Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Rabias of the world unite in Egypt

By Ramzy Baroud
Asia Times

""Lord! You know well that my keen desire is to carry out Your commandments and to serve Thee with all my heart, O light of my eyes. If I were free I would pass the whole day and night in prayers. But what should I do when you have made me a slave of a human being?"

These were the words of the female Muslim mystic and poet, Rabia al-Adawiya. Her journey from slavery to freedom served as a generational testament of the resolve of the individual who was armed with faith and nothing else.

Rabia's story is multifarious, and despite the fact that the Muslim saint died over 12 centuries ago, few Egyptians fail to see the centrality of her narrative to their own. In the north of the Nasr City
district, tens of thousands of Egyptians chose the iconic mosque named after her to stage their sit-in and demanded the return to shar'iya (legitimacy) after it was seized in a brazen military coup which ousted elected President Mohamed Morsi on July 3.

Rabia's narrative is essential because it was about freedom. She was born into a very poor family in Basra, Iraq. According to Farid ud-Din Attar who related her story, she was so poor that when she was born the family had nothing to wrap around her, not even oil to light their only lamp. Years later when Rabia was a youth, she was kidnapped and sold into Egyptian slavery as she tried to escape a deadly famine in Iraq.

Rabia didn't exactly challenge her master through organizing strikes and defiant sit-ins. She was alone and dominated by too many powerful forces. So she spent most of the day as a slave, but late at night she would stay up and pray. It was more than praying, but an attempt at reclaiming her humanity, at comprehending the multitude of forces that chained her to earthly relations of slave and master, and in a sense, she tried to discover a level of freedom that could not be granted by a master's wish.

In fact, her true "miracle" was the strength of her faith despite the harshest possible conditions, and her ability to strive for freedom while practically speaking, she remained a slave. It is as if this female poet, a heroin and a saint by the standards of many poor, downtrodden people, managed to redefine the relationship of the ongoing class struggle, and found freedom within herself. It is believed that her inconceivable faith was so strong that her master could not deal with the guilt of holding a saint a slave. So, she was freed.

Regardless of the details, Rabia al-Adawiya's legacy has passed on from one generation of Egyptians to the next. Like her, many of these Egyptians are mostly poor, immensely patient, and are hostage to the same century-old class struggle by which Rabia was defined.

The January 25, 2011 revolution included millions of Rabias fed up with oppression and servitude. But the class division that was highlighted after millions of Egyptians rose against the military coup became clearer than ever. These were the poorest of the poor, long alienated and dehumanized by both the ruling class and the conceited, intellectual groupings of self-described liberals and socialists.

The unprecedented union between Egypt's ruling class and anti-Muslim intellectual elite succeeded, to an extent, in blocking our view from the substantial class struggle underway in Egypt, where the poorest communities - yes, workers and peasants - were leading a historic struggle to reclaim democracy from the upper and middle class intellectuals......"

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