دار بيبليون
Dr Lwiis Saliba
Speech delivered on the World Day of Non-Violence: Gandhi and Non-Violence in the Arab World, 2/10/2021
It gives me great pleasure, from this part of the world still mired in the darkness of violence, to greet the participants and meditators on this happy occasion of the anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi and the dawn of non-violence in the modern world, a day of the year that is rightly transformed into the International Day of Non-Violence.
A region mired in the darkness of violence, I say, but perhaps it is the darkness that precedes the dawn of light. And there are many signs that this dawn is beginning to emerge in our vast Arab world. The limited time of this speech does not allow me to cover everything, so I will limit my presentation to the most important ones, especially in three countries, and the lessons and implications that can be drawn from them.
How have the countries of the Arab world interacted with the message of non-violence, and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the model of living peaceful struggle that he presented, and what effect has it had on this world?
Gandhism first in Lebanon
And the beginning was most likely in Lebanon, that small country in size, which is often measured by the depth of its influence rather than by its small size on the map. In 1927, the Lebanese writer Omar Fakhoury published his translation of the biography of Mahatma Gandhi, which had been written by the French writer and Nobel Prize winner Romain Rolland and published in Paris in 1924. It was the first Arabic book published on Gandhi. Omar Fakhoury was impressed by the national movement that Gandhi embodied at that time, and he wrote a number of articles on the subject, and his admiration and interest culminated in translating this book, and presenting it as a gift to the readers of his magazine Al-Kashaf.
Egypt the Arab country most influenced by Gandhi
Egypt, the leading Arab state and one that has become familiar with the leadership of the Arab world in its struggle against colonialism and in its renaissance, had the largest share in following the Mahatma’s movement and his approaches, especially since both countries: India and Egypt were united by the same calamity: British colonialism.
In August 1931, Gandhi went to Britain, representing the Congress party, to participate in the second round of the Round Table, which would discuss a solution to the situation in India. His ship arrived from the Indian Ocean, crossed the Suez Canal and stopped at Port Said. The Mahatma wanted to get off the ship to meet the Egyptian leaders, but the British would not allow him to do so, fearing the impact of this meeting on the situation in Egypt. A number of leaders of the Egyptian Wafd party, led by party chief Mustafa al-Nahhas, as well as a group of thinkers and writers, met Gandhi on the deck of his ship which had stopped at Port Said. Mrs Safiya, the widow of national leader Saad Zaghloul, was among those welcomed because of her late husband’s friendship with Gandhi. One of the members of this high Egyptian delegation was the prince of Arab poets of the time, Ahmad Shawqi (16/10/1868-14/10/1932). He recited a powerful poem to welcome the Mahatma that Egyptians still recite to this day:
Children of Egypt, raise the laurel and greet the hero of India
Your brother in the ordeal of the grave situation
And in the great sacrifice, in the demand and in the effort
And in the wound, and in the tears, and in the banishment from the cradle
And in the journey to truth, and in the journey of delegation
Greet him by the ark, and from afar
And cover the earth with myrtle, and cover the sea with roses
***
On the frieze (Rajputan) is a statue of glory
A prophet like Confucius, or of that time
Closer in word and deed to the expected Mahdi
Similar to the Messengers in defending the truth and in asceticism
He taught with truth, patience and determination
And he called the Far East, which answered him and rose from its grave
And he came to the sick souls and healed them of hatred
He called Hindus and Muslims to intimacy and friendship
With the magic of the soul’s powers, he left both swords in the sheath
And by the luck that is given only to a creature born for immortality
***
Greetings from the Nile, O Gandhi, and these flowers are from me
And respect for the pyramids, for Karnak and the papyrus
And the sheikh of the valley, and his little children
Salutation O milker of sheep, to him who ended the salt monopoly
To the one who walked all over India
Peace to you when you pray half naked in the night
And in the corner of the prison and in the chain of chains
****
From the green table – be careful, O Gandhi!
Be the best player at chess and dice
And tell the English: Bring your snakes, the container came from India
And be not tricked by the slanderer, nor deceived by the praise
At the beginning of his poem, Shawqi focuses on the colonial misfortune that brought Gandhi and Egypt together: your brother in suffering (…) and in wounds and in exile… and at the stage of delegation, the practices of the British, their oppression and exile, it is the same in India and Egypt.
However, this great country that day was confused as to how to deal with a leader who is closer to a saint than a politician: his message and the sanctity of his life made him similar to prophets and messengers: a prophet like Confucius… similar to messengers, until he became an expected saviour like Imam Mahdi. The Prince of Poets dwells on what particularly arouses Egyptian sensibilities: his call for intimacy between Muslims and Hindus, an intimacy he wishes for between Muslims and Copts in Egypt.
Shawki notes with enthusiasm and admiration the Mahatma’s simple and distinctive methods of confronting colonialism: preparing one’s own food and thus boycotting British-made food (sheep milking), spinning one’s own clothes, and thus boycotting the clothes and textiles made by the British and their factories. And the salt march he led not long ago, and it would have ended the British colonial monopoly on this vital food and its manufacture. He refers to Gandhi’s journeys on foot across India to unite the nation and its word and to activate and revitalise the movement to confront the colonialist.
He makes Gandhi’s nudity, which the British ridicule, an honour for him and for India. He warned him of their ruse, and of their plans to thwart the conference he was to attend. Gandhi, moreover, did not count much on this conference, so he declared before embarking in the port of Bombay on 29 August 1931: “All the conditions are ripe for me to return empty-handed” (Mosleh, op. cit, p253(.
Perhaps the most important and beautifull image in Shawqi’s poem is the picture he paints for the forthcoming conference and for Gandhi’s role in it. He compares the ideas, proposals and manoeuvres of the British colonialists to snakes that strive to sting its participants, to poison their ideas and confuse them, while the Mahatma is the Indian container, India by the way is famous for its containers, a container that masters well the training. of snakes.
Meditation: Poetry often gives us images and scenes that serve as a medium for meditation. Our thoughts and emotions and the thoughts and manoeuvres of others are often snakes hidden in baskets of roses. We will not be able to eradicate all these snakes, and wisdom requires that we learn how to deal with them, in order to master them. We need to be as clever as a container to make these ideas/snakes work for us, instead of stinging us and poisoning our thoughts and minds. Just as the container makes the snake stand up, we can make the snakes of ideas be like the snake of Kundalini and divert their energies from below to above so that they become a pillar of our development, instead of remaining an obstacle to it.
So let us meditate on this
3 books on Gandhi in 1934
And a second stop in Egypt in 1934. In that year, three books on Gandhi were published in Cairo. The first was Mahatma Gandhi, his biography as written by himself, translated by a progressive Egyptian writer, Ismail Mazhar (1891-1962). The translator had already published five chapters of this book in the magazine Al-Muqtataf.
And the second book, Gandhi and the Indian Movement (Musa, Salama, 1934), perhaps the first book on Gandhi in Arabic, the author is the Egyptian Renaissance thinker Salama Musa (1887-1958)
The third book was written by a young man who would become Minister of Culture after the revolution and during the time of Abdel Nasser. He is the writer Fathi Radwan (1911-1988), and the title of his book is: “Mahatma Gandhi Life and Jihad”.
Ismail expresses his total admiration for Gandhi’s peaceful method of struggle against British colonialism, and for the results achieved by this defenceless man in the face of the most powerful military and colonial power of the time, he says in the introduction: “An empire where the sun does not set on its possessions (…) established and seated by a human skeleton. Of blood and flesh he weighed no more than a cannonball of the smallest cannons in Britain, and that tiny human skeleton was the great Gandhi’ (Gandhi , Biography, op. cit, p. 7)
And Mazhar adds, speaking of the Gandhi phenomenon, whose impact extended beyond India to all parts of the earth: “Gandhi’s slender body is nothing if imprisoned within four walls of stone or steel, so long as his soul flies in the vast sky of freedom, electrifying the atmosphere of the East, but rather the atmosphere of the globe, not the atmosphere of India alone” (Gandhi, Biography, op. cit., p. 8)
As for Salama Musa, in the introduction to his book, he insists on the need for interaction between the Indian and Egyptian movements, and that each should draw inspiration from the other, given the similarity of circumstances, and because the coloniser is one. For this very reason, we must be enlightened by their movement as they have been enlightened by ours. Their leaders have often spoken of the union between Muslims and Copts in Egypt, and have called on their fellow Muslims and Hindus to do the same in India. (Musa, Gandhi and the Movement, op. cit, p. 7)
Salama Musa emphasises the need to draw on the social aspects of Gandhi’s movement, as this is what the Egyptian Renaissance should develop in particular, not limiting its struggle to the political. Unfortunately, I still believe that our struggle against the British should not be limited to politics, and that the political renaissance should be nourished by social and economic revivals in order to achieve the general awakening of the nation” (Musa, Gandhi and the Movement, op. cit, p. 8)
What Moses refers to and calls on the Egyptians to emulate is what Gandhi did for the emancipation of Indian women and their equality with men, as well as equality between untouchables and other Indians: millions of Indians are considered as outcasts. Gandhi often left the political field to fight in the social and economic field” (Ibid)
And what Musa learned from the Mahatma’s experience and called upon to memorise it from him and act upon it, he summarised in the following formula: “Gandhi taught us that the wisdom of the wise is not in acquisition, but in self-sufficiency” (Ibid). It is a spiritual lesson of detachment and abandonment of the greed that causes many conflicts and problems, inspired by this “half naked” leader.
Fathi Radwan, a writer and Minister of Culture during the Nasser era (1952-1958), was a prominent Egyptian thinker, leader and politician, who was influenced by Gandhi and his non-violence. His son Issam Radwan says that his father raised him in memory of four personalities and their teachings, namely: the Prophet Mohammed, Mahatma Gandhi, Mustafa Kamel and Tolstoy. On the day he was imprisoned for political reasons, Fathi Radwan took with him to prison a single book, the Biography of the Mahatma. Thus comes the order of Gandhi in the consciousness of the thinker, leader and minister Fathi Radwan, the first after the Prophet of Islam.
I use only these expressive signs to underline the depth of the impact that Mahatma Gandhi had on Egypt, its thinkers and its leaders.
Sadat’s Peace Initiative inspired by Gandhi
We conclude with a ‘Gandhianism’ of an Egyptian leader and president who was an admirer of Gandhi. This is President Anwar Sadat in his peace initiative. He stunned the world and drew its attention to Tel Aviv, which hosted his arch-enemy in a historic visit on 19 November 1977. The next day, the Egyptian president addressed the Knesset, in the presence of all the leaders he had always opposed and fought against. At the beginning of his speech, he said: “Peace be upon us all in the Arab world and in Israel, and in every part of this great and complex world with its bloody conflicts, turbulent with its acute contradictions, threatened from time to time by destructive wars, those which man makes to destroy his fellow man.
Finally, among the ruins of what man has built, there is neither victor nor vanquished, but the real vanquished is man, the highest of what God has created. Man created by God, as Gandhi, the saint of peace, said, to struggle on his feet, to build life and worship God” (Sadat, autobiography)
Then the Egyptian president commented on Mahatma Gandhi’s words by saying, “I have come to you today on two firm feet to build a new life, to establish peace” (Ibid)
It is noticeable in President Sadat’s historic speech that he began it by mentioning and quoting Mahatma Gandhi. He did not mention any other intellectual or political figure in his long speech, nor did he quote any other writer or book except the holy books: the Bible and the Quran.
And this is a matter of utmost importance: in such a delicate and critical situation, the Egyptian president does not mention anyone other than Gandhi, and he was known for his admiration for the Mahatma. This indicates that he was inspired in this exceptional peaceful initiative, or in part, by the biography and teachings of the messenger of non-violence, which he knew well and which, as we have seen, had been firmly anchored in Egyptian consciousness since the 1930s.
Meditation: Imagine visiting your enemies in their own homes, conversing with them and confronting them with your love, not hate.
The Jasmine Revolution and the Buddhist impact
And we come to Green Tunisia, the Tunisia of the Jasmine Revolution, which brought the Arab world into what has been called the Arab Spring. It is obvious that we should mention and remember Mohamed Bouazizi (29/3/1984-4/1/2011), the poor Tunisian vegetable seller who burned himself on 17/12/2010 to protest against the confiscation of the cart on which he sold vegetables and from which he earned his living!
Bouazizi set himself on fire, and lit the spark of the Arab Spring, the aftermath of which we have been experiencing since 2011. But Bouazizi is not the one who invented this method of protest, which can never be described as a simple suicide. It is a Buddhist method par excellence, and a very old one. That day I wrote an article entitled “Buddhism and the Bouazizi Revolution”, and I was the first to say that the Arab Spring was triggered by a genuine Buddhist spark! The Buddhist monks in Tibet and elsewhere were protesting against the Chinese colonisation of their country. Their movement reached its peak in 2009-2010, when the number of those who burned themselves in Tibet to protest China’s occupation of their homeland, Chinese oppression and the planned and ongoing destruction of Tibetan heritage, reached around 40 between a monk and a woman, and it is obvious that Bouazizi had heard of this much talked about movement, that day he took the idea from her!
The policewoman Fadia Hamdi confiscated his car and slapped him in the market in front of people, and shouted in his face “Get lost”. As the magic turned against the magician, this word became the slogan of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and the slogan of subsequent revolutions in the Arab world. Millions of Tunisians chanted it in the face of the tyrant president, who eventually gave in to the demands of the masses and fled on 14 January 2011, less than a month after the Bouazizi incident.
On 19 April 2011, Bouazizi’s mother withdrew her complaint against the policewoman Fadia Hamdi who had slapped him in order to avoid hatred and help reconcile the people of her town, Sidi Bouzid. Bouazizi has become an example and a model of peaceful protest. Until 14/12/2011, about 50 Arab citizens, from different countries, burned themselves to protest against the social and economic conditions they suffer from!
Meditate: A single word, “Get out”, ignited a whole world, and brought down many tyrants from their thrones and expelled a dictator entrenched in power. How much, then, is this same word capable of expelling many negative emotions from within. Let each of us choose the emotion we feel most inside: anger, or hatred, and say to it and repeat inside: “Get out”.
Lebanon in the footsteps of Gandhi
Finally, we come to the little country: Lebanon. Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence and teachings have had many echoes in this country. We have already mentioned that the first Arabic book telling the biography of the Messenger of Nonviolence was published in Beirut in 1927, and it was a leavening. Since then, many activities, projects, ideas and biographies have sprung up in this field.
In 1969, on an occasion like this, the centenary of Gandhi’s birth, a group of 15 prominent Lebanese thinkers, writers and philosophers came together and published a book entitled: “Gandhi Salutation from Lebanon”. Among them are Mikhail Naimah, René Habashi, Kamal Joumblatt, Fouad Efram Al-Bustani, Charles Malik and others. The book contains articles and research on Mahatma Gandhi: his non-violence, his struggle against colonialism, etc. This compilation has become one of the most important Arabic references in the study of the Mahatma. From its introduction: “From here, from this small country, Lebanon, which is hardly visible on a map, a greeting to you on the anniversary of your birth, the birth of the gift and redemption. We have accepted giving and redemption as a slogan and a path to a decent life. Giving is joy and redemption is exalted. We have an eternal provision, an enduring stream and a waterfall of light that connects earth to heaven. “
Gandhi’s non-violent approach became a model for many Lebanese personalities who followed his approach to non-violence, especially during the Lebanese war of 1975-1990. Among them and those whose pioneering experience of non-violence we have studied: Bishop Gregoire Haddad, Father Ambroise Al-Hajj and Father Afif Osseiran. During this dirty war, they and others launched the slogan: “I will die but I will not kill”. In their slogan, they recall Gandhi’s motto: “Just as one must learn the art of killing when dedicating oneself to a life of violence, so one must learn the art of death when dedicating oneself to a life of non-violence. Violence does not mean freedom from fear, but rather the discovery of the means that lead to the removal of the cause of fear. As for non-violence. There is no room for fear in it. The practitioner of non-violence must practice the ultimate capacity for sacrifice in order to be free from fear, and does not care if he loses his land, his wealth or his life. He who has not conquered death cannot fully practice non-violence.
I will just mention here some of the exploits of Father Afif Oseiran, known during the war as the Gandhi of Lebanon. During the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978, he found himself repeatedly defenseless against an Israeli tank and its gun. He once bravely stood in front of a tank at an Israeli checkpoint, preventing it from running over a Lebanese child who was crossing in what was called the border strip at the time. A scene that was the first scenario for what would later be repeated several times in the revolution of the children of stones who defenselessly confronted the tanks of the Israeli entity, usurper of land and rights, in various parts of occupied Palestine,
Meditation: Father Afif Oseiran faced the Israeli tank, smiling. Zen Master Ji Kong defines Meditation as facing and relaxing.
And another glorious chapter of non-violence in Lebanon: the uprising of October 17, 2019, that night more than a million Lebanese took to the streets to protest against corruption and the corrupt political class. This massive popular movement continued for over two consecutive months. It was a non-violent, high-end, peaceful uprising par excellence.
At the time, a saying of Mahatma Gandhi was popular for this uprising: “The real enemy of the people is not poverty, nor want, nor oppression, but the real enemy is fear”. It is that the masses have broken through this barrier of fear. If this blessed movement has not yet achieved its demands, it is because it has not been able to produce new leaders who embody its ambitions and principles, and is still waiting for another Gandhi of Lebanon. May the time for his appearance be near. The uprising is still at the beginning of the road, and it has to ponder on the words of the Mahatma: “Every progress is made through mistakes and their correction, and there is no good that comes ready-made from God, but we have to formulate it ourselves through repeated trials and errors. This is the law of evolution”.
Meditation: The real enemy is fear. Consider what Gandhi said. It is not external obstacles that hinder our development, but fear and other negative emotions. Let us break down the wall of fear and let the suns of realisation appear.
Mahatma Gandhi remains for us in this suffering East a beacon of non-violence and tolerance, especially in his defense of minorities. He said: “All my life I have defended minorities. Everyone should stand up for minorities and the needy. I strongly believe that the civilisation of a nation is measured by its behaviour towards its minorities’ (Musleh, op. cit, p. 383)
Here we are still at stake. Minorities in our Arab world are always exposed to the dangers of displacement and abuse. A few days ago, Idlib the Syrian province, seized by Islamic fundamentalist movements, was emptied of the last Christians. Before that, Daech mistreated the Christians and Yezidis of Musol in Iraq, so they fled. And the list is almost endless!
Just as Mahatma Gandhi stood up for the Muslims of India and their right to stay in their homeland, and faced the proposals of their displacement and paid his life for his stand, is there another Gandhi for us in our Arab world!
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