Sala El Nagar

"We say, baynatna khubz wa milah," Salah told me. "Between us, there is bread and salt.""Bread is life. It is what we share when we welcome someone in. Salt, salt is hardship. It is the bitterness we endure, the struggles we face. To share bread and salt with someone is to become brothers, to accept them fully. To say: I will not betray you. I see you, and you see me."

I've carried this phrase with me ever since that first chance encounter. We'd met in a café on a grey afternoon, the kind where the rain doesn’t fall but lingers in the air, soaking into your skin. He was already seated when I arrived, a mug of coffee steaming between his hands.

We spoke of humanity, the ghost-thin lines that connect us across borders. Of hunger, not just for food but for meaning, and of faith and where it liberates and how it cages. I learned that Salah was a refugee, having left Egypt eight years ago. He told me about crossing the Mediterranean, five days at sea, swallowed by darkness, the cries of women and children lost in the hammering waves.

Salah didn’t just flee, he was expelled by a regime that feared a man who thought too loudly.

“I came here to the UK as a refugee because I suffered persecution in my home country. I am a writer who has published articles on human rights and freedom. I was also involved in political demonstrations against the Egyptian government and in addition, I am related to Dr. Ahmed Subhy Mansour, an Egyptian-American activist and Islamic scholar.”

He talks about his homeland like a lover lost in war. Between them stands a battlefield, not of blood, but of silence and submission. Home is a place that called him a traitor for demanding..  Human rights? His words stayed with me long after that afternoon, but their full weight didn’t settle until I saw him again, not across a café table, but behind a food stall at a festival. He had invited me there to share his food with me. The air thick with spice, steam curling into the cold afternoon. If khubz wa milah was his philosophy, then his food was its proof.

The act of giving was no longer just spoken; it was tangible. The values he spoke of were no longer just words, but something alive, served in bowls and passed from hand to hand. He was only sharing food, but within it I saw an act of defiance. They cast him out, but they did not break him. They tried to silence him, but here he stood, feeding others, giving without question, turning exile into something they could never take from him. He had not been erased. He had only grown stronger.

This is why I painted him, not as a man displaced, but as a man who reclaims space. Who, in the act of nourishing others, asserts his own existence. But more than that, he is a man must stand stand for truth, for dignity, for the radical idea that every person deserves to be seen, to be heard, to belong.