From El Akkad’s book, One Day,Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This:
It was late, my father was done work for the night. Because he was technically part of the tourism industry, and the Egyptian economy has for a very long time depended on tourism to ward off complete collapse, he was afforded special dispensation to be out during curfew hours. The soldiers on the corner did not know this. Young, bored, tasked with what authoritarian regimes have ordered young, bored soldiers to do since time immemorial-stand there projecting the violent underpinning of political power—they also didn't care. One of them stopped my father.
Your papers, he said.
My father pulled out his paperwork. Without reading it, the soldier tore it in half and threw it on the floor.
…
By chance, my father's boss, who happened to be friends with one of the soldiers, was leaving the hotel a short while later and stumbled onto the scene. This is likely the only reason my father got out unscathed that night, avoided being dragged to some outpost of Egypt's labyrinthine secret prison system, being made into an absence. It was that night, I think, that my father decided he had no choice but to leave the only home hed ever known.
This is probably the hardest kind of call to make and also the most important one to make.