How important are you? Or, better yet, how important do you think you are? That is a tricky question for most of us since we seem to be the “social animals” we say we are, we want recognition and a show of influence. Around here there isn’t much space left for those who actually strive to be “important.” All the positions are sort of “taken.”
If you have money in this country, you are one among millions. So that “blessing” in itself is useless. Even those who don’t have money claim to have it in order to win recognition. You see a young man, who works for a small salary, driving a car a millionaire would dream of. Cheap credit and very un-Islamic money business make this possible. It is better then to claim poverty since we, of all nations on earth, do not have poor people around.
There is another way to be “important.” It is called “title yourself academically.” The way PhDs are given around here and in places like Egypt, the only thing you need is time and money. The education part of it has long been a redundant aspect of a process where people are interested in a title and not in a book. One such young man around here is writing a thesis about the “Gung-ho” approach in management studies and the effect of this silly concept on the organization he works for. My question to him was “how many people in your organization understand what Gung-ho means, let alone its effect?” I was not talked to since.
A third way to become “important” is to write poetry. This is big business around here. If you have the money, like many do, you hire a down-and-out poet and have him compose lyrics and couplets to describe the way you feel on a certain morning. If you have enough money, however, you can get one of the popular singers to sing your trash and you assume a pen name that sounds dramatic: Something like “the one fallen on his wooden sword.” In Arabic, you can manage to get that phrase in one or two words.
Despite the harrowing events of the past few years and their consequences, we have yet to wake up to the painful fact that we, collectively, are not “important” at all. If, say, we want to copy the Italians and name one of our airports Leonardo Da Vinci, Arab-style, we have to go back a thousand years to find someone who is worth the effort. On the scientific front, we have stopped all activities since one of us discovered the distilling process and called the product alcohol.
Speaking of the Renaissance, Italian aristocracy of the sixteenth century used to send their empty carriages to a friend’s funeral if the deceased friend was not of the same class. You can call it “measured respect.” We can take succor and find hope in this practice since it might mean that the other nations of this earth might simply send their empty carriages (or tanks) to our day when history has passed us by and Gung-ho turned to Inshallah.
