It is for sure that others and I have read Shawqi’s poem hundreds of times, over tens of years, and mostly to brag about remembering it by heart, and iterate it without caring for working according to its content, not as youthful students nor as teachers, and the English saying goes as “Easier said than done”. Morals are not only good behaviors, but also include honesty, good acts, etiquette, politeness and respect of others.

All these things were not known well by our fathers and grandfathers in the wider meaning of morals, because this needs academic education and awareness that is mostly not available at home - rather it is the duty of the educational apparatus, and this is what it did not do over the past half century, and the result was negative on the society as a whole.

This is what is going in our countries and Kuwait in particular, who cannot believe what is being committed in it in the form of unprecedented immoral acts such as thefts, dishonesty, embezzlement, lies in documents, commercial cheating, administrative corruption, claiming illness to not report to work, claiming being handicapped, forging school certificates - even by prominent religious scholars - and the acceptance by those equal to them of receiving salaries they do not deserve over a quarter of a century without remorse.

All of those are immoral acts that we did not consider them so because we lived through the illusion of linking morals with sexual matters for men and women, and forgetting or ignoring what is more dangerous and important than that. It is enough to look at the way we behave with simple people in the society such as domestic helpers and laborers, and even with expat teachers and doctors to find out how much we need in intense lessons in morals! Many of us do not even know the word “thank you” or “excuse me”, and if they know it, they will be bashful to use them, maybe out of conceit. They also find it hard to apologize when they commit minor or major mistakes, and they justify the mistake.

We write this as a comment on the discovery of 100 students on scholarships in British universities who presented forged certificates stating that they passed the English language exams. Moreover, some of them launched sit-ins in front of the education ministry demanding that their scholarships not be suspended, and even their financial allocations! Here, we do not find it strange that large numbers of graduates of Western and American universities cannot speak good English, much less write it.

We do not want to go ahead, as the issue is still under investigation, but it is dangerous under all moral standards, and the reason is not because of not being religious, but it is due to the spread of immorality in every home and facility, and this is a bigger catastrophe than the spread of plague or the occurrence of a devastating earthquake, because natural catastrophes can be dealt with and controlled, but the destruction of one’s morals have a long-term destructive effect. —Translated by Kuwait Times

By Ahmad Al-Sarraf