Rifaat al-Saeed … Blessed be you and your thoughts

These were dates of flesh and blood, the ones that freed us, made us grow up, and planted in us manliness and patriotism. 

He is one of the makers of those distant dates in the body. He used to plant the space between his room, (this of the Secretary of the Central Committee of Tagammu Party) and the room of the General Secretariat, in a vicious circle.

He was restless, tireless, and never bored. At 7:00 am every day, you can see him escorting one of the colleagues coming from afar, from his office to those spacious roads. When you start talking to him, he points you to the ceiling of the room, in reference to the presence of someone who listens and records. Our voice was loud at that time. We were young and excited about the idea of ​​building a homeland free of the poor. 

We came from Upper Egypt to dream of Cairo as an incubator for the socialist dream.

Rifaat al-Saeed was this man. 

We disagreed with him, criticized him severely, and we loved him. 

We said about him what Malik said about wine, but we fell in love with his bitter spirit. We were not criticizing him, we were criticizing conditions that prevented us from realizing our dreams, the dreams of a poor country for a clean livelihood, and human dignity for its poor lovers.

We did not come from the middle class. We were the sons of the poor. We did not deny our past, our parents or our teachers.

Al-Saeed is about 81 years of giving. He went where his dream was: Egypt as a warm homeland for the poor, workers and peasants, and the children of young employees, like me and the likes of all my generation. 

Now I confess - as all my fellow left rebels admitted to me before - that we loved him as much as we criticize him perhaps because we could not get ahead of him. He was an old man and we were young people. He was always ahead of us in vision, analysis, and response to reality. When we stopped pursuing our dreams, he sat on this reality, studying and analysing. 

Blessed be he on the anniversary of his birth. Blessed be his generation, his thoughts, and his attitudes. He served us and Egypt as a beacon that lights the way for the future.