Khaberni - On that night when silence clung to the room's walls like a heavy shadow, Salim sat in front of his open suitcase, staring into it as if looking into a mirror reflecting his entire life. He wrote on a small piece of paper: "Nothing resembles the first goodbye, except the farewell to the homeland." Then he folded it and placed it in his pocket, perhaps to remind him one day that he did not leave out of betrayal, but in search of a breath of life that suffocated in a place too cramped for it.
His mother was in the next room, praying softly, her tears hidden behind intermittent takbirs. She knew he was leaving, and she also knew he would not return soon. As for him, he was repeating to himself, "I leave to live, not to escape." This was the phrase he tried to convince his heart with, yet it shattered inside him like fragile glass under the weight of the truth.
Salim was not the first to depart, and he would not be the last. In every Arab home, there is a similar story: a young man carrying his dream on his shoulder, walking a path of no return. He exited the airport gate, his eyes fixed on a homeland that had given him nothing but promises. For a homeland that does not embrace the dreams of its children gently pushes them towards exile, then bitterly wonders why they leave.
Cities in the West await them with open doors. The West knows exactly what it wants: the oil deep in our lands, the markets in our streets, and the minds in our children’s heads. It wants the raw material to feed its industry and the markets to channel its goods, but above all, it wants the creative Arab mind to produce ideas, fuel factories, and invent the future. It has realized that control is not achieved through guns but through ideas, and owning minds is more valuable than owning wealth.
Thus, the Arab doctor builds their renaissance, the Arab engineer plans their cities, and the Arab scientist signs their patent deeds, while his original homeland settles for a picture of him in the newspaper and a sigh in the cafe. How cruel it is to see homelands silently drained, and their youth turned into immigrants carrying their dreams in suitcases, leaving behind their empty chairs in laboratories, schools, and hospitals.
We teach our children with our money, effort, and patience, then send them to distant lands so our efforts bear fruit on alien soil. We plant, and others reap. We sow awareness, and the West harvests knowledge and prosperity. We sow competence, and it is transformed into industry, invention, and wealth. We then ask ourselves after that: Why do we not progress? And how can we develop when the mind that creates growth lives on another shore?
Our children did not leave in search of luxury, but because they dreamed of a homeland akin to humanity. They wanted a democratic homeland, a homeland of citizenship not subjects, a homeland of freedoms and social justice, a land where creativity is honored, and dignity preserved, a homeland based on rights and duties, and the rule of law not the whims of individuals. A homeland where the law is not like a spider’s web; it traps the small insect and is breached by the large. They wanted a homeland that does not raise slogans of reform but lives it as reality; political, economic, financial, social, and administrative reform. But they despaired when they saw corruption protected not pursued, and the loyal exiled not honored. Only then did they pack their bags and roamed the earth in search of an alternative homeland, a future where a person feels like a citizen, not a number on a waiting list.
Someone once said: "The most dangerous form of poverty is the poverty of ideas," and today we are drowning in it up to our necks. Our youth leave because they find no place for hope in their homelands, and those who remain live on the margins of the dream, afraid to be creative lest they be excluded, or speak up lest they be silenced. And if this bleeding continues, there will be no renaissance project, but rather a nation’s funeral marked by four takbirs.
Yet, hope has not died. Nations do not perish when their sons and daughters migrate, but when they forget how to recall them. We can turn migration from a loss into a return, from absence into dawn. It is enough to create a homeland that listens to ideas before judging them and embraces talents before they emigrate. It is enough to believe that the human being is the supreme investment, and that academic dignity is no less important than bread and water.
When we respect the mind, our children will return on their own. Salim will return one day, carrying a new qualification and an old smile, and he will plant in his land what he learned abroad. Only then will the bleeding stop, and the dream will return to the embrace of its first mother — the homeland.
