3am sa3d

3am sa3d… An everlasting symbol of our faculty, maybe more famous than the dean himself to people outside our faculty… This man has been violating copyrights since 1964

It’s inevitable that you deal with him once you were by any way associated with the faculty… Students and professors alike, his knowledge with every book ,it’s contents and it’s version which may exceed the instructors knowledge astonishes everyone, at least everyone who stops at such things in this fast non stopping faculty.

I once had a talk with this guy and to my surprise he was very friendly and open… he told me that he first came here in 64, and it was the same job as it is now, only now he has people assisting him, he said students come and go, doctors come and go, even deans come and go, but only he stayed the same, he was proud to be the only fake books provider in the faculty.

For the community this guy is a hero… as he helped many students get their hands on books that otherwise they would’ve never seen, he is like the social justice that keeps rich students from having a better advantage, of course all of that was in the pre-internet era, but still he does a great job -from the social point of view of course-.

But from the legal point of view this guy should be imprisoned for life… running a simple calculation , our faculty has 15,000 students, say only half of them buy at least 2 books a year, which means 15,000 fake books per year, that’s 15,000X 300 L.E average original book price X 45 years he have worked = 202,500,000… yeah :D you are looking at hundreds of millions of losses which are enough to hang him five times.

What remains is the ethical point of view.. is it OK to violate a copy right to keep social justice ? and is it a must that only inadequate students buy from him ? well I am not an ethics expert nor am I a social analyst, but I can tell that as long as the books prices are far from the average citizen’s reach -the average citizen income in Egypt is 80$ per month-, and as long as the publisher has another market that makes Egypt looks like a school canteen to him, it’s ok for THE STUDENT who’s incapable of buying the book to buy a fake one… which means -in my humble opinion- that these students are ok, but 3am sa3d himself is a thief -maybe a noble one- but still a thief.

I don’t care what legal maniacs say or what ethics experts recommend, because no matter how hard they try to emphasize that it’s not a gray area, I’ll always think it is, it’s not like stealing food, but it’s not like taking pictures of a statue either.

on my way back home

every morning.. every afternoon.. i pass this amazing, old, symbolic building.. i always admire the way it looks, i know it’s not any where near an architectural wonder.. but what really gets to me is what it stands for.. a massive institution that brought brilliant minds, not just to Egypt, but to most of the Arab and African countries…

i remember that i had a friend form Comoros spending a whole hour telling me how great my university is.. this guy who barley spoke Arabic actually knew about it more than i did, he told me that almost every government official there is either a graduate of this university or El-Azhar’s.. which filled me with pride for a moment.

and while it lasted I thought we humans always tend to love stuff in other people’s hands, we only start loving our stuff when people start talking good about it.. I felt bad for people who studied there without knowing how lucky they are, not knowing that the average student in cosmos would kill for such an opportunity…. I was filled with a feeling of patriotism mixed with pride and sorrow, but a few hours later, as this feeling slipped away I started hating it again.

What’s funny about this picture is that it’s sunset.. it’s always sunset, even though I pass this scene twice a day, in the morning and at sunset, I never admire it or even take a picture of it in the morning.. Maybe because in the morning I am more of an energetic person who looks forward for progressing in his life, keen to see what the future holds, never looking back…

on the other hand at sunset I am just tired after a long day, maybe proud of my progress, walking slowly home, admiring everything on my way back, thinking about how great men once had such a similar tiring day and walked this very street with such fast yet tired footsteps, which puts me in a great mood to admire what it stands for and take pictures of it, but if that was true, it would imply that hard working people would make the greatest artists, and that the more you work and get tired of doing work that you’re proud of, the more you will admire beauty and the more you will express it, which makes an aristocratic artist a rare phenomena.

OR maybe it means that the world doesn’t obey the rules of logic, and you cant reason with it.. and that sometimes things happen without a reason we could fathom - because I am a believer I believe that there must be a reason – and maybe art and beauty are just subjective terms that come and go, and maybe me admiring that old building at sunset is just by mere chance, maybe it’s because I tend to look one side more than the other, or maybe it’s the lighting conditions that made me look.. I only know this : if you ever pass this building at sunset, after a long day of work, you will feel something different.