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Ali Café “Dreamers of Tomorrow”
The great Ihsan Abdel Quddous
Among the personalities who had a great influence on the formation of my sentiments was the creative professor, Ihsan Abdel Quddous.. the son of Mrs. Rose Al-Youssef, the woman who competed with men in a patriarchal society, and the founder of Rose Al-Youssef magazine and the Sabah Al-Khair magazine, and his father, Professor Muhammad Abdel Quddous, who was an artist and author. Traditional in every sense of the word.
I met Ihsan Abdel Quddous in Hurghada in the last eight years of his life, where he was resting and my family and I often enjoyed the calm and beauty of the place. Sentimental fabric.
Like other young people, I read Ihsan’s novels and watched great films that embody them, such as “I am free”, “Do not extinguish the sun”, “The Well of Deprivation”, “A Nose and Three Eyes”, “The Bullet is Still in My Pocket”, “Where is My Mind” and “The Black Glasses” and “The Dancer and the Politician” and “My Dear We Are All Thieves”
Then “The Fine Thread” and before them I do not sleep “and after them” The Virgin and the White Hair” and “I will not live in my father’s robes”
And finally, “I don’t lie, but I do make up.”
After that, the time allowed me to befriend his son Muhammad Abdul Quddus in the year 95 during the preparation for the parliamentary elections, and I, Muhammad, had nominated ourselves as independents in that race and gathered together that the state apparatus was working against us for various reasons, but we gathered a sense of injustice and the suffering of passing through the procedures that he held. Security is ahead of us at that time… I am for my audacity to run for elections in an important district (Qasr al-Nil) as an independent at the age of 44 against the candidate of the National Party and the candidate of the Wafd Party, who was promised the seat within the framework of a political deal, and my victory over them in the first round as an unexpected surprise, and Muhammad Abd al-Qudous for being Leaning towards the Brotherhood’s political Islam and its troubles on the ladder of the Journalists Syndicate.
The important thing is that my intimate friendship with Muhammad, despite our different political leanings, then with Ahmed Abd al-Quddous, and my follow-up to Ihsan’s salon in Rosal Youssef made me closer and more familiar with their father through them, as if the beginning of my acquaintance with Professor Ihsan in Hurghada in the year 82 had extended after his death through his two sons.
Ihsan Abdel Quddous wrote social lessons, through which he reveals the Egyptian society, and speaks out about what is in it, with courage that made him enemies who openly oppose him and may prevent their daughters from reading his novels, due to her audacity to dissect the characters within an unprecedented fictional framework..but he reached all segments of society despite his will. That..and his frankness with the reality of life and his courage in literary and artistic presentation were important to me and in my appreciation of the meaning of looking behind events and taking lessons and consideration..
Was he just a man of letters, no?
He was a politician of the first order…and a journalist of a unique style, at a young age and in the prime of his life…
Ihsan, the journalist, did not fear the state when he exposed the issue of corrupt weapons in the war of 1948… He did not fear the authority of his friends who supported them at the beginning of the 1952 revolution, and expressed his opinion, so he was arrested in the military prison for his audacity to criticize the course of the revolution at its beginning, and he used to call out the leader of the revolution “Jimmy” for the intimacy of the relationship, After his release from the military prison, Nasser invited him to his house to calm his mind, so he called him Mr. President to inform him intelligently of his position towards the friend who was..
And I came to a stage in his life that seemed to be the one that put a definite sign in my sentiments, which is his collection of articles, “Ali the Political Street Café”, which after more than thirty years had passed, and I found myself resorting to its philosophy, without deliberate thinking, in expressing my political and social views in my articles. Ali Coffee (Dreamers of Tomorrow), which he published more than seven years ago in Al-Masry Al-Youm, influenced by the dialogues of the philosopher Socrates with his students and Ihsan Abdel Quddous in his dialogues between the young man and the old.
Let me take you with me on a tour of the political street café at the end of the seventies, to know Ihsan’s impact and influence.
Ihsan says in the introduction to the book that included these articles:
“The sessions of the political café are not stories, but they are also not press campaigns, nor are they mere political articles…but they are opinions that go beyond the events, that is, they are not related to the event itself, but are related to the general principles that I believe in, and the logic with which I interpret these principles…..they serve as a record For an opinion that expresses the thought of this generation in which we lived and expresses it.
I chose two of his interviews on the political street café, which were published in 1979:
the first:
The young man said, smiling sarcastically: They are talking about freedom of the press again, as if they were talking about trying to reach the moon!
The old man said bitterly:
All those who talk about freedom of the press are idiots who understand freedom of the press as freedom of opinion.
The young man said in astonishment: Isn’t it freedom of opinion?
The old man said:
Absolutely not. There is a big difference between freedom of opinion and freedom of publication. Now that you are sitting on the coffee shop, you are free to say your opinion: but in order to publish your opinion, you need a tool for publishing.. And the press is nothing but a tool for publishing. If we say freedom of the press, then the correct meaning of this freedom is the freedom of newspaper owners.
The young man said: But the chief editors are the ones who control what is published. And they can provide freedom of opinion.
The old man said: No.. The editor-in-chief is just an employee of the owner of the newspaper. He is the one who chooses and appoints him, and he is the one who dismisses him.
The young man said: How can a person with an opinion ensure that his opinion is published?
The old man said: To choose among the owners of the newspapers, and if he finds someone who agrees with his opinion and with his political direction, he publishes it in his newspaper.
The young man said:
How do we choose among newspaper owners in Egypt?
The old man said:
All Egyptian newspapers have only one owner.
The optimistic guy said:
There is the Supreme Press Council.. There is no doubt that it is a force that can achieve freedom of the press
