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Mahmoud’s surprise decision to go home had been less of a shock than his rapid appointment to a prominent official position in the media. Those who suspected he had been a plant saw this as proof of their suspicions, while others rejected this interpretation, which gave the impression that your organisational structure was lax in the face of other forces. They said he was just a defeatist, a petit bourgeois with no stamina. You were one of those who favoured the second explanation. If he had really been a plant, he would have given you away before you left the country: he had known where you were hiding before your escape was arranged, and when you escaped abroad, with some of your comrades, he was with you.
    But it was striking that his comments on the nature of your work with the Organisation and on the rigidity of your theories had started only a short time before he suddenly decided to go home, and then only cautiously. He had started talking philosophically, in a decadent liberal tone in your opinion, about the relativity of evil. Comparing two evils: the regime and what he called the overwhelming tide of obscurantism. Within the Organisation you hadn’t taken a clear position on the fact that the religious forces were vocal in the country and that some wings of that movement had turned to violence. You stuck to your class-based analysis of the regime, of the forces that had a real interest in change and the role of the revolutionary vanguard in bringing it about. You pointed out confusedly that what was happening in your country was a struggle within the bourgeois class itself. The right was attacking the right. But the thrust of your propaganda remained focused on the regime, which you held responsible for the conflict, for the violence and the bloodshed that was taking place. You said it was the natural outcome of its decision to use the religious forces to wage war on the left. You observed what was happening in Hamiya towards the end of the Grandson’s reign with a certain vengeful satisfaction. What you didn’t say in your statements, you discussed in your closed meetings: if the regime was weakened by the religious forces, was it in the interests of the forces of change or not? Your comrades were close to unanimous that in the end what was happening would work in their interests, because in your opinion the religious forces did not have a sustainable agenda. They were part of the forces of the past, and history could repeat itself only in the form of farce. By weakening the regime and shaking its foundations, these ahistorical forces would help put history on the right track, whether they wanted to or not. But it was a remark by the theorist of the Organisation that became proverbial, when he likened the religious forces to the ox that ploughs the land and prepares it for those who plant the seeds: the ox that pulls the plough of history. Then, as if he had had a sudden inspiration, he said: ‘Let the ox do the work!’ That phrase became an unofficial slogan. You didn’t like the metaphor. You thought it smacked of opportunism in disguise, but you didn’t say that, perhaps because the issue wasn’t fully clear to you, perhaps because you were taken by surprise by the sudden change in the relationship between the religious forces and the regime. But you were not comfortable with what followed: the beginnings of a flirtation between the Organisation and the religious forces, to confront the regime. On that your position was unambiguous, passionate in fact. You argued for the need to stand firm at equal distance from the regime and from the religious forces. You said that tactics should not part company with strategy, and that it was liberal deviationism to say that the end justifies the means. But all this happened after Mahmoud had gone back to Hamiya. To be fair, you should remember what Mahmoud had said at the meeting where the theorist of the Organisation came up with the ox metaphor. He had ridiculed