Читать книгу Revolution 2.0 - Wael Ghonim - Страница 9

MY 2011 ARREST WAS not the first time I had encountered Egyptian State Security. One winter afternoon in 2007, I received a call from a man who presented himself as Captain Raafat al-Gohary, from the bureau in Giza, Egypt’s third largest city, which is part of greater Cairo. Needless to say, Rafaat al-Gohary was not his real name. State Security officers feared the potential wrath of citizens they interrogated and tortured, so they used pseudonyms. I greeted him calmly, attempting to hide the anxiety caused by the surprise. He said I needed to meet him for an important matter and I was to head to State Security in Dokki, a neighborhood in Giza, at eleven o’clock that night. My anxiety increased. I asked what was the matter. His response: “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll just have a chat over coffee, that’s all.” This failed to comfort me. I asked if we could reschedule, saying that I was busy with work. He refused. I wanted to play for time to try to figure out why I was being summoned, but he insisted we meet at eleven. What is the worst that can happen? I wondered. My days of activism were long over. I had never before been summoned.

Immediately after hanging up, I contacted a close friend, and we agreed that I was to call him right after the meeting ended. If he never got the call, he was to find out exactly what had happened to me, since in the past, people in a situation like mine had suddenly disappeared for days or even months after their “visit.” I decided not to tell my wife or my family anything, as I didn’t want them to panic.

I arrived at the main gate at 11 P.M. sharp. The neighborhood was quite familiar to me; my high school was literally right around the corner. At reception, after confirming that I was to meet Captain Rafaat al-Gohary, I was told to sit down and wait. Around me were at least six others. Although I didn’t speak to them, it was clear that we all shared one emotion: apprehension.

Egyptian State Security reached deep into society, involving itself in every detail of life. It thrived on the emergency law, enacted in 1958 but not enforced until after the Six-Day War in 1967, and still in effect in mid-2011. That law gives executive authorities the right to arrest, interrogate, and imprison any Egyptian for up to six months without a warrant or any legal grounds or even the right to an attorney. It also empowers the authorities to ban all types of protests as well as gatherings of any group of people without a security clearance.

The dossiers of State Security were objects of fear and ridicule. Any activist of any sort, or even anyone with considerable financial or intellectual influence, had an exhaustive dossier in his or her name at State Security, containing every detail the authorities had collected that could possibly be useful in blackmailing him or her into obedience when needed. Privacy was almost meaningless to this quintessentially Machiavellian organization. Thus, phone tapping, for instance, was a very common practice of State Security officers. Word spread that tapes documenting the infidelities of famous businessmen and public figures were stored in a room at headquarters. Ironically, officers used to advise each other not to spy on their own wives’ phones, to avoid family conflicts.

Not only did the state monitor and terrorize political opposition groups and religious activists, but its oppressive reach extended to anyone engaged in public service, including charities whose field operations were limited to empowering the poor and unfortunate. With over 40 percent of Egyptians living below the poverty line, the authorities were consistently trying to curb anyone who might mobilize the masses for a future political cause.

State Security approval was obviously a prerequisite for any senior appointment in the government. Even university teaching assistants, who are supposedly selected from among the top students of the year’s graduating class, could not be hired by the university without a security clearance proving that they were innocent of any dissident activism, political or religious.

The Egyptian regime lived in fear of opposition. It sought to project a façade of democracy, giving the impression that Egypt was advancing toward political rights and civil liberties while it vanquished any dissidents who threatened to mobilize enough support to force real change.

The Ministry of Interior was one key force of coercion. Another was the state media: terrestrial and satellite television as well as newspapers and magazines, the most famous of which were Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Gomhouriya. The regime sought to plant fear in the hearts of Egyptians from an early age. Fear was embodied in local proverbs, such as “Walk quietly by the wall (where you cannot be noticed),” “Mind your own business and focus on your livelihood,” and “Whosoever is afraid stays unharmed.” The regime’s uncompromising control also covered workers’ unions and the nation’s legislative bodies.

This all amounted to what I came to call “weapons of mass oppression.” No matter how far down we spiraled, no matter how much corruption spread, only a few people dared to swim against the current. Those who did ended up in a prison cell after an unfriendly encounter with State Security, or were subjected to character assassination in the media, or were targeted on fraudulent charges or long-ignored violations.

“Hello, Wael. Why are you giving us a hard time? Why the troublemaking?”

This, together with a faint smile, was how Captain Raafat greeted me. His air-conditioned office contained three other investigators. The room was modestly decorated with a number of books, many of which were very obviously about religion. State Security wanted everyone to believe that it had nothing against faith.

I looked at him and smiled as I responded calmly, “I don’t make trouble at all. It is you guys who give me trouble, and I have no idea why. I’m glad you called me in, so I can figure out what the problem is. Every time I travel back to Egypt my name appears on the arrivals watch list and the airport officers transfer my passport to State Security, who pulls me aside for an inspection, including a full search of my bags.”

This problem dated back to December 2001, when I returned from the United States, three months after 9/11. As I was collecting my luggage, I heard my name over the loudspeakers. I was urgently asked to return to passport control. There was also someone calling my name in person, so I showed myself to him. He took my passport and asked me to wait in front of a lounge by State Security’s airport office. After a very nerve-racking forty minutes, a detective emerged with my passport and asked me to bring my luggage in for inspection. That day I thanked God that everything turned out well. It appeared to be nothing more than a typical post-9/11 glitch. Yet every time I entered Egypt between that day and the time the revolution began, I was pulled aside. Until this day, I had never found out the reason for that.

Captain Raafat was deliberately friendly, as if we really were just having a chat. However, he was armed with pen and paper, and he carefully documented the conversation. He took time to finish recording my responses before he resumed his questions. Almost everyone from the upper or middle class who was called in for interrogation by State Security was met with this same friendly, off-the-record manner. (Poorer people were treated far more harshly.) It was transparently illegitimate.

The captain asked for my personal information: name, age, address, marital status. I answered all his questions. He asked about my wife’s full name.

“Oh, she is not Egyptian. Where is she from?”

“America,” I responded.

He wrote her full name in Arabic as I pronounced it again and asked me to verify the spelling.

“So you married an American for the citizenship, right?”

He was surprised to discover that despite my marriage in 2001, I had never applied for a green card or U.S. citizenship. “I’m a proud Egyptian and I find no reason why I should apply for any other citizenship,” I explained.

Very cynically, he replied, “And what is it exactly that you like about Egypt?”

“I’m never able to verbally express my reasons for loving Egypt, yet love for it runs in my blood,” I replied honestly. “Even my wife asks why I love my country despite all its shortcomings. I always answer that I don’t know why. You know, Captain, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, during the first thirteen years of my life, I literally used to count the days left, on a paper on my desk, before I could return home to Egypt to spend the annual vacation. And when only a few days remained, I was too excited to fall asleep at night.” I returned his cynical smile and joked, “I love it here because life lacks routine. You wake up in the morning and have no idea what the day will be like. One morning you could receive a phone call like the one I received today, asking you to report to State Security.”

He smiled while saying, “You are certainly a troublemaker.”

I saw a copy of the Holy Qur’an lying on the captain’s desk. I assumed it was there to assure anyone who sat opposite him that the captain regularly read scripture and had nothing against faith. The ruling regime was extremely apprehensive about organized religious forces in Egypt, particularly ones that concerned themselves with public affairs. Their fears were intensified when thousands of Egyptians traveled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders. Many of those fighters, or self-proclaimed mujahideen, returned with ideologies that rejected the Arab regimes, denouncing them as heretical and treacherous tools of the West. The new ideology, and the new militants, posed a threat to the Egyptian authorities. Although the emergency law had been suspended by President Anwar al-Sadat in 1980, it was reinstated eighteen months later, following Sadat’s 1981 assassination at the hands of radical Islamists. Sadat’s assassins were apparently motivated by his crackdown on more than 1,500 political and religious activists, and also by the fact that he signed a peace treaty with Israel and emphasized it with a visit to Tel Aviv.

The influence of religious groups in Egypt increased as time went on, and their variety expanded. These groups were never homogeneous, nor did they all necessarily share the same philosophies or even objectives. They did share one thing, however: enmity toward the regime. In turn, Hosni Mubarak’s government feared them. Mubarak knew these groups could influence the Egyptian masses more than anyone else, since Egyptians tend to be religious by nature; in a Gallup poll conducted in June 2011, 96 percent of the one thousand Egyptian respondents agreed that religion played “an important role in their daily life.” Ordinary Egyptians take religious figures as role models, symbols of nobility and sincerity, values which were thoroughly lacking in many of the the public representatives of the regime. Most of the time when the regime attacked a religious group, that group’s popularity received a boost. The fact that economic conditions were stagnant or declining only magnified the effect.

State Security kept an eye on all religious speakers and scholars and even on university students who frequented mosques, not just those who were active in Islamic movements. They were careful to summon such people to their offices to ask them about their activities and even to intervene and attempt to redirect them. Occasionally, hundreds would be arrested and thrown into jail for years without explicit accusations. Behind bars, they were brutally treated and humiliated. Once released, they either became fanatics, motivated by their bad experience, or attempted to reintegrate into society and forget the past.

This, I realized, was the real reason for my interrogation. State Security wanted to know if I had any links to religious or political activism, especially now that I regularly traveled abroad and, as a result, was becoming more exposed to real democracy. It was time to create a dossier in my name that contained the details of my life for future reference.

The story of my faith dates back to high school days. I did not pray regularly before then, although I adhered to the general ethics of religion, thanks to my parents’ encouragement and because I grew up in Saudi Arabia. That country is conservative by nature, especially in Abha, a small southern city where society and culture are assumed to be less advanced than in urban centers.

One of my closest cousins, Dalia, died in a car accident in 1997 at the age of twenty-five. Her death had an impact on me, and I was moved to explore my faith, as I didn’t want to die unprepared. I listened to sermons, attended religious lessons, and read books. I felt that life was a brief test that ended at death. I started praying five times a day, on time, and often at the mosque.

At the university, I mixed with people from many religious groups and ideologies, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and I joined many of their activities at the school. But I always made my own sense out of things. A famous sheikh whom I met with several times once said to me, “Your problem, Wael, is that you only follow your own logic and you don’t want to have a role model to follow.” It was hard for me to accept conventional wisdom. It was my nature to discuss any matter thoroughly before I could accept a conclusion with both heart and mind. This attitude in an eighteen-year-old is not always endearing. It was not just my age, however. Thanks to frequent exposure to global media and modern communication tools, many young Egyptians were slowly becoming empowered to make their own educated choices.

“So your dad lived in Saudi Arabia. For how many years? What are his religious and political views?” asked Captain Rafaat, who had to gather as much information as he could, not only about me but also about my family members, as part of his job.

My father is a typical hardworking Egyptian who comes from the slowly eroding middle class. Born in the 1950s, his generation sang praises to Arab nationalism and the 1952 revolution, when Egypt’s King Farouk was overthrown by a military coup and Egypt was transformed from a monarchy into a republic. My grandfather, may he rest in peace, was a government employee at the Egyptian Railways. He had seven sons, whom he struggled to raise and educate. My father, the oldest, graduated from medical school and immediately went to work for a public hospital.

After my father married my mother, in 1979, and I came along, in 1980, his salary could hardly cover our basic needs as a family, so he decided to leave for work in Saudi Arabia. It was a very tempting option for many Egyptians. The salary offered in Saudi Arabia was twenty times the amount he received at the public hospital in Egypt. Like millions of Egyptian expatriates, he hoped to save some money and then return home after a few years to start a private practice in Cairo. Egypt’s talented citizens were becoming its main export, to the country’s detriment.

Economic conditions at home were horrendous at the time. Every year tens of thousands of Egyptians applied to the green card lottery, hoping to emigrate to America. Others left for Gulf countries, Canada, or Europe, by any means possible, to look for job opportunities. The phenomenon kept increasing, and emigration became the common dream of scores of Egyptians. Those with fewer skills did not have as many options. Some were desperate enough to put their lives at risk by emigrating to Europe illegally, by boat, despite the risk of drowning. I still remember an Egyptian comedian’s response to a question about the future of the nation: “Egyptians’ future is in Canada.”

After spending only a few years in Saudi Arabia, my father, like many Egyptians, fell into the trap of Islamic private investment companies, which proliferated in the early eighties. These companies offered a huge annual return on investment that reached 30 or sometimes even 40 percent, as opposed to banks, which offered 10 percent or less. My father deposited his life savings with four of these companies to diversify his portfolio. The companies were founded by religious Egyptians who offered their services as an alternative to banks; various Islamic scholars deemed fixed interest rates to be usurious and consequently prohibited by Sharia law.

A few years after the enormous growth of these companies, the Egyptian regime decided to fight them. Among other things, it wanted to protect the interests of loyal businessmen and feared that these private asset management companies would control the economy and cripple the banks. All such companies were frozen by the state, and their founders were arrested for fraud and money laundering. Most of the money saved by my father after years of hard work in Saudi Arabia was lost, as was the money of many other middle-class Egyptians inside Egypt and abroad.

So my father decided to stay in Saudi Arabia for a much longer time than he had initially planned. Every time I asked him why we were not returning home, he would answer, “How can I provide for a family of five with a salary of a few hundred pounds that runs out by the fifth day of the month?” My father is typical of his generation. He is fun, everyone loves him, and back then he spoke about politics only through jokes that timidly criticized the ruling class. “Ignore, live, enjoy” was his philosophy. Whenever he could, he would ignore problems rather than face them. I don’t blame him; the 1952 revolution had this effect on most of his generation.

My mother, on the other hand, pressured my father every year to return to Egypt, start his private practice, and attempt to readapt to life at home. We finally decided as a family that everyone but my father (I now had a brother and a sister) would return to Egypt and that he would follow us two or three years later, when he had saved enough to start a business at home. (Unfortunately, this never actually happened, and my father still lives in Saudi Arabia.)

Captain Rafaat was not very interested in my father once he found out that he was not involved with any political or religious groups, and he quickly moved on to ask, “So, when did you return to Egypt?”

It was in 1994. I enrolled in a private school in Zamalek, near our home in Mohandeseen. Both neighborhoods are known to be among the best areas in Cairo. I was in the ninth grade at the time. The decision to return to Egypt was one of the happiest moments of my life, but it was not easy living away from my father. I was never very capable of expressing emotions. I missed him immensely and always looked forward to his visits home. When he came home for forty-five days of vacation every year, I accompanied him everywhere he went. I laughed at his constant jokes and loved his modesty and his openness toward everyone he met. Tears always came to my eyes when he was leaving to go back to Saudi.

My mother did her best to make up for Dad’s absence. She was fully devoted to raising her three children to become decent and responsible human beings, and I was impressed at how she selflessly agreed to be away from her husband in order to do so. Despite her incredibly strong character, she put her children first in every decision she made.

Fortunately, I quickly adapted at school. My best friend was a genius of a boy by the name of Moatasem. He always effortlessly came in at the top of our class. I tried competing with him during exams, but always in vain. Moatasem was extremely diligent. I scored 92.5 percent and ranked second after him in the ninth grade, which is a milestone year in our educational system, the final year before “secondary education.” Moatasem decided to transfer to a public high school, where he would enroll in classes for advanced students. He convinced me to leave our private school and go with him to Orman High School. “It will be very competitive for us in the advanced classes, and the teachers in these classes are some of the best in Cairo,” he said. These arguments were enough to convince me, but one more reason was to get to know the real Egypt and integrate with Egyptians from different backgrounds and social classes and not just those who could afford to go to private schools.

I missed the aptitude tests for the advanced classes because I was away on our annual visit to my dad in Saudi Arabia during the summer of 1995. Before I began traveling, an admissions employee at the school assured me that I would be able to take the aptitude test once I returned. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t keep his promise, so I found myself attending regular classes.

Orman High School gave me culture shock. It was worse than anything I had ever imagined or heard about public schools. Being an all-boys school, there was a constant surplus of testosterone in the air. Fighting in the school playground always ended with someone injured. There was a designated corner for smoking cigarettes, and sometimes hash. Skipping school was common, as long as you paid a toll — a bribe — to the student guarding the fence. The number of students in a single class was at least double what I had been used to, over seventy students in a space that had contained only thirty students at my previous school.

I quickly tried to reverse my decision by calling the principal at my previous school. He refused to take me back, in order to teach me a lesson: he had offered many enticements to keep me at the school when I announced my decision to transfer, including slicing my tuition fees in half. I was very stubborn and rejected all his offers, so I don’t blame him for refusing me when I suddenly tried to crawl back. Unwittingly, however, I had made one of the most important decisions of my life.

It was no easy task to cope in the new environment. Blending in was more challenging to me than performing well in class, and I regained my balance only after I began to adapt. At the beginning of my Orman experience I hated it so much. Yet at the end I loved it just as much. That school exposed me to social classes I had never mixed with. I learned how to relate to all kinds of people. I later became extremely interested in psychology and sociology, not least because of these years.

In my first year, I received my worst grades ever. The threat of failure has always motivated me to fight back. I decided to focus all my time and effort during the next year — the eleventh grade — to excel, in order to join the advanced classes with my friend Moatasem in twelfth grade, the last year at high school. Mission accomplished: after a year of very hard work, I received a grade of 95 percent and was able once again to sit at a desk with Moatasem, as we used to do in the ninth grade.

Nevertheless, no amount of success could make me forget some of the things I saw during the first two years at Orman. The teachers tried to maintain order by means of violence and beatings. In return, the students enjoyed intimidating and harassing the teachers. There were daily battles in those classrooms of seventy, among whom were a fair number of troublemakers.

Like other government employees, public school teachers in Egypt receive a monthly salary of no more than a few hundred pounds, which does not cover their basic family needs. As a result, private lessons have become teachers’ main source of income. Teachers can generate thousands of pounds by visiting students’ homes and tutoring them in a far better environment than at school. A survey carried out by the Egyptian cabinet’s Information Center in 2008 revealed that 60 percent of parents sought private lessons for their children. Many families were spending up to a third of their income on these lessons.

Like a cancer, the phenomenon of private lessons quickly spread everywhere in the country. Teachers began marketing their services on leaflets that can be found in every street of every city and town. They give themselves catchy titles like “the emperor of physics” or “the colonel of chemistry.” The real shame is that most teachers, along with the government’s textbooks, emphasize rote memorization rather than any genuine understanding. Students and parents have to find their own ways to learn how to solve problems. Many students rely on supplementary texts. Egyptians spend over one billion pounds ($200 million) every year on them. I resisted private lessons adamantly until my final and decisive year in high school, when math and chemistry were so challenging that I simply could not grasp them from the classroom instruction.

One of my elected courses was psychology. I chose to study it because, like many adolescents, I was interested in understanding human nature. I decided to take private lessons with a university instructor whom I will never forget: Mr. Ehab. We used to spend hours more than the scheduled time discussing many interesting topics. Mr. Ehab taught me how to deal with various people and situations and helped me realize that a large number of conflicts result from pure miscommunication, like what Aristotle said about the importance of defining terms to avoid unnecessary disagreement. It was quite a good experience for someone of my age.

The corrupt educational environment also encouraged cheating. Teachers who supervised without allowing cheating were described by students as “bothersome.” Some mothers used to wish that the proctors of their children’s exams would let them cheat. It is not surprising that cheating and fraud gradually became everyday activities in Egypt, making their way from education to business and commercial transactions, and ultimately to elections.

I graduated from high school with a total grade score of 97 percent. I was going to attend Cairo University to study engineering, but first I searched for a job. My primary reason was to pay my phone bill, which had soared for a reason my father might never have imagined: dial-up Internet access. I spent hours exploring the Internet, browsing websites and chatting anonymously with people I did not know from around the world, using mIRC (a famous chat client at the time) to make virtual friends. I remember when my dad stormed into my room during the summer after high school to express his anger at the size of the phone bill. He confiscated the computer and locked it up in a closet, explaining that I was irresponsible and that my relationship with the computer had to end. As soon as he left the house, I broke open the closet and reclaimed the computer. When he returned, I begged his forgiveness and declared that I would get a dedicated phone line and the bill would be my responsibility. Luckily, my father always tried to treat his children as responsible near-equals. He often told us to be careful what we wished for. This time, after hearing me out, he said, “As you wish.” It was the beginning of my life online, and the beginning of my financial independence, as I started earning a steady income from working in a video gaming store and as a freelance website developer.

Working and spending long hours online was a real challenge to my studies. After passing the preparatory year at the engineering school, students were expected to choose a department to enroll in. The number of seats was limited in some departments, making them very competitive. I scored badly during my preparatory year in 1998. As a result, I initially enrolled in electrical engineering instead of my first choice, computer engineering. Nonetheless, I quickly determined that I really wanted to work with computers. A friend of mine had said that if I failed my first year in electrical engineering I could submit an appeal to the dean explaining that my life’s dream was to study computer engineering, so I proceeded to Student Affairs, where I learned that my friend’s information was accurate enough but success depended on the number of transfer requests submitted.

I took the risky decision to skip that year’s exams and submit an appeal at the end of the year. As usual, my parents were surprised by my decision and tried all forms of dissuasion, but I insisted. After few months my wish came true: only one other student requested a transfer, and we were both admitted to computer engineering.

Life was different inside my new department. There were no more than forty students, and the professors and teaching assistants knew each one of us by name. I tried to compete with the top students, but I was always behind, thanks to the countless hours I spent online. I remember one teaching assistant, Ahmed, who paused during one of his lectures and singled me out. “Wael, do you understand?” When I said yes, he responded, “Thank God — then I’m confident that everyone else has understood as well.” That was one of the reasons I hated the educational system in Egypt. I was very defensive and believed that it was the system, not me, that was blocking my progress. Yet even though I was losing at school, I was winning somewhere else.

Earlier, during the summer of my preparatory year at the university in 1998, I had created a website to help Muslims network with one another. It was pretty much like a simple version of YouTube. There were three fundamental differences, however: it was a website for audio material, not video, since video quality was not as advanced as it is today; content uploading was restricted to me and a schoolmate, since the content was religious in nature; and, finally, the website administrators had to remain anonymous. The webmaster could be reached only via an e-mail address that did not include his real name. I named the website IslamWay.com.

State Security would have immediately targeted me if it had discovered that I was the creator of an Islamic website, no matter how moderate it might have been. When I received the call from Captain Rafaat, I prayed that it would have nothing to do with my IslamWay days. Luckily, he never mentioned it during the interrogation, so I didn’t either.

It wasn’t too long before IslamWay became one of the most popular Islamic destinations on the Internet. During its early years, the website contained more than 20,000 hours of audio recordings of religious sermons, lectures, and recitals of the Holy Qur’an. Over 3,000 hours of this material I had digitized myself. In addition, the website relied on more than eighty volunteers, the true identities of most of whom remain unknown to me to this day, to collect and digitize content from existing cassette tapes.

Two years after the launch, the website had strong traffic from tens of thousands of daily users. I wanted it to serve as a kind of public library featuring a complete range of moderate Islamic opinions. When the English version launched in 1999, it spread strongly among Muslims who did not speak Arabic and among others who wished to learn about the faith. The website was becoming increasingly influential.

Surprisingly, IslamWay led me to my future wife. Despite my young age, I wanted to get married. I had proposed several times to Egyptian girls whom I met online or through my network of family and friends. My proposals were always met with skepticism leading to rejection. Many families thought I was crazy to seek marriage while I was still at school, despite the fact that I was financially independent and making a decent income. Stubborn and independent-minded as ever, however, I was determined to solve my problems my own way. Somehow I settled on a solution: I decided that what I really needed was to marry a non-Egyptian who would convert to Islam. I admired the openness of American culture and the practical way in which Americans faced life’s problems — so not just any Muslim convert, an American Muslim convert. I figured that anyone who changed her faith after a period of contemplation must be someone special — in today’s hectic world, most people barely have enough time to think about the ideologies they inherit from their parents, let alone conduct comparisons with other faiths. And even fewer people, I figured, are actually able to cope with the emotional baggage that family and society throw at a person who changes her faith. There was only one difficulty: I did not know a single woman who fit this description. But I did know how I could find one: the Internet.

I first met the woman I was to marry online after reading something she wrote on the website’s discussion forum dedicated to new Muslims, where she participated frequently as she practiced the faith she had recently embraced. I reached out to her, and we began corresponding. I found her personality strong and her writing style quite appealing. Yet when I made the crazy suggestion that she visit Cairo — she lived in California — she refused. Our correspondence trailed off over time.

Not too long after, in June 2001, when I was twenty, I planned a trip to the United States in order to donate the website to a U.S.-based charity that supported Muslim communities around the globe. The site had become very successful, and it was now so large that it was beyond my capacity to keep up with its growth. I was working at least thirty hours per week, and my studies were suffering. I had received an offer in 2000, from a close friend who knew I was the owner, to buy 10 percent for $100,000. It was a huge sum for a young man, but I refused to sell. I had never intended to make money from the portal — I do not feel comfortable profiting from social activities. I always knew I wanted to donate it to a charitable organization. Now it was time to transform IslamWay into a professionally managed website, and an American Muslim charity was ready and willing to take it on. So I hopped on a plane.

During my stay, an American friend offered to introduce me to a girl whom his wife knew was looking for a Muslim husband. Fate stepped in: she was the very girl I had chatted with online for months. Weeks later, Ilka and I were married.

I did not tell my parents in advance. My mother, I knew, was especially opposed to the notion of marrying a foreigner with a culture different from ours. Two days after the wedding (attended only by my mother-in-law, two witnesses, and an imam), I called my father. To my surprise, he only scolded me in calm tones for not consulting him and my mother. I asked if he could help me by sending a few thousand dollars until I got settled, and he agreed. I asked him not to tell my mother until I found a way to break the news to her as gently as possible. But he must have thought twice about that idea. Minutes later, my mother called and unleashed her wrath at my unilateral decision. She refused to speak to me for months afterward. I would call and call, and she would hang up as soon as she heard my voice. I wrote letters, trying to appeal to her love for me. I expressed how much I loved her. I praised Ilka as gently and insistently as I could manage, stressing her good manners and other great qualities. Nothing worked.

My stay in America left a major and lasting impression. Like any Egyptian who visits the West, I was in awe of the quality of education, the respect for citizens’ rights, and the democratic process that gave people voices and allowed them to be active players in the political process. Admittedly, at my young age, I was easily impressed. I drew a conclusion that I repeated to Egyptian friends many times: “We’re being fooled in Egypt!” The thing that impressed me the most was the freedom of religious practice — the respect for religions and every human being’s right to practice his or her faith. There were many organizations that defended Muslims and their rights. They were free to criticize the American government’s policies without fear of any secret police.

Yet not everything was in favor of the United States in the comparison with Egypt. I sensed an individualism in the air that contrasted greatly with my experience back home. In Egypt, a lot of emphasis is placed on the family and on groups in general, which creates an atmosphere that engenders a sort of emotional warmth in spite of its occasional restrictiveness. On the contrary, in the States I noticed that people were on their own in many situations in which they would have enjoyed much social support if they were in Egypt. My brain was in the United States, but my heart was definitely in Egypt.

My initial plan was to stay in the States to finish my degree, because I was so impressed with American higher education. Yet I had a change of heart after 9/11. I will never forget that day. My wife and I were home, and I had woken up early and started working on my computer when, on a discussion board, I found people asking each other to turn on the TV right away. I watched flames emanating from the first World Trade Center building; we all thought at the time that a plane had accidentally crashed into the tower. I woke up Ilka to join me, and shortly after, we both screamed in horror as a second plane crashed into the other tower. I had never imagined that people who claimed to be Muslims could commit such an atrocity. The faith in which I had been raised both unequivocally prohibits the killing of innocent civilians under any circumstances and completely forbids suicide. So I was dumbfounded when I heard speculations in the media that the culprits were Muslims. Over the years I had observed various Western media outlets magnifying the acts of some crazy fanatics and portraying them as representative of Islam. If 9/11 had anything to do with Muslims, I thought, then those who had planned this monstrous murder of thousands of innocent civilians must have been thinking solely about their political ideologies and could not possibly have considered the damage they would do to the image of Islam and Muslims living in America. Or perhaps they couldn’t care less.

It wasn’t easy being an Egyptian Muslim in America during the weeks immediately following the attack. It sometimes almost felt as if my fellow Muslims and I were personally accused of this atrocious crime. In public spaces, I was keenly aware of every look of suspicion that came my way. Many of my Muslim friends suffered acts of discrimination, including brief arrests and harassment at airports. I was getting tired of being unfairly singled out and had little hope of finding a job, so I began to seriously consider returning to Egypt.

Ilka, of course, was quite attached to her home country, although she too felt alienated by the barrage of criticism of our religion that washed through many media outlets. The fact that she wore a headscarf made her conspicuously Muslim, and this made a woman’s life harder at the time. Still, she hesitated for a long time before agreeing to move to Egypt. She had left the United States only once before, on a short tourist trip to Mexico. I remember her saying to me, “I asked some friends online about Cairo, and they said the streets were filthy.”

“Yes, I must admit, some streets are dirty, but people’s hearts are clean.”

The Egyptian people are among the best-hearted and most humorous in the world. They laugh during the darkest of times and find humor in the midst of suffering. Not even sixty years of a regime of fear could change that.

After a heavy dose of persuasion, Ilka agreed, and we flew to Egypt in December 2001, three months after 9/11. I was adamant that we see my mother immediately upon our arrival. Walking into her house right after fourteen hours of flying was actually quite an experience. She was trying to hide her emotions but failed miserably. She didn’t even smile when I said hello, and when I introduced Ilka, she offered a cold greeting. Obviously she felt betrayed. Nonetheless, over time my mother could not help warming to Ilka, and she grew to love her.

Shortly after I returned to Egypt I resumed classes, but I also began searching for a job. An old friend of mine, AbdulRahman Meheilba, along with his partner, Ramy Mamdouh, was working with an Internet startup that provided e-mail services to corporate clients and individuals. Gawab.com quickly spread across the Arab world because its e-mail service supported Arabic and it offered 15 megabytes of storage space at a time when Hotmail offered only 1MB and Yahoo offered 2MB.

Because of the entrepreneurial skills I had acquired during my experience with IslamWay.com, AbdulRahman offered me a job overseeing marketing and sales. Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted. We worked hard to spread Gawab’s services further in the Arab world. Eventually we managed to reach two million users and secure sustainable revenue by selling advertisements as well as hosting e-mail solutions for businesses and other websites. As Gawab. com grew, so did my paycheck. I became responsible for a team of twelve employees who dealt with clients in different parts of the Arab world. It was fun doing business with people you never met, thanks to the Internet. The growth of the company was exciting, and so was a six-figure offer of a buyout pitched by an Arab investor.

Working at Gawab gave me my first real sense of professional responsibility. Anything related to marketing and sales came to me. I was even responsible for accounting and cash management. It seemed everything was happening at once: in addition to spending long days at Gawab and many hours studying during my final two years at the university, I had become a father: Ilka and I were blessed with a baby girl in January 2003. We argued about who would choose the name; Ilka strategically allied with my mother and eventually got her way. We gave our beautiful little girl the name Isra.

I was ecstatic about being a father. It was strange for everyone else at school, since none of them had children. In general, many colleagues found me quite strange. Some saw that I rushed into decisions and actions without fully contemplating the consequences. They were right. It is in my blood. And not just that: I have always wanted to swim against the current.

Time quickly went by; Isra turned one, and I officially became a computer engineer in June 2004. Because I was a father, I felt even more responsibility to excel, in order to provide for my family. I scored my highest grades during the last year of school, yet my overall grade of 64 percent was “unsatisfactory.”

During my work at Gawab and a few months after graduation, I decided to study for an MBA. My job put me in charge of the company’s sales and marketing, and I realized how much knowledge I needed — I could not just read a few books and get up to speed. I needed experienced mentors and a vigorous education in business. My first choice was the American University in Cairo, which has a top-quality MBA program, though it charges high tuition fees. It would mean spending over 60 percent of my annual income on my education. As far as I was concerned, the cost did not matter much, as it was an investment that I trusted would reap returns after a few short years. Yet the university made it clear that I was not a strong candidate. My undergraduate grades were not high enough.

I wrote a long letter to the university explaining the reasons behind my low grades. The general system of education in Egypt was to blame, I claimed. I had missed exams during the first year of electrical engineering, then again during the first half of the third year, when I was in the United States, which had unfairly penalized me. I also explained the distractions of my work and early marriage, and I stressed my attempts to overcome them. One of my dearest university professors, Dr. Ahmed Darwish, who was the Egyptian minister of administrative development at the time, even wrote a letter of recommendation for me.

One of the requirements for acceptance at AUC’s MBA program was to score a minimum of 500 points on the GMAT. The director of admissions told me that if I was very serious about my application, I should score higher to compensate for my low grades. She said my score should not fall below 550, the average score of their applicants. I took it as a challenge. After two months of intense preparation I scored a 680, which was very high compared to the scores of my Egyptian peers. A short while later, I was finally accepted. I pledged to the admissions office that I would prove my worth and score the highest grades in all my classes.

Two years and sixteen courses later, I graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, the highest possible. I would start each workday at Gawab, travel from there to the university to attend classes, then spend long hours at the library to study. Achieving straight A’s became of the utmost importance to me, even though it would have little effect on my career. Yet I did it. My self-confidence was redeemed. I proved to myself that I was not a failure. Ilka was supportive above and beyond the call of duty and stood behind me throughout. She knew that it was my own personal challenge, and despite the fact that I spent little time with her and our daughter, she always encouraged me to keep studying and focusing on my school projects.

The experience of the MBA program at AUC was crucial. Learning the science behind marketing was key to my career progress, and later on was vital to my online activism. The combination of marketing and a concentration in finance enabled me to understand how to study market needs, design products that address those needs, and promote them to target audiences. The finance classes introduced me to the world of business; since I came from an engineering background, this taught me a lot about how to run businesses financially. Little did I know that only a few years later, all this piled-up experience would come in quite handy in promoting a product I had never seen myself marketing: democracy and freedom!

In 2005, during the first year of my MBA, I had the startup bug. It was then that I met a major Arab investor in the field of technology — a chance meeting that I attribute solely to divine assistance. Mohamed Rasheed al-Ballaa was an engineer and a major stakeholder in the National Technology Group. Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, NTG is a multinational conglomerate with more than twenty specialized information and communication technology (ICT) businesses in the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the United States. To my delight, al-Ballaa was impressed with my web experience and listened to me pitch a cars portal for the Arab world similar to AutoTrader.com. He invited me to visit his company’s branch in the United Arab Emirates to discuss the project further.

Instead of offering to finance a startup, however, al-Ballaa offered to hire me. He wanted to expand aggressively into the Internet business in multiple ways, and effectively gave me the opportunity to be part of a larger team with a mission to help what he believed would change the face of the Arab web. The offer was quite enticing, since my entrepreneurial dream would be partially fulfilled with very little financial risk and my efforts would ultimately have more impact given al-Ballaa’s ambitious vision.

After I started working at NTG, I found al-Ballaa to be a model Arab investor. He treated me like a son, to the extent that my colleagues started to refer to me jokingly as Wael al-Ballaa.

One of the companies established by NTG was Mubasher, a Middle Eastern version of Reuters and Bloomberg financial solutions, which provided Arab stock market investors with web-based screens displaying real-time prices to facilitate buying and selling decisions. Al-Ballaa knew the importance of research and economic news for investors. He asked me to take the helm in starting a Cairo-based company to support Mubasher with data and analysis. I was not yet twenty-five.

At the time I knew nothing about the media, or publishing, or even the stock market. I was so ignorant that I did not even know the difference between a stock and a bond. I began avidly reading everything I could get my hands on about stock markets, and decided to take finance-related courses in my MBA. The company was established, and I quickly assembled a team. Needless to say, I was committed to the Internet generation. Most team members were fresh graduates in business and mass communications; I much preferred them to the experienced researchers, who were nowhere near as digitally engaged.

Mohamed al-Ballaa was extremely supportive of the project’s launch, both financially and morally. When Mubasher.info was launched, it quickly became one of the main destinations for many small Arab investors seeking information and news on listed companies.

This experience had a profound effect on me. I was heading a large team of more than 120 people. We were always seeking ways to develop and innovate. I tried every possible means to motivate the team to give the company their absolute best. I constantly urged all the employees to improve their own skills and the work environment. The site had more than one million visitors per month, and its reputation spread around the globe. We launched an English version. Several international stock market websites and companies began using our portal as one of their reliable sources for news and information. As a result, the company became interested in expanding and increasing its investments in Egypt.

Mohamed al-Ballaa was in his fifties, but he had the energy of a man in his twenties. He enjoyed taking calculated risks and venturing into areas where others would seldom go. He often told me that the rapidly evolving world around us makes it difficult to formulate five-year and ten-year plans, especially in a tech-related industry. As an investor, al-Ballaa committed his capital to dozens of ventures at once, a spray-and-pray strategy, hoping that just one would strike gold and make up for losses in the other investments. This made a profound impression on me.

The Internet has been instrumental in shaping my experiences as well as my character. It was through the Internet that I was able to enter the world of communications (when I was barely eighteen) and network with hundreds of young people from my generation everywhere around the world. Like everyone else, I enjoyed spending long hours in front of a screen on chat programs. I built a network of virtual relations with people, most of whom I never met in person, not even once.

I find virtual life in cyberspace quite appealing. I prefer it to being visible in public life. It is quite convenient to conceal your identity and write whatever you please in whatever way you choose. You can even choose whom to speak to and to end the conversation at any moment you like. I am not a “people person” in the typical sense, meaning that I’d rather communicate with people online than spend a lot of time visiting them or going out to places in a group. I much prefer using e-mail to using the telephone. In short, I am a real-life introvert yet an Internet extrovert.

My addiction to the Internet made joining Google a dream that I fervently aspired to make a reality. I had heard a lot about how cool it was to work there. The company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, became among the most influential people in the world after they developed the web’s best search engine. Employees at Google are among the happiest in the world. Their intellectual skills are respected and their innovation is appreciated. For years I persistently applied online every time there was a vacancy that matched my experience. I used to joke with my wife and friends by saying, “I want to work at Google even if I have to take a job as a tea boy.”

One of those attempts was in 2005, only a few weeks after I joined NTG. Google announced a vacancy for a consultant in the Middle East and North Africa. Without hesitation, at barely twenty-five years old, I applied. My résumé was designed to demonstrate immediately that I was crazy about the Internet.

I had doubts about getting this position, because of my age and lack of experience. The job was to develop the company’s strategy for the entire Middle East. Yet to my surprise, I received a call from Human Resources inviting me to start the interview process.

Google is unique in everything it does. Human Resources sent me some documents to read before the interviews. The entire process took a few short months. The last, and ninth, interview was with a vice president, who spoke to me from his office in London. He asked about my experience in mergers and acquisitions along with my web experience, and about my understanding of regional web issues. Although I knew that I certainly was underexperienced, I was still hopeful, because I felt that my character and Google were “plug ’n’ play.” This is why I was devastated when, two weeks later, I found out that I had not been selected. My wife was dumbfounded and could not understand why I didn’t get the job.

My desire to join Google only intensified. It was no longer a matter of employment; it was a challenge, and I was stubborn. I particularly did not want to fail at joining a company that I thought embodied who I was as a person.

In 2008 the company announced an opening for a regional head of marketing, to be based at its one-year-old branch in Cairo. It was the perfect chance, now that I had my MBA in marketing and the Mubasher experience. Of course I applied. I volunteered a study, on my own initiative, in which I explained my vision of what the company’s strategy in the region should be. My observations included technical notes on the search engine’s performance in Arabic. Then a series of interviews began: I met with seven interviewers from different countries and functions. I thought I did very well in most of the conversations. My last interview was with the VP of marketing. I still remember my answer to her question “Why do you want to join Google?”: “I want to be actively engaged in changing our region. I believe that the Internet is going to help make that happen, and working for Google is the best way for me to have a role.”

After eight months of interviews, I received an offer — I had made it to Google! I was later told by my manager that one of the senior Googlers who interviewed me described me in his evaluation sheet as “persistent and stubborn, just the type a company needs when entering a new market.”

My skills and experience were enriched by Google. And I marveled at its culture, which was all about listening to others. Data and statistics ruled over opinions. Most of the time, authority belongs to the owners of information, or as W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

Similarly impressive is the trust Google bestowed on employees, who were empowered to access a lot of internal information that other companies would normally restrict to smaller numbers of employees. Communication and sharing knowledge among employees was key to the company’s success.

Google did not rise to the peak of the tech industry by luck. Its success is all based on strategy and philosophy. Attention goes not only to employees but also to users. The company listens to its users, asks their opinions, analyzes their usage behavior, and uses this input to develop its products. Teams within the company are constantly changing and developing products using unique and innovative product development methods.

The culture of experimentation was another thing I loved about the company. An experiment is always welcome, so long as the results come quickly. In a case where there is a difference of opinion about features of a product undergoing development, the product managers and engineers will put a beta version out to a group of users. The decision will then be based on the results and feedback. Google is not afraid of failure. Failure is accepted. If a product fails, it is terminated. Simple.

What attracted me most was Google’s 20 percent rule. The company allows employees to work on whatever they please for 20 percent of their time (one day a week). This means that they are free to work on projects other than their official assignments if they want. The idea is based on the notion that people work best when they work on things they are passionate about. A host of Google’s most outstanding products were born out of the 20 percent rule, including the e-mail service, Gmail, and the largest online advertising management network, Adsense. For me, Google helped reinforce the idea that employee engagement is the most important strategy of all. The more you can get everyone involved in trying to solve your problems, the more successful you will be. I found it natural, a few years later, to apply this philosophy to political and social activism.

A year before I finally joined Google, when I sat across the desk from Captain Rafaat of State Security, he asked me many questions about my religious faith and practice but none about my Internet experience. After a few hours of interrogation, during which he found nothing to hold against me, the State Security officer seemingly decided that I was not a threat in any way to security or to the political status quo. He said that he would try to remove my name from the airport arrivals watch list after presenting a report to his superiors. I thanked him and departed, grateful that this strange day had come to a peaceful end.

If Captain Rafaat and his colleagues had spent more time thinking about the Internet than classifying Egyptians by type of religious belief, they might have been better prepared for the digital tsunami under way.