Many of you don’t know that this country is on the verge of a legal reform unmatched since Hammurabi went up the mountain and brought back the Magna Carta. The judges and journalists would have you think otherwise. How many times have I told them to stop the melodrama? How many times have I said that reform was on the way, just give us a little time? Sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I think I should just take off and go to Palermo, where justice and the media are always on my side. And yet here I am, staying up all night, helping my fellow citizens sort out the mess.
I am rewriting the Egyptian constitution. The orders came from above. Keep it short, informative, inspirational and fun, I was told. It took me months of work, but I am glad to say that the job is done. The new constitution has been written and will soon be printed on banknotes and emblazoned on government buildings. It will be recited by children in morning assemblies, printed on T-shirts and played out at noon in public squares. It will also double as the country’s national anthem, once we put it to music. Here you go:
Dotsikramshu domtistatshu dinkuchid. Sortamlatich furtukradich abukuchid. Yurmakyaziz turbastassis barduchid. Lalalaaa. Lalalaaa. Lalalaaaa. Achid.
Who would have thought that the nation’s unity and confidence, humanitarianism and freedom, accountability and transparency, could be conveyed in one single quatrain? Many have wondered why I wrote the new constitution in Circassian. I have many reasons. One has to do with our history. Our last time as a great world power was under the Circassian rulers of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, just before the Portuguese went around the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and took trade out of our hands. But the glory is still around us if we care to look. The country’s most dazzling architecture belongs to that period: wekalet el-Ghuri, the Muayyad mosque, Barquq complex, Qaytbay castle, name it.
Then there is the good part. Circassian, especially in the Ubyx dialect I am using, is the world’s most succinct language ever. It is agglutinative in structure, with monosyllabic roots conjugated and pasted together, 10 syllables or more per word in formations of endless expressions. The language was so succinct that it finally collapsed under the weight of its own brevity. Preachers would climb the pulpit, utter one word and the congregation would fall silent for hours, for in this one word resided the entire interpretation of holy texts, commentary on current affairs, and even a few jokes.
This was a great time for poets and writers, for it saved on parchment and clay slates. Take for example the works of Tughribakan, the fourteenth century philosopher and historian. “Burastikameni amaliadurzu etchandabrucht. Etchandaportuna etchandafurt matchistur. Franzatun marki makri makra. That’s it. His entire life’s work. It took him over 40 years to get it right, fiddling with the vowels, removing the diacritics and rearranging the syllables to get it right. He died in Tashkent in 1463, aged 56. You can still see the sum of his work engraved on his tomb: one epitaph that sums up a life of dedication and commitment, a life of hardship and persecution.
On the downside, the simple tasks of everyday life were getting harder for the common people. Knowing that each complete syllable must convey a chapter or two of human knowledge, people took to using single consonants instead. Mmm, for example meant “please come and sit beside me, hold my hookah while I go to the shop, or sprinkle oil on my toes and rub in circular motions, depending on how you intoned that single letter. People couldn’t become orators or lawyers, buy groceries or make a proper marriage proposal, unless they had perfect pitch – and many didn’t. As a result, quite a few young men remained bachelors. Others turned to crime or left to Barcelona. No one speaks Ubyx anymore. Even I mispronounce it on occasion, but don’t tell anyone.
I am using Ubyx not only to teach people in this country to do more and talk less, but also to save the world. I know many of you think that the bane of our existence is terror and those who fight it. This may be true, but only to an extent. The greatest danger to this world is verbosity, this endless torrent of written and spoken words that keep attacking us from every direction, from the media and the market, from journalists and diplomats, and from theologians and bloggers. But don’t worry. I’ll soon be taking care of that.
If everything goes as planned, the time would come when we’ll be able to finish an entire day’s work having exchanged but a word or two. Entire Web sites would consist of two lines of text. UN sessions and world summits would end minutes after they’d begun. Newspapers would become small as a postcard, and that’s for the weekend edition. Think of what this would do to our nerves, to noise pollution and the rainforest.
At home, protestors would go out, chant one consonant, get their message across, and go home. The interior ministry says it can live with that. No more armored trucks, no more sticks and teargas and name-calling. Regionally, the benefits are immense. How hard would it be for the Israelis and Palestinians to agree at last that “bushkatruktruk is the way to go? And with a little “rushta from the international community, the sky is the limit.
