Reflections Over The Nile

Revolution, is a Carnival of humanity, it brings out the instinctive good in humans. There's an Arabic idiom called "قهر", I've been thinking of an accurate English translation of the word and all I can come up with was Servitude, a moral oppression of the inherent instinct of human dignity. What is happening in Egypt now is exactly that, a deliberate attempt to break the human spirit, with the greatest force possible. Egypt's Tahrir Square has become a mini Egypt, a Utopian island of justice and freedom for all, within a land where justice and freedom was bound by participating in a false hierarchy based on loyalty to the Godfather through the membership of the ruling party, a key that opened the doors of heaven for the past 3o years to its holders, and soon will open the doors of hell.

If there's a lesson to draw from the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt it's simply this: Corporate Oligarchies are a threat to the stability of the political system. Since the early 1990s, and the rise of capitalist entrepreneurship across the world, a global phenomenon of utilizing the business mind into the mechanism of government emerged into the political scene, hoping it would create the momentum to modernize the bureaucracy into a slimmer more efficient organism.

This "genius" model was presented across the Arab World through western educated professionals with limited experience in the workings of governments and the political process of nations, they came in with a condescending mentality and a bloated ego, not to mention an appetite to use or misuse authority for their corporate minded benefit through government sponsored models with flashy titles across the Arab World, from Tunisia, to Egypt, to Jordan.

Now that this model has proven its naivety, not to mention its immoral justification of greed as ambition, and embezzlement as investment, the question begs itself, now what? They say business and pleasure don't mix, it is even wiser not to mix business with government; public property never was a means of private gain even for long-term political players, it's called public service for a reason, the service of the public rather than the service of the private. It is time to re-evaluate the whole fascination with the western capitalist model, not because it's proven its failure or because socialism is the inevitable economic conclusion as Marx predicted. Both have their stories of success and failure around the world and throughout the years, but because it's not fair for the larger bulk of the population in developing countries such as ourselves to become pawns on a big chess board of financial gain and loss played by the financially able few. The minute you put public property on the market, the political influence that runs through the veins of civil society would swallow the public interest for the benefit of the few, examples of this are mushrooming across the Arab World, including but not limited to Solidaire in Lebanon and Abdali in Jordan, to name a couple.

I'm fascinated with the Egyptian revolution, and I insist on calling it a revolution and not a movement, an uprising, or a protest. It's a social revolution that has already begun redefining and elevating the moral standards and intellectual aspirations of all Arabs in the 21st century. it's the first true exercise of the true nature of the people in the Arab World, breaking all the clichés of religious tensions and gender inequalities -both do exist- but when the national interest is at risk, everything else dissolves into a melting pot of the basic unifying identity; one of the greatest, most noble feelings of humanity. The fighter-jets of the political regimes can't break the spirit of freedom seekers, nor can its camels, horses and mules match the speed of the internet; a lesson to be remembered by all, on both sides of the political fence, across the Arab World.