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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