“Of those he has omitted, a considerable number are so grossly indelicate that he could not venture to lay them before the public, although it must be acknowledged that they excelled in wit.”
-from the preface to Arabic Proverbs, or the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1830, by John Lewis Burkhardt, explaining the omission of some proverbs from the original collection
“Al-musta’jil wa al-bat’i ‘and al-ma’diya yiltaqaa” “The hasty and the tardy meet at the Nile ferry”
- Proverb 52
My college Arabic teacher in 1974 was Ahmad Tahir Hassanein, a true ibn al-balad, or Son of the Village, as urban Egyptians would call a rural compatriot with rustic manners but honest customs.
I crossed paths with him once outside the library on a very cold morning minutes before opening hour, so we had to wait in the frigid wind. He was wearing only a light weight cotton jacket and a lumberjack type billed cap, the kind with ear muffs that can fold up and snap together on top with the chin strap. That day his muffs were pulled down and strapped under, making him look like an over grown Elmer Fudd.
He had once told our class the story of how, as a poor boy who had distinguished himself in school, he was given a scholarship to study in Cairo, which meant that he had to leave his village in the Nile Delta for the first time in his life and stay away for a year. Upon graduating, he made a telephone call to the village switchboard to say he would be coming home with his diploma on such a day at such a time. The elders where waiting for him in the central square- really more of a dirt-packed open space among the village’s crammed-together houses and market stalls.
My professor told us of how he stepped out of the taxi- he was a tall big man who had to bend over to fit into the seat- wearing a typical Egyptian government bureaucrat’s proud city clothes, a kam qusayr, or short sleeve safari suit, and carrying a Samsonite briefcase.
I had once entered a Cairo cinema for the matinee screening just behind a similarly garbed bureaucrat. We were asked to open bags for security. In his briefcase was a banana, a newspaper, and an alarm clock. I imagined that he was playing hooky that day from his job in Cairo’s massive government building. Reading the newspaper was his morning work, the banana was his afternoon snack, and the alarm clock was set to wake him from a siesta in time to leave the office early for the movies.
Professor Hassanein said that when he stepped out of the taxi, the elders approached not looking at his eyes but rather at his briefcase as if in awe, and then rubbed it like a city fetish, as a good luck charm symbolizing literacy and a government promise of a lifetime job. They all wanted the same for their children, whispering Subhan Allah, God is Perfect, said often when praising a perfect object.
In the wind and cold outside the library that day, the Professor tried to teach me an Egyptian proverb, patiently, with his lips shivering even after the doors had opened and we easily could have walked in and warmed up.
I have forgotten the Arabic but I will never forget the English translation-
A chance meeting is sweeter than meeting by plan.
This is true, he said, even if one is cold and under-dressed and- this he did not say- the other is a thick-headed student.