I Do Not Understand

By Sahar Baasiri

By God, I no longer understand anything.

I do not understand how Marcel Khalife, who composed music to a poem by Mahmoud Darwish and sang it, along with hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon and the Arab world, can be accused of defaming religion. He is the one who sang for the resistance in south Lebanon, for the cause of Palestine and the Arabs, and for man in his humanity. Khalife drew on all that is enlightened in Arab and Islamic history.

I do not understand how a poet’s or an artist’s adoption of a Koranic verse for a noble cause endangers religion, while the use of Koranic verses by for evil purposes, fomenting cheap sectarian hatred which often leads to loss of human life, goes unpunished and unquestioned.

Nor do I understand how today’s "opposition" wastes time criticizing the current conditions; they forget that what is happening today is probably the product of their policies when they were in power. I do not understand how a large number of the new leaders behave as if they were in the opposition.

I also do not understand how politicians take so lightly the language of betrayal, or how political debates sink to the level of insults, with no purpose but to smear people’s reputations and invade their privacy.

Yet, perhaps I do understand.

I do understand that cultural values and national symbols are untouchable, and that meddling with them is dangerous. It destroys standards and subsequently causes chaos in society-an outrageous development indeed.

I do understand that what we experience today proves there has been a decline in political life, and even more than that, it underestimates people’s intelligence, and even their ability to hold those responsible accountable.

What I do not understand indeed is how in the midst of all this we allowed ourselves to lose the hope for change.

Translated from the Arabic by Al Jadid Staff

Sahar Baasiri is a columnist in An Nahar newspaper, where her article appeared. The English translation appeared in Al Jadid Vol. 5, no. 28 (Summer 1999).

Translation Copyright © 1999 by Al Jadid