"F@%king Muslims!"

Assem was in a good mood that evening in June 2012. He was an Egyptian guy that worked in tourism there in the Cairo area that i had become friends with over the last couple days, bonding over our common work background and taste for fun and women. Yesterday i had gone to his home to meet his family. As a Muslim, Assem's wife would cover her head in public, but not her face. "Why cover face?" Assem said to me. "Just the head is enough. Most of the women you see all covered in black, hidden except for their eyes, their husbands usually have the big giant beard. Those guys." he said. "I am Muslim, but sometimes I pray and sometimes I don't. My father, he always pray."

Tonight though was not family time. He wanted to take me to a friend's shop to roll and smoke hashish. The shop was a wholesale store for carved stone statues and stuff. At the entrance of the shop, on a quiet, residential, mostly closed up street, i said hello to a large man in the traditional long, Muslim robes. Assem introduced him as Maomet, he was maybe 50years old and had very yellow teeth. "Hello," said Maomet, "Which country from?"

"America," i said.

"Welcome! Welcome!" And then he showed me in to the shop, telling his assistant to get us some Egyptian tea. He asked me how many sugar cubes i would like in the tea and got us all stools to sit on among his mini-sphinxes, pharaohs and gods.

Assem got to work on warming the little piece of hashish so that it could be made into a sort of sand that would be sprinkled on the tobacco to roll into a spliff. There was a tv set up in the corner of the room pointing down towards us. In its screen i could see the inside of a mosque with a huge congregation inside chanting together. "Is that the call to prayer?" i asked Maomet. With a lit spliff at the corner of his mouth, sitting relaxed like a school boy slouched in his chair, legs open, one foot up on a smaller stool, Maomet raised one eye brow and nodded yes. i asked him some more questions about it (is it live or a recording, how often is it, at what times) and he answered all my questions with very little interest.

After a pair of spliffs had been puffed into oblivion and the tea was finished, Assem and i said good night to Maomet with hardy handshakes and lots of platitudes and we continued on into the night.

We stopped at a road side cart to get fresh grilled corn on the cob. As he chomped on the cob and drove with his other hand in the crazy Egyptian traffic (photos), Assem rambled. He talked politics, he talked about his family, and he liked to say "fucking" a lot. Not in a negative sense, but in a happy, giggly way, it seemed to really amuse him to use this English word. A car would pull out in front of him and he'd yell, "Fucking car!" with a smile, forgetting to feign annoyance. When the street congestion slowed us to a stop he would say, "Fucking traffic!" and grin like he'd just won a prize! His English wasn't perfect but he had definitely figured out the right contexts for this idiom!

After a while, we started talking about women. The conversation began because we just missed running over three of them in the street when Assem swerved to avoid another car. "Mwuza!" Assem yelled out the window.

"Mwuza," he told me, means "very beautiful."

"Mwuza?" i asked, excited to learn a cool Arabic word.

"You just said banana." he told me, "It's 'mwuza.'" But i couldn't hear the difference. ...guess that's not such a useful foreign word to use then.... "Mwuza, mwuza," he said, trying to get me to hear all the nuance of his vowels.

"Banana, banana," i apparently repeated back to him.

A few minutes later there were some young women at the edge of a little park, sitting near the road as we slowed down in traffic. As our car pulled up in front of them, Assem yelled out his open window, "Mwuza!"

Now i don't speak Arabic so i couldn't understand exactly what they yelled back, but the tone was certainly not appreciative. They had definitely rejected his car-window-flirting.

"Fucking Muslims!" Assem said to me and smiled, though shaking his head in mock or actual annoyance.

i froze for a moment. Then i burst out laughing, and we cracked up together.