‘The party with huge following’
Immediately after the liberation, a number of businessmen decided to open an American-style hospital with American technology and expertise.
To publicize the hospital’s idea, and as a kind of gratitude to America’s efforts to liberate the homeland, the owners of the idea published advertisements in various newspapers about their project, including the names and photos of the personalities after whom the hospital wards will be named – names of doctors, nurses, men and women of the American Hospital which opened in Kuwait 1911 and later closed for some reasons.
Full page color advertisements were published in several daily newspapers and this aroused the jealousy of the Muslim Brotherhood, so they asked the project owners to publish the same advertisement in the party magazine.
After hesitation, and a little pressure, the owners of the project accepted and sent the weekly magazine the text of the advertisement.
A serious national and strategic problem has emerged. The sober magazine, the mouthpiece of the Kuwaiti Brotherhood never published pictures of women regardless of their personalities or importance, without wearing a veil.
This is not a joke, but a fact that I wrote about a quarter of a century ago, and I rewrote it again a few years ago and this is the third time, and for a reason that will be mentioned next.
The owners of the project insisted on their opinion by publishing the pictures as they are, especially as they are of characters who died decades ago, but the Brotherhood insisted on their opinion, and after tugging and pulling, the two parties reached a compromise whereby the advertisement be published and the names of doctors and nurses were written under empty blocs and it was a ridiculous advertisement.
Nearly thirty years after the funny advertisement incident, which showed the modesty of some people’s thinking and the extent to which sexual subjects dominated their imaginations, they imagined that publishing a picture of an old woman, who died 40 years ago could arouse the instincts of some if not with a veil even if it was done with the help of ‘Photoshop’, and the Egyptian government decided to transfer some of the mummies of the Cairo Museum to a new museum outside the capital, and among them was a mummy of a Pharaonic queen who died more than three thousand years ago and her image was transmitted by all television stations around the world.
The scene of showing the queen aroused the dismay of Wagdy Ghoneim, one of the hard-line Brotherhood preachers, who was fond of bloodshed, and declared the following: “Look at the immorality, see immorality, they transfer a mummy of one whose hair can be seen, so how does that happen, my brother?”
We leave for the reader to comment, and we wonder how this party, one of its leaders managed to win the minds and hearts of millions including some from our rational government?
In his book “The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude”, the French thinker, Étienne de la Boétie says: ‘When a country is subjected to prolonged repression, generations of people do not need freedom and cope with tyranny, and what we might call a ‘stable citizen’ is born.
Today, stable citizen lives in a world of his own, and his interests are limited to three things – religion, means of living and sports.
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a.alsarraf@alqabas.com.kw