Since I came to Egypt five years ago until the day of the people – and I decided to leave it – I have not created a single enmity there. Everyone I knew and who knew me are today my friends, brothers, and loved ones. I do not remember that I wronged anyone, and I do not remember that anyone wronged me except that you were the first to apologise.
Egypt taught me that you can contain people when you understand the nature of each one of them and deal with him according to his nature. If he is good, you will win his affection, and if he is bad, you will avoid his evil.
Egypt taught me that the world is very big, and that the limited Bedouin mind that thinks the world is confined to a family, a village, a community, or a sect is an incorrect mind, and that God created us free, and the first freedom is the freedom of the mind from the Bedouin restrictions to a vast, great world that can accommodate all people.
Egypt taught me that relationships are one of the most important things in life. Man is an interactive being who does not live on an island or a barn. He will not have any significance unless his relations are good with all the categories of society he lives with: the grocer, the carpenter, the butcher, the coffee shop, the policeman, the government official, and others.
– I sat in Egypt: scholars, poets, Sufis, Salafists, Christians, and atheists, and I had coffee conversations with men of finance and business, men of unemployment and poverty, and I lived in the neighborhood with dervishes, chariots, young lovers, children, madmen, and addicts, so I knew the faces of difference between people, and I heard Their problems, their illnesses, their worship and their purity, and in it I saw the meaning of love, the meaning of hatred, the meaning of generosity, the meaning of miserliness, the meaning of mercy and the meaning of cruelty. There was no misfortune left in people that I did not hear, and there was no good left in people that I did not see and experience.
Egypt taught me that people’s satisfaction is an unachievable goal, but coexistence with them is easy for those who understand how to coexist with them, and friendship with everyone is easier than enmity with them.
Egypt taught me that I am like all people. I am not a hero in a movie, nor a pearl of coincidence. Not everyone who disagrees with me is evil. Rather, he may be right, and I may be wrong.
– Egypt taught me to deal wisely with every dissenter, which is the rational political calm that His Excellency the President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Mr. Mohamed Ould Sheikh Al-Ghazwani, inspired us with. We have experienced that no one enters upon him – no matter how great his dissent – except that he leaves and says: I have found my friend.
Egypt taught me many other things: about the concepts of love, the skills of dealing, the contexts of perception, the jurisprudence of souls, and the rulings of the era, and here I am leaving it with a mentality other than the mentality I entered with, and in it I understood what Abu Al-Alaa said:
People are like other people and the days are the same
Eternity is like eternity, and the world is for those who are defeated
This is because I loved Egypt with great love.
