Egypt

"18/02 Cairo. A breathtaking view of the pyramids. It was mentioned on the brochure. For our first night in Cairo, we chose a hotel facing the pyramids. If I were alone, I would probably have gone and got lost in the heart of the city of Naguib Mahfouz without losing a minute.

I was in Egypt for the first time. My daughter Zoé (fourteen years old) was with me.

I had this to owe to the idiotic comments that I’d often heard describing the disappointing setting of these eternal edifices in the rundown Cairo suburbs: I found the spectacle of the pyramids, seen from these suburbs, overwhelming.

(…) Like every nation, Egypt is the product of a mixture. The difference is that this country has persisted in leaving us traces dating from time immemorial. The latest traces are explosive. 

Violence, according to Naguib Mahfouz, is against the nature of his people: '… the nature which has characterized this people for seven thousand years will have the last word. This foreign phenomenon is the product of current circumstances. It will disappear with the circumstances that gave birth to it.'

He is a secular writer as well as a religious one. But he has always opposed the ideologies on which a power relies. Nasser’s men almost got rid of him. More recently, fundamentalists nearly inflicted a permanent punishment on him for his infamous tolerance. About his unlucky murderer, he would say: 'Can he do anything but destroy a society that refuses him? And if this can be done for a noble religious cause, his attraction for this tendency will be even stronger and firmer…'"

Extract from Carnets de voyage, 2000, Éditions Gallimard