Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Conscription became obligatory in Egypt in the early 19th century during the rule of Muhammad Ali, an Albanian soldier who was forced to fight for the Ottoman Empire and later ascended the throne. Over the generations, conscription came to be seen as a kind of service to the country, a debt that had to be paid in time and body. A form of taxation for being born here. It is “a factory of men” that teaches dignity through humiliation. Liberty through servitude. For so long there has been no visual archive of this system in Egypt, apart from the 6cm by 4cm portraits that soldiers are issued at the end of their service. It is illegal to take pictures of military personnel, so to do so felt intimidating. I joined the army in 2017 and served for a year and two months. I had pondered the idea of documenting conscription for a while. Then two months into my military service, I started discreetly taking pictures on my phone, of details of my daily life, avoiding identifying features of my fellow soldiers. In order to have a chain of command and a soldier at the end of it who follows every order, military institutions around the world tap into an aspect of our personalities that is rarely channelled in our individualistic societies. Namely, our strong sense of the collective. It is their instinct to protect the group that can make soldiers go to great lengths to defend it without hesitation. If a soldier disobeys, or even hesitates before following an order, the rest of the group is sometimes punished as well. My service mates often wondered why I asked to do their night guard shifts for them. But it’s a scene I had grown fond of: those nights marked by the full moon. The sounds of the jerboas’ long tails fluttering against the soft sand whenever they jumped like a kangaroo. Seeing your own shadow cast in the moonlight. Every terrain a temporary moon. The long, lonely, boring guard shifts.Soon, I understood why my father had loved the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. She appealed to so many of the men who sat alone and gazed into the void, carrying a gun that wasn’t theirs. I listened to her singing the same lines over and over, like she knew the deserts each one of us stood in. When I wrote and took photographs for this story, it was only meant as a journal. I feared that I would be in harm’s way if I ever published it, so I never really had a name for it. I was just doing things that reminded me of who I was as a person who loves and cherishes life. I self-published The Dog Sat Where We Parted at the end of last year. It had to be smuggled out of Cairo to Paris. Getting an ISBN was difficult because they are only given regionally, and in Egypt there is a censorship authority that overlooks this process and rejects applications if necessary. Books are constantly reviewed for anything political, controversial or religious. But I was lucky as I had just travelled to Switzerland, so I managed to register the book using my new address. Towards the end of my time in the military, I would take Antar the dog with me on my walks with my service mate. On one of those nights, Antar stopped and sat in the middle of nowhere and started to groom himself, as though he would sleep there. Despite many attempts to call him, he stayed there. The next morning I found him sleeping by the door. But something has stayed with me since that night. It felt like a fitting farewell to a dog who loved the desert and disliked commands just as much as I did.The photo book ‘The Dog Sat Where We Parted’ is available at mahmoudkhatab.com. The photographs were first exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles festival 2022, rencontres-arles.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram
