Since the dawn of civilization, the face of the world has never stopped changing. The Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, and Ottoman empires each appeared, in their own time, to represent the culmination of history. Yet all eventually became chapters within it. In the modern era, the Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen independent states. Yugoslavia fragmented after devastating wars. Czechoslovakia separated peacefully. Germany reunified after the Berlin Wall had come to symbolize the division of the world itself. Even today’s established states are not timeless creations: a unified Germany did not emerge until the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, entirely new nations appeared on the map, such as Pakistan, South Sudan, and Kosovo. History seems to remind us that the state is a political arrangement—capable of being created, transformed, and dissolved—not an eternal entity.

Sometimes, maps are rewritten not only through political decisions but through the displacement of peoples, the erasure of communities, and the destruction of collective memory, as witnessed in the Americas, Australia, Armenia, and Bosnia. Palestine continues to represent a struggle not merely over land, but over existence and identity itself.

Against this ever-changing historical landscape, an intriguing question arises: Why do states possessing the world’s strongest armies disappear, while other civilizations endure for thousands of years despite conquest and changing rulers? Why has the name of Egypt remained alive for more than five millennia? The answer lies in understanding the difference between temporary power and enduring identity.

Power does not guarantee permanence. Empires often carry the seeds of their own destruction when they expand beyond their capacity to govern or rely more on coercion than on consent. Alexander the Great conquered the known world within a few years, yet his empire fragmented almost immediately after his death. Rome did not collapse overnight; it decayed from within before succumbing to external pressures. The Ottoman Empire, which once stretched across three continents, came to an end after the First World War. Many believed the Soviet Union, with its vast military power and global influence, was permanent, yet it did not fall through military defeat but because its political structure lost the ability to sustain itself. Yugoslavia, once its central authority weakened and its leader disappeared, saw its suppressed identities erupt into bloody conflict.

Germany, by contrast, was divided as a state but remained united as a nation—a striking reminder that states are political arrangements, whereas nations are stories carried through generations. A state may be conquered, occupied, or divided. A nation disappears only when it loses its shared memory.

Egypt illustrates this distinction vividly. It endured not because it was always the strongest, but because it possessed extraordinary civilizational depth. Power builds empires; depth sustains civilizations. Egypt survived not because it escaped foreign conquest—it was ruled by the Hyksos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mamluks, Ottomans, and British—but because something more enduring remained. Dynasties changed, capitals moved, languages evolved, and religions transformed, yet the idea of Egypt survived.

Since the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt more than five thousand years ago, the Nile fostered the concept of a centralized state. Its management, annual floods, and agricultural system required unified authority rather than competing city-states like those of ancient Greece or loosely organized tribal societies. Egypt was therefore a state before it became an empire.

Another source of Egypt’s resilience is that Egyptian identity has always been greater than its rulers. The Pharaoh was not Egypt, nor were those who came after him. Rulers came and went, while the Egyptian people remained. This is one of history’s greatest paradoxes: some countries preserved their rulers but lost their homelands, while Egypt preserved its homeland despite changing nearly every ruler it ever had. Its large and cohesive population also enabled it to absorb successive waves of newcomers. Rather than Egyptians dissolving into their conquerors, many conquerors gradually became part of Egypt’s social and cultural fabric. This capacity to absorb without losing one’s identity is among the defining characteristics of a deep-rooted civilization.

Egypt is not unique in this respect. China endured because it viewed itself not as a transient state but as an entire civilization. Dynasties rose and fell, yet the idea of China persisted. Iran, despite invasions by Alexander, the Arabs, and the Mongols, absorbed Islam and reshaped it through its own language and culture, transforming historical trauma into a new civilizational expression. By contrast, Mesopotamia, despite its immense historical achievements, failed to preserve a continuous political identity. Civilization alone is not enough if society loses its capacity to renew the bonds that hold it together.

What, then, causes states to die?

States rarely perish first at their borders. Their decline begins internally. War is often the final blow rather than the original cause. Collapse starts when loyalty to tribe or sect surpasses loyalty to the nation; when a state becomes dependent on a single leader or party, making it fragile in their absence; when justice erodes and both law and wealth become concentrated in the hands of a few; when the economy no longer offers hope, making emigration or fragmentation appear more attractive than belonging.

Perhaps most dangerous of all is the inability to adapt. Empires that failed to embrace the Industrial Revolution inevitably declined. Today, humanity stands before transformative advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing—innovations that may reshape global power just as profoundly as steam engines and electricity once did.

For this reason, a country’s true strength cannot be measured by its territory, population, or military capabilities. It is measured by its ability to convince its citizens that their shared future is greater than their differences. The greatest threat to any nation is not an enemy at its borders but the moment its people lose the feeling that they belong to a common homeland. At that point, borders become little more than lines on paper, and the collapse of the state becomes only a matter of time.

Every generation assumes that the map it inherits is permanent. History knows no such permanence. Artificial intelligence is redefining power itself. Climate change, water scarcity, migration, demographic aging, and technological transformation may redraw not only the balance of power but the very boundaries of influence. Meanwhile, the international order established after the Second World War appears increasingly fragile.

The question may no longer be which states will disappear, but rather which possess the civilizational resilience to adapt to a world changing faster than ever before. The future belongs to nations whose identity binds society together, whose institutions provide stability, and whose capacity for innovation secures tomorrow.

Egypt has endured for millennia through this balance. China has survived because it has continually reinvented itself whenever it seemed finished. Iran has remained because it preserved its civilizational depth despite changing empires and religions.

Great civilizations are measured not by the number of their victories but by the number of crises they have survived. Truly great nations are not those that never fall, but those that rise again—still knowing who they are.

In a world where technology increasingly moves faster than politics, and politics increasingly moves faster than geography, one question remains open to every nation:

Will we build our future on the power of the moment, or on the depth of history?

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The attack targeting the American vessel at Egypt’s Port of Damietta should not be viewed merely as an isolated security incident, nor should it be assessed solely by the number of casualties or the extent of material damage. In international politics, events are measured not only by the destruction they cause, but also by the messages they send and the changes they impose on the strategic calculations of states.

Many have understandably asked: Who was responsible? Yet that is not the only question, and perhaps not even the most important one. Before identifying the perpetrator, it is equally valuable to ask why this particular target was chosen, why the attack occurred at this specific moment, and who ultimately stands to benefit.

For decades, wars were primarily associated with military fronts, air bases, and naval fleets. Today, however, the nature of conflict has fundamentally changed. Ports, shipping lanes, energy infrastructure, and undersea communication cables have become targets every bit as strategically significant as military installations. The modern world is sustained not only by balances of military power, but also by the stability of global trade, energy flows, and supply chains.

From this perspective, Damietta Port was, in my view, targeted not simply because it is an Egyptian port, but because it represents a critical junction linking commerce, energy, and the Mediterranean. If the targeted vessel was American, the message appears directed more at what the ship symbolizes than at the port where it happened to be docked.

That distinction is crucial.

In my assessment, the objective was not to draw Egypt into a regional conflict, but to draw the Mediterranean itself into the strategic equation of war.

The message is that conflict is no longer confined to the Gulf or the Red Sea. Instead, every major global energy and trade corridor can become part of the operational theater. The aim is less to expand the battlefield than to expand uncertainty.

Accordingly, the principal beneficiary is not necessarily the party that carried out the attack, but whoever succeeds in reshaping the world’s perception of security.

If shipping companies, insurance markets, and energy investors begin to view the Eastern Mediterranean as an increasingly unsafe region, then the political objective of the attack may already have been achieved—even if the physical damage remains relatively limited.

For that reason, Egypt’s response deserves careful attention and appreciation.

The Egyptian state refrained from making premature accusations or reacting emotionally. Instead, it concentrated on three priorities: conducting a thorough investigation, strengthening the protection of critical infrastructure, and ensuring the uninterrupted operation of the port. This response was itself a strategic message, because the greatest danger in incidents of this kind is allowing fear to evolve into economic reality.

The United States will naturally interpret the incident as part of the broader regional deterrence equation, while other actors are likely to exploit the uncertainty surrounding the attack. In contemporary conflicts, ambiguity has become as much a political instrument as it is an intelligence asset.

The world has already entered a new era of conflict in which drones target not only military forces but also confidence itself. Confidence is the backbone of the global economy. If trust in the security of ports or the reliability of international trade routes is shaken, the consequences quickly spread to energy prices, insurance premiums, and investment decisions—even when the operational disruption lasts only a matter of hours.

Herein lies the most important lesson.

Protecting national security is no longer limited to defending borders. It also requires safeguarding a nation’s reputation as a stable and secure destination for trade and investment. In this context, the uninterrupted operation of Damietta Port and the continued flow of maritime traffic represented more than a security achievement; they constituted a political and economic success as well, because they undermined a significant part of the message the attackers sought to convey.

We are living in an era in which messages can be more dangerous than bullets. The impact of a drone is sometimes measured less by the physical damage it inflicts than by the doubt it plants in financial markets. Consequently, the true challenge facing states is no longer simply intercepting hostile drones, but preventing adversaries from undermining confidence itself.

“In politics, the most dangerous weapon is not the one that strikes its target, but the one that changes the way the world thinks about the meaning of security.”

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Nero, as the story goes, was a handsome young man who loved the arts. He played the lyre, wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming the greatest performer Rome had ever known. He ascended the imperial throne at the age of seventeen, carrying with him a single, unwavering ambition: to remain forever at center stage, with the applause of the crowd never fading.

On that summer night in AD 64, when Rome was engulfed in flames, historians tell us that Nero was not even in the city. Yet legend—sometimes truer than fact in capturing the essence of history—insists on portraying him standing on a balcony, playing his lyre and singing while the poorer quarters of Rome burned below.

The legend is not false in its deeper meaning. Whether Nero actually started the fire or not, he certainly exploited it. He accused the Christians, crucified them, and burned many alive as public spectacles to entertain the masses. Then, upon the ruins of the devastated neighborhoods, he built his magnificent Domus Aurea—the Golden House—larger and more extravagant than anything that had stood before.

This is the harsh lesson Nero has left to history: for those who know how to manipulate events, a fire is not a disaster—it is an opportunity. The city burns. The people search for someone to blame. Meanwhile, the ruler stands upon the stage, playing his instrument—not because he is oblivious, but because he understands that an audience captivated by the performance rarely asks who lit the fire.

I imagined a conversation across the centuries between Nero and a ruler of our own time—one who never played the lyre but mastered a far more powerful instrument: the screen.

Nero: I hear you’ve set fire to walls built from agreements and alliances that generations before you spent decades constructing.

Trump: I burned nothing. I simply rebuilt. Who says those old walls deserved to survive?

Nero: That is precisely what I said about old Rome. The crowded, impoverished city “deserved” to be rebuilt. The problem, my friend, is that history never asks, “What did you build?” It asks, “Who paid the price for the fire?”

Trump: The crowds applaud me every day.

Nero: They applauded me in the Colosseum while I threw people to the lions. Applause is not proof of innocence—it merely proves the performance is successful. I died despised, remembered as a tyrant. Did you know the Senate eventually declared me an enemy of the people? The same crowds that once cheered my name stood still as I fled.

Trump (smiling): I am not you. I have elections, legislatures, and the media.

Nero: I had a Senate as well. If there is any difference between us, it is that you inherited a machine for amplifying your voice beyond anything I could have imagined. Today, every citizen carries a miniature theater in their pocket, and you perform upon its stage day and night. I needed a palace for people to hear me. You need nothing more than your thumb.

Trump (laughing): I am the greatest leader in history. I do what presidents before me did—but I have the courage to say it openly instead of hiding behind polite words. I make deals. And behind every visible deal are others that generate profits and reshape the balance of power.

Nero: I have been dead for two thousand years, by the sword of a servant after everyone abandoned me. But ask yourself this: when the music stops, when the applause fades, and people finally realize that the city has truly burned—not metaphorically, but in reality—who will still stand beside you?

I do not write this to equate any contemporary figure with an emperor who murdered his mother and wife and persecuted followers of a faith he never understood.

I write because history, when it repeats itself, does not repeat faces—it repeats patterns: a ruler who loves the stage more than the responsibilities of governing; a public that prefers spectacle to inquiry; and a fire whose blame is assigned to the victims rather than to those who ignited it.

The question worth asking in every age—not only in Nero’s—is this:

Who is playing the music while our cities burn? And which of us, in the audience, is still applauding?

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Our growing understanding of genetics and modern medical technologies has given humanity extraordinary power. Yet such power demands equally extraordinary scientific integrity and ethical responsibility. Only by balancing innovation with ethics can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past while preserving human dignity and the richness of human diversity.

Introduction: From Genes to Medical Intervention

The themes explored in this article are connected by a single thread: humanity’s relationship with its genes—and our continuing efforts to understand them, influence them, or treat the diseases associated with them.

Our journey begins with a specific gene that has been associated with certain behavioral tendencies, moves through a historical attempt to “improve” the human race through genetics, and concludes with one of the most revolutionary medical technologies of our time.

The “Warrior Gene” (MAOA)

What Is It?

The “Warrior Gene” is the popular name given to certain low-activity variants of the MAOA (Monoamine Oxidase A) gene, which is located on the X chromosome.

What Does It Do?

The MAOA gene encodes an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, which breaks down several important neurotransmitters in the brain, including:

• Serotonin, which helps regulate mood, sleep, and appetite.
• Dopamine, which plays a central role in motivation, reward, and movement.
• Norepinephrine (Noradrenaline) and Epinephrine (Adrenaline), which are involved in the body’s response to stress.

When the enzyme’s activity is reduced—as occurs in the variants popularly labeled the “Warrior Gene”—these neurotransmitters may accumulate in ways that influence emotional regulation and impulse control.

Does It Cause Aggressive Behavior?

Research has shown that individuals carrying low-activity variants of MAOA may have a somewhat higher likelihood of impulsive or aggressive behavior, particularly if they experienced abuse, neglect, or severe trauma during childhood. This is a classic example of gene–environment interaction.

The association appears more pronounced in males because they possess only one X chromosome.

However, it is essential to emphasize that carrying this genetic variant does not predetermine violent or aggressive behavior. Its influence is relatively modest and depends heavily on environmental factors, upbringing, and life experiences.

Genes influence behavior—they do not dictate destiny.

Eugenics: A Historical Warning

Definition and Origins

The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by the British scientist Sir Francis Galton, inspired in part by Charles Darwin’s work on evolution.

The word literally means “good birth” and refers to attempts to improve the genetic characteristics of the human population through selective reproduction.

Two Forms of Eugenics

Historically, eugenics has taken two principal forms:

Positive eugenics encouraged those considered to possess desirable characteristics to have more children.

Negative eugenics sought to reduce or prevent reproduction among those considered to possess undesirable traits.

History and Consequences

These ideas gained widespread popularity during the early twentieth century across Europe and North America. They led to compulsory sterilization laws in several countries.

Their most extreme and horrific implementation occurred under Nazi Germany’s doctrine of racial hygiene, where eugenic ideology was used to justify forced sterilization, persecution, mass murder, and genocide.

Following the Second World War, eugenics became widely discredited and is now closely associated with racism, discrimination, and profound violations of human rights.

The Situation Today

Classical eugenics is rejected by the overwhelming scientific and ethical consensus.

Human traits are extraordinarily complex, shaped by the interaction of thousands of genes together with environmental, cultural, educational, and social influences. Furthermore, definitions of what constitutes “desirable” traits have always reflected societal biases rather than objective science.

Nevertheless, modern technologies—including prenatal genetic screening and gene-editing techniques—have reopened important ethical discussions regarding the appropriate limits of human intervention in genetics.

CRISPR: The Revolution in Gene Editing

What Is CRISPR?

CRISPR, short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, originated as a natural defense system used by bacteria against viral infections.

In 2012, scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier transformed this biological mechanism into a precise gene-editing tool, an achievement that earned them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

How Does It Work?

Imagine that your DNA is an enormous instruction manual containing everything needed to build and maintain your body.

Sometimes a tiny typographical error appears within that manual—a mutation capable of causing disease.

CRISPR functions like an exceptionally precise pair of molecular scissors. Guided to the exact location of the mistake, it cuts the faulty DNA sequence and, in many cases, enables scientists to replace it with the correct one.

In this way, researchers can potentially repair genetic mutations responsible for inherited diseases.

Although the technology remains under active development and carries important technical and ethical limitations, CRISPR represents one of the most promising advances in modern medicine.

A Common Thread

These topics are connected by a single, powerful narrative.

The story begins with a single gene—MAOA—that influences brain chemistry and may contribute, alongside environmental factors, to aspects of human behavior.

It then moves to an earlier and deeply flawed attempt to control human heredity through eugenics, demonstrating the dangers of allowing science to become detached from ethics.

Finally, it arrives at CRISPR—a remarkably precise technology that offers hope for treating diseases once considered incurable while simultaneously reminding us that scientific capability must always be accompanied by moral responsibility.

Conclusion

Our expanding knowledge of genetics offers unprecedented opportunities to prevent disease, improve health, and transform medicine.

Yet every scientific breakthrough raises a corresponding ethical question.

The lesson of history is clear: scientific progress should never come at the expense of human dignity.

Understanding genes grants us tremendous power. The true measure of our civilization will not be how much power we possess, but how wisely—and how humanely—we choose to use it.

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Fifteen years of rivalry between Ronaldo and Messi made football richer, more captivating, and more beautiful.

I was deeply saddened to see Ronaldo leave the World Cup in tears. I had hoped to watch him reach the final, even at the remarkable age of forty-one.

Yet what happened after the recent Egypt–Argentina match compelled me to reconsider—not my opinion of Messi as a footballer, but my own mindset as a supporter, and the mindset of a society that so often searches for a scapegoat.

Suddenly, sections of our media portrayed Messi as personally responsible for the refereeing decisions that many believed had gone against Egypt, while almost no attention was given to our own mistakes during the final ten minutes of the match—the very period that ultimately decided the outcome.

What fault was it of an Argentine player that he became, overnight, the focus of an unprecedented wave of hostility? The campaign had little to do with football itself and much more to do with the release of collective frustration seeking a convenient target.

We blamed him personally for Egypt’s elimination from the Round of 16, as though he should have refrained from scoring the winning goal out of sympathy for Egypt—or in protest against refereeing decisions that many of us considered unfair.

Such controversies are, after all, part of football.

The opposite reaction was equally revealing. Egypt’s qualification for the Round of 16 was celebrated with extraordinary exuberance, as though we had won the World Cup itself.

Exaggeration in victory. Misplaced blame in defeat. In both cases, the same thing was missing: objectivity—and the willingness to examine ourselves honestly or to build on genuine achievements so they become lasting progress rather than fortunate moments.

The question that continued to occupy my mind was this: What are we teaching our children and young people when we behave this way? What message do we send when defeat must always be someone else’s fault, while victory is celebrated without proportion or perspective?

While reflecting on these questions, I came across a thoughtful article by the Moroccan philosopher Said Nachid, who explored Messi’s career as a source of lessons extending far beyond football and into the art of living. I would like to share some of those insights, blended with reflections of my own.

The first lesson is that an obstacle can become the path itself.

As a child, Messi suffered from growth hormone deficiency. He possessed little more than an uncertain talent and quiet determination. When FC Barcelona embraced him and financed his treatment, they did not simply help him grow—they enabled him to transform what seemed like a disadvantage into his greatest competitive strength. His small frame gave him an unusually low center of gravity, extraordinary balance, and an unmatched ability to change direction, making him almost impossible to catch. This echoes an ancient Stoic insight: what obstructs action can itself become the means of action.

The second lesson is that intelligence often overcomes strength.

Messi played in an era filled with physically imposing defenders, yet he never relied on direct confrontation. Instead, he depended on reading space, anticipating movement, remaining agile, and reacting with remarkable speed.

The third lesson is perhaps the deepest: outward calm may conceal the highest level of awareness.

Watching Messi during a match, one might think he has drifted out of the game. While everyone else is sprinting, he often appears to be walking. Yet in those moments he is reading the field like a chess master studies the board—observing, calculating, conserving his energy until the perfect opportunity appears. Then, at precisely the right moment, he strikes. It is an economy of effort combined with extraordinary generosity of attention and impeccable timing.

These three lessons, I believe, offer a valuable framework for evaluating our own collective behavior after every sporting victory or defeat.

Our recent experience suggests that we remain too attached to a culture that glorifies noise and emotional outbursts, while constantly searching for someone else to blame. Messi, through his composure, intelligence, and quiet confidence, offers a very different message: that apparent weakness can become uniqueness; that those who know when to act need not act constantly; and that one of the greatest forms of strength is self-control.

When I reflect on Messi’s story, however, I realize that it is not unique. The same pattern appears in the lives of the greatest footballers of this generation—including the one I have personally admired above all others: Cristiano Ronaldo.

Ronaldo was not born a superstar. He came from a modest home on the island of Madeira and climbed every step of his career through relentless daily effort and unwavering discipline until he became one of football’s greatest legends. His story is not merely one of talent, but of extraordinary commitment: a rigorous diet, relentless training even after reaching the summit, and an uncompromising determination to remain among the very best every single season.

That, in itself, is a lesson no less valuable than those we learn from Messi: talent alone is never enough, and remaining at the top is often harder than reaching it.

Closer to home, we have another equally inspiring example: Mohamed Salah.

An Egyptian who emerged from the small village of Nagrig in Gharbia Governorate, Salah built a professional career that secured him a place among football’s global elite while carrying Egypt’s name onto the world’s greatest stages and into its most prestigious clubs.

His story is precisely the one we should tell our children. Like Messi and Ronaldo, he came from humble beginnings and proved that modest origins are never barriers to greatness. The journey to the top begins with a single step from a small village. True representation of one’s country is not achieved through angry chants in the stands or hostility toward opponents, but through the quiet resilience with which Salah built his career—brick by brick—with talent, discipline, perseverance, and humility.

Finally, I would like to offer our young people a fatherly piece of advice.

Rather than hating Messi—or any rival—we should learn from him. We should learn discipline from Ronaldo, and perseverance and humility from Salah despite all they have achieved.

Noble competition does not require enemies to condemn; it requires role models against whom we measure ourselves.

That, in my view, is the greatest lesson our children should take from every match—not from who won or who lost, but from the stories of those who played it.

Instead of passing on resentment and hostility toward every opponent, let us pass on admiration for hard work, respect for talent, appreciation for knowledge and teamwork, true sportsmanship, personal responsibility, the courage to accept defeat, and genuine respect for one’s competitors.

Let us celebrate when we win and grieve when we lose—that is only natural. But above all, let us accept responsibility for our mistakes and learn from them.

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Henry Todd’s book Die Empty presents a simple yet striking idea: Do not take your ideas to the grave. Empty them into life before life empties them from you. Every human being—regardless of status or profession—carries within them a treasury of experience, reflection, and hard-earned lessons. That treasure was never meant to be buried with its owner; it was meant to be passed on to those who come after.

Todd explores the hidden forces that keep talented people trapped in routine despite their ambitions: the loss of purpose, boredom, the lure of comfort, the illusion that yesterday’s knowledge is sufficient, and the pride that prevents us from becoming learners again.

His conclusion is both simple and profound: the difference between those who leave this world having poured all they had into something meaningful and those who depart with their finest ideas locked inside themselves is not a matter of fate—it is a matter of choice.

I found myself dwelling on this idea because it reaches far beyond professional development, which was the author’s primary concern. It raises a far deeper, almost existential question:

What remains of a person after they are gone?

Is it enough simply to have lived, acted honorably, and thought deeply if none of that survives in a form that can be read, remembered, or built upon?

At that point, Die Empty intersects with another conviction that has repeatedly come to mind whenever I reflect on the history of human knowledge:

What is not documented does not exist.

At first glance, this statement may seem harsh. It appears to deny existence to countless experiences merely because they were never written down. Yet, in another sense, it accurately describes what time does to memory.

Wisdom that is never recorded dies with its owner.

A lesson that is never passed on must be rediscovered from scratch by every generation.

A mistake that is never documented is destined to be repeated.

What leaves no written trace never becomes part of humanity’s collective memory. It remains confined to the individual and disappears when that individual does.

Civilization itself is built upon the accumulation of knowledge across generations.

Science advances because theories are first documented, then tested, and ultimately either confirmed or disproved by evidence.

Even an error, once recorded, becomes progress. It saves those who follow us from repeating the same mistake.

An idea that remains imprisoned within the mind—whether right or wrong—never enters this ladder of accumulated knowledge. It contributes nothing to humanity’s shared inheritance, forcing each generation to begin again from the very same starting point.

History offers another painful irony.

Time and again, original thinkers who dared to bring new ideas into the light were met with ridicule, condemnation, or even accusations of heresy.

Yet it is often the accusation itself that history preserves.

The idea that provoked it disappears.

We remember that someone was denounced, persecuted, or excommunicated, while rarely learning what they actually thought or hoped to say.

As though history were kinder to those who attacked ideas than to those who dared to produce them.

During my years as a physician, I witnessed this reality firsthand.

I sat beside patients in the final chapters of their lives—men and women who possessed enough wisdom, experience, and insight to fill volumes.

Yet they left this world without writing a single page.

They were not authors.

They never imagined their lives were worth recording.

That, precisely, is the illusion Henry Todd seeks to challenge: the belief that documentation belongs only to scholars, celebrated figures, or extraordinary achievers.

The truth is that every authentic human experience, however ordinary it may seem, carries within it the potential to illuminate someone else’s path.

Documentation need not always take the form of a published book or formal memoir.

It may be a letter.

A voice recording.

A conversation shared with a son, a daughter, or a student.

Even a painting may preserve what words cannot express.

The form matters far less than the act itself: bringing what lives within you into a world where others may encounter it after you are gone.

At its heart, documentation is not an act of self-glorification.

It is an act of reconciliation with oneself.

It is accepting that what you have lived was not meaningless—and giving others the opportunity not to begin where you once began.

Perhaps the greatest irony of our age is that, despite possessing more tools for recording our lives than any generation before us, we have become obsessed with documenting fleeting moments while leaving our deepest experiences unspoken.

We photograph passing moments.

Yet we remain silent about the wisdom acquired through years of struggle, suffering, and reflection.

It is as though the ease of recording has caused us to forget the purpose of preserving.

People close to me often ask, sometimes with barely concealed amusement:

“Why do you keep writing? Why spend so much effort on articles and books? Does anyone even read them? Why not simply relax?”

I admit that, beneath its apparent simplicity, this question reflects an entire philosophy of life—a philosophy that sees comfort as an end in itself and silence as safer than expression.

I understand that philosophy.

I simply do not share it.

Because the reader for whom I write is not necessarily the one reading today.

It may well be someone who has not yet been born.

The call to Die Empty is not an invitation to vanity, as though everything we think deserves an audience.

It is an invitation to genuine humility.

To believe that our experiences, however modest, do not belong exclusively to us.

They are a trust placed temporarily in our hands.

We have no right to carry them away when we leave this world.

The person who dies having emptied every lesson, every insight, every fragment of meaning they possessed has not truly disappeared.

A living part of them continues to work through the minds, the writings, and the memories of others.

As I write these lines each week, I realize that I am doing nothing more than trying not to die full.

Every article is another drop poured out before the well runs dry.

Every idea I record is a wager that someone not yet born may one day read it—and find within it enough to begin not where I began, but where I left off.

So let us bring what is within us into the light before it disappears with us into silence.

And let us always remember:

What is not documented does not exist.

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It is a great honour to stand before you today, in a place that has shaped so much of how the world thinks about the state, liberty, and power.

I want to begin with a question that seems almost naïve in its simplicity, and yet I have found that our confusion about it lies behind much of our confusion about modern history itself:

 **Do nations change overnight, the way weather changes between one evening and the next morning? Or is what we witness as a sudden explosion in the streets, in fact, a fruit that has been ripening for a long time beneath the surface — 

one we only notice the moment it falls, and so mistake for something newly born?**

I come to this question not primarily as a political scientist, but as a physician who has spent much of his career also thinking, and writing, about education, culture, and the Egypt’s  long and difficult passage toward modernity.

 I mention my medical background because it will return more than once in this lecture —

 not as an ornament, but because I have come to believe that the vocabulary of medicine —“ fever, chronic disease, tolerance, relapse “— describes the anatomy of political change more precisely than the vocabulary of triumph and defeat that dominates our news cycles.

Let me start by saying :

1. The Word “Revolution” Betrays Us

We use the word “revolution” to describe almost anything: popular anger, a coup, the fall of a ruler, even a passing rebellion against a single unpopular decision. 

The more we use the word, the less clear it becomes.

Is every mass uprising a revolution? 

Does the fall of a ruler mean the fall of a regime? 

Does a revolution begin the day the crowds fill the square, or years earlier, when ideas and expectations quietly begin to shift beneath a placid surface?

I want to propose, at the outset, a working definition, one I will test against history for the remainder of this lecture:

> **A revolution is a relatively rapid, fundamental transformation in the legitimacy of authority, the structure of the state, and the social contract — occurring when the gap between a changing society and the state’s capacity to absorb that change becomes unbridgeable by reform.**

This definition does not require violence, though violence is often present. 

It does not require a single leader or a unified ideology.

 And critically, it sets a threshold: an event only qualifies as a revolution if it produces new rules and new legitimacy — not merely a new face at the top of an old hierarchy.

This distinction matters enormously, 

Why?

because it lets us separate three phenomena we routinely conflate: 

**protest**, which says to a government, “change this policy”; 

**uprising**, which says, “we can no longer bear this rule”; and

 **revolution**, which asks the far more radical question — “who has the right to govern, on what basis, and under what covenant?”

1. Why the Poor Do Not Always Revolt

Here is where common sense misleads us. We assume, almost instinctively, that poverty and oppression are the fuel of revolution — that suffering accumulates until it detonates. 

But history does not confirm this. 

If poverty alone produced revolutions, the poorest societies on earth would be the most revolutionary.

 They are not. 

Some of the most repressive regimes in history have endured for generations, unchallenged.

“Alexis de Tocqueville”, writing in the nineteenth century about the French Revolution he had not personally witnessed, made an observation I consider one of the most penetrating in the whole of political thought: 

**the most dangerous moment for a bad government is typically not when it is at its most oppressive, but when it begins to reform.** Reform does not merely relieve pressure — it awakens something more volatile than anger: 

it awakens hope. 

A people who have known only repression may adapt to repression. 

But a people who glimpse the possibility of change will demand more of it — and when reform stalls midway, disappointment becomes a far more combustible force than despair ever was.

“James C. Davies” formalised this insight in his famous “J-curve” theory: revolutions tend to erupt not at the point of deepest deprivation, but after a period of rising expectations followed by a sharp reversal.

 And “Ted Robert Gurr” gave us the concept of **relative deprivation** — people do not revolt because they are poor in absolute terms; they revolt when they perceive a widening gap between what they believe they deserve and what they actually receive. 

This is why a frustrated university graduate in a middle-income country may feel more aggrieved than a subsistence farmer in a much poorer one: the graduate has glimpsed a door that then closed in his face, while the farmer never saw the door at all.

Education, media, and connectivity to the wider world do not merely inform people — they raise the ceiling of expectation. In this sense, revolutions often begin in the mind long before they begin in the street.

III. The Real Question: Why Do Some States Adapt and Others Break?

If suffering alone does not explain revolution, we are left with a more interesting — and, I think, more useful — question:

 **why do some states manage to reform themselves continuously, while others are eventually forced to break?**

I want to offer you a concept that I have found more analytically productive than the tired opposition between “revolution” and “reform”: 

**the state’s capacity for civilisational adaptation** — its ability to continuously adjust its laws, institutions, and distribution of power at a pace commensurate with the real transformation occurring within society: in knowledge, values, education, the role of women, family structures, technology, and citizens’ understanding of their own rights.

Society changes every single day — through schools, universities, the economy, migration, the internet, and successive generations. 

The state, by its very nature, moves more slowly: laws are not rewritten daily, bureaucracies are inherently conservative, and institutions resist change because they fear losing their own stability.

The problem is never simply that society changes, nor simply that the state is slow. The danger begins when the *gap* between their respective speeds grows wide enough that they effectively come to inhabit different eras. 

A citizen may live with the mind of the twenty-first century while parts of the state still reason with the instincts of the twentieth.

Allow me, once more, my medical metaphor: a physician does not regard a patient’s fever as the disease itself.

 Fever is a sign — sometimes a healthy sign of the body fighting back, sometimes a dangerous sign that something has gone badly wrong. 

The disease itself lies in whatever produced the fever. **Revolution, I would argue, is the fever, not the illness.** 

The illness is the state’s loss of capacity to adapt to a society that has already changed beneath it. 

And this is why lowering the fever — toppling a government, removing a president — does not by itself cure the disease. 

The deeper condition, the broken relationship between state and society, may persist long after the visible crisis has passed.

1. Legitimacy: The Question Every Revolution Is Really Asking

If I could distil this entire lecture into a single analytical tool, it would be this: 

**every revolution, whatever its slogans, is ultimately an argument about the source of legitimacy

** Does authority derive from God, from heredity, from the nation, from the revolution itself, from a party, from a constitution, from the ballot box, from a particular religious doctrine? Trace how a society answers this question, and you will understand far more about its trajectory than any account of marches and battles could tell you.

Consider four cases briefly, because I think the contrast is genuinely illuminating.

**England, 1688** — what the English themselves called their “Glorious Revolution” — was not the most violent of revolutions, nor did it seek to remake society from its foundations. 

Its achievement was narrower and, in a sense, more radical: it relocated legitimacy from the person of the king to the constitutional order itself. 

The king would still rule — but not alone, and not above the law.

 It was, I would argue, a revolution *within* the state rather than *against* it, and it may be the single most durable contribution to what we now call constitutional government.

**The American Revolution** asked a different question: not “how do we constrain a king?” but “who has the right to govern us?” 

Its most iconic phrase, “no taxation without representation,” was not really about the tax rate — it was a philosophical claim about the absence of consent. 

This was neither a revolution of the hungry nor of class conflict; it was a revolution of political legitimacy, and its genius lay in what came immediately after independence: the swift construction of institutions — a constitution, a separation of powers — capable of *sustaining* liberty long after the founders themselves had gone.

 Power may be built by a leader; only law builds a state.

**The French Revolution** asked the most radical question of the three: not how to constrain the king, nor merely who should govern, but where legitimacy comes from *at all*.

 Its answer — sovereignty belongs to the nation — rewrote the political vocabulary of the entire world: citizenship, popular sovereignty, the general will, equality before the law. But we should not romanticise it. The revolution that began in the name of liberty descended, within a few short years, into Terror, and then into the rule of Napoleon. 

This was not an accident; it exposed a pattern that would recur again and again: **toppling the old order does not, by itself, answer the much harder question of who now speaks in the revolution’s name.**

 The moment of unity — everyone agreeing on what they reject — is far easier to sustain than the moment of construction, when former allies discover they want fundamentally different futures.

**The Russian Revolution** pushed this danger to its extreme. 

The Bolsheviks were not merely asking who should govern; they believed they possessed the final answer to what the human being itself ought to become. 

Ideology preceded the party, and the party preceded the revolution. 

This is, I think, the deepest lesson of 1917: **the more certain a revolution becomes that it possesses ultimate truth, the less capable it becomes of tolerating disagreement** — because dissent is no longer received as another opinion, but as a threat to the revolution’s very identity.

1. State Strength and Societal Freedom Are Not Opposites

Allow me to challenge a dichotomy I think has done real damage to political thinking in both the West and the developing world: the assumption that a strong state and a free society are somehow in tension — that more of one requires less of the other.

I do not believe this. 

A weak state does not produce more freedom; it tends to produce the collapse of law itself, and the rise of competing centres of power — clan, militia, faction, capital — that fill the vacuum the state has left behind. Citizens do not fear a strong state; they fear a state unconstrained by law.

Equally, a state that maintains order through force alone may look stable for decades — until it doesn’t. 

Force can suppress protest, but it cannot suppress the underlying transformation of society; 

it can postpone the reckoning, but not cancel it. 

Over time, the gap I described earlier widens, and power — once a tool of stability — becomes an obstacle to renewal. 

Rigid states, like dry wood, appear strong, but they are the first to snap. 

Flexible states, like the green branch, bend in the wind — and survive it.

This is why I insist on separating two things too often treated as one: 

**the strength of the state** and **the strength of the ruler**. 

A ruler who concentrates everything in his own hands may appear powerful, but the institutions around him grow weaker with every year of that concentration — they learn to wait rather than to decide, and when that ruler eventually departs, the vacuum he leaves reveals just how hollow the surrounding structures had become. 

A genuinely strong state, by contrast, is one that continues to function competently regardless of who occupies its highest office. Great states are not measured by the greatness of their rulers, but by their capacity to endure after those rulers are gone — which is precisely why I regard the peaceful, regular transfer of power not merely as a democratic value, but as an administrative and civilisational necessity: a mechanism for the state’s own biological renewal.

1. Why Changing the Regime Is Not Enough

I want to turn now to what I consider the most difficult — and most neglected — question in the entire literature on revolutions: 

**why do some societies, after successfully overthrowing their old order, end up reproducing precisely the authoritarianism they rose against?**

A constitution can be rewritten in months. A government can be replaced in days. But a *culture* cannot be replaced at the same speed. 

Citizenship — respect for law, tolerance of disagreement, the belief that authority is a function and not a privilege, that opposition is not treason, that a ruler is a public servant rather than a national father figure — these are not laws. They are habits of mind, and habits of mind take generations to form.

This is why authoritarianism so often survives the authoritarian: it has already embedded itself not only in politics, but in the family, the classroom, the university, the workplace, and even in how we raise our children. A child taught that obedience matters more than understanding grows into an adult who searches for someone to obey, not someone to hold accountable.

 A school that rewards memorisation over inquiry produces citizens who fear questions rather than citizens who generate knowledge.

This is also, I believe, why freedom itself can feel frightening. Freedom is not merely the absence of constraint; it is the burden of choice, and choice is exhausting. 

Some people, quite understandably, prefer the certainty a strongman offers to the anxiety that liberty demands. And so, after a ruler falls, many societies find themselves searching — almost involuntarily — for a new one to take his place, not because they love authoritarianism, but because they fear the vacuum more.

I would go so far as to say that the single most dangerous illusion that follows any revolution is the belief that changing power is sufficient.

 It is not. 

It may, in fact, be the easiest part of the entire process. **The harder task — infinitely harder — is rebuilding the citizen.**

VII. History as a Laboratory: More Than One Path to Change

I want to close the historical portion of this lecture by resisting the idea that revolution, in the French or Russian sense, is the only template for national transformation. It is one template among several.

**China** shows us revolution that rebuilt the state, followed decades later by the state itself undertaking sweeping economic reform without a second revolution — proof that even a revolutionary order may, a generation or two later, be compelled to revisit its own founding assumptions.

**Japan**, during the Meiji era, achieved something that functioned like a revolution in its depth of consequence, without a popular uprising at all — a revolution imposed from above, by a state that understood the world had changed and chose to reform itself before the contradiction became an explosion. 

Perhaps the more useful question is not always “did a revolution occur?” but **”did the state manage to revolutionise itself before society was forced to revolutionise it for them?”**

**India** shows us decolonisation that preserved and repurposed inherited institutions within a new democratic covenant, rather than demolishing everything and starting from zero — a reminder that independence does not end the work; it only begins it, at the much harder question of whether a diverse nation can govern its own differences.

**South Africa** offers, I think, one of the most morally significant cases in modern history: a negotiated transition, led by figures such as Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, that avoided a near-inevitable civil war by treating compromise itself as a revolutionary act.

 Revolution, this case teaches us, does not always mean defeating one’s opponent; sometimes the truly revolutionary act is accepting his continued existence.

**Sudan**, by contrast, illustrates the opposite lesson: repeated uprisings that succeeded in toppling governments but repeatedly failed to build what comes after — a sobering reminder that toppling a ruler may take weeks, while building a state may take generations, and that a revolution unable to convert itself into institutions remains at permanent risk of returning to its starting point, or somewhere worse.

VIII. Egypt: Three Revolutions, Three Different Questions

Allow me, finally, to bring this closer to my own country, because I think Egypt offers a compressed illustration of everything I have argued today.

In less than a century, Egypt experienced three distinct historical moments, each posing a fundamentally different question about legitimacy.

**1919** was, at its core, a *national* revolution. Its question was not how to rebuild the economy or reinterpret religion, but simply: does an Egyptian nation exist with the right to determine its own destiny? It united Muslims and Christians, peasants and intellectuals, men and women, around a single idea — national independence — and the legitimacy it produced belonged to the Egyptian nation itself.

**1952** arose in a different context — a country with a measure of political independence, but still burdened by deep social inequality, weak institutions, and continued occupation of the Suez Canal. The question shifted from “who are we?” to “how do we build a state strong enough to deliver social justice and genuine independence?” 

Its legitimacy derived from state-building itself — real achievements in education, health, industry, and land reform — but its parallel legacy was a narrowing of political space and a weakening of the mechanisms for transferring power, as the state’s legitimacy became increasingly fused with the legitimacy of the revolution itself.

**2011** was different again — leaderless, without a single ideology or organisation, which was simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. It could unite millions around a rejection of the status quo, but not around a shared vision of what should follow. Its slogan — “bread, freedom, social justice, human dignity” — was a brilliant expression of that breadth, but it was not a governing programme. And so the real struggle began only after the old order fell: not whether change was needed, but **who now had the right to define the revolution and determine the state’s future** — the legitimacy of the ballot box, the legitimacy of the square, the legitimacy of the state, the legitimacy of institutions, the legitimacy of the revolution itself, all competing at once, without the national consensus needed to resolve them quickly.

I would add one further reflection here, offered more tentatively: Egypt’s particular resilience, I suspect, lies not only in its recent history but in the depth of its civilisational memory. The Egyptian state is not a creature of the twentieth century; it is one of the oldest continuous centralised states in human history. Perhaps this is part of why no single ideology — religious or secular — has ever succeeded in permanently capturing the whole of Egyptian society: not because Egyptians are less committed to their convictions, but because that civilisational memory runs deeper than any single project for reshaping identity.

1. Conclusion: From Revolution to a Culture of Renewal

Let me draw these threads together.

I began with a question about timing — does change happen suddenly, or does it only appear sudden? I hope I have persuaded you that the honest answer is the second.

 What we call revolution is very often the visible eruption of a much longer, quieter process: the widening of a gap between a society that never stops changing and a state that has stopped changing with it.

I have argued that poverty and oppression alone do not explain revolution — that rising expectations, followed by disappointment, are frequently more combustible than despair itself.

 I have argued that every revolution, beneath its slogans, is really an argument about where legitimacy comes from — and that the most durable transitions in history are precisely those that succeeded in relocating legitimacy from persons to institutions, and from the revolutionary moment to permanent, revisable rules.

 I have argued that a strong state and a free society are not natural enemies, but natural partners — that the true opposite of freedom is not order, but a state unaccountable to law. 

And I have argued that changing a regime, however necessary, is the easier half of the task; the harder half is cultivating the citizen who can sustain what comes after.

If there is a single idea I would ask you to leave this room with, it is this: 

**the true achievement of a civilisation is not measured by how skilfully it conducts its revolutions, but by how successfully it renders revolution unnecessary** — not by closing the doors to change, but by keeping other doors permanently open: reform, accountability, the peaceful transfer of power, and the capacity to learn, continuously, from one’s own mistakes.

Nature offers no permanent stillness. 

Cells renew themselves; seasons turn; rivers keep their names while their waters are never quite the same water twice. 

Stillness, in biology, is not a sign of life — it is a sign of death.

 I believe the same is largely true of nations. 

They too must continually renew their ideas, their institutions, their leadership, their laws, their methods of education, and their understanding of the human being. 

When that renewal stops, history begins searching for another way to force it — and we call that way, when it finally arrives, a revolution.

I opened this lecture with a question about revolution. I want to close it with something closer to a conviction: that civilisation is not measured by how many revolutions a nation survives, nor by how many rulers fall, but by whether renewal has become a habit, reform a culture, disagreement a source of creativity, and the transfer of power a means of the state’s continuation rather than a threat to its survival. 

A nation that reaches that point has not escaped autumn — autumn remains part of every living cycle — but it has learned, finally, that autumn is not an ending. 

It is only the season in which the tree prepares itself for a new spring.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

—

The post Dr. Hossam Badrawi Delivers Lecture at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations Titled “How Do Nations Change?” appeared first on Dr. Hossam Badrawi.

As a continuation of my conversations with young people about the importance of thinking—and after discussing how the pursuit of justice begins with the courage to think, a reflection inspired by Henry Todd’s book Die Empty, whose central message is that one should not take one’s ideas to the grave but bring them into the light, where they may benefit humanity—I found myself returning to the writings of Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, and, before them, Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, as well as the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), and, above all, the Qur’an’s repeated emphasis on reason and reflection.

In his remarkable book Thinking: An Islamic Obligation, Al-Aqqad argues that the Qur’anic command to think encompasses the full capacity of the human intellect and elevates contemplation to one of humanity’s highest virtues.

Islam, he writes, is a religion that knows no priesthood. It recognizes no intermediary clergy standing between the Creator and His creation. It does not require sacrifices offered through the intercession of a powerful saint or a sacred authority. No one possesses the exclusive right to interpret God’s will, to declare what is lawful or unlawful, or to decide who is saved and who is condemned. Naturally, the message of such a faith is addressed to the free, rational human being—unrestrained by any earthly authority that might stand between them and sound understanding or independent thought.

Al-Aqqad further argues that the greatest obstacles to reason are the worship of inherited tradition, blind obedience to religious authority, and the humiliating fear of political power.

Historians of religious thought, he observes, often agree that political tyranny poses less danger to the human conscience than inherited customs or the deception of those who claim exclusive religious authority. Political oppression comes from outside the individual, while unquestioning reverence for ancestors or submission to false spiritual guides captivates the mind from within. Tyranny is a problem of circumstance; intellectual submission is a problem of conscience. One may escape a tyrant by leaving a place, but escaping intellectual captivity requires liberation of the mind itself.

As the Qur’an declares:

“And when it is said to them, ‘Follow what Allah has revealed,’ they say, ‘Rather, we will follow what we found our forefathers following.’ Even though their forefathers understood nothing and were not guided?”
(Qur’an 2:170)

Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib—the City of Knowledge and the banner of justice—considered reason to be the foundation of faith and the pillar of worldly life. He famously said:

“The head of all virtues and the source of all refinement is reason, which God has made the foundation of religion and the support of worldly life.”

He also said:

“A person’s speech reveals the measure of his intellect, and his eloquence reflects the extent of his excellence.”

Among his enduring maxims is:

“Minds are not measured by age. Many a young person possesses remarkable wisdom, while many an elder has an empty mind.”

Tawfiq Al-Hakim, in The Four Conversations, imagines himself addressing God:

“The Qur’an speaks of Your three revealed religions and their sacred books—the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an. Permit me, my Lord, to ask: Was it necessary for all three revelations to be sent?”

Surely, he answers, there must be profound wisdom behind this progression.

God created the human intellect—perhaps His most astonishing creation—not merely to exist, but to contemplate His wisdom.

Al-Hakim reflects on the stages of human development: from embryo to infant, from crawling child to questioning youth, from adolescence with its passions and ideals to mature adulthood, where reason reaches its fullest expression and individuals begin making independent judgments.

Perhaps, he suggests, divine revelation unfolded in a similar progression, each stage corresponding to humanity’s evolving intellectual capacity.

Moses and the Torah addressed humanity in its earliest communal stage, centered on tribal identity and the revolutionary affirmation of monotheism.

Jesus embodied humanity’s youthful stage, emphasizing love, compassion, and moral idealism.

Then came Muhammad (peace be upon him), representing humanity’s intellectual maturity, bringing a message addressed to reason itself. As the Qur’an says:

“Say, ‘I am only a human being like you, to whom revelation has been given.'”
(Qur’an 18:110)

This marks, in Al-Hakim’s interpretation, the stage at which the human intellect becomes capable of seeking truth through reflection itself.

Reason examines the nature of existence.

Reason investigates creation.

Reason arrives at the knowledge of God—not merely through miracles, but through understanding.

I believe that this capacity for rational awareness is one of the greatest gifts God bestowed upon humanity, distinguishing human beings from all other creatures.

Reason and thought are among God’s greatest miracles within us.

Why, then, do some seek to suppress them, forbidding people to think in the name of protecting religion or preserving inherited traditions—as though Islam itself required protection from those who reflect?

This is precisely why the Qur’an repeatedly invokes reason, knowledge, learning, and scholars. Unlike earlier prophets, Muhammad was not sent with spectacular physical miracles, despite the demands of his contemporaries.

They challenged him to produce springs from the earth, gardens flowing with rivers, fragments of the sky falling upon them, visible angels, a palace of gold, or a heavenly ascent followed by a written revelation descending before their eyes.

His response was simple:

“Glory be to my Lord! Am I anything but a human messenger?”
(Qur’an 17:90–93)

When humanity was still in its intellectual childhood and adolescence, tangible miracles served a purpose.

Once reason itself reached maturity, understanding became the greater miracle.

Al-Hakim continues:

We are born in complete unconsciousness. Our earliest existence is governed entirely by instinct. Even the brain does not complete its physical development until well after birth, while consciousness itself unfolds only gradually as experience accumulates.

Imagine, he asks, if we entered life fully conscious from the very first moment.

The miracle of life lies precisely in its gradual unveiling.

Perhaps this gradual unfolding also explains why Muhammad is called the Seal of the Prophets and why Islam is regarded as the final revealed religion.

Humanity had reached the stage at which it could come to know both the Creator and creation through the exercise of reason.

God entrusted humanity with that responsibility.

No further prophets.

No further miracles.

Only the ongoing responsibility to think.

In my view, the final revealed religion achieved a balance between intellect, emotion, and material reality. It entrusted humanity with the task of thinking for itself.

We seek evidence before conviction.

We question before belief.

We debate before agreement.

We revisit inherited interpretations in light of knowledge unavailable to previous generations.

Whoever forbids us from thinking denies one of God’s greatest blessings: the gift of reason itself.

The Prophet is reported to have said:

“How can the Qur’an benefit anyone without knowledge?”

Some have misunderstood the idea that Islam is suitable for every time and place.

They have interpreted it as requiring the preservation of the earliest historical understanding forever, limiting knowledge to what existed during the Prophet’s lifetime—as though Islam were meant for only one era.

I understand it differently.

Islam is universal precisely because humanity continues to advance—from ignorance toward knowledge.

As the Qur’an asks:

“Are those who know equal to those who do not know?”

Why do I write this?

Because two recent events—one Egyptian, one international—have stirred intense controversy. Though very different, they are connected by a common thread: hypocrisy, bad faith, and manufactured division.

At home, a thinker nearly found himself condemned simply because he dared to question prevailing assumptions and suggest that what we are told may not represent the whole truth—that we should investigate and verify for ourselves.

Internationally, another form of hypocrisy has become impossible to ignore: the glaring double standards in the world’s response to Ukraine and Europe on one hand, and to Palestine—and, more broadly, the Arab world—on the other.

Sadly, we now live in an age where those who claim to defend rights often undermine them, and those who speak most passionately about freedom are frequently the first to restrict it.

Extremism and self-righteousness seem to flourish on every side.

The time has surely come for us to understand.

The time has surely come for humanity to reach its full intellectual maturity.

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It immediately sparked my curiosity.

Five candidates sit before the world, each presenting a vision for the future of the Organization, answering questions, and trying to persuade a global audience watching on screens that they are the most qualified person to lead the world’s foremost international political institution.

On the surface, the scene appears deeply democratic.

Transparency. Public dialogue. Candidates. Questions. A global audience.

Yet the first question that came to my mind was both simple and, perhaps, unsettling:

Will this debate actually determine who becomes the next Secretary-General of the United Nations?

The answer, of course, is no.

The Secretary-General is not elected directly by the peoples of the world. Nor is the position freely decided by the General Assembly. Public debates do not determine the outcome. Under the UN Charter, the Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.

And that is where real politics begins.

Within the Security Council sit five permanent members armed with the power of veto: the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom. In practical terms, this means that the path to the Secretary-General’s office passes through a very narrow gate—one that no candidate can cross if even one of the major powers decides to close it.

A candidate may be the most qualified.

They may have the deepest experience.

They may present the strongest vision.

They may even win the admiration of the world during a public debate.

Yet they can still be eliminated behind closed doors simply because one great power does not want them.

That is why these debates are fascinating—not necessarily because they determine the winner, but because they reveal a deeper paradox within the international political system:

Democracy before the cameras… power behind closed doors.

But is this paradox unique to the United Nations?

I fear it has become, to varying degrees, a miniature reflection of what is happening across much of our world.

The candidates will speak to a global audience.

They will discuss peace, sustainable development, human rights, international law, and institutional reform.

We will listen carefully.

Yet somewhere else, the calculations that truly matter will be taking place.

What does Washington want?

What will Moscow accept?

Who can Beijing live with?

Whom will London and Paris not oppose?

And what balance between the Global North and the Global South is considered acceptable?

If the institution that is supposed to represent the nations of the world cannot choose its own Secretary-General without first securing the consent of the five victorious powers of a war that ended more than eighty years ago, then to what extent does the international system truly reflect the world of today?

The world has changed.

New powers have emerged.

The number of UN member states has multiplied several times since the Organization’s founding.

The global economy has changed.

Population distribution has changed.

Technology has transformed every aspect of life.

Yet the basic architecture of international power still bears the unmistakable imprint of 1945.

The paradox is therefore unmistakable.

We urge states to embrace democracy within their borders, while the system governing relations among those states is itself far from democratic in the same sense.

In the General Assembly, a small state and a nation of more than a billion people each have one vote. Yet the real power of decision remains concentrated in the hands of a very small group of states through the Security Council.

It is democracy among nations at one level—and an aristocracy of power at another.

Perhaps the problem is that we have become accustomed to thinking of democracy as a collection of procedures, when in reality it is a philosophy of distributing power.

The fundamental question in any political system is not simply:

Who gets to vote?

It is also:

Who actually has the power to decide?

Who has the power to say no?

Who can change the rules?

Who can remain in office even when everyone else wants change?

These questions apply to individual states just as much as they apply to the international system.

They apply to parliaments just as they apply to the Security Council.

They apply to national elections just as they apply to selecting the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I do not write this to argue that democracy is an illusion.

Quite the opposite.

I continue to believe that democracy remains the best system humanity has devised for managing differences, ensuring peaceful transfers of power, and correcting mistakes without resorting to violence.

But defending democracy does not mean turning it into a sacred doctrine beyond criticism.

Its true defense lies in constantly examining and improving it.

A democracy that cannot criticize itself eventually becomes an ideology of its own.

The question we should be asking today is not merely:

Are we democratic societies?

Rather:

Is democracy, in the form it took shape during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, still capable of governing the realities of the twenty-first?

A world of multinational corporations.

Artificial intelligence.

Algorithms that know more about citizens than politicians do.

Enormous concentrations of wealth capable of shaping public opinion.

Digital platforms that can spread a false story to one hundred million people before the truth has even had time to put on its shoes.

I will watch the public dialogue for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I will listen carefully to the candidates.

I will try to judge who presents the most convincing vision.

But as I watch, I will also know that another debate is taking place—one that is never broadcast.

It is the debate of interests, power, and geopolitical balance.

That is not necessarily a bad thing; politics has always been the management of interests and power.

The real danger begins when the distance between what people see and what actually determines their future becomes too great.

That is when institutions begin to lose public trust.

Democracy risks becoming a beautifully staged performance while the ending is written in another room.

Perhaps this is where a broader conversation should begin:

Is today’s democratic crisis a crisis of the idea itself, or a crisis of the widening gap between its appearance and its substance?

Can democracy renew itself before people lose faith in it?

And then comes the most difficult question of all—particularly for those of us in the developing world:

Is democracy a single universal model to be applied identically in every society, or is it a broader human philosophy that, in each society, requires institutions, political culture, and an appropriate stage of development before it can become a genuine practice rather than merely a performance for the cameras?

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