Making History

"When a system of government and a culture of governance has prevailed for many, many years, it cannot be rectified or corrected over night. There are institutional issues that need to be addressed and there are cultural issues that must be addressed." Egyptian Ambassador Wael Ahmed Kamal Aboul Magd, Canada

Reasonable and to the point. Which also speaks to the point that President Hosni Mubarak, now deposed and out of power in Egypt, also made. It was his intention to guide his country through that transitional period, at its inception. And to step away from his guiding post at the earliest possible opportunity. Which suggestion to his people only served to further enrage the anti-regime protesters whose success in removing him from office his wishes further encouraged.

Events moved swiftly, far more so than any onlooker, within or outside Egypt, might have imagined. Because, in fact, the unimaginable occurred. A small but growing, resolute group of disaffected Egyptian youth decided that they would no longer live under the authoritarian rule that had marked their lives and that of their parents for three decades. Not that Egypt had ever known any other kind of rule, even if some might point to the Nasser years as an experiment in socialist iron-fisted democracy.

Many Egyptians, having experienced dire living conditions due to poverty, poor civic infrastructure, religious intolerance between the ancient Christian Copt community and Egyptian Muslims, and the heavy institutional hand of state security, chose to leave their country. Over many decades 55,000 Egyptians assembled through emigration and birth, to live in Canada. They retain, as is natural, a deep-rooted interest in their country of origin.

And they celebrate the vast changes that have taken place in Egypt, with the hope that more beneficial changes are yet to take place. The uncertainty of the outcome of the protest must have been riveting for them. They feel a new confidence in their old country of origin, that it will now take a turn toward the kind of secular democracy that will advance Egypt into the 21st Century for a prosperous and sustainable future.

The concerns expressed by outsiders that with the vacuum left by the departure of President Mubarak and the dissolution of the executive of his National Democratic party, the way has been opened for the only well-organized political group remaining in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood, is dismissed by many.

Perhaps not, however, those within Canada who do represent the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood, active throughout the world, as a political force.

"I don't believe Egyptians want to go back to that. The economy has grown quite a bit during the peace (with Israel), and my hope is that they (Egyptians) want to preserve the peace", according to Sherif Barakat, president of the Egyptian-Canadian Cultural Association of Ottawa, in response to expressed concerns about the possibility that under a new authority Egypt might break its peace ties with Israel.

We can only hope.