The Sheikh died without blaming me

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When I was a student at school, every time I woke up, I would go to the corner of our house and rub my eyes to see if Sultan's car had arrived or not. Sultan was the school principal throughout the years I studied there. Despite his busy schedule, he would arrive before the assembly started, punish those who were late, and make sure that the teachers were present. During the first period, he would inspect the students' school, class by class. He came to my mind as the school principal, not as the sheikh of the country, and this doubled my feeling of shame.

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Years passed, and whenever I returned from Sana'a to the country and went to a place where Sheikh Sultan was, I greeted people with embarrassment. Whenever I approached him, I imagined that he would reproach me now, that he would not greet me, that he would make a fool of himself by fixing the pillows. He extended his hand, so I thanked God, sat down, prepared for the embarrassment and reproach of talking about the article, and prepared the responses: I would tell him that my position was the position of his eldest son, the distinguished lawyer Abdullah, and I would throw the article at him as an influential model for us, given the time period closest to the emergence of the last educational models from our school. No. The sheikh would not laugh. The response is not appropriate. It is better, then, to respond by talking about freedom of expression. This is also inappropriate. School memories overwhelm me and I say to myself: I will apologize and that's it. In the end, Sultan leaves as if the article had not been written.

I used to go to the Sheikh's house. I would sit near him, waiting for the reproach. One day he asked me about working in journalism. I was sweating in the middle of winter, feeling that my turn to reproach had come. I answered him briefly, and he merely commented: "It's fine, there are people from our country who have entered journalism."

Then we enter the world of funny stories and situations about the old days. Or the situation of the country in the shadow of war. Just as we did not agree on the 2011 revolution, we did not agree on the war. But this time, I have learned my lesson. I am still waiting for the reproach about the revolution article, and so I was discussing it honestly during the war days. In the few sessions I attended, I was reading long analyses that proved that we, the Yemenis, were right. At the beginning of the war, the sheikh looked at it with a clean social mentality, unaware of its historical roots and dimensions. After that, his view gradually changed. He did not expect the war to last all these years; he felt that his estimates had been wrong and far exceeded his calculations. Like any Yemeni, Sultan lost a lot in the war. However, his sons did not hesitate to play important social and humanitarian roles, not at the regional level, but also at the country level, as lawyer Abdullah Sultan does in the file of prisoners and detainees.

For more than five years I did not leave the area because of the war. The area I could move in did not exceed five square kilometers. But it was enough for me to see Sultan here and there. Throughout these years, whenever I saw him, living within his problems and the problems of others, the article lying in the cabinet of insights would jump out at me and I would wait for the reproach, and I would pray for mercy for my friend Asim who was martyred in the war before I could confirm: Did the Sheikh keep the newspaper or was it a joke?

In 2020, I left the region to settle in the city. I was carrying two things: my confusion as to whether the sheikh still had my article in the Basair box. When would he reprimand me so I could apologize to him? And the details of the establishment of the school where I studied and where my father works.

The details of the school, which was established in the seventies, revealed to me that Sheikh Sultan was stubborn since childhood. And how wonderful this nature was when it was harnessed to serve the people and the interests of the country, such as establishing a school or providing electricity.

Sultan was not yet thirty years old when he decided to work on establishing a government school in the area, which is the Bin Muadh Bin Jabal School. This was during the era of President Ibrahim Al-Hamdi, and the school was established in several stages. I heard Sheikh Sultan mention the details of the establishment, and he remembered the men who stood firmly by his side at that time. He mentioned two important men, the first: Mr. Khalid Mohammed Saeed, the Director of the Education Office at the time, and the second is Sheikh Abdullah Ali Sarhan, may God have mercy on them.

Sultan remembers gathering the students, sitting under the trees, including the large "tulqa" that was relatively far from the school, and preparing to receive the government committee in the area to see if we needed a school or not. Despite the tension and some disagreements that occurred between the notables of the isolation, which almost made the committee leave and decide not to build the school, the Sheikh's insistence and his presentation of evidence and justifications made the committee refrain from leaving and agree to the establishment, after Sultan solved the land problem, in a square on his land, and proved that there were a number of students who needed classes and teachers to whom the government would give official salaries. When the committee asked him about the name of the school whose students studied under the trees before it was approved, the school did not have a name, but the Sheikh responded quickly: Muadh bin Jabal.

From this school, graduated doctors and engineers, officers and pilots, lawyers and professors, they all made their memories here, they worked hard and worked hard, the director did not show leniency with any student, his stances are still told of how he prevented students, sons of sheikhs and non-sheikhs, from playing in the classroom, and personally, I remember in my time, how he beat his son Zaid, in front of us in school and no one was able to stop him except his cousin, my grandfather Muhammad Qasim Shaddad, may God heal him and grant him good health.

I studied at this modest school with great memories. I was not one of those who got high grades, but I had enough to enter the field in which I find myself: writing. And the Sheikh Director was one of the first people I hinted at with some offense when I entered the world of journalism.

Before he died, he had left something to the school, and a space for a university project that would benefit the students of the area.

Before his death, I was waiting for his reproach, so I could apologize to him and end this waiting.

It is unfortunate that he left without reprimanding me or even hinting that the newspaper was in the Basair box. Whether the matter was a joke by my friend Asim or the truth, I now apologize to two people: Sultan, and his friend who always sat next to him: Ahmed Saeed.