Revolution 2.0

I missed the aptitude tests for the advanced classes because I was away on our annual visit to my dad in Saudi Arabia during the summer of 1995. Before I began traveling, an admissions employee at the school assured me that I would be able to take the aptitude test once I returned. Unfortunately, however, he didn’t keep his promise, so I found myself attending regular classes.

Orman High School gave me culture shock. It was worse than anything I had ever imagined or heard about public schools. Being an all-boys school, there was a constant surplus of testosterone in the air. Fighting in the school playground always ended with someone injured. There was a designated corner for smoking cigarettes, and sometimes hash. Skipping school was common, as long as you paid a toll — a bribe — to the student guarding the fence. The number of students in a single class was at least double what I had been used to, over seventy students in a space that had contained only thirty students at my previous school.

I quickly tried to reverse my decision by calling the principal at my previous school. He refused to take me back, in order to teach me a lesson: he had offered many enticements to keep me at the school when I announced my decision to transfer, including slicing my tuition fees in half. I was very stubborn and rejected all his offers, so I don’t blame him for refusing me when I suddenly tried to crawl back. Unwittingly, however, I had made one of the most important decisions of my life.

It was no easy task to cope in the new environment. Blending in was more challenging to me than performing well in class, and I regained my balance only after I began to adapt. At the beginning of my Orman experience I hated it so much. Yet at the end I loved it just as much. That school exposed me to social classes I had never mixed with. I learned how to relate to all kinds of people. I later became extremely interested in psychology and sociology, not least because of these years.

In my first year, I received my worst grades ever. The threat of failure has always motivated me to fight back. I decided to focus all my time and effort during the next year — the eleventh grade — to excel, in order to join the advanced classes with my friend Moatasem in twelfth grade, the last year at high school. Mission accomplished: after a year of very hard work, I received a grade of 95 percent and was able once again to sit at a desk with Moatasem, as we used to do in the ninth grade.

Nevertheless, no amount of success could make me forget some of the things I saw during the first two years at Orman. The teachers tried to maintain order by means of violence and beatings. In return, the students enjoyed intimidating and harassing the teachers. There were daily battles in those classrooms of seventy, among whom were a fair number of troublemakers.

Like other government employees, public school teachers in Egypt receive a monthly salary of no more than a few hundred pounds, which does not cover their basic family needs. As a result, private lessons have become teachers’ main source of income. Teachers can generate thousands of pounds by visiting students’ homes and tutoring them in a far better environment than at school. A survey carried out by the Egyptian cabinet’s Information Center in 2008 revealed that 60 percent of parents sought private lessons for their children. Many families were spending up to a third of their income on these lessons.

Like a cancer, the phenomenon of private lessons quickly spread everywhere in the country. Teachers began marketing their services on leaflets that can be found in every street of every city and town. They give themselves catchy titles like “the emperor of physics” or “the colonel of chemistry.” The real shame is that most teachers, along with the government’s textbooks, emphasize rote memorization rather than any genuine understanding. Students and parents have to find their own ways to learn how to solve problems. Many students rely on supplementary texts. Egyptians spend over one billion pounds ($200 million) every year on them. I resisted private lessons adamantly until my final and decisive year in high school, when math and chemistry were so challenging that I simply could not grasp them from the classroom instruction.

One of my elected courses was psychology. I chose to study it because, like many adolescents, I was interested in understanding human nature. I decided to take private lessons with a university instructor whom I will never forget: Mr. Ehab. We used to spend hours more than the scheduled time discussing many interesting topics. Mr. Ehab taught me how to deal with various people and situations and helped me realize that a large number of conflicts result from pure miscommunication, like what Aristotle said about the importance of defining terms to avoid unnecessary disagreement. It was quite a good experience for someone of my age.

The corrupt educational environment also encouraged cheating. Teachers who supervised without allowing cheating were described by students as “bothersome.” Some mothers used to wish that the proctors of their children’s exams would let them cheat. It is not surprising that cheating and fraud gradually became everyday activities in Egypt, making their way from education to business and commercial transactions, and ultimately to elections.

I graduated from high school with a total grade score of 97 percent. I was going to attend Cairo University to study engineering, but first I searched for a job. My primary reason was to pay my phone bill, which had soared for a reason my father might never have imagined: dial-up Internet access. I spent hours exploring the Internet, browsing websites and chatting anonymously with people I did not know from around the world, using mIRC (a famous chat client at the time) to make virtual friends. I remember when my dad stormed into my room during the summer after high school to express his anger at the size of the phone bill. He confiscated the computer and locked it up in a closet, explaining that I was irresponsible and that my relationship with the computer had to end. As soon as he left the house, I broke open the closet and reclaimed the computer. When he returned, I begged his forgiveness and declared that I would get a dedicated phone line and the bill would be my responsibility. Luckily, my father always tried to treat his children as responsible near-equals. He often told us to be careful what we wished for. This time, after hearing me out, he said, “As you wish.” It was the beginning of my life online, and the beginning of my financial independence, as I started earning a steady income from working in a video gaming store and as a freelance website developer.

Working and spending long hours online was a real challenge to my studies. After passing the preparatory year at the engineering school, students were expected to choose a department to enroll in. The number of seats was limited in some departments, making them very competitive. I scored badly during my preparatory year in 1998. As a result, I initially enrolled in electrical engineering instead of my first choice, computer engineering. Nonetheless, I quickly determined that I really wanted to work with computers. A friend of mine had said that if I failed my first year in electrical engineering I could submit an appeal to the dean explaining that my life’s dream was to study computer engineering, so I proceeded to Student Affairs, where I learned that my friend’s information was accurate enough but success depended on the number of transfer requests submitted.

I took the risky decision to skip that year’s exams and submit an appeal at the end of the year. As usual, my parents were surprised by my decision and tried all forms of dissuasion, but I insisted. After few months my wish came true: only one other student requested a transfer, and we were both admitted to computer engineering.

Life was different inside my new department. There were no more than forty students, and the professors and teaching assistants knew each one of us by name. I tried to compete with the top students, but I was always behind, thanks to the countless hours I spent online. I remember one teaching assistant, Ahmed, who paused during one of his lectures and singled me out. “Wael, do you understand?” When I said yes, he responded, “Thank God — then I’m confident that everyone else has understood as well.” That was one of the reasons I hated the educational system in Egypt. I was very defensive and believed that it was the system, not me, that was blocking my progress. Yet even though I was losing at school, I was winning somewhere else.

Earlier, during the summer of my preparatory year at the university in 1998, I had created a website to help Muslims network with one another. It was pretty much like a simple version of YouTube. There were three fundamental differences, however: it was a website for audio material, not video, since video quality was not as advanced as it is today; content uploading was restricted to me and a schoolmate, since the content was religious in nature; and, finally, the website administrators had to remain anonymous. The webmaster could be reached only via an e-mail address that did not include his real name. I named the website IslamWay.com.

State Security would have immediately targeted me if it had discovered that I was the creator of an Islamic website, no matter how moderate it might have been. When I received the call from Captain Rafaat, I prayed that it would have nothing to do with my IslamWay days. Luckily, he never mentioned it during the interrogation, so I didn’t either.

It wasn’t too long before IslamWay became one of the most popular Islamic destinations on the Internet. During its early years, the website contained more than 20,000 hours of audio recordings of religious sermons, lectures, and recitals of the Holy Qur’an. Over 3,000 hours of this material I had digitized myself. In addition, the website relied on more than eighty volunteers, the true identities of most of whom remain unknown to me to this day, to collect and digitize content from existing cassette tapes.

Two years after the launch, the website had strong traffic from tens of thousands of daily users. I wanted it to serve as a kind of public library featuring a complete range of moderate Islamic opinions. When the English version launched in 1999, it spread strongly among Muslims who did not speak Arabic and among others who wished to learn about the faith. The website was becoming increasingly influential.

Surprisingly, IslamWay led me to my future wife. Despite my young age, I wanted to get married. I had proposed several times to Egyptian girls whom I met online or through my network of family and friends. My proposals were always met with skepticism leading to rejection. Many families thought I was crazy to seek marriage while I was still at school, despite the fact that I was financially independent and making a decent income. Stubborn and independent-minded as ever, however, I was determined to solve my problems my own way. Somehow I settled on a solution: I decided that what I really needed was to marry a non-Egyptian who would convert to Islam. I admired the openness of American culture and the practical way in which Americans faced life’s problems — so not just any Muslim convert, an American Muslim convert. I figured that anyone who changed her faith after a period of contemplation must be someone special — in today’s hectic world, most people barely have enough time to think about the ideologies they inherit from their parents, let alone conduct comparisons with other faiths. And even fewer people, I figured, are actually able to cope with the emotional baggage that family and society throw at a person who changes her faith. There was only one difficulty: I did not know a single woman who fit this description. But I did know how I could find one: the Internet.

I first met the woman I was to marry online after reading something she wrote on the website’s discussion forum dedicated to new Muslims, where she participated frequently as she practiced the faith she had recently embraced. I reached out to her, and we began corresponding. I found her personality strong and her writing style quite appealing. Yet when I made the crazy suggestion that she visit Cairo — she lived in California — she refused. Our correspondence trailed off over time.

Not too long after, in June 2001, when I was twenty, I planned a trip to the United States in order to donate the website to a U.S.-based charity that supported Muslim communities around the globe. The site had become very successful, and it was now so large that it was beyond my capacity to keep up with its growth. I was working at least thirty hours per week, and my studies were suffering. I had received an offer in 2000, from a close friend who knew I was the owner, to buy 10 percent for $100,000. It was a huge sum for a young man, but I refused to sell. I had never intended to make money from the portal — I do not feel comfortable profiting from social activities. I always knew I wanted to donate it to a charitable organization. Now it was time to transform IslamWay into a professionally managed website, and an American Muslim charity was ready and willing to take it on. So I hopped on a plane.

During my stay, an American friend offered to introduce me to a girl whom his wife knew was looking for a Muslim husband. Fate stepped in: she was the very girl I had chatted with online for months. Weeks later, Ilka and I were married.

I did not tell my parents in advance. My mother, I knew, was especially opposed to the notion of marrying a foreigner with a culture different from ours. Two days after the wedding (attended only by my mother-in-law, two witnesses, and an imam), I called my father. To my surprise, he only scolded me in calm tones for not consulting him and my mother. I asked if he could help me by sending a few thousand dollars until I got settled, and he agreed. I asked him not to tell my mother until I found a way to break the news to her as gently as possible. But he must have thought twice about that idea. Minutes later, my mother called and unleashed her wrath at my unilateral decision. She refused to speak to me for months afterward. I would call and call, and she would hang up as soon as she heard my voice. I wrote letters, trying to appeal to her love for me. I expressed how much I loved her. I praised Ilka as gently and insistently as I could manage, stressing her good manners and other great qualities. Nothing worked.

My stay in America left a major and lasting impression. Like any Egyptian who visits the West, I was in awe of the quality of education, the respect for citizens’ rights, and the democratic process that gave people voices and allowed them to be active players in the political process. Admittedly, at my young age, I was easily impressed. I drew a conclusion that I repeated to Egyptian friends many times: “We’re being fooled in Egypt!” The thing that impressed me the most was the freedom of religious practice — the respect for religions and every human being’s right to practice his or her faith. There were many organizations that defended Muslims and their rights. They were free to criticize the American government’s policies without fear of any secret police.

Yet not everything was in favor of the United States in the comparison with Egypt. I sensed an individualism in the air that contrasted greatly with my experience back home. In Egypt, a lot of emphasis is placed on the family and on groups in general, which creates an atmosphere that engenders a sort of emotional warmth in spite of its occasional restrictiveness. On the contrary, in the States I noticed that people were on their own in many situations in which they would have enjoyed much social support if they were in Egypt. My brain was in the United States, but my heart was definitely in Egypt.

My initial plan was to stay in the States to finish my degree, because I was so impressed with American higher education. Yet I had a change of heart after 9/11. I will never forget that day. My wife and I were home, and I had woken up early and started working on my computer when, on a discussion board, I found people asking each other to turn on the TV right away. I watched flames emanating from the first World Trade Center building; we all thought at the time that a plane had accidentally crashed into the tower. I woke up Ilka to join me, and shortly after, we both screamed in horror as a second plane crashed into the other tower. I had never imagined that people who claimed to be Muslims could commit such an atrocity. The faith in which I had been raised both unequivocally prohibits the killing of innocent civilians under any circumstances and completely forbids suicide. So I was dumbfounded when I heard speculations in the media that the culprits were Muslims. Over the years I had observed various Western media outlets magnifying the acts of some crazy fanatics and portraying them as representative of Islam. If 9/11 had anything to do with Muslims, I thought, then those who had planned this monstrous murder of thousands of innocent civilians must have been thinking solely about their political ideologies and could not possibly have considered the damage they would do to the image of Islam and Muslims living in America. Or perhaps they couldn’t care less.

It wasn’t easy being an Egyptian Muslim in America during the weeks immediately following the attack. It sometimes almost felt as if my fellow Muslims and I were personally accused of this atrocious crime. In public spaces, I was keenly aware of every look of suspicion that came my way. Many of my Muslim friends suffered acts of discrimination, including brief arrests and harassment at airports. I was getting tired of being unfairly singled out and had little hope of finding a job, so I began to seriously consider returning to Egypt.

Ilka, of course, was quite attached to her home country, although she too felt alienated by the barrage of criticism of our religion that washed through many media outlets. The fact that she wore a headscarf made her conspicuously Muslim, and this made a woman’s life harder at the time. Still, she hesitated for a long time before agreeing to move to Egypt. She had left the United States only once before, on a short tourist trip to Mexico. I remember her saying to me, “I asked some friends online about Cairo, and they said the streets were filthy.”

“Yes, I must admit, some streets are dirty, but people’s hearts are clean.”

The Egyptian people are among the best-hearted and most humorous in the world. They laugh during the darkest of times and find humor in the midst of suffering. Not even sixty years of a regime of fear could change that.

After a heavy dose of persuasion, Ilka agreed, and we flew to Egypt in December 2001, three months after 9/11. I was adamant that we see my mother immediately upon our arrival. Walking into her house right after fourteen hours of flying was actually quite an experience. She was trying to hide her emotions but failed miserably. She didn’t even smile when I said hello, and when I introduced Ilka, she offered a cold greeting. Obviously she felt betrayed. Nonetheless, over time my mother could not help warming to Ilka, and she grew to love her.

Shortly after I returned to Egypt I resumed classes, but I also began searching for a job. An old friend of mine, AbdulRahman Meheilba, along with his partner, Ramy Mamdouh, was working with an Internet startup that provided e-mail services to corporate clients and individuals. Gawab.com quickly spread across the Arab world because its e-mail service supported Arabic and it offered 15 megabytes of storage space at a time when Hotmail offered only 1MB and Yahoo offered 2MB.

Because of the entrepreneurial skills I had acquired during my experience with IslamWay.com, AbdulRahman offered me a job overseeing marketing and sales. Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted. We worked hard to spread Gawab’s services further in the Arab world. Eventually we managed to reach two million users and secure sustainable revenue by selling advertisements as well as hosting e-mail solutions for businesses and other websites. As Gawab. com grew, so did my paycheck. I became responsible for a team of twelve employees who dealt with clients in different parts of the Arab world. It was fun doing business with people you never met, thanks to the Internet. The growth of the company was exciting, and so was a six-figure offer of a buyout pitched by an Arab investor.

Working at Gawab gave me my first real sense of professional responsibility. Anything related to marketing and sales came to me. I was even responsible for accounting and cash management. It seemed everything was happening at once: in addition to spending long days at Gawab and many hours studying during my final two years at the university, I had become a father: Ilka and I were blessed with a baby girl in January 2003. We argued about who would choose the name; Ilka strategically allied with my mother and eventually got her way. We gave our beautiful little girl the name Isra.

I was ecstatic about being a father. It was strange for everyone else at school, since none of them had children. In general, many colleagues found me quite strange. Some saw that I rushed into decisions and actions without fully contemplating the consequences. They were right. It is in my blood. And not just that: I have always wanted to swim against the current.

Time quickly went by; Isra turned one, and I officially became a computer engineer in June 2004. Because I was a father, I felt even more responsibility to excel, in order to provide for my family. I scored my highest grades during the last year of school, yet my overall grade of 64 percent was “unsatisfactory.”

During my work at Gawab and a few months after graduation, I decided to study for an MBA. My job put me in charge of the company’s sales and marketing, and I realized how much knowledge I needed — I could not just read a few books and get up to speed. I needed experienced mentors and a vigorous education in business. My first choice was the American University in Cairo, which has a top-quality MBA program, though it charges high tuition fees. It would mean spending over 60 percent of my annual income on my education. As far as I was concerned, the cost did not matter much, as it was an investment that I trusted would reap returns after a few short years. Yet the university made it clear that I was not a strong candidate. My undergraduate grades were not high enough.

I wrote a long letter to the university explaining the reasons behind my low grades. The general system of education in Egypt was to blame, I claimed. I had missed exams during the first year of electrical engineering, then again during the first half of the third year, when I was in the United States, which had unfairly penalized me. I also explained the distractions of my work and early marriage, and I stressed my attempts to overcome them. One of my dearest university professors, Dr. Ahmed Darwish, who was the Egyptian minister of administrative development at the time, even wrote a letter of recommendation for me.

One of the requirements for acceptance at AUC’s MBA program was to score a minimum of 500 points on the GMAT. The director of admissions told me that if I was very serious about my application, I should score higher to compensate for my low grades. She said my score should not fall below 550, the average score of their applicants. I took it as a challenge. After two months of intense preparation I scored a 680, which was very high compared to the scores of my Egyptian peers. A short while later, I was finally accepted. I pledged to the admissions office that I would prove my worth and score the highest grades in all my classes.

Two years and sixteen courses later, I graduated with a 4.0 grade point average, the highest possible. I would start each workday at Gawab, travel from there to the university to attend classes, then spend long hours at the library to study. Achieving straight A’s became of the utmost importance to me, even though it would have little effect on my career. Yet I did it. My self-confidence was redeemed. I proved to myself that I was not a failure. Ilka was supportive above and beyond the call of duty and stood behind me throughout. She knew that it was my own personal challenge, and despite the fact that I spent little time with her and our daughter, she always encouraged me to keep studying and focusing on my school projects.