El-Gaili Fuses His Multiple Identities

Ahmed el-Gaili '98 has a certain experienced, fluid smoothness when presenting himself, from his perfectly articulated speech to his perfectly shaved head--"by choice and divine choice," he says ruefully.

The native of Sudan has had to present a picture of himself, his religion and his country many times before, in speeches for Model UN and the International Club back in Andover, where he spent a post-high-school year, and subsequently in positions such as president of the Society of Arab Students and co-founder of the Woodbridge Society of International Students at Harvard. There have been very few students from the Muslim Middle East sharing his American education, much less from Sudan, and his background has been subject to many curious inquires.

"I'd say there's definitely less than a thousand Sudanese studying in America right now," says el-Gaili, a special concentrator in development studies. He regretfully notes that when he tries to discuss the possibility of a Western education for members of his extended family living in the Middle East, the response is usually reserved.

Stuck between two cultures, el-Gaili presents the trappings of both home and adopted home with ease. Perennially clad in oxford shirts and khakis, he manages to simultaneously exude American preppiness and interpret his current home at a polite distance. Meanwhile, his Currier House single is full of Islamic and Sudanese artifacts from home and family. He pauses briefly to point at cane with an emblem of an eagle, the Sudanese national symbol.

"That was given by the Sudanese government to my grandfather, who was ambassador to the U.S. in the 1960s. My grandfather then gave it to me when I was preparing to come to America," el-Gaili says.

Asked if he considers himself a present-day Sudanese ambassador, el-Gaili laughs.

Managing his own life, it seems, is a balancing act worthy of a diplomat. Constantly, he reconciles his family's cultural and religious traditions with his overseas experience and his Sudanese patriotism with the realities of his predominantly expatriate past. He is an individual but also a member of an Islamic Arab intelligentsia from a predominantly agrarian country where less than half the nation is literate and its ethnically and religiously diverse population speaks 132 different dialects.

His father, a former supreme court justice in Khartoum, where el-Gaili was born, became disillusioned by increasing governmental encroachment onto the judiciary and left the country with his wife and four children for self-imposed exile in 1978. El-Gaili was two years old at the time. With the encouragement of his father, el-Gaili mostly learned about events in his homeland--its civil wars, famines, floods and increasing implementation of fundamentalist Islamic law--from newspapers he started to read when he was eight, at his home in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on the other side of the Red Sea. The painful reality of Sudan, he says, became a powerful driving force in him.

His family returned to Sudan every summer to visit relatives. For el-Gaili, growing up the only Sudanese expatriate at his Saudi school, memories of the town el-Gaili, named after an ancestor and 25 miles north of Khartoum, became a major influence over his identification with his country. Still, from ninth grade onwards, el-Gaili harbored dreams of going to America and broadening his horizons.

Originally, however, el-Gaili's father, a conservative Muslim, was very opposed to el-Gaili leaving the Middle East and tried to persuade him to take the traditional elite Sudanese education--university in Egypt and graduate school in England.

"My headmaster at my Saudi school, who was an avid supporter of my [American] education, had to meet with my father for three hours before he gave his consent," el-Gaili recalls.

In retrospect, el-Gaili says he now understands his father's fears but has had no regrets about his decision to come to America.

"Most of the challenges he referred to are true, such as the pressure on one's beliefs, moral code and cultural perceptions. Yet, equally true was my belief in the ability to withstand those challenges without compromising what I stood for. My U.S. experience increased my awareness of my multiple identities--Sudanese, Arab, African, Muslim and international," he says, noting that his parents are now perfectly fine with his choice.

In the Middle East, el-Gaili was the occasional victim of strife among even his fellow Muslims. Three summers ago, el-Gaili was in Egypt writing for Let's Go travel guides when Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak narrowly missed assassination. The event precipitated a terrifying ordeal for el-Gaili.

"There are many [anti-Mubarak] activists who receive training in Sudan, and here I was, a Sudanese visiting all of Egypt's sensitive areas," el-Gaili explains. "One day, I returned to my hotel, and I was apprehended by officers from Egypt's National Security Service who wanted to `ask me questions about my story.' I knew I was in trouble when I said I was from Harvard and the officer asked, `What's Harvard?'"

Isolating him in a `waiting room,' the officers interrogated him for nine hours before the Egyptian embassy in Washington would confirm that el-Gaili was not, in fact, a terrorist. El-Gaili's Egyptian experience, is removed, and yet not, from his preparations to move to New York City after graduation. At Morgan Stanley el-Gaili will analyze oil and gas deals before proceeding to Columbia Law School to study corporate and constitutional law. While seemingly on a straightforward professional career path, el-Gaili says he wishes to use his education to improve conditions in Sudan.

"My parents, for my sake, would like to see me out of [Sudanese politics]," says el-Gaili, who identifies with the "technopols" of Turkey and Egypt he wrote about for his thesis. "[But] there is that sense of obligation--having had this unique opportunity, to share it with my country."