Malesh: the story of the Middle East

The problem with Egypt, and perhaps the entire Middle East, is their false sense of entitlement. People demand money for what in any other part of the world would be considered common courtesy: pulling out a chair, showing one the local sites, delivering bills, or receiving technological services on time. They feel entitled as well to completely mooch off their women for food and a place to rest. This would be fine if they worked hard as well, but instead they expect all this in exchange for a long morning at the coffee shop with the water pipe. They seem to follow whichever rules suit them: charity is a pillar of Islam, so why work? They drive without looking where they are going and without a care for the rules. Moreover, they believe that they know what God wills. “Allah wanted it dead,” about some bird he had squished, said a taxi driver, and not only that but they seem willing to barrel through traffic lights and over birds to impose it. So what happens as a result of their pride? Fundamentalists easily gain support, and on a smaller scale, women look worn and bedraggled before they hit 25, innocent birds die; they will never sing, children are forced to rely on others for their welfare because their fathers are too lazy to work, and people like Sayed have to move far away from their families in order to find a job where they can support themselves and not be held down by some ridiculous bureaucracy that no one bothers to change because that would not be “charitable” and they are too lazy, too inundated with “malesh, never mind” to fix it. But perhaps their sense of malesh is only to be expected in a country which has tried dictatorships of various kinds, of the pharaoh, of the religious Nasser, and now democracy, without experiencing any real change. But then again, perhaps this is their own fault for feeling so entitled that they are not willing to work. Until the Middle East has the courage to look around them and say, we may have been sitting around drinking coffee for 5000 years, but it is not giving us a healthy nation, politically, economically or religiously, and from that get the courage to admit that sometimes malesh is just not enough to build a life on, it will never change. -a.s