About My Father… The Worker Mohammad and the Officers of the Republic

“Despite his marginal role, my father participated in both the virtues and vices of this country's history, both pivotal, when he and his peers traveled to the Gulf and Iraq in the 1970s, following the oil boom. The country relied on remittances from abroad and benefitted from the exchange rate difference. The economy revived, as did the black market economy, in a strange paradox. The game went as follows: petrodollars flooded the Egyptian market. Remittances from Egyptians abroad were exchanged on the black market at a higher rate, creating a pattern for making easy money, validating President Sadat's saying in one of his speeches, which, in one way or another, encouraged looting: "If you don’t get rich under my reign, you’ll never become rich."