Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi died in 965 AD, leaving behind a scathing poem describing the political and social turmoil of the Second Abbasid era. While few today remember that the poem was his, one of its verses continues to be echoed by poets and intellectuals—sometimes even claimed as their own—whenever humiliation tightens its grip on a people in their own land. In his forgotten masterpiece, al-Mutanabbi writes:
‘Nothing is uglier than a virile man
Led by a nation without a womb.
Every people’s masters rise from among them,
Yet the masters of Muslims are dwarf slaves.
Is the pinnacle of faith to trim your moustaches,
O nation at whom the world laughs for its ignorance’
Nearly nine centuries later, the Turkified Arab poet Hasan al-Tuwayrani, who died in 1897, lamented the collapse of his own nation, borrowing al-Mutanabbi’s final line:
‘I speak the truth, and truth is what I say,
Yet they failed to grasp what they understood.
Hear me, servants of God, and take heed:
O nation at whom the world laughs for its ignorance.’
More than a hundred years after al-Tuwayrani’s repetition of al-Mutanabbi’s wisdom, the so-called ‘brotherly’ match between Egypt and Algeria on the soil of their ‘third brother’, Sudan, descended into a tribal war reminiscent of the days of al-Aws and al-Khazraj. The question now is: who will be next to invoke al-Mutanabbi’s timeless verse, as history continues its cycle of tragedies and shifting circumstances.
It is striking that Egyptians and Algerians not only shed blood side by side in the struggles to liberate Algeria and Sinai, but also share the same swamp of ignorance, poverty, and underdevelopment, living under the same relentless grind of economic hardship. And yet, rather than uniting against their common oppressors, these very factors have driven them to be more ruthless than their own tormentors, preying on those whose necks are already pressed against the blade of barbarism.
What happened to ordinary Egyptians after that ill-fated match in Sudan—those who had nothing but football as their sole outlet for expressing patriotism—was just another episode in a long series of outbursts of pent-up hatred between yesterday’s brothers. The economic dimension was never far from the chaos: vandalism, arson, and assaults on Egyptians and their interests in the ‘land of one million martyrs’.
In fact, the economic reality binds both nations together: both suffer under inflation, unemployment, and stagnant growth, and both have seen the collapse of their middle class. But when intellectual emptiness takes hold of a people, football always becomes the greater priority.
It seems that Egypt’s prolonged silence in the face of decades of assaults and insults from its ‘brothers’—masked by handshakes and kisses in front of the cameras on the soil of the ‘big sister’—has finally exacted its price. And, as always, it is the ordinary people who pay. The Arab world, from the Atlantic to the Gulf, has long been plummeting into a pit of backwardness, its descent so slow that it took us this long to realise there is no bottom. And so, as al-Mutanabbi foresaw more than a thousand years ago, the world laughs at our ignorance.
This article is originally published by AlBorsa in Arabic and later AI-translated by South Push.