CHAPTER TWO: A SON OF THE NILE
EPISODE EIGHT

In 1913, after my father had been transferred back to Wad Midaniy, I entered Gordon College in Khartuwm.

My education had begun with a thorough study of the Qur’an, which has never failed to give me strength in my hours of need. The Qur’an affects different people in different ways. Its chief effect on me has usually been Qur’an for half an hour every day. As a boy I used to read it in preparing for my examinations. It helped me to obtain high marks if only because it filled me with self confidence. Unlike some people, I have never read the Qur’an merely in the hope that it would bring me luck. I have read it, instead, in order to exalt my spirit and also to increase my command of the Arabic language. Luck, I have found, usually abandons those whose spirits are low; by the same token, it usually accompanies those whose spirits are high.

My father wanted me to be a good student, and I seldom disappointed him. Once, after I had come home from Wadiy Halfa with a bad report card, he took me aside and gave me a lecture that I have never forgotten.

"I always tried to be the first in my class," he said. "I want you to do the same. I'll forgive you anything if you do your best; It forgive you nothing if you don't."

My father was opposed to my studying after midnight, but I often studied all night long, especially before examinations. At midnight he would turn off the gasoline lanterns and make me go to bed, examination or no, but, if it was the right time of month, I would sneak up to the roof of our house to continue studying by the light of the moon.

Of the two of us, I was the better student and `Aliy the better sportsman. We had both wanted to be soldiers for as long as either of us could remember, although my father wanted only one of us to follow in his footsteps. The Egyptian Army, he said, was not all that it was supposed to be. It was not really an army at all, but rather an auxiliary corps in which Egyptians were expected to take orders from the British. Even he, who called himself an Egyptian officer, was merely a servant of the British who ruled Egypt from behind the scenes as surely as they ruled Sudan from the center of the stage. Since I was the better student, it would be better for `Aliy to be the officer and for me to be a lawyer or an engineer. I could do more for my country in civilian clothes, he thought, than I could ever do for it in uniform.

"You'll never get anywhere," he warned me, "because you'll never be anything more than an overseer for the British."

Gordon College offered courses leading to three different government career teacher, magistrate, and engineer. Since it was necessary to elect one or another of these courses in order to remain in school, I tentatively elected to become an engineer, even though I still hoped to become a soldier. I chose the engineering course because my father believed it would offer me the best chance of winning a scholarship at a British university. But the warden of Gordon College, M. F. Simpson, rejected my application.

"You're an Egyptian," he explained, "and you'll have to be a teacher. The engineering course is for Sudanese only."

One of my own teachers, N. R. Udal, who was later to become the warden, put the matter even more bluntly.

"The purpose of Gordon College," he said, "is to train Sudanese for government careers. It is not intended to be a school for Egyptians. If we allow you to study here it is only because your father is a civil servant."

Such remarks were not calculated to make me an obedient student. Flogging was the customary punishment at Gordon College

In 1952 Gordon College became the University College of Khartuwm.

Gordon College in those days as I believe it was at every British high school. I was flogged three times by an English teacher alone. Once, during a lesson, he chose to dictate a passage from a book in which it was stated that Egypt was governed by the British. Without thinking, I leaped to my feet and said, "No, sir, Egypt is not governed by the British. Egypt is merely occupied by the British." The teacher warned me that he would flog me if I said another word, but I was so excited that I failed to heed his warning. He took me to the warden, explained what I had done, and was duly authorized to give me ten lashes with the heavy strap that was kept in the warden's office.

The same teacher flogged me again when he caught me writing a speech entitled "The Civilization of Egypt and Sudan." Anything connected with Egypt's national claims was a forbidden topic at Gordon College.

A year later, as he was returning our notebooks at the end of the term, the teacher read aloud what he had written on the cover of mine: "Composition excellent; writing awful." With that, he tossed my book out of the open window beside his desk and then ordered me to retrieve it. When I refused to do so, he administered another ten lashes with the warden's strap.

Napoleon was my first hero. At Wad Midaniy, I remember, I slept on the floor instead of in bed because I had read in a book that Napoleon had done the same. I have eaten brown bread all my life for the same reason. Gradually, though, my interest in Napoleon waned as my interest in Mustafa Kamil, the founder of the Egyptian Nationalist Party, increased. Among the forbidden books I read during my last year as a primary student at Wad Midaniy, was The Eastern Question, Kamil's nine-volume study of the struggle between Britain, France, and Russia to dominate the dying `Uthmanliy (Ottoman) Empire, of which Egypt, in theory, was still a part.

(To be continued)