The New Egypt, Where We Unite Despite Differences, This I Believe

I believe Egyptians should get along despite their differences because there are so many things that we can do together. I believe this because of my own experience.

When I went abroad for an exchange semester, I thought I would have a cultural shock from the people around me who are different in ideas, beliefs and even jokes. I also knew that some of them know nothing about my culture. But what I didn’t expect is to have a cultural shock from the Egyptians who travelled with me.

Four AUC students went with me for a semester abroad. Two of them became close friends to me. Surprisingly enough, one of these two had a totally different life and different belief than mine. He’s a Muslim and I’m a Christian. But that’s not the problem. I’ve been friends with Muslims since I knew what friendship meant. The problem was that he knew nothing about Christians. H e was actually underestimating and not fully accepting the difference in beliefs.

When we first arrived there, we were still getting to know each other. I remember a situation when I looked at the sky and I found it beautiful and I just shared what I felt. “God is an artist.” I said out loud and I found him yelling at me, “We can’t call God an artist, there is a certain speech that we should use while speaking about God.” 

I was shocked by his reaction. And after this situation, I knew we would have so many conflicts.

We had prolonged conversations. Some of these conversations were persuasive where we were about to fight and others were just informative where I talked to him about what I believed and he talked to me about what he believed.

We laughed together; we cried together, we were away from home together. Both of us missed our families, both of us missed our country and eventually, we were willing to unite for we knew we had similar circumstances.

After spending four months together, we are now close friends. He knows I worship God my way and I know he worships God his way. Even if we had a totally different religion, even if we don’t worship God at all, this shouldn’t keep us isolated and intolerant against each other.

Religion had formed a lot of our beliefs and life styles in Egypt. It is involved in every aspect of our lives to the extent that we no longer accept to see someone is different. Even though we’re all Egyptians, we are different. We believe in different things but at the same time we share a lot of things. We were raised together.  In Egypt, we should accept each other because there is a lot that we can do when we are united. Tahrir square didn’t know differences, we all had the same spirit, we all revolted against the same thing and we all felt the power of being united.

In the new Egypt, Muslims and Christians should know more about each other and accept each other, this I believe.