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When the Zionist, European and American war of annihilation against the valiant Gaza intensified; With the intention of eradicating the free Palestinian resistance and uprooting it from its roots, in the last quarter of the year 2023 AD, I wrote a reminder of the poem (Palestine) by the engineer poet Ali Mahmoud Taha 1901 – 1949 AD, and I referred to the musician Muhammad Abdel Wahab 1902 – 1991 AD, who composed it and sang it, and I quoted from its beginning. Saying:
“My brother, the oppressors have gone beyond the limit…so the right of jihad and the right of redemption
Should we let them usurp Arabism…the glory of fatherhood and mastery?
And they are not other than the clanking of swords…they answer us with a voice or an echo
So your hair was stripped of its sheath… and it no longer has the right to be sheathed.”
It was written by the poet, composed by the musician, and sung by the musician, and the Arabs responded to it wherever an Arab lived, everywhere in the world, in the year of the First Nakba, 1948 AD. Then, in 1953 AD, President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970 AD) ordered the establishment of Voice of the Arabs Radio, and it began broadcasting it in the form of an intense radio program of no more than thirty minutes.
The Voice of the Arabs program broadcast the song in its inaugural episode, accompanied by an interview with the musician Muhammad Abdel Wahab, while the author of its lyrics, the poet Ali Mahmoud Taha, had died four years ago. That is, one year after the date of writing the poem, 1948 AD. Then an intellectual friend commented on what I wrote by saying: “If such a poem had been written, composed, sung, and heard in our days, everyone who participated in writing it, composing it, singing it, broadcasting it, publishing it, and listening to it would have been arrested, then brought to trial on charges of promoting terrorism and incitement to it, and then they would be sentenced to death. Sentences of imprisonment for many years.”
Culture of normalization
I commented on the comment of the intellectual friend by saying that his words are correct, and that his observation is completely correct. What successive generations knew as honorable resistance is today classified under the terms of terrorism. The culture of resistance – which took root over more than two centuries with the vanguards of the European colonial invasion at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century – gradually disappeared from official dictionaries, and became an old, abandoned language, to be replaced – forcibly and forcibly – by the culture of normalization with the essence of colonialism. Europe, and its final conclusion, which is Israel.
Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the Levant in 1798 AD, to the founding of Israel in 1948 AD, to the Zionist war of genocide on Gaza in 2023 AD, culture was – and still is – the first bulwark of resistance, before weapons and after weapons, with an important difference: culture belongs to us, in our consciences, in the depths of our souls. In the depth of our formation, in the folds of our taste and feeling, in the layers of the civilizational spirit rooted in time and place, we do not import them – like weapons – from our enemies according to their conditions, quantities and prices. The enemy controls the arms market, but he does not control our culture except when we sever ourselves from our civilizational commitment. When our confidence in the foundations of our existence is shaken.
Luring
Two men, one of whom was illiterate and neither read nor wrote, Muhammad Ali Pasha 1805 – 1848 AD, and Gamal Abdel Nasser 1954 – 1970 AD, both of them were aware that our first existential dilemma is the West’s aggression, ambitions, and tendencies to control us. The two men were also sufficiently aware that the West’s aggression supports and increases… Its danger is the West’s superiority, as they were on a sound perception of the fact that the West’s superiority is cultural, mental, scientific, values, and moral, before it is a material superiority in weapons and the strength of the armies. But the two men’s awareness – alone – was not enough to protect them from the encroaching Western threat.
Russia, France, and Britain – despite all their hostilities – came together to break the Pasha’s fleets in “Nawarin Al-Bahriyya” in 1827 AD, and then went to lure him to his final death. Britain lured him to invade the Levant, and France tried to lure him to invade Algeria. He fell into the British lure, and escaped. The French lured him, and he invaded the Levant and actually possessed it, and ascended to the throne of a nascent empire of his own making. Then the whole West returned, without exception, and gathered against it, crushed it, and returned it to the banks of the Nile in 1841 AD, spending the remainder of his life until he died in 1849 AD.
Window to the west
This illiterate man lived his life maneuvering with European powers – especially Britain and France – and he was confidently certain that the goal of each of them was to seize control of his seat of rule. Next year, 2025 AD, two hundred years will have passed since the first scientific missions sent by the Pasha to Europe. After twenty years of experiencing power, exercising rule, and experiencing the two realities: Islamic and European, his sound instinct and sharp political instinct guided him to the fact that he had to start where the West left off, there was no other option, but he did not integrate into the West, nor was he impressed, nor did he surrender, nor did he lose his position. Its immunity did not undermine the components of local culture, it only opened a window through which some of the rays of the rising Western civilization could enter.
The Pasha postponed – as long as he could – the fall of Egypt under the direct rule of the West, but that ray that entered or infiltrated from the civilization of the West was the introduction and then the prelude to Western influence, civil influence, economic hegemony, and then military occupation, not much more than twenty years after His death.
Summary of the lesson: You can possess weapons, produce them or import them, you can establish armies, you can plan wars, fight them and win them, and establish an empire in less than two decades, but without a cultural, intellectual, value-based, subjective, superior, advanced base. And strong, you will not be able to keep it all, but you will lose it all.
The defeat of the Pasha’s project was a cultural defeat. The Pasha’s armies were victorious, but the Pasha’s culture was defeated. Europe did not win the final battle against the Pasha with armies – with the exception of the Nuwarin War – but it won it with what it had of precedence and superiority, balance of nerves, long breaths, accumulated wisdom, and colonial savvy. .
The Pasha imported some of the modern culture from Europe, but he did not master a new culture within Egyptian territory. The Pasha – from a cultural perspective – was the last of the Mamluks and the first of the new Pharaohs, and I read this description from Dr. Gamal Hamdan in the book: “The Personality of Egypt.” The Pasha’s culture was a mixture of late Mamlukism, which was of course mostly decadent, and then neo-Pharaonicism, of which he was the founder. Pharaonic authoritarian state that borrowed from the West everything that increases its ability to oppress, control, bind, and tighten control over the people.
Timeless symbolism
When Israel was founded in 1948 AD, Abdel Nasser was thirty years old, while Muhammad Ali Pasha had died approximately a hundred years ago, and just as the Pasha came as an officer in an Ottoman division; With the intention of fighting the French and evacuating them from Egypt, Abdel Nasser participated as an infantry officer in the First Arab-Zionist War in 1948 AD. The Pasha’s war against the French shaped his awareness of Europe. Abdel Nasser’s war against Zionism shaped his awareness against the entire Western formation: old European colonialism, new American colonialism, Zionism, and then what Abdel Nasser used to call; The forces of Arab reaction, by which he meant the forces of moderation, whether within Egypt or the Arab world.
If the Pasha – from the perspective of political culture – was the last of the Mamluks and the first of the new pharaohs, then Abdel Nasser – as he was rightly described in the aforementioned reference – was the last of the great pharaohs, and the first of the new Mamluks. The High Dam is enough to make him a great pharaoh, but his political tactics, both at home and abroad, link him to the political legacy of the late Maliks.
If the Pasha’s armies were victorious, while his culture was defeated, the opposite is true in the case of Abdel Nasser: his armies were defeated, and his culture was victorious. Abdel Nasser – who did not win a single war – remained a symbol of resistance, with eternal symbolism in the Arab conscience, as well as in the culture of the Third World, and as in the heritage of national liberation movements. His opponents attribute this to his media, power, and influence, but that is a very limited part of the truth, and the truth is that Abdel Nasser – although he crushed his predecessors and annihilated his competitors – was, in his person, the embodiment of all the national virtues of his predecessors and competitors.
Abdel Nasser was the essence and essence of Egyptian patriotism in all its eras, just as the Pasha did when he lived maneuvering with the Europeans. So that they would not break it, and then in the end they broke it. Likewise, Abdel Nasser maneuvered the British and the Americans. Until he was able, in less than two years, to gain absolute control over the reins of government in Egypt without the slightest competitor or dispute, then he revealed to them – that is, the English and the Americans – an authentic, national, revolutionary face. The difference here between the Pasha and Abdel Nasser is that the Pasha lured him and then broke him, while Abdel Nasser was preparing ambushes for himself and arranging traps for himself. He entered the Yemeni ambush of his own free will, and went to trap the setback with all his mental powers.
The similarity between the two men – other than the brokenness of the two projects – is the culture of independence, and this explains the secret of their lively, and perhaps noisy, presence until this moment.
The culture of independence here means the direction of history. Which direction do we choose, which path do we take, what price do we pay, which war do we fight, and what identity do we have?
This is next Thursday’s article, God willing.
