I’ve never heard a taxi driver laugh as hard as the guy in Cairo did.
It was a little more than five years ago, and my wife and I were in Egypt’s capital for one night. The cabbie taking us to Giza, the suburban home of the famous Sphinx and pyramids, was prone to riding up on the curb or between parked cars in an apparent effort to avoid using his brake pedal, and he didn’t speak a word of English — besides, we hoped, “pyramids.”
But that didn’t mean he was inhospitable. During one of the handful of times he had no choice but to bring the car to a stop, he reached back toward us and offered his half-empty pack of cigarettes. (I forget the brand, but no, they weren’t Camels.) My wife was first to say, “No, thank you.”
And that’s when the laughter started.
In text-message acronymology, this was no mere LOL. It was a full-on LM[insert your favorite expletive(s) here]O. Between his guffawing and his ostensible decades of smoking, I wasn’t sure he was going to make it.
But he did, and we made it to Giza, left to wonder if he could have been laughing at anything but the notion she, a woman, thought he, a man, had offered her even something so quotidian as a cigarette.
I’ve thought about that moment many times since then. I thought about it in early 2011, when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians protested until Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year rule came to an end.
I’ve thought about it again over the past week — in the days leading up to our own Independence Day — as the crowds came back to protest the power grabs by his elected successor, Mohamed Morsi, and as the military seized power Wednesday and suspended the country’s constitution.
I’ve wondered, as pro-Morsi crowds and anti-Morsi crowds have swelled in streets and plazas up and down the Nile River, which group that taxi driver favors, if the driving, the smoking and the laughing haven’t already gotten him.
Does that taxi driver side with the young, secular, liberal (not in the American political sense) protesters who filled Tahrir Square in 2011, only to see Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party win the elections and shut them out of the political process while imposing ever more Islamic law, and who have now returned to the streets to oppose Morsi? Or was he one of the many who voted for Morsi precisely so that the president would do those things?
Or is he one of those Egyptians we’re told about who trust only the military at the end of the day, even if that means a coup d’etat like Wednesday’s?
Is he one of the protesters holding signs saying things like “Obama Backs Up A Fascist Regime in Egypt” and “Obama Supports Terrorism”? Do those signs mean more than Barack Obama personally, and extend to the U.S. more generally? (I suspect they do.)
Do they write those signs in English — and tweet in English with hashtags such as #MindYourBusinessUS — because they hate us? Or because they expect more from us than supporting whichever regime is in power, even when its actions betray our ideals?
I’ve never met a cab driver anywhere without an opinion about politics. I wonder what he’d tell me today in his taxi if he spoke English, or I Arabic.
That moment with the cigarette, the offer and the response and the laughter, albeit just one anecdote about one man in one point in time, makes me think there are a lot of things he and I wouldn’t understand about each other. It makes me think there might well be a lot of differences in the ways we’d go about trying to accomplish the same goals — like making Egypt a place for all Egyptians to live as they wish.
But seeing and hearing the crowds this week, the week of the Fourth of July, I can’t help but renew my belief that living as they wish is the hope of all men. And of all women. Smokers or not.
And I can’t help but believe it is incumbent on our nation above all nations — they don’t hold signs saying “Von Rompuy Supports Terrorism” to shame the European Union, after all — to remember always that we can’t protect our interests in the long run without promoting our ideals.
