A Quote by Hisham Matar
In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.
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The patriarchy is alive and well in Egypt and the wider Arab world. Just because we got rid of the father of the nation in Egypt or Tunisia, Mubarak or Ben Ali, and in a number of other countries, does not mean that the father of the family does not still hold sway.
Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.
I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.
Muhammad Ali was my idol, and I always say, if Muhammad Ali had told me the exact same thing my mother, the principal, the security guard, my brothers... you know, the same thing they were telling me that I didn't listen to, I would have listened, just because it came from Muhammad Ali.
I am tied to my father's land and am happy to visit relatives in Egypt, but I feel Italian and was never remotely tempted when Egypt asked me to play for them.
When a dictatorship imprisons someone or makes them disappear, it's actually a very strategic move. We forget that. It's not as senseless as it seems. It's a way to silence someone, but also it's a way to silence their family as well, out of fear, and society by extension.
We've seen what happened in Libya, what a disaster that's been driven by Hillary Clinton, and the disaster in Syria and almost disaster in Egypt. What a close call that's been. We're not out of the woods yet with Egypt.
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
I often wonder if it makes me a less interesting person, because it really is music that I geek out about exclusively. It's just everything to me. Those other things too a much lesser extent - photography, food, people - I geek out about people.
I'm Muhammad Ali's daughter, but my father and I are very different in that area. I don't necessarily try to put on a show. That's what my father's thing was, and he was great at it. Everything I say is because I feel it, and it comes out of my mouth. It's not scripted.
All is made clear,regarding Abraham and Sarah's traversal into Egypt, when we realize what biblicists meant by the term "Egypt." As Ralph Ellis so brilliantly points out, the name Egypt was employed by the composers of the Old Testament to denote Thebes in Lower Egypt. This was the city and region controlled by the adversaries of the Hyksos. It was considered a separate region, with different rulers, gods, customs, and politics. So, it was not the country of Egypt that Abraham visited, but Thebes within Egypt.
In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.
My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.
Everyone has their own methods, when Muhammad Ali was coming through I am sure people said he leaned back too far, had his chin too high and dropped his hands too low. I am not comparing myself Ali, just showing that people have different methods that work for them.
I've made far too many mistakes. That's the way I feel.
I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.
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