Over the past few days, I have been following the debate surrounding Abdelrahman El-Sayed, an American of Egyptian origin, and the wave of Egyptian commentary that followed his emergence as a prominent figure in American political life. A small number of people have celebrated his success, while many others have searched through his statements and positions for a sentence here or a word there that could prove that he is “attacking Egypt.”

I am not here to defend Abdelrahman El-Sayed, nor do I believe that success exempts anyone from criticism, or that having Egyptian roots grants anyone immunity from accountability. If the man has wronged Egypt, we have every right to disagree with him. If he has taken a position that we consider unjust or unfair, we have every right to respond.

It should also be noted that he is an American citizen by birth, not a dual citizen, as some have claimed.

Once again, I do not know him, and I have no preconceived opinion about him.

My observation is that much of the criticism is focused on his statement that, had his father not left Egypt, he would probably have ended up driving a taxi.

Some people considered this an insult to Egypt.

But is being a taxi driver an insult, according to the standards of those who are outraged?

Yet the question that concerns me is far broader than Abdelrahman El-Sayed himself:

Why have we become so much quicker to discover what divides us than what connects us to others?

And why does a slip of the tongue sometimes become the headline, while success itself becomes merely a footnote?

There is a significant difference between criticism and hunting for mistakes.

Criticism places words in context. It examines meaning, position, and how an individual’s views have evolved. It accepts that a person may be right on one occasion and wrong on another.

Hunting for mistakes, however, begins with a verdict and then searches for evidence to support it.

This is where the danger of social media lies.

Social media has created a new culture that does not read an entire speech; it searches for ten seconds of it. It does not discuss the idea; it isolates the sentence. It does not ask, “What did the person say before and after this?” Instead, it asks: “What is the most inflammatory statement we can put on the screen by itself?”

Over time, we have all become, to varying degrees, prisoners of this culture.

Even more troubling is that algorithms themselves reward outrage more than fairness.

A statement such as, “This person is successful; there are positions of his that we agree with and others that we disagree with,” does not spread very far.

But a headline such as, “Scandal! See What He Said About Egypt!” is far more likely to generate shares, comments, and confrontation.

And so negativity is no longer merely a state of mind. It has become an economy of attention.

This leads me to a question that may sound provocative:

What if the man’s name were not Abdelrahman El-Sayed?

What if he were a successful American politician of European or Asian descent and had made exactly the same statement?

Would we have pursued him with the same intensity?

Or is it his Egyptian origin that has led us, without realizing it, to expect him to be a permanent representative of Egypt—to defend Egypt on every issue and agree with us on every position?

A person who lives, grows up, and practices politics in another country will inevitably have his own views, interests, and political context.

Having roots in a country does not mean sharing all of its opinions.

Egyptians themselves, living inside Egypt, disagree about Egypt and its policies. So how can we demand that someone living abroad carry a single, unchanging view of the country?

And this is not about Abdelrahman El-Sayed alone.

Even Mohamed Salah, who has become one of the most famous Egyptians in the world, has not escaped this culture.

At times, we want him to be nothing more than a football player.

At other times, we expect him to be a politician, a diplomat, and a spokesperson for Egypt and the Arab world.

Sometimes we judge him by a photograph. Sometimes by his silence. Sometimes by something he said. Sometimes by something he never said. And sometimes by religious practices he did not perform, simply to prove that he is Muslim.

As though success were not enough.

The higher a person rises, the higher the expectations placed upon him, until we sometimes reach the point where we demand perfection according to our own standards.

That is unfair to the successful individual.

But it is also a loss for society.

Smart nations do not merely seek to claim ownership of their successful people; they build bridges with them.

India, for example, does not require every Indian-American to agree with the Indian government in order to regard that person’s success as an addition to India’s soft power.

The same applies to many diasporas that have succeeded in turning their people abroad into networks of knowledge, influence, investment, and relationships, rather than subjecting them every day to a test of loyalty.

Here in Egypt, we possess enormous human capital beyond our borders: scientists, doctors, university professors, businesspeople, artists, athletes, and politicians of Egyptian origin.

The question is not:

Do they agree with us on everything?

The smarter question is:

How do we preserve a space in which they can feel that Egypt is part of who they are, even when they disagree with it?

True belonging is not created through intimidation. Nor is it created by committees inspecting people’s words.

It is created through memory, affection, respect, and shared interests.

And here I arrive at what I believe is a deeper problem in our public culture:

We have become better at discovering the negative than at recognizing the positive.

We read a long article and search for the sentence we disagree with.

We listen to an hour-long speech and extract ten seconds from it.

We look at a person’s twenty-year journey and reduce it to a single موقف.

We may even do the same in our everyday lives: we forget dozens of good deeds because of one bad incident.

It is as though the mind has been trained to search for the mistake rather than see the whole picture.

I am not calling here for naïve optimism, nor am I suggesting that we sweep mistakes under the rug in the name of patriotism.

A society that cannot criticize itself loses its ability to evolve.

But there is an enormous difference between criticism that seeks reform and negativity that seeks condemnation.

The first asks:

How can we make things better?

The second asks:

How can I prove that the other person is worse?

The first builds.

The second takes pleasure in tearing down.

That is why, for me, the Abdelrahman El-Sayed case is not really about Abdelrahman El-Sayed.

It is a small mirror reflecting a much larger question:

Can we celebrate a person’s success while disagreeing with him at the same time?

Can we say that this man is of Egyptian origin and has achieved a success worthy of recognition, while also discussing his positions calmly—agreeing with some and rejecting others?

I believe a mature society is capable of holding both ideas at once.

Life is not a contest between black and white.

A human being is not a single sentence.

And patriotism is not an examination that we administer to others every morning.

Perhaps the simplest question worth leaving for our children is this:

Why do we always search for what divides us, while successful societies search for what they can build upon together?

Egypt does not become greater by narrowing the definition of who is Egyptian.

It becomes greater by expanding it.

And it does not become stronger by pursuing its people around the world and demanding that they conform to us.

It becomes stronger when it turns their differences, their success, and the breadth of their experiences into bridges leading back to Egypt.

Perhaps the time has come to replace a culture of hunting for mistakes with a culture of discovering common ground.

For nations that are confident in themselves are not afraid of the differences among their people.

They know how to turn those differences into richness, their people’s success into strength, and their roots into bridges.