Saturday: baby milk bottle official price = 10 pounds
Sunday: baby milk bottle not available in markets
Monday: army goes down to the market with 30 million milk bottles, the price: 30 pounds, the media goes like: “the army saved our babies, long live the army”
This is a routine scene in lands of horror.
The previous scene sums up the role of our government in our lives, a direct enemy you try to avoid day by day, and freedom of expression is guaranteed on the walls of bathrooms in prisons.
Faceless states and everything about it was dark.
Based on the above, we had to find mechanisms to ensure us to life in the light of repression, but we are lucky, all we had to do is follow a system of solidarity that exists already in our values and upbringing. One of the basics of this system, the most simple rule of it, you find in the words of prophet Mohammad: “he does not enter the paradise, he who whoever sleeps full of, while his neighbor is hungry”.
You find also in our beliefs that god will be on your side as long as you are on the side of your brother.
Mostafa Khalifa, the Syrian novelist, in “The cochlear” is talking about a young man who was arrested for twenty years, the charge - muslim brotherhood. The guy was a… Christian. In the same novel: talking about a group of young people, call them silf (Fedayeen): their mission is receiving torture instead of the elderly and sick people and those who lost and those who lost their endurance, can you imagine that the (Fidayeen) were singing under torture: “O prison darkness come, we love darkness, inevitably after this long night daybreak is coming”
By the way altruism is still there and it is main reason why the Syrians in Syria are still alive.
Social solidarity is in its worst conditions in this war but still can feed the hungry and keeps warm to those who are cold. For example the project of “grace conversation” in Damascus which provides medicine for thousands of families from excess medication at other families, and also “maoayed alrahman” which are food tables spent by the Syrians with very high annual cost ( 50 million dollars) in 2014 through all the cities. In addition to internal displacement thousands of families are participating with their homes and food and many other live examples.
The shape of our lives makes us one body: we know our relatives, enjoy their joys, get sad for their sadness. The satisfaction of our grandparents is as important as our parents.
The poor celebrate double in our holidays because of a race for goodness, because the concept of “Eid” in the perception of Islam linked to “Zakat” which is basically the process of cleansing the money by giving the poor his legitimate right of the money which is 2,5 percent of annual profits in secret. If there is no secrecy Allah does not accept it .
And many annual grants to the poor some of it linked to time, and some linked to personal events like “Akika” which is slaughtering two rams and distributing them to the poor when the child is born.
Of course every rule has exception but the united community can overcome it.
Every citizen has moral responsibilities and he is already indebted to the community.
There is no perfection of course, being in Europe allows me to discover the value of freedom, human value, accept differences, respect the personal space, working hard. To be precise I have to admit that the western civilization is the mirror which we see the deterioration of our situation through it, and the image we want to be closer to.
The respect for the human person, the system of rights and duties, which I respected from the first day. But living in the middle east gives you the chance to see the dark face of that world, the military training field I came from taught me to not believe the existing models, the part of relations of states specifically.
I’m talking here about the weapons/arms markets, and other markets based on the dead bodies of other states. Especially after watching the news talking about Aleppo, Mosul … etc Cheap games to prolong the war, unlimited support for the parties of the conflict, in exchange for contracts and concessions we will know in the future.
Transforming the world into struggles areas to gain wealth, and safe areas to enjoy the wealth.
Religion also had a lion’s share in the misuse and legitimization of wars has nothing to do with religion and history is full of examples. The equation of religion and ignorance had a devastating impact through history and nowadays it is very clear that faith without understanding is more dangerous than earthquakes, with corrupt regimes support hate speech that all you need to have new Libya, and with governments are the direct enemy to their citizens you will have Syria or Iraq if you are lucky , and in order to not equate the killer with the victim, I blame the governments for expanding the circle of ignorance, and put the platforms in the service of semiconductor scientists and intellectuals.
Under these conditions the best thing you can get to is the Egyptian model, with hungry ignorant people afraid to be like those in Syria or Iraq, governed by fascist goverments.
But I believe in the communion of civilizations.
The ashes of war go away by time, and civilization remains.
For some reason we live short lives, nobody knows the reason more than you, nobody can tell you what is the ideal way of thinking, but for sure at least in the civilized world we can be like ants villages, be single hand for the good of future generations, to get a world does not force you to be a refugee, a world where mankind life in the first consideration, morality and intelligence to regulate relations.
My message to the reader:
- Keep reading
- No one has a monopoly on truth, it is somewhere in the middle, I don’t have it, but I have part of it, we complete each other, you and me are pieces of the puzzle. Let’s talk with each others, accept each other.
The production of this article was supported by Op3n Fellowships - an ongoing program for community contributors during May - November 2016.