The fellahin…a uniform, autochthonous mass, they may be rightly called the people of Egypt…They have changed their masters, their religion, their language and their crops, but not their way of life…A receptive people, yet unyielding; patient, yet resistant…they remain as tranquil and stable as the bottom of the deep sea whose surface waves are lashed by storms.
-The Egyptian Peasant (1938), Henry Habib Ayrout, S.J.
Binban Bahri, a village so far up Upper Egypt that you would bottom out in the First Cataract if you went any farther south. That is where I met Ahmad Hassan Abd al-Majid in 1984, a straw boss for the camel herds as I liked to think of him, but you could better call him a well-off fellah. He had a milk cow, a water buffalo, and many crops. He had a big family and a welcoming majlis, or men’s sitting room. I stayed there several times and in 1995 I went back to ask him a favor.
I was part of an evaluation team on a Maternal and Child Health project funded by USAID and we were supposed to organize focus groups, separate ones for men and women, in Upper Egypt on the topic of family planning. Our Egyptian government handlers were putting on Potemkin Village gatherings, and the team and I did not like it. When I ask canned questions, I hate getting canned answers. I knew Ahmad could help us break through the thought control by gathering his own friends, and his wife hers, to speak their minds.
Ahmad agreed as did his wife, and we returned the next day. Someone must have told the police, because once the discussions were underway, held in rooms on opposite sides of his courtyard led by our team’s male and female doctors respectively, they showed up in paddy wagons. What ensued was a big dowsha, or shout-down, as they would call it in a Cairene street when a car runs into a donkey cart.
Ahmad’s friends included the mayor, the school teacher, the prayer leader, and some pretty big-bellied farmers- and they all added their voices to the dowsha. So did the women. It seemed like everyone wanted to speak their minds about contraception.
The police looked like they’d rather be somewhere else, but said they were just doing their job, and they’d heard there was an unlawful gathering of foreigners in the house. Unlawful?, yelled Ahmad. These are my friends. So the police left.
In thinking about this later, I wondered if Father Ayrout, wearing his clerical collar and showing his Paris-educated manners while visiting Upper Egypt for his field work, a khawaja like me if there ever was one, asking fellahin about plows and blood feuds and such, ever ran into something like this. A dowsha. Just for asking questions. Just for looking like he, as did we, had dropped down to the bottom of the deep sea from somewhere up in outer space.