El Murahan

If you need a loan and you live in a rural villages in Upper Egypt, you might go to El Murahan. El Murahan is the guy who runs the local agricultural pawn shop business. In exchange for a minimum two year loan, he gets usufructuary rights to a portion of the borrower's agricultural land. El Murahan explained his current contract as follows: he loaned 30,000 pounds in return for the rights to farm one hectare (10,000 square meters) of the borrower's land for two years. At the end of two years, El Murahan gets the 30,000 pounds back. If he doesn't the borrower can go to jail, and El Murahan continues to farm the hectare. He claimed that he can usually make 6,000 pounds a year on a hectare of land, so El Murahan makes a pretty penny -- 20% -- on his loans.


Who asks El Murahan for a loan? It's always for consumption purposes. Some people want to help their children marry, but choose another route. The majority buy weapons -- automatic rifles to be precise. 


Why? According to him (and a bunch of others confirmed his story), Asyut is the land of feuds. My local contact, Ibrahim, claimed that the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich can all be involved in feuds in Asyut. Only a couple months ago, the supreme court judge of Asyut killed two people related to someone who killed his son.


Sometimes people wait years for another family's son to grow up and on his wedding day, they'll show up to take care of the vendetta. It's as absurd as the feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Buck Grangerford claims that neither family can even remember who started the feud, but it basically goes like this, "A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills HIM; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the COUSINS chip in -- and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time."


So, you have to ask, how would increased access to finance affect feuds? Maybe speed up the process with automatic weapons?