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chatted, I remembered why I liked him and why I thought him an ass, and then the bill arrived. Before I’d realized it, Imad had grabbed it, opened it, and stiffened. There was no point arguing, and so there I sat as Imad, as discreetly as possible, conjured small-denomination banknotes from every one of his pockets. He made it, Allahu akbar, and the evening was saved. But we both knew he’d spend the
next month staying in because half of his salary had gone on those glasses of fruit juice.
    As I walked home, I remembered what an impression the poverty had made on me as a student in Cairo. I would never have imagined anything like it until I saw it with my own eyes and understood that you had to experience it yourself. Take a child you really care about—a son or daughter, nephew, little sister, neighbor’s daughter—and try to remember an instance when that child really suffered. Take the helpless feeling you had then, and multiply it: She’s in terrible pain, the illness is terminal, and she’s withering away in her bed, screaming because she doesn’t understand what’s happening. Imagine now that there’s a hospital five hundred meters away, where she could be saved—only you can’t afford it.
    That’s poverty. When I saw it close up in Imad and others, I wracked my brains over why such a defining phenomenon doesn’t get more attention in the press. How could you understand anything about the Egyptians without an idea of how incredibly vulnerable these people were? Imagine if you had no right to social security, a state pension, student loans, child benefits, fixed rent ... And yet you still bought drinks for a loaded Westerner. As a faithful newspaper reader and news watcher, why hadn’t I had a clue about poverty or the way that these people coped with it?
     
     
    I mad and his sense of pride reminded me of other things that had happened during my student times, and I began to suspect the cause of my growing unease. In my work as a correspondent, I was propagating that same image of the Arab world that had wrong-footed me as a student. At any rate, after six months I hadn’t written a single story on poverty, let alone
on the pride felt by the poor. At the same time, my personal archive contained stories with headlines like these:
    “Sanctions should clip Saddam’s wings” 2
“Saddam Hussein’s trump cards” 3
“Lockerbie poses a dilemma for Libya” 4
“Israel accuses Egyptian media of anti-Semitism” 5
“Israel is still Egypt’s enemy number one” 6
“Arab world at turning point” 7
    The fact was that I was only covering summit meetings, attacks, bombings, or diplomatic stratagems. “Egyptians proud despite poverty,” “Lower crime rates and less alcoholism in Arabic countries,” and “Arabs less afflicted by stress than Westerners” ... these things weren’t news. They were seldom-written background stories or features, and they had no impact on people’s ideas of the region; but without them you couldn’t understand the headlines or the news stories.
    Not only did my positive experience of the Arab world remain hidden in my articles, but I was also contributing to the image of Arabs as exotic, bad, and dangerous. The ways the news worked meant that while I did write about “angry men” burning flags and chanting slogans, I didn’t have the space to tell readers what was happening out of shot. On television or in photographs, it might look like there was a crowd; but on the spot you saw that there were just a few angry men who only held up their lighters when the cameras were turning, and that they all went home for tea afterwards. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, children were going to school, trams were making their circuits, and tomatoes were on special offer at the market.

    In a descriptive piece about Damascus, I quoted the gigantic slogan on Martyrs’ Square: “Dear Assad, The Syrian people support you with Blood and Soul.” I had to leave out how, after