"Sectarian?"

(Below is a piece i wrote for www.kore.uk.com)

   I guess I am now brave enough to admit that I was never pro this revolution. I thought it was unfair to compare ourselves to Tunisia, no two revolutions are the same. Besides, their education rate is the same as ours, multiplied! They are a small country of 10 million, we are 80 million. How will we organise ourselves? How will we make our demands heard? Besides we are a nation that has learned submission before even learning to walk, how will ALL of us walk to our freedom?

Before January 25th, if you had taken a walk down any street in Cairo, you would have seen herds of people with the same expression, disappointment, manifested in many forms.  From the angry faces of the two cab drivers fighting, to the mother yelling at her child to not let go of her hand, each had the same body posture, they walked with their heads down, shoulders dropped and everyone looked like they had just lost a battle. How could you motivate all of these people that have been drenched in disinterest their whole lives to go down and march for their freedom?

Then January 25th came, and what started out as a march initiated by a Facebook group and organized by Twitter enthusiasts, ended up being a march of millions. I, like everyone else became intrigued, so I went down to Tahrir square, and I was in tears.

The first time I went was on Tuesday, the 25th, I couldn’t get in because it was too crowded. Then I went again on the 28th, ‘bloody Friday’. I met a group of friends in a coffee shop next to Mostapha Mahmood mosque and we waited for people to finish their Friday prayers so that we could start the march to Tahrir Square. As we waited, we saw one police truck after the other standing in front of the Mosque, then a friend of mine told me “..there was a rumor last night that Christians will form a cordon around every mosque to allow people to pray in peace”. We all smiled, some of us even teared up, then the rest is history.

We marched that day. I will not go through the horror of that day, but would rather share with you the incredible unity and how organised that march was. People were walking around distributing tear gas masks, then many others followed them with vinegar bottles spraying its contents on our masks to minimize the gas’ effects.  The highlight of those was a girl who used a Victoria’s Secret plastic perfume bottle filled with vinegar. Then when the tear gas bombs erupted, many were walking around screaming “don’t rub your eyes with your hands”, followed by several others carrying tissue rolls to help us dry the tears coming off our eyes, followed by others with Pepsi cans to spray on our faces to help minimize the gas effects. At some point, people would shift positions with those in the first line because it is their turn now ‘to take the first blow of gas bombs’. As for the girls, the men were heavily surveying them, every time the march would start running, the men would surround us, and guide us to the safest side of the march for protection.

This attitude is what embarrassed me from having this previous anti revolution mentality. I was too busy focusing on how defeated we have always been that I forgot how caring and peaceful we, the Egyptians, have always been. You would want these beautiful people to win because they deserved it, it made you feel that it is not just a fight for freedom, but rather a fight to flourish the good heart that everyone has in this country, and was screaming to prove its existence. It was a wake up call to a human side in us that we never thought was that big. As for the love of Egypt, I wish I could share it with you, but my emotional sentiments will override my writing capabilities and this article will never be concluded!

When the Alexandria bombings of Christians happened on the 1st of January 2011, we were all dumbfounded. We all watched the news and couldn’t believe this was happening in our country. We never realised that there is such a thing as ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ until this bombing happened. We started looking up the word ‘sectarian’ in the dictionary because we honestly had no clue what it meant. Everyone was terrified that it would split us up, because all of a sudden we became accused of an issue that we never understood because it simply never existed in our heads, and this is coming from me: a Muslim who went to a Christian school for ten years. None of us foresaw these bombings, if the news here had announced that the Loch Ness monster has been found and has been hiding all this time in the Nile river, people would have believed it more than the Alex bombings. So when the Coptic Christmas came up on January the 7th, several Muslims decided to go to church, some attended the ceremonies and some stood outside to protect the Christians inside.



And when the January 25th revolution happened, it did confirm to us that these sectarian issues have nothing to do with us, because by the time I took that picture and I shared it on Twitter, I thought I was simply sharing a nice sight, as this was perhaps the tenth time Egyptians had seen Christians and Muslims protecting each other during their prayers. I never expected it to be such a worldwide sensation as it was
communicating a gesture that we were all used to seeing here. Funnily enough, my Egyptian friends on Facebook didn’t share it because they never felt it was newsworthy.

You may choose to believe me or not, I am of no profession to preach about what is and what is not Sectarian in my country. I am simply one of the 80 million people who loves their country, who believes in the good in it, in the kindness of its people, in their immense ability to believe, to build and to smile for a better tomorrow. And that it is an amazing privilege to be Egyptian, and we are all grateful for January the 25th for re-igniting this pride in all of us.

(Post Written by Nevine Zaki Yfrog Photo by Nevine Zaki: Nevine Zaki is a freelance writer and copywriter from Cairo, Egypt.  She’s an Egyptian Muslim, social media enthusiast and avid tweeter whose tweets and Yfrog photos gained a global following during the marches and protests at Tahrir Square, Cairo following the ‘January 25th revolution’.
Nevine is best known outside of Egypt for her photo of ‘Christians protecting Muslims during their prayers’ which immediately went viral with over a third of a million Yfrog views and almost 100 thousand retweets and Facebook likes within a month of being uploaded, not to mention its international use by mainstream media outlets.)

(The original piece can be found on http://worththeask.com/2011/02/sectarian/)