A 10-year-old prize-winning schoolgirl has become a media sensation in Egypt after being asked to recite a poem to the education minister and using the opportunity to launch into a bloodthirsty denunciation of the state of the country.
Habiba Yahya Abdulmoneim, who had won a national poetry recital competition, was an obvious choice to perform for the minister, Ibrahim Deif, when he visited her school in the coastal resort of Hurghada. Instead of reciting a traditional epic, she surprised her audience with a composition by her father, an amateur poet.
“The feast-day sheep butts me, it wants to slay me,” she said, with the full range of hand gestures and facial drama that audiences expect from Arabic performances. “But its price is high. It is I who will roast you, it says, I who will destroy everything that is of value to you. I will not feed you, my wool will not warm you.”
The poem, though obscure on the surface, was immediately understood by the audience — the opposition regularly refers to followers of Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood as sheep because of the obedience it demands of its members.
The minister, who is not a member of the Brotherhood, seemed to take the performance in good part. But the Brotherhood may have been more upset. Yahya Abdulmoneim, her father, told a television interviewer that a local member of its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, had telephoned to berate him. He said that he had originally written the poem as an attack on the previous president, Hosni Mubarak, but neither he nor his daughter dissociated themselves from its updated interpretation.
Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Egyptian+girl+denounces+Muslim+Brotherhood/8323683/story.html#ixzz2S8lN1bhv
