CAIRO — He lives in the rich quarter but shops in the poor, driving to the outskirts to buy vegetables and meat in the dirty, narrow alleys of a bazaar where flies and barefoot children race through scents of ginger and coriander.
Is this Mahmoud Mussa's fate? He doesn't know. All he's sure of is that he sold one of his homes in Iraq for $25,000; the money ran out and he sent his wife to Baghdad to sell the other one. That cash is disappearing, too, and now, after 14 months as a refugee in a Cairo suburb, Mussa has little left to sell or barter, and he's afraid he'll slip out of his affluent neighborhood and end up in a place with broken walls and tattered awnings.
He and his family escaped war, but sometimes there are worse things, like watching everything you worked for in one country being siphoned away in another.
He was a success in Iraq, a mechanical engineer with a couple of cars and a housekeeper. But now he's just a restless man with a temporary residency card looking to fill empty hours in a nation that in many ways is poorer than the one he left. And they're not so friendly now, the Egyptians. Walk through Mussa's suburb, known as 6th of October City, and you hear it: in bakeries, on street corners, in schoolyards, whispered euphemisms of patience turned sour.
"Our relations are worsening with the Egyptians. They fight you psychologically," Mussa said. "If you try to start a business, they all stand against you. They're poor and hungry people, and they saw us coming out of Iraq with cars and money and they were scared -- they feared we would compete with them."
Decades ago, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians migrated to Iraq to work as farmers, laborers and technicians; now the flow has switched and there's uneasiness over how to navigate the reversal of fortunes. Egyptians and Iraqis call each other Arab brothers, yet they are preoccupied with each other's idiosyncrasies, each hinting at a moral superiority that blames the other for un-devout lifestyles and lascivious souls.
"I can't figure out their religion," Moh Nuri Hamza, a Shiite Muslim refugee from southern Iraq, said of the Egyptians. "Their women wear head scarves, yet they wear tight, tight jeans below. I never let my sisters-in-law leave the house. I don't want them corrupted."
