Ahlan Arabic fans! Here is the English translation of the last article by the Egyptian journalist Ahmad Bahgat. Bahagat أحــْــمــَــد بــَــهــْــجــَــتْwho worked at Al-Ahram Newspaper for a long time. He had a daily column in the newspaper under the heading of “Box of the World صــُـــنــْــدُوق الــدُّنــْـــيــَـــا” in which he dealt with so many topics in an interesting way.
Cain leads Abel to death by James Tissot from (commons.wikimedia.org)
“The Conflict الــصــِّــرَاع” by Ahmad Bahgat, July, 14th, 2009
“The world is basically based on (the idea of) conflict, not agreement … There is a conflict between man and nature as well as a conflict between man and man … Moreover, conflict does exist there inside between man and his inner self.
What we want to say is that conflict is part of the mechanism of life or the technique of life or the style of life … This is a fact that heavenly books told us about and history itself has uncovered.
There is always Cain and Abel … There are Adam’s two sons … One of them thinks in killing and the other thinks in life … The latter will not set his hand even to push death away from himself … There is goodness … and there is evil … Isn’t this life? Isn’t it just a conflict between goodness and evil!?
Long time ago, primitive man went out of his cave with an axe in his hand … There is that wild ox coming towards him … Both of them want to go back with his dinner … Man triumphed because he thinks better than the ox and here he is pulling the ox to his primitive cave to cut its meat and grill some of it on fire to eat. This conflict was promoted with man’s promotion but still is the essence of this conflict. The ancient picture was erased and life got more complicated … its shape was changed and so was the shape of conflict … Countries came to need people to feel secure and conflict came to be between ideas … One idea sees right is the right path … Another idea sees left is the road … A third idea looks east … and with no conflict between all these ideas, there is no life.
Life is a conflict between ideas for the sake of generating new ideas, and this leads to the development of life … Life get spoiled if it is governed only by one type of thought and hence dictatorships were a certain step behind to peoples … and democracy was the only way for progress.”
Read the Arabic article here
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Peace ســلام /Salam/
