At an unassuming café in Maadi on a Saturday afternoon, an event that no one asked for came to fruition: a gathering of Marwans, all of them strangers, united by nothing except their first names.

When I arrived, I found the group of young twenty-somethings sitting around a large table playing chess, Clash Royale, and solving a Rubik’s Cube. They all wore name tags (“Hello My Name Is Marwan”) and chatted to one another while a DJ, whose name was also Marwan, spun music.
Marwan Sallam, the 25-year-old content creator behind this Marwan Meetup, sat at the head of the table and thanked all the Marwans for coming. This was Sallam’s fourth such meme event—his most notable being a performative male competition at the Cairo Flea Market last September—and he had a full programme planned out. There was to be Marwan trivia, an Imposter Marwan elimination game, and an Ultimate Marwan competition. Marwans who could not be there physically tuned in via Zoom to watch the other Marwans compete.

Sallam first announced the event on Instagram on January 13 in a post that has since garnered over a hundred thousand views. Within just five days, registration for the meetup reached full capacity. More than 200 people, mostly Marwans but also some Marwas, had signed up to attend and were added to a group chat. Worried that 200 people would already be too many, Sallam tried to further limit the number of attendees, including by announcing a 150 EGP door charge. His worries were perhaps unnecessary: in the end, the crowd he got was a decent, mild-mannered group of about twelve Marwans in total.

“A lot of people show up to my events just for the sake of it,” explains Sallam, “to hang out and meet new people. When I moved back to Egypt in 2018, I had trouble finding people who were as into internet culture as I was, but with time I realized there’s many people like me. These events I make are under the guise of building a community in general.”

For this specific event, Sallam took inspiration from past gatherings that had taken place in the United States, like the Josh Fight of 2021 and the Ryan Meetup of 2023. The basic appeal is simple enough that there have even been numerous world record attempts. (The world record for the largest gathering of people with the same first name is held by the Ivans, 2,325 of whom came together in Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 30, 2017.)

While the gathering of Marwans was far more modest, it appears to be the first time such a meetup was attempted in Egypt. Beneath the layer of jokes, what the event achieved was, like Sallam said, just as much about turning strangers into friends as it was for the memes.
“Though the turnout was lower than in my previous events, the people who showed up are still essentially the same kind of people,” says Sallam. "The point isn’t really that we're all called Marwan. The turnout is always a group of people who all somehow fit together.”

This feeling was shared by the attendees. According to Marwan #8, the university student who built his own chess engine and was crowned ‘Ultimate Marwan’ by group decision, “It’s the first time that someone makes an event like this in Egypt, and everyone was really friendly. I felt all the Marwans were similar to me.” With no pun intended, he added, “I found my people.”

Salma Shaker, a friend of Sallam’s and a co-facilitator of the meetup, said, “I noticed in previous events that it's introverts who are coming out of their bubble. People who feel like they don't fit in, and they try to find people who act and look like them and come to a place like this and connect."
While this may not be true of all the attendees, it appeared to be true for most. Marwan #7, who goes by Matwa, had previously attended the performative male competition. “It was insanely fun. The flea market in general is very special, being one of the only places in Egypt where you can actually express yourself as part of Gen Z. It's very fun for us to be part of the meme culture.”

Sallam, meanwhile, intends to keep putting on more of these events in the future, and building what he calls a community of like-minded people. “As a content creator, the thing I try to convey most is, ‘Don't take yourself too seriously.’”

By taking his own advice, what he's achieved through the Marwan Meetup was not so much a hysterical meme event, but an occasion that brought some twenty people out of their homes by appealing to their basic Gen Z-ness, which would have otherwise rolled their eyes at what the event really was: meeting random strangers and making new friends.
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