Richard Engel Egyptian Quotations

There are clearly many Egyptian free-thinkers and intellectuals - lots of wonderful Egyptian artists and architects and scientists.

An Egyptian newspaper once publicly identified me as the C.I.A. station chief in Cairo. It seemed so stupid at the time. I was only 24, a little young to be a station chief, and, of course, I was never with the C.I.A.

There was an insurgency under President Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. Egyptian police and soldiers fought weekly battles with Islamists in the sugarcane fields and thick reeds along the Nile in rural southern villages like Minya, Sohag, Enna and Assiout.

In popular Egyptian and regional culture, women are seen as weak, easy victims to temptation in the same way Eve couldn't resist that shiny apple in the Garden of Eden.