The vocabulary lists for Arabic lessons reflected both the country’s shifting politics and its enduring difficulties. Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez

When you move to another country as an adult, the language flows around you like a river. Perhaps a child can immediately abandon himself to the current, but most older people will begin by picking out the words and phrases that seem to matter most, which is what I did after my family moved to Cairo, in October of 2011. It was the first fall after the Arab Spring; Hosni Mubarak, the former President, had been forced to resign the previous February. Every weekday, my wife, Leslie, and I met with a tutor for two hours at a language school called Kalimat, where we studied Egyptian Arabic. At the end of each session, we made a vocabulary list. In early December, following the first round of the nation’s parliamentary elections, which had been dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, my language notebook read:

mosque

to prostrate oneself

salah (prayer)

imam

sheikh

beard

carpet

forbidden

On many days, I went to Tahrir Square, to report on the ongoing revolution. If I heard unfamiliar words or phrases, I brought them back to class. In January, after some protesters had become suspicious of my intentions as a journalist, the notebook had a new string of words:

agent

embassy

spy

Israel

Israeli

Jew

The following month, I learned “tear gas,” “slaughter,” and “Can you speak more slowly?” “Conspiracy theory” appeared in my notebook on the same day as “fried potatoes.” Sometimes I wondered about the strangeness of Tahrir-speak, and what my Arabic would have been like if I had arrived ten years earlier. But it would have been different at any time, in any place: you can never step into the same language twice. Even eternal phrases took on a new texture in the light of the revolution. After I could understand some of the radio talk shows that cabbies played, I realized that callers and hosts exchanged Islamic greetings for a full half minute before settling down to heated arguments about the new regime. Our textbook was entitled “Dardasha”—“Chatter”—and it outlined set conversations that I soon carried out with neighbors, using phrases that would never be touched by Tahrir:

“Peace be upon you.”

“May peace, mercy, and the blessings of God be upon you.”

“How are you?”

“May God grant you peace! Are you well?”

“Praise be to God.”

“Go with peace.”

“Go with peace.”

One of our teachers, Rifaat Amin, prepared a five-page handout entitled “Arabic Expressions of Social Etiquette.” This supplemented “Dardasha,” which also featured some lessons about social traditions, including the evil eye, the belief that envy can cause misfortune. In “Dardasha,” icons of little bombs with burning fuses had been printed next to the kind of phrase that, even during a revolution, qualified as explosive: “Your son is really smart, Madame Fathiya.” Fortunately, this compliment-bomb was promptly disarmed: “This is what God has willed, Madame Fathiya, your son is really smart.”

I often heard that phrase—masha’allah, “this is what God has willed”—when I was out with my twin daughters. Occasionally an elderly person smiled at the toddlers and said, “Wehish, wehish”—“Beastly, beastly!”—which confused me until somebody explained that a reverse compliment is another way of deflecting the evil eye. Rifaat’s handout taught us what to say when somebody returns from a trip, or recovers from illness, or mentions a dead person (allah yirhamuh, “may God rest his soul”). Beggars can be deftly rebuffed with a piece of deferred responsibility: allah yisahellik, “may God make things easier for you.” There’s even a dedicated phrase for anybody who has just received a haircut: na‘iman. The neighborhood barber said this every time he finished cutting my hair, but I didn’t understand until Rifaat’s tutorial. The first time I responded correctly, the barber smiled, and then for five years we followed the script:

“Na‘iman.” “With blessings.”

“Allah yin‘am alik.” “May God bless you.”

Rifaat was in his fifties, a thin, intense man with eyes that flashed whenever he became animated. He had thick white hair and the dark skin of a Sa‘idi, an Upper Egyptian. Rifaat’s father had been a contractor who grew up in a southern village known as Abydos, whose region had likely been the homeland of the kings of the First Dynasty, five millennia ago. Rifaat was proud of this heritage, and, like many southerners whose families had risen in social class during the mid-century, he was a staunch Nasserite—Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had led the revolution of 1952, was another Sa‘idi. Every evening, at ten o’clock, Rifaat watched the Rotana channel’s rebroadcast of a concert from the nineteen-fifties or sixties by the singer Umm Kulthum. Once, Rifaat prepared a class worksheet that included the sentence “There is not a real Egyptian who does not love Umm Kulthum.”

But Rifaat had other qualities that seemed out of place in Egypt. He was Muslim, but he drank alcohol, avoided mosques, and didn’t fast during Ramadan. He said that the hajj was a waste of money that would be better spent on the poor. Since his teen-age years, he had followed a mostly vegetarian diet, a rarity among Egyptians. Rifaat’s siblings told me that their father had often shouted at him when Rifaat refused beef and lamb, but he held firm. Even as an adult, one of the few meat dishes that he ate was chicken prepared by his older sister, Wardiya, who had a special way of removing the skin.

“This year’s all about fur on the inside.” Facebook

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Wardiya sometimes delivered meals to Rifaat’s apartment, because he was a man without a woman. A decade earlier, he had had lymphoma, and she had cooked for him weekly. At one point, briefly, he had been engaged to a foreign woman, but he seemed happy that it hadn’t worked out. He lived alone, which is also unusual in Egypt, and Wardiya told me that she disagreed with Rifaat about two things in particular: religion and his belief that men and women are equal. But he had persuaded her to give the best possible education to her daughters—in his words, this was a weapon. “If her husband lets her down, then she’ll have a weapon in hand,” Wardiya explained. “She can rely on herself.”Rifaat was natural in the presence of women, which was one reason Leslie and I had classes with him. Cairo is notorious for sexual harassment, but the male response to women also runs to the opposite extreme. If Leslie and I were together in our neighborhood, polite men often addressed all conversation to me, carefully avoiding eye contact with my wife. But there wasn’t any such bias with Rifaat, who had taught many foreigners; in the late nineteen-eighties he had even served as a private tutor to the actress Emma Thompson, who was filming a movie in Cairo. For our classes, Rifaat prepared lessons that often reflected his social criticisms, to the degree that boorish men could be denied names: