Lesson 1: "The Will of Change" by Dr Zaki Naguib Mahmoud

01First: the author

• Dr Zaki Naguib Mahmoud: a great Egyptian writer, thinker and philosopher — born in Damietta governorate and died in 1993.
• He took his PhD in philosophy from the University of London, so he joined Arabic culture to Western culture.
• He made many contributions that enriched the Arabic library, and his concern was to make thought and logic the basis of renaissance.

His books and his work

• He wrote in philosophy, in logic, and in the simplification of thought, combining the precision of the philosopher with the fluency of the writer.
• He is reckoned among the most prominent voices calling for binding thought to action and for modernising Arab life.

02Second: the occasion of the essay and its intellectual direction

• The essay was written at a stage when the people had achieved a victory and had let loose their will — so the remaining question was: what do we do with this will?
• The writer means to move people from passing enthusiasm into organised work that changes values and conditions.
• Type of essay: an intellectual, philosophical essay (maqāl fikrī falsafī) that relies on definition, logic and examples.
• Its intellectual direction: the real will is act and change, and true change begins with changing values and standards.

03Third: idea one — the will is the act itself

The content of the idea

• The will is itself the work that realises the goal and removes what obstructs it.
• On condition that the goal is your own goal — otherwise you become a machine pressed into service in the hand of the owner of the goal.
• So saying "the will to act" adds nothing to saying "the will" — for there is no will without an act.

The comparison with correlatives (mutaḍāyifāt)

• The writer likened the relation between will and act to things that complete one another: the parent and the child, right and left, the far and the near, the higher and the lower.
• Neither side of these has its meaning except through the other — and likewise the will is not a will unless it becomes an act.

04Fourth: idea two — every act is a change

The content of the idea

• You do not perform the act in a vacuum; you perform it in the world, so things change and your relation to them changes.
• The examples he brought: the stone moved from the mountain into the wall of the house; the water from the river into the pipes of the homes; the ink from the bottle into a writing some reader reads; the barren land was planted; and the iron became rails.

The conclusion

• Every will is an act, and every act is movement and change.
• So the phrase "the will of change" adds nothing new; it only clarifies the meaning of the will by bringing out one element within it.
• The living human is a rational, purposeful being: in his will he is an agent, and in his act he is one who moves, one who sets others moving, one who changes and one who is changed.

05Fifth: idea three — the individual and the group (freedom inside the frame)

The problem

• Many claimed that the individual's share in a collective effort clashes with his freedom to choose his own path.

The writer's opinion

• There is no clash if we distinguish between the frame (al-iṭār) that sets the rules of the road and the steps taken inside that frame.
• The frame is shared by everyone; the movement inside it is free.

The examples

• The players of football and chess: one set of rules that no one may break, yet each player is free to move the ball or the piece as he wishes.
• The rules of grammar: a writer may not make the subject accusative or the object nominative — and still he freely chooses his subject and his style.
• The principles of logic: one may not claim that a traveller covering two hundred kilometres in two hours is served by a train running at twenty kilometres an hour, nor that a plan costing two hundred million is covered by fifty million.

The summary

• The citizen is free in his way of going and his style of life, so long as his activities keep to the principles and goals set by the group — of which he is one member.

06Sixth: idea four — from "is it a will of change?" to "what do we change?"

• If every will is a will of change, then the question is no longer whether the will the people loosed on their victory day was a will of change.
• The correct question is: what is it that we change? And for what goal do we change?

From details to values

• The partial details are counted in their thousands: the sick are healed, the ignorant are taught, the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, roads are paved, vermin are destroyed, land is planted, and factories are built.
• All of these fall under a limited number of principles, and those principles fall under the values and standards by which we measure what we want and what we do not want.
• Whoever changes the values and the standards changes the face of life entire.

07Seventh: idea five — unifying the public and the private

• The will of change will not take "so much as a fingertip's width" out of our lives unless we make in our minds a complete unification of the public and the private.

What is wrong with the reality, as he pictured it

• We care for private property and neglect public property, by an inherited social tradition.
• We see a great gulf between caring for one's own son and caring for the distant fellow-citizen.
• And between cleaning the house inside and cleaning the street.
• And between private money and the money the state holds for everyone.
• And between the private clinic run by the doctor and the public hospital run by the very same doctor in the name of the state.

"I and we" versus "he and they"

• Our concern is still confined to "I" and "we" — that is, the family and its borders.
• As for "he" and "they", which take in all the children of the homeland, they are still in our imagining as ghosts whom neither starving nor torturing can hurt.
• What is required is that the meaning of "we" should widen to include all the citizens.

08Eighth: idea six — transferring the seats of pride

• The second condition for change to succeed is that we transfer the places where pride is taken.
• The present state: a man boasts that he is not subject to the law to which ordinary people are subject, and the one above the law is counted high.
• His example: if rations of meat, sugar and oil are fixed, the man of influence fills his house and the houses of his relatives with more than his due — because for him "rank" means escaping the rule of the law.
• The state required: that a man should take pride in the measure of his obedience to the law of the state, openly or in secret.

09Ninth: idea seven — the standard of change and its result

• Change is not merely swapping one condition for another without constraints; it is replacing a lower condition with a higher one — that is, rising upward.
• The scale of "higher" is the number of citizens who benefit from the new condition.
• What matters is that we know: what do we change? and how do we change it?

The answer

• What is to be changed is the values by which we measure the aspects of life.
• And the way to change them is to choose for every situation the standard that secures the greatest amount of benefit, strength, dignity and enlightenment for the greatest number of people.

10Tenth: vocabulary and its meanings

11Eleventh: images and rhetorical styles in the essay

• Simile: likening the will to the act to the parent and the child, and to right and left — it brings the idea of necessary correlation within reach.
• Argument by sensory examples: the stone, the water, the ink and the iron — they make the abstract idea visible.
• Personification and embodiment: the description of the ghosts whom starving and torturing cannot hurt — it lays bare people's neglect of the public domain.
• Contrast (muqābalah): between "I and we" and "he and they", and between the public and the private — it locates the flaw.
• Interrogation: "what do we change? and for what goal?" — it directs the reader to the heart of the matter.
• Emphasis: "it will not take so much as a fingertip's width… unless…" — a negated conditional that strengthens the idea.

12Twelfth: the traits of the writer's style

• The logical method: he begins with a definition, then builds premises, then draws out conclusions.
• Reasoning by example: he relies on examples close to life — football and chess, the train, industry.
• Clarity: his words are simple and his sentences tightly linked, without forced ornament.
• Gradation in presentation: he moves from the definition to its application on the conditions of society.
• Intellectual allegiance: he represents the current of thinkers who bind thought to action and hold that renaissance rests on changing values.
• Connectives: he is frequent in the logical particles — fa-idhā (so), in (if), lākin (but), wa-min thamm (and hence).

13Thirteenth: the values drawn from the essay

• That the real will is never separate from work.
• That the individual has his freedom inside the frame of shared rules.
• Caring for public money and public services as for private ones.
• Respect for the law, and taking pride in obeying it.
• That lifting the values is the road of renaissance, and that every change is measured by its benefit to the greatest number of citizens.

14Exam traps and key takeaways

• The essay type is intellectual-philosophical (built on definition, logic and examples) — not a subjective literary essay, and not a purely scientific one.
• Occasion: written after the people had won a victory and let loose their will; the writer's aim is to move them from passing enthusiasm to organised work that changes values and conditions.
• Idea 1 in its exact form: the will is itself the work that realises the goal and removes its obstacles — provided the goal is your own; otherwise you are a machine drudged for the owner of the goal. Hence "will to act" adds nothing to "will".
• The correlatives list (parent–child, right–left, far–near, higher–lower) is a simile of necessary mutual completion — a question asks what it proves, and the answer is there is no will except as act.
• Idea 2's examples are all transformations of matter (stone→wall, water→pipes, ink→writing, barren land→planted, iron→rails); the conclusion: every act is movement and change, so "will of change" only makes an element of the will explicit.
• Idea 3 is the frame/steps distinction: the frame is shared, movement inside it is free. The three proofs are games (football, chess), grammar (may not make the subject accusative or the object nominative), and logic (200 km in 2 hours is not done at 20 km/h; 200 million is not covered by 50 million).
• Idea 4 = the change of the question: from "is it a will of change?" to "what do we change, and for what goal?"; the ladder is countless details → a limited number of principles → the values and standards, and changing values changes the whole face of life.
• Idea 5's unit of measure is the phrase "not a fingertip's width unless the public and the private are fully unified in our minds"; the contrasts listed are son vs distant citizen, house vs street, private money vs state money, private clinic vs public hospital run by the same doctor.
• "I and we" = the family and its borders; "he and they" = all the children of the homeland, still imagined as ghosts whom starvation and torture cannot harm. The demand is that "we" widen to include every citizen — do not read "we" as the nation in the current sentence.
• Two conditions for change appear: unifying public and private (idea 5) and transferring the seats of pride (idea 6). The present boast is escaping the law (the ration example: the man of influence fills his house and his relatives' houses beyond his due); the required boast is obedience to the law openly or in secret.
• Change defined strictly: replacing a lower condition with a higher one, i.e. rising; and the scale of "higher" is the number of citizens who benefit — not the age of the new thing nor its cost.
• The final formula to quote exactly: choose for every situation the standard that gives the greatest benefit, strength, dignity and enlightenment to the greatest number of people.
• Style signatures of Zaki Naguib Mahmoud: definition → premises → conclusions, everyday examples, plain unornamented wording, gradation from concept to social application, thought bound to action, and heavy use of logical connectives — the opposite of rhetorical decoration.