California Egypt
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| Al-Said (right) and Azza (left), Mohamed Morsi brother and sister talk about the president life in his village in Sharqia |
Daily Telegraph
4:12PM BST 30
Jun 2012
For millions of youngsters around the world, it would have been a dream come true: a scholarship to
For the two pious young Egyptians, though, it represented a very different opportunity.
For Mohammed Morsi and his new teenage bride, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud,
They were there to work hard, to resist temptation and to "give something back" to the profoundly Muslim world that had got them where they were.
While fellow students frolicked and smoked pot, he excelled in academia, gaining an engineering PhD, publishing papers in scientific journals and eventually winning a place teaching at a prestigious American university. She chose her own route to integration with her host society, helping to translate religious texts at a hostel for American women wishing to convert to Islam.
Then, when they were ready, they returned home, back to the drab Nile Delta region where Mr Morsi was raised in poverty, and began their slow, worthy ascent to prominence.
But, even as Mr Morsi capped those 35 years of hard slog by being sworn in on Saturday as
They were offered engagement with the outside world, and conspicuously refused to take it – so how can they now represent
The divisions in Egyptian society are deep, and the margin of victory of 52 to 48 per cent in the battle between the secular and military forces represented by Ahmed Shafiq and Mr Morsi's Brotherhood last week show how much must be done to unite a troubled society.
Mr Morsi was a deliberately non-confrontational choice for the Brotherhood – he became known as the "spare tyre" after he replaced the more charismatic and forceful Khairat al-Shater, a long-term former political prisoner, as their man.
But even his pious blandness raises hackles in an extrovert society; while the more characterful Mrs Mahmoud – Egyptian women use their own name – is in the eyes of many modern Egyptians, particularly liberal young women, even worse.
For them her whole persona, her lack of education, her "khimar" – the all in one headscarf and cloak beloved of working and lower middle class housewives – and her avowed dislike of her new prominence are an affront to a century of gains for Egyptian women in schooling, careers and social life.
"She does NOT represent me in any way!" said Sarah Ebeid, a young woman whose avatar sports defiantly free-flowing hair on Twitter, the favoured social medium for the young elite in
Such messages have flooded internet noticeboards, with an equal powerful response of "But how can you say that – she looks just like my mother!" from those wishing to defend the new First Lady.
Not that she allows herself to be called that.
"Who said that the president's wife is the first lady anyway?" she said in an interview last week.
She said that – again in keeping with a tradition much sneered at by more modern types – she would prefer to continue to be known as "Umm Ahmed" – Mother of Ahmed, her firstborn son.
For Mr Morsi, 60, and Mrs Mahmoud, 50, it has been a long and surprising path to the presidential palace.
He was brought up on a small farm allotted his father by the first Egyptian revolution in 1952, and she in a poor
Devout and particularly devoted to his mother, his brothers told The Sunday Telegraph from their hometown in the Delta this week, he was a model pupil, told his friends to study the Koran and work rather than to play cards, and won a place at Cairo University.
"He was a Brother before he joined the Brotherhood," his sibling, Al-Said, said.
Mr Morsi's life changed when he won a place to study at the
Sometimes it works, and that certainly seems to have been the case for the Morsis.
According to those who remember his seven years there – he went on to teach for three years as an assistant professor at California State University Northridge in the
While young
But nor did he grow a beard, sporting only a moustache that was the style of the time, and was never heard to complain about Western social mores, unlike some more outspoken Muslim students.
"He was an affable hard-working young man, a typical graduate student who was certainly conservative but also social and certainly did not espouse radical politics," said Farghalli Mohamed, an academic at USC who first met him in 1978 when he moved to
Dr Mohamed befriended the then solo new arrival, who sometimes visited his family at their home for meals and joined trips local attractions such as the
Mr Morsi's new wife arrived two years later. At the time, her husband was living in student dormitory accommodation close to USC's urban campus in an area known as South Central that was long-plagued by gang violence.
"It was an elite private school, but the neighbourhood was pretty rough and we knew not to walk on the streets at night," said Dr Mohamed.
Mrs Mahmoud took a job helping at a hostel for Muslim students and translating religious texts for American women interested in converting to Islam.
The couple's mutually reinforcing religiosity has been a key factor in their rise to power, as both admit: he calls his marriage his "greatest achievement" while she has described how when he nervously told her he had been invited to join the Brotherhood, she supported him enthusiastically.
Mrs Mahmoud enjoyed life in
He has been there ever since, mixing his teaching duties with a growing prominence in the Brotherhood. Mrs Mahmoud stayed at home, bringing up their children all of whom save the youngest, who is still at high school, have gone on to university.
It has been an anonymous life by choice, and that has left many analysts, diplomats and even those who know them asking for the real Mr Morsi please stand up.
"He is Mr Average," said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent Egyptian writer and professor of politics, who first met Mr Morsi when both were detained in Torah Prison in southern
Mr Morsi was part of the senior cadre of Brotherhood leaders in Block Three of the jail, an immaculately kept enclosure with a well-maintained exterior and even freshly plants flower beds – a tribute to the organisation of the Brotherhood rather than to the efforts of prison staff.
Brotherhood members would exercise, pray, and take lectures, Mr Ibrahim said, and had their own football team. They were also helped by being well-funded from outside.
Mr Morsi was a senior figure in the strictly hierarchical Brotherhood, but he was not a natural leader, Mr Ibrahim said.
"He struck me as decent, quiet, but not much of a leader.
"Whenever I met with them as a group there was always an order in which they spoke, and in the way they sat around."
Mr Morsi, then as now in the hierarchy, was not number one. That position went to Khairat al-Shater, a man who differed from Mr Morsi in many respects – not least his forceful charisma and drive. Mr Shater was the undisputed Brotherhood spokesman in the prison, with the right to address the governor in person over its concerns.
Mr Morsi – along with Mr Shater and other Brotherhood leaders – has been meeting western diplomats, including the British, since 2003, holding dialogues at the Swiss diplomatic club.
But Mr Morsi has remained ambiguous, punctuating speeches with fierce criticisms of American imperialism and in particular of
On Friday, Mr Morsi told crowds thronging
"If he was a fundamentalist, he was a private fundamentalist," said one academic who knew him at the time.
Perhaps the answer does really lie in the figure of his wife.
She may be different from her predecessors – Suzanne Mubarak, the half-British wife of ex-President Hosni, dressed glamorously, loved publicity, and espoused worthy causes while not relaxing at their Sharm el-Sheikh holiday home – but she has, in an expression she would never use, "kept her man real".
Mr Morsi can now cook, says his wife, and at least helps clear the dishes. In return, she says that her own life was suitable for women of 30 years ago like her – but not for modern women, who even if devout need to get out and earn a living. Her own daughter took a science degree at her father's university.
There was a touching moment on Monday morning, when the farmer's son president took his slum-born wife to the Presidential Palace, to show her around. He showed every sign of thrilling to his new home; she less so. She found it impersonal, she said in her interview this week.
"All I want," she said, "is to live in a simple place where I can perform my duties as a wife."
Everything has changed in
* Additional reporting by Jeff Maysh and Catherine Elsworth in
