Egyptian schoolgirl, 10, becomes media sensation with protest poem
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, a precocious child 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, however, she surprised her audience with a passionate rendition of 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 – and by those who saw the subsequent video on television or online. The opposition regularly refer to followers of the Muslim Brotherhood as sheep because of the obedience it demands of its members.
"If I catch you looking at me, I will whet my horns and pull out your shoulders," she went on. "I am nobody's except someone who can afford to buy me – and they had better have a bank account."
The minister, who is not himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, seemed to take the performance in good part, applauding but telling the girl, with good-humour: "I don't think we have anything to be ashamed of."
The Muslim Brotherhood itself 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 phoned to berate him.
"How come your daughter criticises the Brotherhood," he said he was asked. "What does she know about it?"
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.
The Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi won Egypt's presidential election last year by a narrow margin of less than 52-48 per cent, and has since been beset with falling poll numbers, protests and a failing economy. It maintains that the opposition are deliberately setting out to destabilise the country.
Habiba's poem has been picked up by an often hostile media as a new weapon to use against it. Asked if she had a message for the president, Habiba said: "I want to say to him, our country is beautiful and rich in resources but we are not using them properly. We could make great progress, if only we thought about it a bit."
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