Photo logical than 1,000 words!

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The first photo I have in my collection is a photo of the official delegation of the Kuwaiti and British Prime Ministers for their last meeting. Members of the Kuwaiti delegation sat across face to face with the British delegation, and it was clear that the member of the British delegation were preoccupied noting down the minutes of the meeting between the two prime ministers.

As for the members of the Kuwaiti delegation, none of them thought of writing down what was being said. Rather, they were content, as usual, with hands on their cheeks.

These people are not to be blamed for their behavior. This is what they have learned, or we have learned from those who are older than us, from the curricula of our schools and from our customs and traditions.

Noting down and documenting history are not among them, that is why we are very happy when we read the text of a letter sent by a merchant in Kuwait 100 years ago to his brother in Pompeii, and we put the letter in the museum and preserve it as a rare thing, not only for its moral value, but also for the rarity of such documents in a society that was and still does many things verbally.

The marriage contract, for example, which for a few years was the most dangerous thing in the lives of 90% of us, was verbal. Even the five or six copies of the Qur’an collected and written down by the Caliph Uthman bin Affan and the Muslims were unable to preserve them despite their great importance. Rather, all of their original copies were lost, and only parts here and there remained.

The picture of the two presidents in an incident that took place more than fifty years ago brought back memories when I was working at the Gulf Bank when the Scottish manager ‘McCloud’ asked me to join him as part of a training program in international relations, when he received a delegation from a big Japanese bank.

The meeting, which lasted for about an hour, was attended by three members of the delegation, during which they did not stop asking carefully prepared questions, and the three wrote down what McCloud answered and then suddenly left under the pretext of having another appointment.

McCloud asked me for my impressions of the meeting, and I asked him why the three men wrote down what he was saying, not only one. I sighed, and said in Arabic: ‘May God help us’.

As for the second picture, it dates back to 1957, and it is of the Sheikh of Al-Azhar and the Grand Imam ‘Ahmad Hassan Al-Baqouri’, standing with his (unveiled) daughter, who appears to be of mature age, and her hair is tied in beautiful braids behind her back, wearing a dress that shows her arms, with the following comment on the photo sent by a person that says: If an ordinary girl, the daughter of an ordinary man wears a similar dress, a lot of hurtful words would have been hurled at her and her father.

The late Egyptian actress Faten Hamama explained our situation by saying: “We were respectable societies with liberal clothes and bright minds. We now live in loose societies, with modest clothes and rotten minds.”

e-mail: [email protected]

By Ahmad alsarraf

This news has been read 10169 times!

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