The Great Pole

Author's name: Khairy Shalaby

Sleep peacefully in your final resting place, for you are now lying beneath the soil, nourishing the land of Egypt with the fragrance of your conscience and the trees of poetry. The poetry that you carried with you on the day of your departure before you took it to us, its time has now become fragrant, sprouting and branching out on the land that contains your great body. I see you, my master and teacher, emulating Jalal ad-Din al-Rumi, Farid ad-Din Attar, Ibn al-Farid, al-Nafri, and others. You were bred from this raw material and from the same nectar you were nurtured. At the beginning, you were a great poet of resistance, and you spent the prime of your life behind bars, accused of loving and adoring Egypt. For you, Egypt was Arabism, the young civilization, and the future. Experience matured you behind and outside the bars, and poetry for you became an absolute jihad for the sake of God, for the sake of truth, justice, and noble, lofty principles. Your goal became pure poetry, and the goal of your poetry was to educate man, to reformulate him in a manner befitting him, to be a son of the highest heavens, of the divine power that created him. Like Jalal al-Din, Ibn Arabi, and other great figures, your poetry has become the true culture, which is a light from the light of God.