Face of Truth: From Athens to Cordoba…
Ibrahim Shaglawi
The past is not always something we return to; rather, it is what returns to us when awareness matures. Only then do we realize that the years of learning were not merely an accumulation of knowledge, but a hidden journey of reshaping the self and the idea.
This was the essence of the evening that brought me together with my fellow students after years of absence. We gathered to welcome our friend Dr. Talal Abdelbasit, who had returned from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Salah Al-Hanan, Abu Al-Qasim Abdelhadi, and Babiker Farouk also joined us. As soon as the conversations began, the vibrant days of our lives returned to us, along with social relationships and political activities. Our memories revived Cairo University – Khartoum Branch, where it was a small homeland for the mind, a place where our ideas were formed.
There, we realized too late that time reveals the value of moments only after they are gone. What we once thought were merely past lectures were, in reality, an apprenticeship under philosophers who generously bestowed knowledge. They carried a book, but they also carried with it the history of human thought. They did not fill our memories with information; rather, they awakened within us the passion for questioning and taught us that the greatest gift a teacher can offer is the ability to think and analyze events.
During that remarkable gathering, as I searched for news about our professors, I learned that Dr. Atef Al-Iraqi had passed away, and that Dr. Amira Helmy Matar had followed him after a long journey of serving thought.
We felt sorrow and sadness, not because death had taken them away, for death is a law of existence, but because we realized for the first time that we had been so close, almost inseparable, to intellectual peaks whose height we only recognized after we had moved away from them. As if time, in its noble irony, always grants us wisdom too late.
Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of existence that philosophers have spoken about. We do not recognize the value of things while they are in our hands, because presence obscures vision, while absence reveals it.
A person does not see the impact until it is complete, nor does he recognize the virtue of a teacher until he becomes responsible for creating awareness in others.
Dr. Atef Al-Iraqi was one of those who made Islamic philosophy a moral stance before it became an academic specialization. He did not teach philosophy as merely a history of ideas, but as a history of liberating the mind from fear. He believed that questioning was not a threat to faith, but rather a condition for its maturity, and that reason does not contradict identity, but protects it from stagnation and surrender. Therefore, he devoted himself to Ibn Rushd’s project, seeing in it an unfinished civilizational promise — a promise of reconciliation between reason and text, and between humanity and the world.
As for Dr. Amira Helmy Matar, she was our window into the first dawn of philosophy. Through her books, we did not read Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as mere names in the history of thought, but as companions on humanity’s journey toward truth and reality. She believed that philosophy is a civilizational necessity, because nations that stop questioning begin, without realizing it, to write their own end.
From here, the title of our article, “From Athens to Cordoba,” transcends its geographical meaning to become a vision of the journey of the questioning human mind. In Athens, the free question was born; and in Cordoba, the question regained its life within the flourishing Islamic civilization, when revelation met reason, interpretation met proof, and philosophy met wisdom.
Ibn Rushd was not merely a commentator on Aristotle, but a witness that civilizations do not rise through what they possess of wealth, but through their ability to engage in creative thinking.
We thought our professors were explaining the history of thought to us, but they were actually making us part of it. Cairo University – Khartoum Branch was not merely an academic institution, but a civilizational bridge between Sudan and Egypt, where knowledge achieved what politics could not. Although the Sudanization of the university came within its national context, experiences are measured by their outcomes as much as by their intentions.
Today, we recall that experience with the belief that the university builds the human being before granting him a degree, and that investment in knowledge is the investment that creates the future. The teacher is a partner in building the state, and thought is its foundation.
What pains us in our Arab world is that we often recognize the value of our scholars only after their departure, even though true loyalty lies in honoring them while they are among us. Every mature mind is the fruit of teachers who gave silently, and their greatest tribute remains in the continuation of their mission. Medals adorn chests, but ideas dwell in the conscience of nations.
We left that evening recalling our professors’ memories and realizing that knowledge is a value inherited by generations, and that building human beings is the greatest legacy a teacher leaves for his nation.
In conclusion, and according to #Face_of_Truth, we can only pray for mercy upon Dr. Atef Al-Iraqi, Dr. Amira Helmy Matar, and every teacher who left in his students an impact that time cannot erase. A teacher is not immortalized by what he writes in a lecture hall, but by what he plants in minds, because ideas remain where words disappear. Nations inherit their teachers no less than they inherit their history, for civilizations are built through knowledge before construction, and through human beings before stones. Here lies the complete meaning of loyalty, and immortality becomes the survival of thought alive in the minds of generations, even when its owner has departed this world.
Wishing you continued health and well-being.
Thursday, 30 July 2026
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