Some people, as usual, stopped their lives, entered their homes, and concealed their sorrows…they practiced waiting! This is the behavior of many people if they feel that the situation is bigger than them and that they have nothing to do with it.. Writer Mohamed Elhamy shows how to react to the rumor in his blog post that he wrote for Al Jazeera blogs.
Al-Jabarti said: “On Wednesday, the fourth of the last of the tenth of the Hijjah of the year 1147 [that is, the day following Eid al-Adha of this year, which corresponds to May 7, 1735 AD], it was rumored among the people in Egypt that the Resurrection would take place on Friday the sixteenth of the Hijjah [just two days later], and this word spread among the people all over, even in the villages and countrysides, and the people bid each other farewell: 1- A person says to his companion: There are two days left of our lives, and a lot of people came out and disgraced the Ghaitan. And the parks, and some of them said to each other: Let us do a good deed and bid farewell to this world before the resurrection comes. 2- The people of Giza, women and men, went out and started bathing in the sea. 3- Among the people were those who were filled with sadness and deep within them, 4- and among them were those who began to repent of their sins, supplicate, and pray. Because of what he said. 6 – And they say: This is true, and so-and-so the Jew and so-and-so the Copt said it, and they are known among the unbelievers and the non-believers, and they do not lie about anything they say, and so-and-so among them reported that he passed wind on such-and-such a day, and so-and-so went to such-and-such prince and told him about it, and said to him: Lock me up until Friday, and if the resurrection does not come, then kill me, and similar whisperings spread among them until the aforementioned specific Friday, and nothing happened! Friday passed and it became Saturday. 7- Then they moved on and said: So-and-so scholar said: Sidi Ahmad Al-Badawi, Al-Dasouki and Al-Shafi’i interceded in this matter and God accepted their intercession. Then the other said, “O God, benefit us from them, for, my brother, we are not satisfied with this world and we are willing to work for our share and other such forms of guidance.” Al-Jabarti’s speech ended… which I quoted in its letters, and I did not intervene except by punctuation and two clarifications in square brackets [..]. Some people, as usual, stopped their lives, entered their homes, and concealed their sorrows…they practiced waiting! This is the behavior of many people if they feel that the situation is bigger than them and that they have nothing to do with it. In this scene, we see that the rumor was able to spread widely in Cairo, the villages, and the countryside, even though time was faster than the carrier pigeon! It is even as if some rumors have the ability to spread independently, defeating the barriers of time and distance! In it, we also see the types of people and their doctrines in dealing with expected major catastrophes, and Al-Jabarti identified seven types of them: 1- Among them are those who do not see in any incident anything but a source or opportunity for amusement, play, laughter, and fun. Perhaps those are the ones who are always able to invent sarcastic jokes that come out in the most severe times of sorrow and misery, to the point that it is as if the one who invented them lives in a world alone, observing the scene from afar for the purpose of producing new jokes. In this incident that is before us, it was rumored among the people that the Day of Resurrection would be after two days, so they hastened to make up for it Fun and pleasure because they are the last two days of life! So they consulted in choosing the parks, places of entertainment, and fields that would witness their final bliss! 2- Some people reacted to the situation with a collective mentality that still baffles social scientists in explaining it. The collective behavior of humans is one of the most important fields that is still being studied to understand it. It is said that people deal with a collective situation according to their first reaction, and that any person can lead any confused gathering if he acts as a leader. They give an example of people meeting around an incident, for example, if a man comes from behind and says, “Come on, man,” and presents himself as having the solution, people will automatically make way for him without question, without hesitation, and without prior knowledge, even though he may be just a new spectator! Likewise, whoever rushes to deal with the sick or injured person as if he were a doctor, people surrender to him and leave him to examine the patient, and if he asks for such-and-such medicine, some of them rush to carry out his order!… In the incident that took place in the days of Al-Jabarti, the people of Giza had a collective nature of behavior, which was that they went down to wash in the Nile River… Why? And for what purpose? With what motive?.. God knows best! Perhaps they followed in this behavior a man who started it, and the collectivist tendency worked to spread this behavior. 3- Some people, as usual, put their lives on hold, entered their homes, and swallowed their sorrows…they practiced waiting! This is the behavior of many people if they feel that the situation is bigger than them and that they have nothing to do with it, and that everything has become useless, and that there is no longer any benefit to anything.. I imagine if these people were in our time, one of them would turn off their phones and sit in their room after they turned it off on them! If there was some positivity in it, he would have spent his time commenting on every post on social networking sites with the meaning: “What are you talking about? This is the resurrection.” If he saw a post calling for repentance, he would say: “That’s it, it’s no use. The one who repented has repented a long time ago.” And if he saw a post calling for fun, he would say: “By God, you don’t have blood.. After tomorrow, God will burn you!” 4- Among the people are those who remember God Almighty and begin to repent, pray, and supplicate in a final attempt to change their fate in the afterlife… There is no doubt that this is the best of all situations, and the best work in it is the obligatory work of the time: whether it is prayer, jihad, or something else, and in the hadith, the Prophet made the best work for the one who plants the shoot to plant it. I remember that a relative of mine – who was a merchant in a village in Upper Egypt – told me that in approximately the year 1996, when Egypt was witnessing a solar eclipse – which it had not witnessed before for many years – people began coming to him and paying him the debts they owed because the resurrection would occur on Wednesday (the day of the eclipse), so that they could be freed from it, until he started laughing and saying: What will I do with the money if the resurrection will also occur! But the problem with this type is that it believes in illusions and myths He surrenders himself to charlatans and liars, and submits to what they say without examination. Although his response is better than others, the danger comes to him from this characteristic. 5- There are people who will make every effort to confront this rumour, give priority to reason over emotion, resist the prevailing public collective behaviour, and argue that this is a lie…but they will be the weakest voice in the midst of the collective outburst responding to the rumour, and the most dangerous and biggest person who will fuel this popular outburst against it is the next type. 6- Those who volunteer on their own initiative to prove and confirm the rumor and invent evidence for it. Here a mixture of lies, whims, and love of appearance and fame interact to create this type of people. What is unfortunate is that these are not few. Rather, the presence of one of them encourages the emergence of others in the same vein. In the incident at hand, evidence, stories, narrations, and sources were invented that confirm the rumor. This is so-and-so the Jew and so-and-so the Copt who know the unseen and know the future, and a history of true prophecies is invented for them, such as the sick person who was cured, so-and-so who had a child, so-and-so whose husband returned to her…etc! And the wind that they were told was blowing was as they said, and others invented a story that adds more confirmation about so-and-so who went to such-and-such prince and said to him: Lock me up until Friday, and if the resurrection does not occur, then kill me. It would have been easier for the person who was deceived by the rumor to lie again to God and his righteous saints than to admit that he made a mistake or was foolish! There is no doubt that every one of us remembers things like this, especially in times of revolution and turmoil, and the sources that talk about the escape of so-and-so, or the killing of so-and-so, or warning so-and-so, or agreeing on such-and-such a matter, or arranging the political situation in such-and-such a way, and the news is amplified and confirmed through a network of liars who do not confirm or come clean. Indeed, accounts on Twitter and Facebook have specialized in spreading rumors, and other accounts have specialized in confirming and consolidating what is published! Then the Samer refuses to lie… but the accounts continue their mission because all segments of the rumor are still dealing with it as if nothing had happened before… and those are the seventh category. 7- These are the ones who, when the Resurrection did not occur on the promised day, invented a completely unseen story, an intercession that the righteous saints used for God, Blessed and Most High, so God accepted their intercession and extended the lifespan of this world!! The rumor finds someone inventing a story that took place in the highest kingdom so that it would not be false. That is, it would have been easier for the one who was deceived by the rumor to lie again to God and His righteous guardians than to admit that he made a mistake or was one of the fools!… If I did not want to divert the article from its general idea, I would have mentioned some of the names of journalists and media professionals who specialized in reporting what was said. It happens in closed rooms between a man and his wife, or a father and his son, or what happened in the offices of presidents and intelligence chiefs and in narrow political circles from which no air leaks. They publish it on the pages to explain the movement of history and to cover up with it the nakedness of their lies and deceit!! The same thing that Al-Jabarti narrated three centuries ago happened to a group in America in 1955, where they believed that the end of the world would occur at four o’clock on December 21st. A story occurred that did not differ in essence from what Al-Jabarti narrated. Its conclusion was that the believers would be brought by flying saucers in the courtyard of a certain woman’s house to extract them and save them. This prompted the believers to gather in the woman’s house, and then their prophecy failed at four o’clock! This is the story from which the famous psychologist Leon Fingster derived his theory of cognitive dissonance, and published it in his book “When Prophecy Fails,” trying to analyze the explanations provided by the group when reality contradicted what they believed. Such positions prove that man is man, and that he is not subject to the standards of progress related to material matters, and therefore it is not correct to say that a people is advanced or a people is backward simply because of race, geographic location, or type of culture. What is required now is for you to close your eyes and imagine: How does the authority use these human natures to control and control people? If you had the opportunity to present your proposals to combat this, what would you advise?! The deeper you think and contemplate, the more correct and better your advice and suggestions will be.
The post was published for the first time on the Al Jazeera Blogs website
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