Five Types of Honourable Citizen
Five Types of Honourable Citizen
by Alaa El Aswany
Imagine a man is going home one evening and suddenly, as he's going up the stairs to his apartment, he sees some criminal trying to rape a woman. The girl is calling for help and trying to escape but she doesn't succeed and her attacker rips her clothes off and started to rape her. The man's reaction to the crime taking place before his eyes would be one of the following:
1. the man rushes to save the woman from being raped, even at the risk of his own life. In this case he would be a brave man, a chivalrous man of honour.
2. the man refrains from helping the woman himself but he rushes up to his apartment and calls the police. In this case he would be an ordinary man who is not exceptionally brave but at least feels a responsibility to try to prevent the crime.
3. the man goes up to his apartment, resumes his normal life, completely forgets about the crime and leaves the woman to her fate. In this case the man would be a coward with no conscience.
4. the man not only refuses to try to save the woman but also insults her while she is being raped before his eyes and accuses her of being a slut who likes being raped. In this case the man would give an ugly example of human behaviour and in my opinion would need psychiatric help to find out how he managed to ignore his conscience in order to blame the victim and make fun of her. Unfortunately some Egyptians have recently adopted this shameful way of thinking. Policemen and soldiers have committed heinous crimes against demonstrators at the Maspero building, in Mohamed Mahmoud Street and at the cabinet building. All kinds of crimes have been committed against Egyptian citizens in broad daylight: they have been blinded by shotguns and killed by live ammunition, and girls have been been stripped by soldiers and dragged along the ground. All these crimes, which have been recorded on videotape, have raised a storm of anger against the military council, both in Egypt and around the world, but some Egyptians continue to play down the importance of the crimes and even blame the victims. The military council loves these people who refuse to speak the truth and unconscionably justify the most heinous crimes, and in its statements it calls them 'honourable citizens'. In the eyes of the military council honourable citizens are those who agree with everything the council does, support its plan to undo the revolution and turn a blind eye to all the heinous crimes for which the council is solely responsible, politically and legally. How is it that can we watch with our own eyes an Egyptian woman being stripped and dragged brutally along the ground by army troops, and then 'honourable citizens' blame her because she was wearing a gown with press-studs rather than buttons? How can we watch our mothers and sisters being dragged along the ground under the boots of soldiers, and then one of these 'honourable citizens' comes out and asks us to forget these crimes and look to the future? What kind of future should we look to before those who killed our sons and violated the honour of our daughters go on trial? These 'honourable citizens' are a strange phenomenon in Egyptian society. I have tried to understand them and I have found that they fall into five categories:
The first category: the loyal minister. Hosni Mubarak's concept of a minister was the same as that of the military council. The first task of any minister can be summed up as defending the decisions of those in power and justifying their mistakes and their crimes. So when all these heinous crimes were committed against Egyptians not a single minister objected or offered his resignation because they understand well that their task is to obey the orders of the military council, just as they used to obey Mubarak's orders. Prime Minister Ganzouri did in fact promise to provide demonstrators with full protection, saying even that he would not allow them to be abused verbally (let alone physically). Ganzouri gave this promise in front of the world's cameras and then the massacres of demonstrators took place in front of the cabinet offices, yet Ganzouri was not embarrassed in the slightest that he had broken his promise and had not kept his word, simply because he considered himself to be working for the military council, whose wishes trump everything.
The second category: the opportunist liberal. This type of 'honourable citizen' is common among university professors, intellectuals and professionals. The opportunist liberals consider themselves more entitled than others to a life of comfort and ease, and are prepared to lie and cheat, cooperate fully with State Security, write reports about their colleagues and voluntarily offer their services to the authorities. They are ready to do anything and trample all values under foot to reach high position and become ministers. They not only turn a blind eye to the heinous crimes committed by the police and army against demonstrators but they are also fully prepared to create political justifications for these crimes. They know that allying oneself with the military council is pure common sense, because whatever changes take place the military council will still be able to give them the privileges they want.
The third category: the hateful extremist. This type of 'honourable citizen' embraces an extremist interpretation of religion that inspires hatred and violence rather than love and tolerance. The extremists' mistaken understanding of Islam drives them to show hatred and contempt for all those who disagree with them. The extremists hate Western Christians, Egyptian Copts, Baha'is, Shi'ites, Sufis, liberals, leftists and secularists. They simply hate everyone except those who share their extremism, and they considered those who disagree with them to be misguided and sinful, or infidels, shameless degenerates or foreign agents plotting against Islam. They believe that they alone understand true religion and possess the whole truth, and they consider that they have the right to impose their opinions on others by force. The hateful extremists need conspiracy theories in order to maintain their extremism. They firmly believe that Islam is the victim of internal conspiracies by secularists, liberals and leftists, as well as of major foreign conspiracies by Western Crusader powers. No one can convince the hateful extremists that the liberals and leftists are patriotic Egyptians who paid a high price in the revolution, in which no religious slogans were raised. You cannot convince them that all Egyptians leaders, from Saad Zaghloul to Gamal Abdel Nasser, were liberals or leftists who believed in a civil state and who embraced Islam as a great religion, not as a political programme to be used to obtain power. The extremists cannot be convinced that the Western governments are interested only in their own interests, as is proven by the fact that the United States' closest ally after Israel is the Saudi regime, which is the source of Wahhabism in the world, that the Taliban movement was set up and supported for years by the CIA , until it turned against the United States, and that General Zia-ul-Haq, the former Pakistani president, was a CIA agent and at the same time applied a strict Islamic system with Saudi support. In fact the United States is hostile to Hizbollah and Hamas because they are resistance movements, not because they are Islamic. Whatever you tell the extremists they will not listen, and probably they will insult you and will not believe you, because they only believe what their sheikh says in the mosque. They believe that all those who disagree with them are at odds with Islam itself and are therefore enemies of God deserving of all kinds of punishment and chastisement. So, while millions of people across the world were moved by the video showing the innocent Egyptian woman being dragged and kicked by a group of soldiers, on one of the Wahhabi channels I saw three well-known bearded sheikhs mocking the woman, questioning her honour and making fun of her. These sheikhs behave like that because they do not want to upset the military council, so that the council will hand power over to them. They also consider that such abuse only warrants anger when the victim is a member of one of their groups, but if it happens to an ordinary Egyptian woman, her honour does not merit defending because she is detached from the true Islam that they alone represent. These sheikhs, who practise the worst kinds of chauvinism and moral decadence by making fun of a defenceless woman attacked by soldiers, still insist on talking in the name of Islam, when they have nothing to do with any religion or any humanitarian values.
The fourth category: the corrupt collaborators. This category of 'honourable citizen' is common because of widespread corruption. Under Mubarak Egyptians had three options: to emigrate, to take part in corruption in order to live, or to reject corruption and pay a heavy price. Thousands of Egyptians did not join the National Democratic Party but they did indulge in corrupt practices in their jobs. They convinced themselves that Egypt would never reform so they had to go along with corruption in order to live. These were the civil servants who took bribes, the teachers who formed private-lesson mafias, the doctors who sold banned medicines and engineers who sold inspection reports, and so on. These corrupt people were completely taken by surprise by the revolution and of course they did not take part in it and did not like it. The revolution proved to them that they had surrendered and were corrupt while millions of young people, the same age as their children, had risen up and paid for freedom and dignity with their blood. They hate the revolution because it reminds them that their corrupt practices were not inevitable but a choice, and also because real democratic change will bring an end to the corrupt earnings to which they are accustomed. These corrupt people favour cracking down on and killing the revolutionaries so that things go back to how they were in the past and they can resume their corrupt practices.
The fifth category: the frightened submissives. These people submitted to, accepted and accommodated to the repression of the Mubarak regime. If a man of this kind was stopped by a police officer young enough to be his son, and slapped and insulted, he would consider the humiliation to be just an unpleasant experience to be forgotten while he resumed life as normal. The submissives are always frightened of any change that happens in Egypt because they feel that their security is much more important than their dignity. The breakdown in law and order and the various manufactured crises put such pressure on these 'honourable citizens' that they were terrified. They refuse to sympathize with the demonstrators who are killed and the women who are abused because to do so would lead them to criticize the military council and they are psychologically incapable of thinking in isolation from an authority that protects them, even if it also represses them and violates their human rights.
Finally, the heinous crimes committed against the demonstrators has proven two facts: first, that most Egyptians are still loyal to the revolution and determined to fulfil its objectives. They fully understand the military council's repeated attempts to break the will of the revolutionaries and reverse the revolution; and second, the Mubarak regime that oppressed Egypt for three decades brought the country to rock bottom in every sphere of life, but it also produced some mental and intellectual deformities that have made some Egyptians unable to see the truth or take the ethical positions imposed by their responsibilities as humans.
Completely achieving the objectives of the revolution is the only way to build a democratic state, and it will also ensure that Egyptians recover their mental and intellectual health, so that they can become truly honourable citizens.
Democracy is the solution.
email address: dralaa57@yahoo.com
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