The Egyptian expats in Kuwait pretty much stuck together. Since only Kuwaitis were legally allowed to buy property, expats lived in rental apartments in complexes that catered to foreigners. Our last apartment, in Salmiya, had four bedrooms and a spacious foyer that led into a family room with huge windows overlooking the Gulf.
My father’s one personal indulgence, not surprisingly, was technology; he was always an early adopter. We had a video camera and a VHS player long before anyone else, which made him the official documentarian of family events. My earliest memory in Kuwait is of a child-size plastic blue chair that I called my royal blue chair, my throne. When I was around five, I’d stand on top of the chair and I would just talk, giving one speech after another about anything that popped into my head. My dad videoed my talks and gave me tips on public speaking (“Rana, look at the audience; enunciate your words!”). This was my first exposure to technology, but more important, it was my first experience speaking before an audience, even if it was just an audience of one. This was my special time together with my dad, and I loved getting all his attention.
We were also the first among our set to have an Atari 2600 computer, an old-school console with a slot where you inserted game cartridges. Never one to squander a teachable moment, my father made us figure out how to set it up. Perhaps that explains my ease with computers. I have never been daunted by having to build a piece of technology from scratch. If you persist, you can eventually figure it out.
Still, I was not the stereotypical nerd transfixed in front of a digital screen. As my family members and I were wiping out alien invaders, we would talk and catch up with one another. To me, technology was a social tool, a platform to bring people together.
From kindergarten to third grade, I attended the Sunshine School, which followed a British-approved curriculum. Classes were taught in English (with the exception of Arabic-language classes), with an emphasis on the liberal arts, music, and sports. In contrast, most Middle Eastern schools focus on rote education.
The Sunshine School was founded by Vera Al-Mutawa, a proper but warm English lady who was married to a Kuwaiti sheikh. She had some very progressive ideas about education. I’m not sure I would have made it past kindergarten without Mrs. Al-Mutawa’s intervention. You see, I am left-handed, and according to Islamic tradition, you should eat and work only with your right hand. That makes anyone who is a lefty, like me, a bit of a pariah. So I spent much of my early years trying, with little success, to sublimate my natural impulse to use my left hand. Mrs. Al-Mutawa noticed that I was struggling to hold a pencil. Familiar with Arabic culture, she quickly realized that I was a lefty being “trained” to be right-handed. She contacted my parents, who were surprised to learn that “handedness” is encoded in your genes; people really don’t have a choice in the matter. My parents may be traditional in outlook, but they also respect science: From that point on, they no longer tried to cure my left-handedness, and I began to excel in school. By the summer before first grade, I was so far ahead of the rest of my class that Ms. Al-Mutawa recommended that I skip first grade altogether and go directly into second grade. And so for the rest of my academic career, I was the youngest in my class by a couple of years.
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I may have been sent to Western-style, more progressive academies than the typical Middle Eastern student, but at home, traditional values reigned, especially when it came to the role of men and women. On the one hand, my father was extraordinarily progressive for the Middle East: He believed that women should be educated and he himself married a successful, educated woman. He was very supportive in encouraging us to do our best and make something of ourselves. On the other hand, like most Egyptian men—and I mean most Middle Eastern men—he expected my mother to wait on him hand and foot. For example, I never saw my father walk into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He would ask my mother to get it for him, and she would comply. I don’t even think he realized what he was doing; it was ingrained in how he was raised.
As my sisters and I got older, my father began asking us to fetch things for him. I never questioned this, until I was around nine years old. My father and I were sitting in the den, and he said to me, “Ranoon [that’s my nickname], get my black shoe shine kit from my closet!”
I was annoyed; my first impulse was to say, “Go get it yourself!” Of course, I would never talk back to my father—it was shocking enough that I even thought that way. But I was incensed that he expected me to fetch things for him. So I devised a strategy of passive resistance—I played dumb. I dutifully went into the bedroom, opened his closet, and deliberately picked the brown kit, knowing that he wanted the black. I brought it to him with a smile: “Here, Pappy.” He looked at me, shook his head. “That’s brown. Go get the black.” I went back and shuffled through the closet, taking my time until I brought him the right one.
I practiced this form of silent rebellion often, pretending to misunderstand what he wanted or just bringing the wrong thing. Eventually, he stopped asking me to get things for him and turned to my sister Rasha.
I don’t want to make it sound like I walked around my home seething with resentment—I didn’t. But as I watched my mother cater to my father, and my aunts cater to my uncles, and my grandmother to my grandfather—the list goes on and on—I remember thinking, “I don’t want to marry a typical Egyptian man!”
THE HIJAB
In the Middle East, what a woman wears is not just a sign of her fashion sense or her devoutness, but also a reflection of the cultural and social trends of the day. At times, some of the women in my family were “veiled”: They covered their hair and necks with a scarf or a turban when outside their home, and so did I. My sister Rula and I are now unveiled, while my mother wears a hijab, as does Rasha, my middle sister. A hijab frames the face and, without the distraction of hair or jewelry, accentuates the eyes, which are arguably our most expressive feature. People think of a smile as being all about the mouth, but without those crinkly smile lines around the eyes, a smile is only half-hearted, or can even be fake. My mother’s older sister now wears a niqab—she is covered from head to toe, with just a small slit left for her eyes—and although she is fully covered, I can tell whether she’s had a good day or a bad day just by looking into her eyes.
Every summer, my parents would take a month off and we’d spend two weeks visiting family in Cairo; one week at a time-share in Alexandria, the second largest city in Egypt, with beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean; and one week in Europe—we alternated among Cyprus, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, and Nice/Monte Carlo.
Perhaps my favorite part about these trips to Europe was planning for them. My dad had invested in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was quite expensive at that time and included a huge atlas. Every summer, as my dad planned which country we would visit, he and I would lay out the atlas on our dinner table and he’d help me trace with my little fingers where the different cities were. He instilled in me a sense of wonder about the world. A sense of adventure. There was no fear of the “other,” only curiosity and open-mindedness. This is how I got my love of travel, but also how I ended up an open-minded citizen of the world.