Before democracy

By Samir Sobhi

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Here we are in the year 2005. President George W Bush, I support you in bringing democracy to countries that have abandoned justice and liberty. Ours are peoples upon whom God also bestowed rights of equality, whose religion recognises no difference between Arabs and foreigners in their propensity to understand and enjoy freedom. We have no special talent in stomaching dictatorship and ignorance. Nor are our aspirations aberrant when set within the unfolding history of essential humanity.

We have kept with you in faith, and with all of your predecessors: we've stayed with you from the 1950s and the Baghdad Alliance, and we watched the aid flow in for military development. If you've come this far, then you have to go further. Speaking about freedom evokes it; calls to and awakes it. But words have to be translated into actions if freedom is to live among us.

All around the world people can listen to you talk about democracy, but if they cannot read -- still less write themselves -- the constitutions and rules upon which their societies are based will they ever taste democracy? The Egyptian people want nothing more than to abolish illiteracy -- be it in reading, writing or the new arts of the electronic age -- so that language has, for all, meaning; so that politics, the discourse of our societies, does not remain a mere jumble of symbols. We must eradicate illiteracy and combine the study of linguistics and mathematics with Arabic, English, French, Japanese and Chinese. We, the Arab people, are not outside of history; we have links to all civilisations.

Literacy is the key to a genuine renaissance, because there can be no true democracy amongst those dispossessed of the word. President Bush, if you're serious about freedom and you're serious about rights and liberty, help us build schools, channel US aid, where people can learn to speak and to write and to read and not simply listen.

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor-in- chief of Al-Ahram.