the friday prayer service has over the years been transmitted live on the state radio and television. on one of the days in february 1981, when the notorious awakening was in its infancy, a preacher of a mosque from where the sermon and prayer were transmitted was a young teenager, the output of the afghan awakening.
during his sermon he was taken by enthusiasm or vanity or whatever you may call it, he lost composure and d e s c r i b e d renowned academics and newspaper columnists as ‘born out of wedlock’, fed from sewers and are raised in brothels.
because of the high prestige of those who were attacked and the foul language used in describing them, the then undersecretary of the ministry of information offered an apology, and the subject was contained with the intervention of the brotherhood forces, and the apology from the preacher, but the incident did not pass without its repercussions.
the ministry of awqaf then issued a decision banning random sermons from the mosques pulpits, and made it mandatory for preachers to preach ‘sermons’ approved by the ministry. this is in addition to putting the age limit of minimum 50 years on preachers, but many preachers violated that rule remained undeterred and got involved in every matter only for the ministry to show bias towards some and punish the others, but failed to put a complete end to the violations.
the insults hurled by that particular preacher from the pulpit made him a star overnight among his followers his audacity in obscenity. his party also saw in him raw material, which the party thought, could be used to attack the opponents of the party. thus, their ‘underground’ activities began with his frequent portrayal as a hero and within years he became a superstar when some governments opened the doors of their male and female schools to destroy the minds of the young with his ideals.
the malls and theaters welcomed him to give speeches and he did speak on every subject and every file and was satisfied with the title given to him. he was called maulana (a title preceding the name of respected muslim religious leaders) after appearing in television programs and became a star in the gulf channels.
the continued silence of the concerned authorities prompted his political party to pay more attention to him especially after the title dr preceded his name, a ph.d. acquired from an unrecognized university, preceded his name.
for three decades, he succeeded in exploiting the mental strength of the society with his corrupt ideas. this helped him and other ‘awakening knights’ to reap the harvest (wealth and ownership of real estate) amid the continued silence of some governments and other fools in the nation which steadily deteriorated our situations and thrust us to the bottom of the pit where we find ourselves now.
a professor in the kuwait university said he fell victim to this saboteur boy (preacher) when he heard that told a veiled student that the university rules and regulations prohibit those whose identity is not known and therefore she will not be able to sit for exam as long as he is uncertain of her personality and asked her to look for another class. the news of rejection reached the boy preacher and he attacked him with those words and descriptions.
the revolutionaries of lebanon and iraq demand that politicians in their countries to disclose their wealth, and we demand our politicians also to disclose their wealth, and also demand that clerics who have become rich overnight to disclose their wealth.
note: we thank and appreciate the initiative of the touristic enterprises company for the tender to build smart bathrooms along the coastline. we hope that the kuwait municipality, with its good management, will follow the example of the touristic enterprises company and launch a similar tender for the installation of smart bathrooms in the heart of the capital.