Posts Tagged ‘Rashad’

‘Social Justice’

I asked my father when I was in primary school what “social justice” was. He answered, “Social justice is when you do not see anymore people throwing bread in the garbage, while others can’t find it.”

I never forgot those words…

Rest in peace…

This might be a “youth revolution,” but I want to dedicate it to my father and his generation, who dreamed of it, and never lived to see it… I could feel he was with me in those past weeks… I recalled our conversations, his sighs whenever he remembered his broken dreams…

Rest in peace…

Rashad رشاد

Demoralized by the failure of the 1977 Bread Intifada, and faced with an escalating witch-hunt campaign and purges by Sadat’s regime against leftists in the universities and civil service, thousands of Egyptian communists and radical nationalists left the country and sought refuge in Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait (yeah, believe it or not, Kuwait received tons of Egyptian communists back then!) and Yemen… Four months after my birth, my family left Egypt for Yemen in 1977, where we lived in Sana’a for two years. In the above photo, taken in 1978 or 1979, my father (on the left dancing while carrying a stick) is dressed together with an Egyptian friend in a Yemeni traditional costume, during a trip outside Sana’a. Below, is a pic of Hoss and Abu Hoss taken on 13 June 1979…

Comrade Rashad الرفيق رشاد

My father Mohamed Rashad el-Hamalawy (1942-2000) in Moscow, praising Lenin’s anti-Zionist stands and his support for national liberation movements, in a gathering of local and foreign students, part of the centennial celebrations of Lenin’s birth, 1970.