Hossam Badrawi Official Website
June between right and wrong
Written by
Hossam Badrawi
June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar and one of the four months consisting of 30 days. In Iraq and the Levant it is called June, sometimes in Egypt it is called June, and in Tunisia and Algeria it is called June.
The month of June is one of two months in which the solar solstice occurs (the other month is December), and in this month The Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere turns towards the Sun, which means that June 20 or June 21 is the summer solstice. The northern and southern solstice means that this date will have the most daylight of any day. In the Northern Hemisphere and less in the Southern Hemisphere, there are 24 hours of daylight in the North and North Pole. 24 hours of darkness in Antarctica.
The month of June is associated in my mind with two important events, one of them had a negative impact on shaping the future of the Middle East and the world, which was the decisive defeat of 1967, and one of them put dots above the letters, which was June 30, in which the middle class in Egypt, its young and old, became clear. Their ability to change reality when they want
Everything in history has a structure and there are no coincidences. The social reality during the era of Abdel Nasser had an imprint on the construction of political thought in the future, and on the construction of the moment of defeat in June 1967 and the sequence of events after that until the present moment. .
In the sixties, the systematic infringement on freedoms and privacy began without mercy, linking the fate of Egypt to the Soviet Union, and presenting leftist ideas that were close to communism despite the official declaration of political non-alignment, which led to making everything in Egypt the property of the state, and making all citizens Its employees, without individual initiatives or personal dreams…
It was a system that created a contradiction internally and within the youth of Egypt at the time, while we were in the stage of mental and emotional formation with pride in being Egyptians, influenced by the mental buildup of the ideologies of the time period in which Egypt was living, and the pain from the injustice and violation of freedoms that we saw around us and sometimes approached us, a contradiction that made me refuse and I In middle school, I joined the youth organization to which all the youth of the country were forced to go, and at the same time I cried over the death of Abdel Nasser, as if Egypt had died with him.
The defeat in 1967 was a devastating blow to me and my generation, as I was at the end of high school, feeling humiliated and not believing everything we were told after that.
During the 1967 war, I was like a young man of my age, walking in the streets where we lived, calling for the lights to be turned off so that we would not be bombed by enemy planes at night. In the first two days, I remember repeating my call to my father from under our house, “We have entered Tel Aviv yet.”
Our feeling and conviction was that we were the strongest and that it was a matter of hours and Israel would end while we read the lies of the German media about our success in shooting down hundreds of enemy aircraft. The truth was that our army’s defeat was severe in the first 6 hours of the battle.
An experience that imprinted a lot on my conscience, between previous contradictions these days and a pride whose foundations were proven false in minutes.
I read After the Setback by Nizar Qabbani:
If we lose the war, it is no surprise
Because we enter it…
With all the talents of oratory that the Oriental possesses
With annelids that wouldn’t kill a fly
Because we enter it…
With the logic of the drum and the rabab,
Summary of the case
Summarize in a phrase
We have put on the veneer of civilization
And the soul is ignorant…
The Jews did not enter our borders
But..
They leaked like ants… from our faults…
Even as I write these lines after more than half a century, the same feeling of pain that all the youth of the country suffered and which was only partially erased by the victory of October 1973 returns to me.
The Egyptian army returned defeated, and the Egyptian people restored their dignity to their army by joining its educated and young people with free will to form it. The army erased its pain after 6 years of pain, humiliation and indignity.
But at the same time, I think of Nizar Qabbani’s description of our civilized position, and I fear that we are still suffering from it.
The scars of the wound of setback 67, its effects still haunt me as I search for enlightenment and modernity, rejecting their mere peels, and seeking their truth and essence. Therefore, the reader will find among the words of my articles and books a search for light, enlightenment, science and knowledge, and a belief in our opportunity for our children and youth to be liberated from Salafist constants that make what is humane, divine, in order to control minds, and hypocrisy created by fear of worldly authority from those who do not believe in the right of citizens to dignity. And freedom.
During the youth revolutions of the years 71 and 72, demanding the recovery of the occupied land in Sinai, what is happening in American universities today against the oppression and extermination of the Palestinian people reminds me of the vitality of Egypt’s youth in this time, pressing for the liberation of Sinai and the removal of the occupation. The Israeli.
…The leftist movement at the beginning of the seventies was intense, and the political Islamic movement was growing rapidly and violently, and the movement of reason was hidden between a reality created by Abdel Nasser and a reality created by Sadat, and an American intelligence agreement to spread Wahhabi thought in Egypt..
The arena of Cairo University was where these trends collided, between leftists who were the product of the youth organization and the vanguard organization, and between Islamists whose tentacles were growing with funding and a reconstituted organisation, and a civil movement, which saw in freedom and democracy a hope for Egypt and a path to it, and I was one of them.
My way of participating was to enter the Student Union and write articles on the wall magazines that were being torn apart by leftists and Islamists, who were enemies of each other but agreed not to accept free, rational opinion.
Belonging and awareness of the homeland is cumulative, specific, and collective at the same time. It grows through coexistence and life with geography and history…
The bright side of the month of June is the 30th Revolution, which is the first time-bound revolution in history that was carried out peacefully by the middle class in Egypt to change a political situation and declare rejection of the Brotherhood and their rule.
I return to the defeat of 67 and the victory of 73 to remind everyone that the Egyptian people have a deeper and stronger sense of civilization than many people think.
I remind everyone that the defeat was a defeat for the rulers’ administration of the country at that time, which despite that supported his army and regained his land.
It was not a religious war, but rather an integrated national action in which the people worked with their army to achieve a common goal without distinction between state institutions.
But what my mind does not accept is that the civilized world is building its philosophy in the twenty-first century in dealing with humans and in creating regulating laws, on religious foundations that have nothing to do with science. Rather, all the revolution of enlightenment and the audacity to think in the dark Middle Ages separates the church and the temple from the practice of politics because the clergy at this time used God in His Majesty to control people, and we return in the twenty-first century and allow and support the model of building the Jewish Zionist religious state based on The instructions of the Torah, as they say, to God’s chosen people, inferior to the rest of the peoples of the world, and His promise to them of the land of Palestine, and their right to annihilate the owner of the land.
And protecting the Semites, the children of Shem, son of Noah in particular. If studies and linguistics say that the Semites are also Arabs before the Hebrews, this is overlooked in order to protect the descendants of Jacob, the grandfather of the children of Israel.
What I saw of the trial of the Egyptian President of Columbia University, Nemat Shafik, and the US Senator’s accusation that she was seeking to curse her university for not believing in defending the children of Shem, the son of Noah, is something I could not have imagined nor expected.
Do you not see the madness practiced by humanity in the West as a result of Zionism’s control over the minds of those with money, weapons, and power to achieve the annihilation of the people of Palestine, to establish in their minds the illusions of historical rights for God’s chosen people, and to turn the criminal into a martyr and the victim into a criminal?
What I see and hear from politicians in the West now seems like a return to the Dark Ages in Europe. It is a plan that began with the removal of the Palestinian people from their land, then with the defeat of Egypt in 1967, then in the war of extermination that the world is seeing now…
What I do not like, nor do I understand, is that all our Arab peoples do not express support or rejection of the genocide practiced by Israel.
What I do not like and do not understand is that it is not true that not a single university in the Arab world has allowed its youth to declare their discontent with what is happening in Gaza and Palestine.
If there is religious-political immorality in the West, there is submissiveness and submission that suffices with statements in the East.
“There is still hope in Egypt.”
