Thursday 2 January 2014

Paying the price




It is a heavy price we accepted to pay not matter what… the only thing impossible to accept is to kneel and surrender our country for muslim brotherhood and the rest of terrorists to forgive the Egyptian people and stop killing, destroying and confiscating people’s life… and to dictate their conditions including giving them carte blanche to do whatever they want whenever and however they want.

It is the price that we let accumulating since we let go our national responsibilities on all levels; economic, political, social and cultural… we also neglected the new generations until they became easy prey and victims for those who focused all their efforts and capabilities to tempt them in the name of religion.

To make things clearer, the whole scene now is similar to a family that left its children and abandoned them, then gangs of human smuggling, drugs, begging and robbery took the chance to control these young generations mentally, psychologically and materialistically… they convinced them that they are the support and backing that can provide them with care, protection and proper guidance… and that we, accordingly, are the criminal culprits who shall not be entrusted with the mission of their protection, their own life or the society life.

Everyone who had role in accumulating such heavy price shall participate in paying back… starting from the presidents, ministers, university professors, public education teachers, journalists, media people, people in charge of Dawaa and preaching in mosques and churches, others in charge in sport clubs and social associations… also political parties, civil society organizations… and not ending by fathers and mothers.

We reacted to such very serious issue either with disregard sometimes… with opportunism some other times… with negativity… with despair… with negligence… not a single field escaped from those things… either from a single one or all of them… until our country deteriorated and corruption spread everywhere.

Yes, there was tyranny, corruption, intrusion and also treason… these crimes were committed by officials at the top of the regime starting from the presidential palace and going down to levels regarded as high positions according to profession hierarchy… and yes, there were cases that opposed and relatively resisted such corrupted behaviors and those cases were subjected to oppression, punishment, alienation and defamation… however, the general thing we cannot deny is that we gave up our rights and then we evaded our responsibilities.

We are standing before a socio-psychological case… in part of it, we have deviant sons who set fire in whatever and whoever meet them… and what they cannot burn, they break… break their professors’ bones… break the desks and laboratories of their universities… and when they finished burning, destroying and burning all this, they went into other people’s properties outside the university… they went burning trees… they burnt the green trees.

On the other side of this socio-psychological case, we have masses of people distributed in their normal places… in homes, work residences, fields, factories, streets, cafes… those masses have no manual to follow in order to pay their shares of the price… and until this moment of writing those words on Monday morning, December 30th, people who participated in the two revolutions of January, 2011 and June, 2013… those who knew that their only program and clear target was to topple the then-ruling regime… those people do not have any programs or specific targets to pursue achieving with the same enthusiasm and momentum they had during the two revolutions… the painful paradox in our case here is that standing against chaos, rubbish, sewage discharge and administration corruption seems more difficult than toppling the state president or overthrowing his cabinet and aides.

On the sides of this socio-psychological case, we have groups of those we used to call the elite bunch… such elite bunch stays on the top… in the side of those deviant sons, we find this elite bunch containing mostly university professors of different disciplines predominantly by scientific specializations like medicine, engineering, veterinary, agriculture and basic sciences… in the side of the public masses, this elite bunch includes a wide spectrum of different specializations and professions ranging from elite eminent university professors to young men professional at political incitement and who find no shame in being jobless and having no work to earn their living.

These elite bunches on both sides are directly responsible for pushing the sons into more deviance, violence and nihilism… and for the missing of the public masses for a working program to face their escalating daily problems.

However, the most dangerous is the absence of any ability to bridge the gap between those elite bunches and the grassroots… also the absence of both will and capacity to align these elite bunches in a coordinated or phase-designed working program despite the clarity of the severe challenges we face.

Fathers and mothers stayed silent when the sons used to tell them about what they experienced during the primary stage of education… such things that used to take place every day when they used not to give salute to the national flag nor chant the national anthem in morning line-up… also when they used to repeat the slogan of muslim brotherhood.

Those elite bunches stayed silent on all that was happening and even worse than this that used to take place in mosques; big and small ones that were established at the bottom floors of buildings violating all regulations of construction and laws of order… those big and small mosques were nothing but a false pretence of faith used as protection against demolition resolutions and fines levied for such violations.

In such regard, I still remember when one of those, who was famous in building real estate violating regulations, invited me to have Friday prayers with him in the mosque he had at the bottom floor of his law-violating building… once we entered, the mosque Imam and Quran reciter stood standing… the mosque and building owner called the Quran reciter: hey, you sheikh X… we have Y Pasha with us today… I want you to recite a little bit of Mariam with a little bit of Rahman and a little more of Kahf[1], then he called the Imam: hey, you sheikh Z… be short with the sermon for the Pasha has limited time… make it short!!... He was the same person that whenever he saw me getting out of the building and he entering the Kebab and Kofta restaurant he used to own turning our lives into hell because of it, he called: come have coffee with us… please give me some culture... he used to pronounce it in a way mocking the word culture… also, he was the same person that used to say on purpose to the other woman – also very famous in real estate field – before me and others: do you remember that guy; chief of prosecutions who wanted to buy that apartment and was willing to beg us for it!

I mentioned all this to present you a living evidence I witnessed myself for the crimes we committed when we stayed silent on the spread of such corruption and unprincipled capital… also, the submission of authorities to such corruption represented in people occupying top positions and who need apartments, cars, parties and lavish invitations which they cannot afford.

That was part of the soil where that generation grew up… that generation that now burns and destroys… a muslim brotherhood upbringing in one part… and a society where tyranny and corruption control its political, social and economic circumstances in other part…

We did this and now we shall pay the price.


Translated into English by: Dalia Elnaggar.




This article was published in Al Ahram newspaper on January 2, 2014.

To see the original article, go to:

#alahram #ahmed_elgammal #Egypt #corruption #muslim_brotherhood #terrorism




[1] These are names of chapters in the Holy Quran, however the names here are mentioned as the man said them, not exactly as should properly said. The right names are Mariam, ar-Rahman and al-Kahf.

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