Originally published in Enigma magazine, this witty, wicked compilation of articles will strike a cheeky chord with a generation of young Arab women who suspect there’s more to life than playing nice and being good!

AUTHOR’S NOTE
I came to Cairo for the grubby glass bottles of Pepsi. For that fleeting feeling I get whenever I drive past the Pyramids; for the seething view from my grandmother’s balcony; for my crazy great-aunt’s high-ceilinged crimson-walled salon, its dusty hollow corners smug with secrets of old intimacies and whispered indiscretions; for imposing ancient cupboards that smell of mothballs and crazily coiling alleyways that smell of the dirty drama of street life. For everything that Cool Britannia and all the clichéd excesses of young life in London could never give me. I came hoping the Motherland might provide for a little protection, some much needed padding against my own impulses. Surely, it’s easier to be a Good Egyptian Girl if you’re actually living in Egypt.

But why the desire for goodness? Because no matter how intelligent or independent, how sassy or sexy, how astute or aware, no matter how old she gets, what experiences life deals her or how badly, ridiculously and horribly she screws up, every Arab woman still needs, wants and tries eternally to be the Good Girl. It’s simply in our genes, like big asses. So each one of us is a virgin (until proven otherwise), a fallen angel, a wife in training; a Good Girl in the making. We’ve never touched a drop of alcohol (until we’re caught drinking), never smoked a cigarette (in front of our parents), and the Devil is always the third person in the room, the white elephant in the room, the thing you dare not mention, but you know is lurking, waiting to get you, even if it’s two in the morning and you’re dancing on the bar at some club in London of which you can’t quite remember the name. It’s all just a phase, and one day, one day you’ll get married, settle down, move into a villa on the outskirts of Cairo, complete with two maids, a cook, a nanny and a driver called Ahmed. And maybe you’ll even remember the Big Guy above…occasionally.

Your mother will repeatedly warn you against mentioning your pre-marital adventures to your husband-to-be, your friends will pretend they never held your hair back as you puked into the loos at Club 35, and you will eventually fulfil your pre-destined role as a Good Egyptian Girl. So I was hoping to speed the process up a bit. I was tired of my own Western misadventures, I wanted out. Of course I hadn’t accounted for just how intent I was on finding creative ways to mess up my own life. Rather than La Vie Bohème I had envisioned, I somehow ended up as a writer and then the managing editor of Enigma magazine, the country’s most famed glossy lifestyle magazine, a sort of Tatler-cum-Vogue for the Arab world. So I was thrown high heels first into the superficial social whirlwind that is Cairo high society with all its incredible idiosyncrasies. And for the first time, I came face to face with the Egyptian man…and all his scream-inducing idiosyncrasies. And I don’t mean the good type of screaming. I’d like to say I loved and lost, yet I could barely get past the first date… with any of them. But I did love every minute of it, because throughout it all I laughed. And, unlike a Good Egyptian Girl, I did it loudly. Laughed at the riotous ridiculousness of it all. And then I started to write about it all on the back page of the magazine. Month in and month out. About my adventures in Cairo, about the kaleidoscopic swirl of characters I collided with, about the parties I went to, the men I dated and the mistakes I made. Entitled Fe-mail my column unwittingly and organically morphed into a sort of Sex and the City for the Arab World
(without the sex or the Manolo Blahniks).

Yet, throughout it all, there remained the underlying quest to become a Good Egyptian Girl. To say the right thing, to do the right thing, to act the right way, to marry the right man and to do it all while wearing the right dress. To find that elusive balance between who I am, who I ought to be and who my parents and high society peers want me to be. To stumble along that precarious line between East and West and try and pay a little attention to God’s advice along the way. After all, who wants to be sequestered to an after-life of eternal damnation? Of course, I failed miserably. No scrap that. I failed spectacularly. Which is probably why a legion of young women latched onto my words. Gradually, and much to my continuing surprise, they would e-mail me, message me on Facebook, tap my shoulder at a party, even throw their arms around me on the middle of the street. (OK that hug on the street thing only happened once, but indulge me a little here). And they would thank me for “getting it”. For telling their story, for pointing out that it’s all just one big mess and we’re just as messy. For telling it how it is and requesting that the world kindly take me as I am. Good Girl or not.

And somewhere along the way, came the idea of throwing all those articles together into a sort-of book. A collection of true-life trials and errors. And this is it. The trials and tribulations of a Good Egyptian Girl…in the making.

Amy Mowafi, Cairo, 2008