98
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
emerged from the grounds. I estimated that there were at
least five hundred soldiers and assorted police on duty. "Yes,"
said Gamal, "we also have Ikhwan members here. They watch
not only the students, but also some of the professors. They
arc just as Communist as the students."
THE SLUMS OF CAIRO
THE mysterious student, whom I shall call Yusef, was in the
lobby of the Continental at exactly four o'clock. He lit the
cigarette I offered him and looked at me.
"How did you like our university with all those police?" he
asked.
I smiled noncommittally. "I hear you are a Communist."
"In Egypt every reformer is called a Communist," he replied. He was a clean-cut, attractive young man of about
twenty-three, with brilliant black eyes, curly hair, and a great
earnestness about him. He had been jailed twelve times because he believed passionately in social reform. "Because I
think this, I am called a Communist," he said.
He explained that he believed in neither violence nor armed
revolution. He was a supporter of Ghandi's methods of "passive resistance" and "demonstration." He told me the Egyptian government had sent soldiers to the university in February 1946, after more than twenty-five thousand students and
workers had staged a giant demonstration against the Saadist
regime. Seven had been killed and scores wounded in the
rioting. Numerous professors had been dismissed or transferred since then.
Yusef explained that he represented the "radical young
generation" that sought to divorce itself from Egyptian ultraconservatism and particularly from the straitjacket of Moslem
orthodoxy. He rarely attended religious services. "Worship is
something between God and myself. It is not necessary to