Year 1961 - Part 1: The Casablanca Conference and Three Dismissal Cases Weighed Between Law and Mercy

Sunday, 1 January 1961: An Evening at the Aleppo Club

My wife, "Umm Ghassan," and I spent New Year's Eve at the Aleppo Club, in the company of my friend Rifaat Zureik, governor of Aleppo, and his wife, Major General Muslim al-Sabbagh, garrison commander, and his wife, Colonel Mustafa al-Nabulsi, chief of the provincial police, and his wife, along with a number of senior provincial officials and their own wives.

The gracious invitation came from Pierre Mamarbachi, the club's president, a man whose own generous hand had done so much for the reclamation of barren lands in the Jazira province.

What caught my attention was the great number of Muslim young women dancing on the "dance floor" like women possessed, showing no hesitation at all in "partaking of drink." Does the call to "liberate women," I wondered, really mean that women should abandon Islam's own modesty and slide down this dangerous path, simply "to keep pace with" and imitate the Western woman?

Wednesday the 11th

The "campaign by Ahmad Abu Saleh and Aref Jazmati" continues to fester in the two ministers' own hearts, Ahmad al-Hunaidi and Taama al-Awdallah. The proof is that they have taken to opposing every single project I propose for the city's own advancement.

Even granting that these two lawyers' own stance toward the two ministers was a very poor one, they are hardly "the whole of Aleppo," a city known for the refinement of its own people and its famous hospitality.

Al-Sarraj took exactly the stance one would expect of him in this matter.

I said to myself: here is my chance to submit my own resignation from the government, and retire to rest, after such long strain and exhaustion.

Nazim al-Qudsi and Rashad Barmada pressed me hard to hold on to my own patience, given the state's and the city's own need for my continued presence, especially since my colleague Muhammad al-Alem (Minister of Communications) was ill, and Thabet al-Aris (Minister of Culture) was attending his own wedding in Cairo.

In truth, we succeeded in resolving Aleppo's own major outstanding matters.

The tender for building the Palace of Justice, in the Souq al-Juma quarter, was completed, and the tender for building the "Great Hospital" in the Muhafaza quarter was likewise completed.

Within a few days, the tender for building the museum will be awarded as well.

Friday the 13th: The President's Return from the Casablanca Conference

Abdel Nasser returned from the "Conference of African Leaders" held in Casablanca. By every measure, the President achieved a resounding victory, one not altogether expected, given the presence there of Ghana's President Nkrumah and Modibo Keïta, Prime Minister of Mali, both of whom had opened their own countries' doors to Israel.

It is worth noting that Modibo is a Muslim, and his own name means "the disciplined one," that is, "the teacher," Keïta. The name "Keïta" itself may well have an Islamic origin.

Among what appeared in the joint communiqué issued at the conference's close was:

"That Israel is a base of colonialism."

On Algeria, the communiqué's signatories said:

"They reject any referendum held there that is not conducted under United Nations supervision."

This passage means that the referendum de Gaulle organized in Algeria, to establish "Algerian Algeria," and which won 75 percent of the votes cast by Algerian voters (that is, the French settlers there, and a small number of the country's own Arab inhabitants), is unacceptable.

No one is unaware of what de Gaulle actually means by this referendum.

He wants it as a merely formal concession to the Algerians, while the ties between mother France and her "daughter" Algeria remain strong, that is, for Algeria to remain a French protectorate, in which French settlers continue to enjoy its own riches and exploit its own people, a people colonialism has, since 1832, stripped of their own identity, their own being, and their own language.

De Gaulle would never have taken this step out of genuine conviction or contentment, but he came to recognize with certainty that massacres would never secure his own rule there, and that the war's continuation would expose the French economy, and the franc's own value especially, to continuous, violent shocks.

France remains a country living in the shadow of its own defeat in the Second World War, and it owes God, and the Marshall Plan, its thanks morning and evening, for being able to stand on its own two feet at all in the global arena.

Sunday the 15th: The Law, or Mercy?

Here are three signatures I must place on three dismissal decisions, my own legal duty.

The Customs Enforcement Council had taken several decisions to dismiss a number of its own officials, upon proof of corruption in the performance of their duties.

The prominent charge in these dismissal decisions was bribery and embezzlement. It is not the Enforcement Council that has wronged them, nor the minister's own signature, but they themselves who have wronged themselves and their own families. I know this department's own state of corruption, and how difficult it is to reform. I have tried before, choosing competent, honest officials for its directorates, sidelining the corrupt, and tightening oversight over them. But it has remained like the unclean staff of legend, impossible to purify.

The root of the corruption here may well lie in how widespread it has become among its own staff. Another cause may be the low salaries they draw from the state, compared to the sums smugglers offer them, sums they find themselves too weak to refuse.

I signed off on every one of these dismissal decisions but three, which put my own conscience to the test. The first was an official from the Jazira, held to be quarrelsome and prone to frequent "clashes" with his superiors and colleagues, and "suspect" in his own conduct. This charge of being "suspect" was not enough to convince me to approve his dismissal, and cast him, along with his wife, his mother, and six children, out onto the roadside.

I confess I was moved by a telegram from his mother, sent to me in desperation, begging me to have mercy on her own old age and spare her family's breadwinner.

I did not sign his dismissal decision, taking an administrative measure against him instead.

The second was from the town of Amuda, shaken by a fire that broke out in its own sole cinema, in which a large number of schoolchildren burned to death during a film screening.

His file states that he supports an elderly mother, a wife, and nine children.

The charge established against him was that he had stolen a piece of fabric from the department's own storehouse. I said to myself: he may well have taken it to clothe himself, or to clothe his own mother, and while his motive does not erase his responsibility, his offense amounts to no more than a misdemeanor. I did not sign the decision, and we imposed a lighter administrative penalty on him instead (Article 34, Paragraph 1, as amended, of the Penal Code).

As for the third, he was the worst of the three, and my own pen very nearly balks at telling his story.

He is an official with seven daughters and two sons, his eldest daughter eighteen years old, his youngest son barely one. He is "not clean-handed," drinks, plays the oud, and loves gatherings of music and song. But his own companions at these gatherings commit indecency upon him, for he suffers from this very affliction himself.

I said to myself: it is his own bad luck that caught him in this net. And even if he himself deserves no mercy, that same mercy must still keep its eyes wide open toward seven daughters at risk of ruin.

Whatever society might gain from dismissing him from his post would hardly outweigh what would follow from depriving his two young children and his daughters of his salary, a fall into the abyss of need, and perhaps of vice as well.

I kept him in his post, but transferred him to a place where he could do the state no further harm.

I hope the reader will bear in mind that I am a professor of criminal law, and that this law, for all its own severity, opens its heart to an institution called "mitigating circumstances," left to the judge's own conscience, to temper the law's harshness and open a window through which the breath of mercy may enter (Articles 243 and following).

In any case, these three "small" men are hardly the only corrupt, corrupting figures within the state. Even were they removed from it, far more corrupt men would remain.

An Italian thief is said to have once broken his neighbor's fence and stolen a chicken to eat, only to fall into the hands of justice, and when the criminal court sentenced him to a term of hard labor, he said:

"I am sentenced to hard labor over a chicken, while your own justice never reaches the great thieves. Poor Italy, how I pity you."

Friday the 20th

Two days ago, God granted us mercy in the form of rain, just as people had very nearly despaired of His mercy. Today, this blessing returned to us once more, and joy returned to people's own faces along with it.

How sweet it is to walk beneath its drops, their gentle touch caressing one's own face.

We were as God Himself described:

"Like one who stretches his hands toward water to reach his mouth, but it never reaches it" [Quran 13:14].

And now it has reached us, and the bare branches of winter have broken into leaf within us, and we have begun to dream once more of water to drink, and of a season pouring fertility and sustenance down upon us. Your Lord's mercy encompasses all things.

Today, American President Kennedy took up the reins of power in his own country. He is a young, enthusiastic man, the first Catholic president in the United States' history.

My own sense is that President Abdel Nasser is optimistic about him, perhaps hoping for some measure of neutrality between the Arabs and Israel. Let us hope we will not find ourselves repeating the poet's own words, "like one fleeing the scorching heat, only into the fire."

Monday the 23rd

We were summoned to Cairo, for what might prove an extended stay, to discuss the state's general policy, following the powerful shocks that had struck the very foundations of government.

That evening, we attended a session of the National Assembly, where the President delivered a measured address on his own trip to the Casablanca Conference, summarizing the gains achieved there for the Arabs.

The six hundred members listened to him in a state of reverent admiration, breaking only to burst into applause with their own hands, and cheers from their own throats.

He is, in any case, one of their own, and the first Egyptian to rule Egypt since the reign of the last pharaoh came to an end.