Ever since I can remember as a child growing up in Cairo, I have been always afraid of those un-identified hands –sometimes referred to in the diminutive as fingers–that mess with the internal harmony of Egyptian society. I was warned not to pick up toys or candy from strangers or that were left unattended on the streets, because they might be placed there by those hands. Later, I heard that any unrest, protest, demonstration, and even the mere rise in prices of goods, was nothing but the action of those hands. Even the failed attempts at setting the early steps toward democracy in Egypt were always destroyed by those foreign hands, which did not want to allow it to reach our borders. That, it was said, would lead to the inevitable escape of Egypt’s sovereignty from the firm grip of foreign colonizing forces whose hands always succeeded in dooming our innocent baby steps.
Those hands knew no limits. They were even accused of sending women stricken with HIV to lure Egyptian youth to acquire the disease, of directing sharks to swim into the Red Sea from Eilat to Sharm El Sheikh and blowing up touristic sites in Sinai to scare away tourists, and even of starting the Egyptian revolution in January 2011. They were even contradictory at times, having been blamed for keeping Mubarak in power for thirty years to maintain Egypt’s failed state in perpetual limbo, and afterwards for bringing him down to tinker with Egypt’s stability. In other words, those hands were omnipotent, and ruthless, and were determined to destroy Egypt’s present in order to guarantee its gloomy future. The reward of course was the predominance of the ever greedy imperialistic forces of the West, or more recently, the rise of the Judeo–Christian alliance, against the ever victimized Islamic states. And the proof was President George W. Bush’s statement that a “crusade” must be carried out to combat terrorism.
But lately, and since the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took over both the legislative and executive branches of the government of Egypt, we have been incessantly hearing about those “foreign hands that mess with our transitional period”. It has become the common refrain in the song and dance of the almost daily announcements or decrees that the SCAF comes up with. Those foreign hands had even trained and bred the April 6 movement, one of the important forces that started the revolution, which brought the SCAF into power in the first place. Not only did those hands help bring about the revolution, but –once again– they are determined to destroy it, or halt its progress–who knows for whose benefit–but they are utterly unscrupulous nonetheless. Perhaps they are interested in evil doing without strategy anyway; just to be bad. Those hands have gone as far as to incite hatred between Muslims, who constitute the overwhelming majority of Egyptians, and the Coptic Christian minority there, in order to fracture the internal peace of the country.
Yes, this is their latest indictable deed, and the whole wide world has heard about it lately, through the announcements made by Essam Sharaf, the Egyptian prime minister, by Osama Heikal, the minister of information, and Sheikh Ahmed El Tayeb, head of al-Azhar. Those damned hands yet again. They succeeded in instilling anger in the hearts of the naïve Copts, who had heard that for the fourth time this year alone, a house of worship of theirs had been burnt and destroyed (in previous cases, also flattened), by the hands of mobs demanding that churches should not bare crosses, or display domes, as these hurt their eyes. So they take things in their own hands, having received orders from their religious leaders and sheikhs in their mosques. Those foul hands of foreign powers –for they couldn’t possibly be Egyptian, succeeded in forcing the governor of the region to come on TV and state that the Copts built the Church without proper permits, and that zealous Muslims rectified the situation. Of course those hands have covered his eyes to the proper function of the law and order that he supposedly represents. I said they are cunning hands, didn’t I?
The conniving foreign minds then proceeded to extend their hands to incite the Copts to demonstrate, in an apparently peaceful way, marching from Shoubra–a district where they have a relative preponderance–to Maspero, where the Cairo TV and Radio building lies, and where they have demonstrated before peacefully. However, the plot does not reach its fruition until those same abhorrent hands would somehow raise outrage and indignation in the hearts of resentful Muslims, who plainly cannot view Egypt as a Muslim nation while it harbors ten or fifteen million infidels, without cloaking them with the status of dhimmis, or “protected”( subservient) people, not real citizens. This is what the new (for Egypt) Wahhabi Islam has been teaching them for years now. This aside, those foreign forces manage to lure them into attacking the marching Copts, and to somehow join forces with the military in teaching them a lesson they’ll never forget. As a matter of fact, we are beginning to witness reports of arrests of foreign figures, incriminated one way or the other, in shooting at both the demonstrators and army personnel alike.
Ingenious, isn’t it? At least twenty five Christian youths dead, and three hundred and fifty injured.
And no one has done anything about those who burnt the church this time either, while those who were killed were mourned, and buried. Aren’t we all awaiting our turn?
Those foreign hands that mess with Egypt!
Sherif Meleka, an Egyptian-born novelist, poet, and columnist, is a physician specializing in pain management at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, MD.