Sam's Salon: Chaos and Collectivism in Egypt 🇪🇬
a conversation featuring Noha Beshir!
Hi, friends! There are a hundred more of you here now than when I sent my last newsletter on loving and leaving Cairo—the response to that essay was so much bigger than I expected. Some of you also likely found me after Substack HQ featured my “Egyptian magic” project on Notes, where I’m posting one special thing about Egypt per day for a month. Thank you all for being here. I’m so happy to have you!
With so many new folks joining, it seems like a good time to re-introduce myself. I’m Sam, and I write about the wonderful, interesting, weird, and messy parts of travel and life abroad. Each month, I send out one essay and one virtual “salon dinner,” where I bring the world into your home through a menu, book/movie recommendations, and ideas to spark conversation, all inspired by a given place (paid subscribers get to stay for “dessert,” with a new menu, a second discussion topic, more recommendations, and other sweet treats).
Today’s newsletter is a salon dinner, so step inside and let’s travel from home together! Past dinners have taken us to Greece and Guatemala—both fabulous destinations—but this one is extra special. It’s about Egypt, my home for the last two years, AND I am hosting our very first dinner guest:
, a Canadian-Egyptian who writes about her experiences as a Muslim woman, mother, and third-culture kid in . All of Noha’s essays are beautiful, but this piece about the practice of praying five times a day, sometimes in the most unexpected places, is a particularly good place to start exploring her work.Below, Noha and I chat about our experiences with the chaos and collectivism of Egyptian society and how it compares to the (relative) orderliness and individualism of the West. FYI, if you’re reading this post as an email, your email service provide may truncate it—click the “view in browser” link in the top lefthand corner to see the full thing.
but first, sustenance
Food is a love language in Egypt. As we designed this menu, Noha and I talked about how the archetypal Egyptian mother shows care by preparing lots and lots of tasty dishes; most Egyptian meals are served family style rather than as a regimented progression of appetizers + sides + main, so we’re giving you options.
Appetizers: dips! You all know hummus and baba ghanoush, but for a uniquely Egyptian spread, try bissara (split fava bean dip flavored like falafel), ful medames (another fava bean dip, but creamier), and salatet zabadee (yogurt with cucumber and mint). In Egypt, these are served with eish baladi flatbread, but pita is close enough.
Main(s): Two of my favorite classic Egyptian recipes are koshary and fattah.
Koshary looks and sounds weird, but it is much, much tastier than it appears. A carb-y, starch-y mix of rice, pasta, chickpeas, and lentils topped with tomato sauce and fried onions, koshary is meant to fill you up on the cheap. It is a national treasure, the sort of food that unifies rich and poor. This is the best recipe I’ve found, but I would change two things to make it closer to what you get on Cairo streets: use vermicelli instead of spaghetti, and break it into 1/2 inch pieces before cooking.
Egyptian fattah is a sort of layered casserole with rice, beef or lamb, crunchy pita chips, and garlic-vinegar and tomato sauces. The flavor is complex, the texture divine. This is a great recipe. If you want a vegetarian version, try the equally delicious fattet al-makdous—it’s technically Syrian, but is found all over Egypt, too.
Drinks: fresh juices are the drink of choice in Egypt (if you don’t count black tea, of course). Thick, sweet hibiscus juice—called karkade here—and lemon with mint are always crowd pleasers.
Now that we have full bellies, onto our discussion of chaos and collectivism in Egypt!
food for thought
SAM: Thank you so much for being here, Noha! As I prepare to leave Egypt, I’m reflecting on how I’ve grown over my time here. It has changed me for the better in so many ways, but I find I didn’t integrate into Egyptian society anywhere near as much as I’d pictured before moving—I thought I would be fluent in Arabic by now, and I’m sorry to say that I still barely speak any!
In my “why you shouldn’t try to travel like a local” piece, I mentioned being at a dinner with Egyptian couples who joked about dealing with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and how I couldn’t relate to that, despite having lived in Egypt for over a year at that point. I believe I understand this country fairly well, but that conversation highlighted the aspects of the Egyptian experience and identity that I will simply never be able to access as a foreigner. Being an outsider is, in some ways, a privilege—it insulates me from kafkaesque bureaucracy and from the economic hardship affecting so many Egyptians—but in other ways, it’s very alienating. I could live in Cairo for 20 more years and it would still be immediately clear to Egyptians that I’m not one of them. People know I’m merely passing through and don’t share their cultural background.
That’s a strange space to occupy in a highly collectivist, family-oriented society. I’m surrounded by really strong communities that I’m not part of, and never really can be. Noha, you have a different perspective, because you have family in Egypt; perhaps you can start by sharing a bit about your experiences of visiting them?
NOHA: It’s so fun to be having this conversation with you, Sam! And I think one of the coolest elements of it is how we each approach Egypt from a different perspective. You’ve been living in Cairo for two years, but like you said, you’ll always be a foreigner. I’ve never lived in Egypt, but I’ve visited a bunch: my parents were born there and I still have extended family there to this day. Until recently, I’ve always seen myself as a “bad Egyptian”, as in, I was bad at being Egyptian. My sense of the culture was limited, just the world I observed in snippets during the weeks I spent visiting with my cousins, and then the food and the humour and the language that my parents passed along to me. When I met my husband, I got a much wider lens on Egyptian culture, because his family stayed a lot more connected. I got more exposure to the movies, the books, the music, and some of the other facets of Egyptian life. I don’t consider myself a true expert on Egypt, more a second generation child of the diaspora who’s grown to love and appreciate my heritage as I’ve evolved.
But, on to the story! My first cousins knew me and my sisters quite well, because we would visit them every time we went to Egypt, which was every summer when we were very young, and every few years, as we got older. But I also have a lot of extended family that I didn’t see very often. My father is the second youngest of 12 children. His eldest brother was 23 years older than him, which means I have second and third cousins of all ages. Some of these cousins I’ve never met, and others I’ve met once or twice on visits to my father’s family’s small town.
On one such visit, when I was around 12 years old, we were hanging out with one of my closer cousins. We were in her bedroom after dinner, trying to cope with the heat, when word got out that “the Americans were here”. My sisters and I were “the Americans” in question. For the 10 year-olds in the provincial capital of Meet Ghamr, Egypt, Canada and America were indistinguishable, and America was much more exciting. There was a general hubbub and my cousin told us that some of the other kids in the extended family wanted to meet us, so we went out to the landing of the apartment building. I still remember the look on this little boy’s face. “Those are the Americans?” he asked, curling his lower lip in disdain and walking away. We were such a disappointment to him! Four little Arab girls in hijabs, not a blonde in sight!
In my experience, there can be an internalized inferiority in Egypt, and perhaps in other countries that have been colonized by Western powers. I think it was more pronounced when I was younger, partially because the internet wasn’t around and you couldn’t just Google or YouTube your way into another part of the world, so the West was romanticized, almost mythical. You couldn’t possibly see the mundane aspects of it, only the symbols of material success and luxury.
I was guilty of it too. In Canada, I was proud of my heritage and my identity as an Egyptian. But when we would go to Egypt to visit family, I subconsciously, and sometimes consciously, looked down at many aspects of Egyptian society. I had this sense of having escaped this awful fate of being born there, and I was constantly on the lookout for any reference my parents made to moving “home”. You talk a lot about the chaos of Cairo in this newsletter, Sam, but in a loving way. I looked down on the chaos for my whole childhood and young adulthood. I was constantly thinking, “Look at the dirt! Look at the disorganization! Ugh. No wonder everything is so hard here. If only these people tried harder/were more punctual/etc.” It was only in my adulthood, when I read about minorities using proximity to whiteness to gain power, that I realized I was doing that. And it was a shock.
Some of that chaos helps you cope with the uncertainty of life. When Covid hit, I was desperate for dates and deadlines and reassurances and promises that everything would be better. I felt entitled to it, probably because I was used to having this sense of control. You do A, and then B will happen. But people who live in Egypt know better. They don’t have that inherent arrogance that the world will revolve around their actions. They’re probably better off for it when life throws them for a loop, And isn’t life always throwing us for a loop? Isn’t that resilience valuable?
SAM: I would love to pull the thread on resilience and attitudes toward chaos and uncertainty a bit further. Egyptians have a way of throwing up their hands and saying, “welp, who knows! Insha’allah everything will work out!” (I have written about this, too.) To some, especially those of us from the West, this can look like laziness or indifference, but that’s a cultural misunderstanding. Egyptians’ lives are highly unpredictable due to instability and economic strife. They might not know whether their money will be worth the same tomorrow as it is today, or if they will have power in their apartments, or if there will be meat at the supermarket. Their que será será attitude is an extremely valuable adaptation to navigating that chaos.
I think it’s a very healthy worldview, because the truth is none of our lives are predictable! Radical, unanticipated shifts could strike anywhere, at any moment; that reality is just a lot more immediate for Egyptians than it is for those of us who come from relatively stable societies, because weird things happen to them every single day. I’ve found myself taking on more of the “whatever will be will be” outlook since moving to Cairo, and it’s made me a happier, more well-adjusted person. When you learn to let go of expectations, small irritants can’t ruin your day so easily.
NOHA: The way you describe the Egyptian attitude to chaos and the Western response to it is exactly how I responded for years. I definitely moralized that attitude. But you’re right, it’s actually quite valuable, especially as the world gets more chaotic as a whole. The other aspect of saying insha Allah—aka, “whatever God wills to happen will happen”—is tied into the Islamic understanding of fate. I think because of Egypt’s history as a majority Muslim country for centuries, even if the level of religiosity has dipped in recent decades, that ethos is embedded in phrases like “insha Allah”. Even when I’m 100% planning for something, and I’ve done everything in my power to make it happen, there’s an understanding that my plan is just one little part of the big picture. Insha Allah can seem like a cop out, and sometimes it is used that way. But it can also be an admission that I’ve done what I can, and I leave the rest to God, because it’s beyond me.
Another area where I changed my outlook over the years was the community vs. individualism lens. Egypt, and the Arab world in general, is very collectivist. Family and community come above almost everything. When I was younger, growing up as I did in a Western environment, I looked at this primarily through a negative light: family meant family obligations, family expectations, and community pressures. I focused on how little room there was for individual self-expression and self determination, especially as it pertains to your life choices for education and career choice. In Egypt, at least when I was growing up, there were 3 elite study/career paths: Doctor, Engineer, Pharmacist. These correlated directly to your final high school grades, which were based on something called “sanawiya ‘amma’, the final year exams that every high school senior in the country writes. So, you’re essentially in a competition with every other senior in the country, the top students get into these three university programs, and the rest are… I don’t know—losers? Definitely not successes.
Now, I never went through sanawiya ‘amma, because I was born and raised in Canada, but I was aware of the general ranking of education and career path. Every time we visited, family and friends would ask about grades and exam results and university acceptances. One of my older sisters, who was an A+ student, chose to study psychology and then teaching. I remember my mother qualifying all her comments to our Egyptian relatives with, “but she chose this program. She had the grades for medicine and engineering.” It was incomprehensible that someone would have the grades for medicine and instead study psychology.
Similarly, I went to an arts high school for a creative writing program, and then I studied software engineering. Not because my parents pressured me, but at least in part because there was this internalized sense of expectation, of the appropriate career choice. I’m grateful for my stable, steady IT job—I don’t think I have the disposition to be a starving artist!—but when my writing stagnated under the pressures of my 9-5 and my young children, I definitely blamed it on the Egyptian ranking of certain careers over others.
It took reaching adulthood for me to realize the positives of strong family and community ties. On one hand, you have family obligations and family expectations, but on the other, you have family support. You have community pressures, but you also have people who come through for neighbors and friends and anyone around them in need. I think the community lens is tied to the chaos lens in some ways, in that Egyptians don’t expect the world to revolve around their individual needs and expectations because there’s a larger group to serve: the family or the community.
SAM: I absolutely agree that the collectivism is linked to the chaos. I’ve experienced that from a slightly different angle. In Egypt, if I want to get something done, I have to rely on my community to help me, because information isn’t as readily available as it is in the U.S. For example, if I needed a dog sitter in the U.S., I would open any one of ten apps built for the specific purpose of connecting dog owners with professional dog sitters. Those apps don’t exist in Egypt, so I have to ask around for recommendations. The services you want are absolutely there, it’s just that you often have to know somebody to find them, which is where community comes in handy. You can do or obtain even the rarest things in Cairo at the snap of your fingers, but they will only be accessible if you know the right person—so the more extensive your network, the easier your life is. This is collectivism in action; you have to pool knowledge and help each other for society to function efficiently. I know a couple Egyptians who have a knack for helping American expats navigate those aspects of Egyptian life–they act as “fixers” by connecting us to services we wouldn’t be able to find otherwise, and they earn a solid supplemental income doing it, so it’s a win-win.
The chaos of Egypt makes life harder in general, but at least you’re in it together…you need others to help get you through, and that feeds our very innate human need to have a community. In the U.S., you can go about your daily life without needing anyone, and while that’s great in terms of convenience and quality of life, it can be really isolating—I think this lack of a need to actively cultivate community is one of the reasons it isn’t uncommon for Americans to have neither friends nor family that they see regularly.
Of course, as you point out, Noha, collectivism has its downsides. I’m an introvert, so when I first arrived in the Arab world, it was tough for me to constantly have to interact with people in order to get stuff done. But in the end, I think I will miss it. I see my little corner of Cairo like a janky version of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—it’s erratic and loud and people can be nosy, but there are recurring characters that I interact with every day, and that feels safe, comforting, and kind of whimsical.
NOHA: That’s an interesting lens, and one I think I didn’t see because it’s just too close for me to have any perspective on it. Needing people to get stuff done forces you to have a connection, whether you feel up to connecting at that moment or not. I’m definitely a third-culture kid, in that my surrounding culture (Canadian) and my home culture (Egyptian) were two very different ways of being, but Arabs are constantly in community with each other. We don’t give each other a lot of space. That was often overwhelming for me as a child when I visited Egypt, but even when I came home, I still took part in that culture as a member of the diaspora, although it was definitely tempered. Canadian Egyptians are less together than Egyptians and more together than Canadians. It’s a spectrum, I think. It’s also something I would hear constantly from new immigrants. “Everyone here is so distant! I miss the crowds.” I remember getting into an argument with my cousin way back in our early twenties because he called Ottawa boring after he came to visit in the summer one year, and I called Cairo chaotic. And maybe we were both right!
Think of “My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding.” When I watched that movie, the characters were obviously exaggerated, but the “busy-ness” of family everywhere was actually relatable. I read a lot about the loneliness epidemic, and I think what you described about being able to go about your day to day without needing other people logistically might contribute to that.
Speaking of the chaos, I read your piece about “why you shouldn’t travel like a local,” and I noticed that the government complex your dinner companions had to go to was in Abassiya. My husband and I went back to Egypt for our honeymoon, to meet each other’s extended family and vacation on the Red Sea. We were going to visit his aunt’s family, in Abassiya, and we hailed a cab. Traffic was bad (what’s new!). We may have told him we were in a rush, I don’t remember, but of course we were being very busy North Americans! Well, the cab driver just drove over the raised median and started driving against traffic to get us there quickly. I don’t know the street names but it was a huge road with 3 lanes going in each direction. I remember putting my head in my lap and praying and just being so terrified. And then we were there, and he’d gotten us through the rush hour and saved us 30 minutes. Not that I’d recommend it!
SAM: That is so classic. Everything in Egypt is navigable if you have the right person to help you! A brief tangent about driving and traffic, because it’s hilarious and you will totally get it—I was having dinner with an Egyptian friend the other night and he told us a story of a friend’s cousin who moved to the U.S. for work. This guy missed his highway turnoff, so he did a very normal Egyptian thing and decided to cross over the median so he could take the exit on the other side! Apparently a bunch of other drivers thought he was a homicidal maniac and called the cops, who took him in for a mental health evaluation. They eventually let him go, but…yeah, he got deported. As a North American who has lived in Egypt, I can totally understand both sides of this story. In North America, missing your exit is no big deal; you just take the next one. But in Egypt, if you miss your turnoff, you are likely to be sent on a 30+ minute detour to who knows where, which is why crossing medians and backing up on highways is acceptable behavior. If I had been one of those cops and realized the driver was Egyptian, I would have just said, “I see why you thought that made sense, but never, ever do it again.”
NOHA: OHMYGOD!!!! Poor everyone in that story!! I feel so bad for the driver but I feel so bad for the others on the road who I’m sure were terrified for their lives. It has never crossed my mind before that a cultural translator would be needed for something like this but now that you mention it, it does make all the sense in the world.
SAM: Yes—we need cultural translators! Or maybe even more so, we need to approach people from other cultures under the assumption that they do what they do for a reason because their life circumstances are totally different from ours. People don’t usually act randomly. That guy who crossed the median looked completely unhinged to Americans, but to him, his behavior was perfectly logical. So when you’re in a new cultural context and witness behaviors that confuse or frustrate you, it’s probably not because the people lack sense or virtue. They’re just navigating their environment in the best way they know how.
Thank you again for such a wonderful conversation, Noha!! With that, let’s turn to some of our favorite books and movies that address the chaos and collectivism of Egyptian society.
read
Sam’s pick: Cairo Circles by Doma Mahmoud. This debut novel is one of the better books I’ve read in recent years. It follows the overlapping lives of six young Egyptians who, despite coming from different social strata, are tied together by the bonds of family, friendship, and business. Set in Cairo and New York City, this book explores how the main character, Sheero, navigates emigration from his collectivist home to the more individualistic U.S. It paints a stirring portrait of modern Cairo society and of the expatriate experience–the latter of which often leads to complicated feelings about one’s homeland. Purchase it here.
watch
Noha’s pick: Assal Eswed. This comedic film tells the story of Masry El-Araby, a 30 year old Egyptian American returning to Egypt for the first time since childhood. Masry is expecting the Egypt of his youth and nostalgic memories, but instead he finds himself dropped into one chaotic situation after another. His naivete and false expectations lead to a series of hijinks that include getting conned and losing his American passport, until he finally finds refuge with his childhood neighbors and their family. During his time with his old neighbors, Masry rediscovers a part of his identity that has long been dormant, reconciling his two selves. The film, a commentary on both the beauty and chaos of life in Egypt, manages to maintain a lighthearted tone despite the serious topics it broaches. The title literally translates to black honey, highlighting the bittersweetness of life in Egypt. Click here to watch it for free with English subtitles on YouTube.
let’s discuss.
Would you describe your home culture as more collectivist or more individualist, and why?
Have you had any experiences on the opposite end of the cultural spectrum?
What do you see as the pros and cons of each?
What experiences have you had where a “cultural translator” could have helped (like our Egyptian friend who crossed a highway median in the U.S.)?
I’ll go first: I lived with a host family when I studied abroad in France. Shortly after I arrived, they left for the weekend. I called my host mother to ask if it was ok if I could have a couple friends from my study abroad program over to hang out after dinner, and she was taken aback—her response was “no strangers in our house.” I took that to mean that she thought I was untrustworthy, or that my friends weren’t good people. But in French culture, inviting someone into your home is a bigger deal than it is in the U.S. If my host mother and I had realized that our baseline expectations were different, the exchange would have been much less awkward.
thanks for coming!
I hope you’ve enjoyed our little trip to Egypt. Paid subscribers are invited for dessert, which will be posted tomorrow; this month, I’ve put together a whirlwind tour of ancient Egypt, with easily digestible history and photos of all the iconic ancient sites I’ve visited, from the Old Kingdom to the New. Upgrade your subscription to join us, or refer two friends and get a month free.
Next month, we’re going to another country close to my heart: Norway. I hope to see you there, and please feel free to bring a friend!
Until next time,
Sam xx
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This is such an incredible conversation and I adored hearing such an in-depth perspective on Egypt and Egyptian culture mixed with both of your unique perspectives. Thank you for such an enriching read xx
Really interesting conversation! The diaspora / expat dynamic is so interesting because your perspectives are so different, but you both share an 'outsider' status to a degree, though experienced differently.