Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Read Online Free PDF

the ruling monarchy and helped create a republic in the shape of Egypt. It was just a matter of time before the same Arab socialist sentiments would spread south to Aden. Still, Mohamed loved, in theory, the nationalist rhetoric of Nasser, and as with many Arabs, Nasser’s role in the frontline against Israel made him a sympathetic figure even to those who stood to lose it all to his politics. Egyptian popular music from the likes of Shadia, Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Mohamed Abdel Wahab glorified Nasser and his steadfast position against Western influences. Most of that music was banned during the Sadat and Mubarak years when I was growing up, but now the songs that moved a whole generation of Egyptians are there for anyone to hear on YouTube.
    After a number of skirmishes and small-scale protests, the situation in Aden escalated in December 1963 when a group of North Yemen–backed rebels threw a grenade at largely unarmed British officials. The action started what would become known as the Aden Emergency. According to several historians, the British recognized that their time was up in Aden, as vital as that port city was to trade, and whatever was left of the British Empire in the neighbouring Gulf states. So while the Royal Air Force maintained a state of preparedness, diplomats sought other divestment solutions, including declaring Aden and the southern regions of Yemen part of the larger Federation of the Arab Emirates of the South. That solution didn’t fly with the two now-competing nationalist factions in Aden: the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen, which had the unfortunate Sesame Street –appropriate acronym of FLOSY.
    Neither ranked particularly high on Mohamed’s wish list for a post-colonial Aden. But whether out of blind faith in the British or social prejudice against the largely working-class makeup of both liberation movements, Mohamed did little to prepare for the coming change. In 1965 he built his biggest and most luxurious apartment building—named Al-Azhar, not after the famous Egyptian mosque or university, but because the word means “flowers”—to the cost of roughly a million pounds sterling in today’s money. “The British will not let us down,” he told my oldest brother, Helmi, groomed from a young age to take over his business. It was around that time, my siblings tell me, that my father developed a lifelong dependence on the BBC World Service. He’d hush down everyone and listen intently to the news, teasing out every last meaning from what he heard. He often switched off the radio to his own announcement that we’d all be all right and that the new building would include an even bigger space for us. He’d hide from his wife and children any intimidating encounter with the young revolutionaries or the odd graffiti message scrawled on his storefronts that described him as traitor. The Brits would come to his rescue. Didn’t he speak English just as well as they did?
    It was probably that final apartment building, that last act of defiance and faith in Aden as a colonial haven, that pitted the nationalists against Mohamed. We were one of several well-to-do clans, and other business people like my father were harassed, but for some reason my father’s presence in the city through real estate made him the kind of public enemy every nationalist movement needs as a target.
    The beginning of the end came in 1967. By then infighting between NLF and FLOSY had reached the residential streets of Aden, while attacks on the British military bases and on civil servants continued. Nasser’s disastrous performance in the Six Day War against Israel in the same year did nothing to weaken his grip on the liberation movements, least of all in Aden. By November Britain started pulling out its troops from Aden, tacitly endorsing the NLF as the winner of the sectarian war and the new custodian of the city.
    How could Mohamed not have predicted