القرد بعين أمه غزال (al-qird bi-ʿayn ummihi ghazāl)

Literally: A monkey in its mother's eyes is a gazelle

Example: “رسمة ابنها مجرد خطوط، لكن القرد بعين أمه غزال.” — Her son's drawing is just scribbles, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

English equivalent: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Origin: Widely traced, in popular Arabic retellings, to a beauty-contest fable in the tradition of Aesop, the Greek storyteller enslaved in the 6th century BC whose animal fables spread widely through later Roman-era collections. In the story, a ruler organizes a beauty contest among the animals, and before a winner can be announced, a mother monkey pushes forward to show off her own baby, insisting he is more beautiful than any other creature present despite everyone else's obvious disagreement. The ruler, amused rather than annoyed, waves off the objections with the line that gave the proverb its name: leave her be — to a monkey, her own baby looks like a gazelle. Whether this specific fable genuinely traces back to Aesop himself or was attached to his name later, as often happened with popular animal stories, isn't independently verified, but the tale is consistently repeated as the proverb's traditional origin across Arabic sources. Either way, the saying captures something universally recognized: a parent's love reliably outshines any objective judgment of their own child.