Dear Yahia Abu El-Gheit, your father was a noble man

Dear Yahia Abu El-Gheit,

I do not know if you are going to read this post one day or not, but I hope you stumble upon it when you search more about your late father Mohamed Abu El-Gheit.

I did not know your father personally, but we share many things it turned out that we read the same young adult fiction writers as teens and young adults also.

Mohamed Abu El-Ghait (1988-2022)

We also did not study media or mass communication officially, but we turned our passion into our profession with all its ups and downs, all triumphs and defeats in the most difficult of times in the most difficult places in the world to share the truth or to express an opinion.

I have to say your father is the kind of journalist I wish to be one day, but he was one of a kind.

I did not know your father personally, but we had many common friends who all shared a common opinion about him: he was a noble name.

He was an honourable honest young man in time terms like honour and honesty became a rarity in this big vast world especially in the world of media in the Arab world.

I am writing this on the day that your father was buried in London. “I hope one day that he would be buried in his home country Egypt which he truly adored and hoped the best for”

Aside from the London funeral, there was an online uncoordinated natural virtual vigil made of pure love. Many strange people virtually expressed their sorrow and condolences for the early departure of your father after a battle with a cursed disease that I hate more and more now as it takes our best.

Your father left a huge, long legacy in his career as one of Egypt’s and the Arab world’s top investigative journalists despite his short life, despite being originally a medical doctor. You will know that already and read your father’s superb work.

 He was talented beyond his age when it comes to writing in Arabic. I thought Mohamed was in his mid-40s from his writing and huge knowledge but to my surprise, that highly sophisticated man was younger than me.

Mohamed Abu El-Ghait 

Aside from the common friends, we are technically from the same generation in Egypt; your motherland: The 1980s kids who suddenly decided to express themselves and their hopes for a better future as bloggers in the early 2000s then began the greatest time of our lives that turned everything upside down.

The 2011 revolution, our biggest pride, a triumph that turned into a defeat that I pray that it is just to be one battle defeat in a big war for a better Egypt.

Despite our differences in background, the 2011 revolution brought millions like me, your father, your mothers, our friends and millions of other Egyptians closer together with the same hopes and dreams for a better future for your generation. 

In the 2011 revolution, we opened Pandora's Box and our generation paid and has been paying its cost as you probably have known.

Your Father paid the price heavily.

Your father chose a hard choice to live in voluntary exile to find a better life for you and your mother. It was a hard choice, but it was worth it. He decided that you were brought up in the UK, but he never gave up on Egypt for one single second.

Your father worked hard to defend the principles we wish to see in Egypt like freedom of expression, democracy, and human rights for all whether through his investigative reporting or his work to be a founder and unknown soldier for Egypt’s Most important Pro-democratic Facebook pages in Arabic after 2013.

He believed in Egypt and the Egyptians; he knew that they can be better and inshallah will be better but huge changes and transitions take time.

Please do not give up on Egypt or the Egyptians, we are more than pyramids and once a great past civilization. Your father believed in that, and I know that your mother too despite the price she had to pay.

Dear Yahia, my words may sound cliché but our generation of bloggers especially the 1980s ones are like a virtual family despite many of us have not met each other thus if someone leaves us, it hurts, and your dad’s departure was so hurtful.

We are exhausted, too exhausted as a generation, as a group being blamed for everything wrong in Egypt.

Many blame us for opening Pandora's box but the optimistic self of your father makes me want to remind you and others that the light in Pandora’s box was found after all the darkness was unleashed with the evil in the world, that light is hope.

Hope is what kept your father fighting the battle of his life strongly for you and your mother. You are his hope.

Remember your father chose the light, chose the hope and he went to that light. 

Dear Yahia, all the best to you and to your great patient mother Esraa.

On that night you are both in the prayers of thousands of Egyptians and Arabs you may not know or meet in your life, but this is the least we can do.

I hope that inshallah you read this, you will be in Egypt your father prayed, hoped and worked for.

                                                                                                                        Your virtual aunt 

                                                                                                                           Zeinab