Egypt

🇪🇬Ptahhotep

Literature

-2450–-2400

"Truth is great and its effectiveness endures."

🇪🇬Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Politics

1922–2016

"I believe it will take time to find a solution to the problem. Thus we must have patience."

🇪🇬Sayyid Qutb

Politics

Islamism

1906–1966

"A society cannot be Islamic if it expels the civil and religious Laws of Islam from its codes and customs, so that nothing of Islam is left except rites and ceremonials."

🇪🇬Mohamed ElBaradei

Politics

b. 1942

"IAEA Leader's Phone Tapped" ~ The Washington Post"

🇪🇬Said Ramadan

Politics

1926–1995

"According to Saeed Ramadan in his book Ḍawābiṭ al-Maṣlaḥ and Muslehuddin in The Philosophy of Islamic Law, any ruling that can be changed is restricted to custom."

🇪🇬Naguib Mahfouz

Medicine

1882–1974

"According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy, he is given the choice between repentance and punishment."

🇪🇬Anwar Sadat

Politics

capitalism

1918–1981

"Russians can give you arms, but only the United States can give you a solution."

🇪🇬Nawal El Saadawi

Literature

1931–2021

"…Nobody can help anybody. Nobody can help us in Egypt—we did our revolution alone, we liberated ourselves alone. I don’t believe in charity or “helping.” I believe in the equal exchange of ideas, and networking."

"We hear from the saints who experienced prayer power that prayer gives wings to humans lifting them up so they can fly."

🇪🇬Mahdi Akef

Politics

"In no country and under no circumstances is it possible to launch resistance unless the government approves of this."

🇪🇬Ahdaf Soueif

Politics

b. 1950

"…In Egypt, in the decade of slow, simmering discontent before the revolution, novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction."

🇪🇬Anthony the Great

Religion

"St. Athanasius of Alexandria and St. Antony the Great"

🇪🇬Samira Ahmed

Literature

b. 1935

"Writing for young adults is writing into the realm of possibility…I always say that middle age novels are about doors closing, and young adult novels are about doors opening."

🇪🇬Mohamed Atta

Technology

1968–2001

"Everybody hates death, fears death, but only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death."

🇪🇬Dhul-Nun al-Misri

Science

796–860

"God gives his servant no source of strength more powerful for him than when He leads him to humiliate himself."

"For I myself saw the Sibyl indeed at Cumae with my own eyes hanging in a jar; and when the boys used to say to her, "Sibyl, what do you want?" she replied, 'I want to die."

🇪🇬Ayman al-Zawahiri

Medicine

Salafi jihadism

1951–2022

"“Our people in Sham prepare yourselves for a long battle with the Crusaders and their allies the Shi’ites and Alawites,"

🇪🇬Mohamed Al-Fayed

Business

1929–2023

"I am not talking to you, you are bloody idiot, you are part of the establishment, you work for MI6"

🇪🇬Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani

Literature

1372–1449

"He who speaks in other than his field of knowledge comes up with such absurdities."

🇪🇬Suzanne Mubarak

Politics

b. 1941

"I do not believe that in Egypt we can prohibit it by law....Polygamy cannot be prevented by force, but through education."

🇪🇬Hosni Mubarak

Politics

1928–2020

"We shall continue to work for a Middle East that is free of strife and violence, living in harmony without the threat of terrorism or dangers of weapons of mass destruction."

🇪🇬Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

Politics

b. 1954

"Anyone harms you will be wiped from the face of Earth."