud and angry rant about the people of Egypt. “When I came here 25 years ago, everything was different! People were good! But now, the TV, the internet, the music channels- they have ruined the people!” He would complain. “The only people I hire at my house, the only people that I trust, are the Sa’eedis!” A man from Cairo tried to tell him that the Sa’eedis are stubborn, but the French man insisted that they were the only trustworthy and hardworking people in Egypt. Everyone else had been corrupted.

But that waiter in London, he didn’t care about the fact that my friend thought the people of his hometown were the best he had ever met. Nor did he care that they were people of real traditional values, people of honor. The people of his hometown, he lamented, would find it shameful for a woman to smoke in public… If only they can be rescued by civilization… “progress”!