‘He who laughs last, laughs best’

This news has been read 14079 times!

THE issue of freedom, whether for humans, birds or any living creature, is a very important issue, and many die, or end their lives if they are captured. The world has never known creativity without freedom, and Muslims are no exception. In the short and only period of their history, in which they felt freedom, they reached the top in many vital sciences, a period that extended for nearly two hundred years from the age of the Abbasid state (750 AD – 1258 AD), and the Mongols and the fl ood and decay, came after and continues until today.

Our colleague Samir Atallah says that China will soon become economic power outclassing others, and it may be the fi rst in many fi elds, and it will be a force to be reckoned with, but its victory will miss civilization, and it will pass a time before we know who their Shakespeare is, if they have one, and who is their Newton, or Da Vinci, etc.

The civilization of this world before the astonishing emergence of China are stacks of Islamic, Greek, Roman, Germanic, Aryan, Egyptian, and many others, and nothing in the civilization of Greater China is equivalent to these civilizations. If we search, we will fi nd very little, and it is absolutely not enough to assemble something like the Louvre, for example. Therefore, the race is very long and diffi cult between the Chinese imitative giant, and the authentic Western giant. China will fi nd that the list of its inventions, literature and arts is very small compared with what humanity has accumulated over the years.

Without English, China would not have another Hollywood, another theater, or another Iliad, nor will it hold the annual French Mountain Conquer Cycling Tournament, nor will it present 100 years of singers who have captivated the world. There is no doubt that China’s heritage, literature, and sciences are not small. It is a country of the future, and it competes for the future, not the past. It does not have German philosophers, French poets, Oxford of Britain, or Harvard of America. China is a modern state in every sense of the word, or more precisely, it is a strange state that did not emerge from its historical isolation until forty years ago to fi nd itself surrounded by thousands of chapters of other civilizations. The Chinese stand out at Harvard, Stanford, and major universities as the best students, but there is no other Harvard in Beijing today.

China was a great civilization based on the philosophy of closure, and the “Great Wall”, fearing the inside and fearing the outside, while other empires were sweeping everything in front of them and when the Italian traveler “Marco Polo” arrived, he found it a self-suffi cient world that does not care of what’s going on outside its borders, and most Chinese still don’t care what’s outside their country. For many years to come, there will be many things from China in our cities, villages and markets, at prices that no one can compete with, but in bookstores Mao’s red books will continue to collect dust on bookshelves. All this competition and struggle for leadership is taking place around us, but it does not seem to mean much to us.

Placing a plate of beans or a few pieces of falafel and a bundle of bread on the dining table for ninety percent of Arab families comes naturally before paying attention to the global confl ict or our position on global warming, or our position among the countries of the world, in this way the peoples were domesticated and the livelihood was made the fi rst and the last in our interests.

❑ ❑ ❑

e-mail: [email protected]

By Ahmad alsarraf

This news has been read 14079 times!