The Exchanges: The Story

The 'Egyptian phase' 1973-79

The 'Sudan phase' 1981-86

The 'Jordan phase' 1986-96

The 'Lebanon phase' 1994-2002

The 'Egyptian phase' 1973-79

The starting point of these student exchanges was a conviction that developed in an Egyptian student, Nagia Abdelmogney Said, that there was a side of Europe of which her generation was ignorant and of which it should become aware. Now a university lecturer, she relates the events that led her to this belief:

‘When I graduated from high school in 1968, I was invited to attend a ‘Youth Leadership Programme’ in Switzerland within the context of an international conference of the Moral Re-Armament (MRA 1 ) movement in the village of Caux. I met people from different parts of the world who were able to communicate because of the harmonious and friendly atmosphere. It was not only informative but very inspiring. The following summer, I, by then a student of architecture at Cairo University, and two others, received an invitation to visit Britain from Dr Robin Mowat of Oxford Polytechnic. Upon our return to Egypt, we met the Minister of Youth, Dr Kamal Abulmagd and suggested inviting a group of British students who represented this thinking to visit Egypt.’

Mohsen Hussein (right)
with Hoda Naguib Amin (front),
Nagia Abdelmogney Said (behind)
and Mary Lean of the first British delegation, 1973

Mohsen Hussein (later Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Youth, and recently retired as Adviser on Youth Affairs to the government of Saudi Arabia ) takes up the story:

‘In the summer of 1972, I was working in the Planning Sector in Egypt ’s Supreme Council for Youth and Sports where I was responsible for school and university students. Three young engineering students referred to me by the Minister of Youth arrived at my office to ask about the possibility of hosting a delegation from British universities. At that stage we were developing a student exchange programme at an international level called the Youth Embassy Programme.

The three students had just returned from Switzerland and England and their eyes were glowing with enthusiasm. It was not possible to respond officially to them, so I invited them to meet me the following evening at the Nile Club. Some club members who joined the meeting expressed their support for hosting a British student delegation, and offered to cover their expenses in Cairo. We appealed to the Supreme Council for Youth to finance their visits to the archaeological sites in Cairo, Luxor and Aswan. The joy of these young students at this arrangement was very great. Within two weeks, the Egyptian Ambassador to the UK received a letter accepting the invitation, and the British student delegation arrived in April 1973. It was a great event: the idea of a Youth Embassy had become a reality, and at an official level.’

That first delegation consisted of five students from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham. One of them, Judi Conner, who later became a BBC TV documentary producer, remembers:

‘As a 21-year-old, the journey was only my second outside Western Europe. Identifying with the life and culture of Egyptian students, and learning to interact with counterparts from a different background made quite an impact. My outlook on life was stretched, as were my understanding of people,my heartpower and my social skills.

The Pyramids, the ancient university of Al-Azhar, the mosques, the wonders of Luxor and Upper Egypt, feluccas on the Nile …none of us will ever forget these treasures - nor the visits to the Minister of Youth, the Al-Ahram newspaper offices, the Gezira Sports Club, or the beach at Alexandria.

It was fascinating and fun, and also somewhat daunting, knowing we were treading new ground as official delegates in a country that was recently at war, and that had plenty of reason to be wary of a bunch of naive young Brits on the loose! But it was the friendships with our Egyptian counterparts, and the visits to university common-rooms and students’ homes, that made it so much more than the conventional tourist or educational trip.

We were also impressed to find ourselves in a culture,which generally accepted a more ‘holistic’ approach to life than ours in the West. In other words, religious faith and community values seemed to be more widely accepted in Egypt as a normal, integrated part of life, rather than as a specialist interest for the religiously-inclined! Coming from the UK where materialism and individualism were increasingly dominant trends, I realised the extent of the spiritual vacuum in Western society, and the way that this vacuum breeds extreme forms of religious fundamentalism in all the major faiths. I began to see how Western policies and attitudes have helped create the desperation that drives suicide bombers.’

Abdel Mogney Said (left) and Bill Conner

The delegation was selected and accompanied by Judi’s father, Bill Conner. It was through his friendship with Nagia’s father, Abdel Mogney Said, Egyptian Under-Secretary for Labour, that Nagia had known of the leadership training programme. Bill encountered MRA when he was at Cambridge University before the war. He later served as a tank commander in an Irish regiment in the 8th Army at the battle of El-Alamein in Egypt in 1942. He later described an experience he had under enemy-fire:

‘I found myself paralysed with fear. I had always felt I wasn’t a very fearful person, but now I was totally unable to think. I considered praying and I thought, “If God is here at all, He will presumably function under these conditions”. In a flash, nothing less than a miracle to me, I found myself absolutely clear-minded and able to think for the whole situation.’

Directing the driver to move quickly to wherever the last shell had landed, he led the tank back to safety.

He went on,

‘After the battle, one night we were down near the sea. The silence was total under a great dome of a sky with its bright stars. I remember thinking we might now get back home, and I found myself saying, “If I do get back, I must find something dealing with the root causes of what’s wrong in the world”, because clearly this war wasn’t going to do it 2.’

After spending some time in Germany with a programme aimed at helping Germans lay a basis for democracy and reintegration with the rest of Europe, he returned to Egypt in 1954. Picking up friendships he had made during the war began what was to be a 38-year association with people of the area. He recounted an experience with the first Muslim he met socially, a doctor, Abdo Sallam, who later became Minister of Health.

‘At that time Abdo Sallam was at the beginning of his career and he had to make a decision about taking a job with little pay or prestige. He said to me, “I want to do God’s will.What do you think it is in this case?” So we sat quietly, and soon my mind was filled with the one question, “He’s seeking guidance from Allah, I’m seeking guidance from God. Is it the same thing?” My friend broke the silence by saying, “That’s time enough, I’m clear now. I should take that job.” ’

For ever after, Bill felt as a Christian that there was a common task to be undertaken with people of the Muslim faith and other faiths.

He and his wife Cherie made numerous visits to the Middle East throughout a period when intergovernmental relations were strained by revolution, the Suez crisis in 1956, and the subsequent alliance of much of the Arab world with the Soviet bloc. Bill met Abdel Mogney Said at a conference of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, and they became close friends. For Bill, MRA was an ideal context for trust-building between people from Europe and the Arab world, because both acknowledged similar moral and spiritual values. The annual conferences in Caux, Switzerland, became for him and others a central tool for this task.

One has to remember the context of the times in which Nagia took her initiative. President Anwar El-Sadat, who had succeeded Gamal Abd El-Nasser on his death in 1970, was enacting a radical change of course for his country. He had announced the ‘Infitah’ (Open Door) policy towards the West, and severed links with the Soviet Union. Such changes were causing great turbulence. The Egyptian authorities were concerned about the values that would flow through the newly opened ‘door’ to the West. So there was a ready response to Bill Conner’s offer of a link with students from the West who believed in faith and moral values, and that real change started with oneself rather than with others.

In August that year, Mohsen Hussein and his Palestinian wife Lamia El-Shawa joined a group of fifteen Egyptian students from five universities led by Dr Hassan Abdoun, first to the international conference in Caux for ten days, where they addressed the conference on their vision for their country, then to Britain for a further two weeks.

By this time, Bill Conner had recruited a distinguished ‘Committee for British-Arab University Visits’, which included senior academics from Oxford and Edinburgh, the Member of Parliament for Cambridge, and a retired Air Vice Marshall, with himself as Secretary and Treasurer. They and others from the MRA network who had links with the Middle East, together with the students who had visited Egypt, put together an ambitious programme, which became a model for subsequent visits. This included receptions at New College, Oxford and the British Council, meetings with the President of the Scottish Liberal Party, the Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, students at Liverpool University and the General Secretary of The Socialist International.

The group also visited the Houses of Parliament,Westminster Abbey, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (as guests of the Lord Provost) and watched a football match at the Chelsea ground.

The financing of this first visit also became a model for subsequent visits: the visitors were responsible for their airfares to Britain (in this case covered by the Ministry of Youth); the hosts provided accommodation and meals, and accompanied them on the road; and a company sponsored the petrol costs. Only a comparatively small sum remained to be raised from individual donations.

Dr Sayed Hasan Khidr, now Associate Professor of Pharmacy at Assiut University, recalls:

‘In the summer of 1973, I was an undergraduate student at Assiut University. I was chosen among a group of university students to visit Europe. All we knew about our hosts was that they were a group of Christian people who strongly believed in four absolute standards: honesty, love, purity and unselfishness. Initially, we had some doubt about these people’s intentions.We thought they may be missionaries or have a hidden political purpose. But I was amazed by their keenness to listen to our opinions and to learn about the religious principles that we represented. Most of the Egyptian delegation were Muslims with different levels of Islamic knowledge and culture, but we all felt how much people in the Western countries are in need of the Eastern principles and morals.’

Samia Kholoussi and Aida Mohammed
in conversation with Ross Belch,
Chairman of Scott Lithgow Shipyards,
Greenock, Scotland, 1975

Because of the October 1973 war and its aftermath, it was not appropriate for a British group to visit Egypt during the following two years, but there were further Egyptian delegations to Caux and Britain in the summers of 1974 and 1975. Dr Samia Kholoussi who is now a university lecturer in the USA, and who met her future husband Aly Elezaby on the 1975 delegation, reviews the experience:

‘Our interactions, conversations we had, and times we spent together have made an indelible impact on our growth and developing consciousness. It was an eye-opening and rewarding experience in many ways. At this young age, being exposed to Western culture through the values and morals of MRA provided us with a positive outlook on the West. It was amazing how different streams from East and West converged into an inclusive whole. Each member of the delegation became aware that we as human beings shared common beliefs and aspirations; that there was a shared interest in making the world a better place.

Our interaction with the international participants in the conference gave us a chance to see that on all issues there were other perspectives that need to be considered and debated. It stimulated the urge to explore and get to know other people’s experience.We realised that our experience and vision are Arab but also part of the human condition everywhere. To Aly and I, then as now, MRA unravels a vision that thinks across the cultural divide and negative stereotypes of monolithic categories. It is a vision that goes beyond relations of asymmetrical structures of domination and supremacy, cuts through rigid binarisms and establishes a paradigm in which the self acts as much as it is acted upon.’

Denis Nowlan (Oxford University) at a meeting with the Student Union of Alexandria University, 1976

The next British student delegation went to Egypt at New Year 1976. One striking experience was a visit to Port Tawfiq on the Suez Canal, to witness the devastation caused by war.

There was a return visit to Britain that summer, of which one of the high points was to be received by former Prime Minister, Lord Home and his wife at their home in the Scottish borders.

Diversifying

Due to staff changes in the Egyptian Ministry of Youth, there was no official delegation from Egypt in 1977, but two Egyptian students and two Palestinian students (nominated by Said Hamami, the Delegate to the UK of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation) formed a small informal group.

It was in 1978 that the ‘Association for British-Arab University Visits’ was finally registered as an Educational Charity, with the broad objects of educating the British in aspects of Arab and Islamic life, and educating Muslims and Arabs about British life.That summer saw the visit to Britain of a larger mixed delegation, including the Secretary of Cairo University’s 150,000-strong Student Union and four of its top academic students, three students from the University of Jordan, and other individuals from Sudan and Egypt.The following January, a group of five British students made a return visit to Egypt at the invitation of Cairo University. In all, between 1973-79 six Egyptian groups visited Britain involving over 50 students and group leaders, and three British delegations visited Egypt involving 17 students and group leaders.

In July 1979, a group of five students led by Peter Everington, Secretary of the Association, visited Jordan at the invitation of the University of Jordan, the first group of British students to have been invited by the University.

While there were no visits in 1980, members of the National Committee made visits to Egypt, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon and Libya, pursuing contacts with senior academics as well as others in positions of responsibility.