Public funeral ceremony is a popular funeral and a way to express the public s gratitude and love and appreciation of the deceased. Furthermore, it is the opportunity to respond to him for his work or positions Or sacrifices.
For example, the funeral of Saad Zaghloul was a public funeral where the masses raised the coffin on her shoulders from the Opera Square to the cemetery of the Imam, which is clearly a big distance. So was the funeral of Major General Abdel Moneim Riad, who was martyred in the first rows in the war of 1973.
When Jamal Abdel Nasser died, his funeral was officially and unique in the history of Egypt. It is enough that the streets of Cairo were filled with eight million mourners. The same happened with Umm Kulthum, Abdul Halim Hafez and Taha Hussein.
During all these public funerals, millions of people went out to express the public s gratitude and love and appreciation of the deceased. However, funerals under Hosni Mubarak the funerals became official managed by security and the masses were deprived of participation in the state and senior officials to walk tens of meters only, and then take the deceased to his last resting place.
President Anwar Sadat, artist Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Suad Hosni and Naguib Mahfouz were unlucky to be deprived from such public funerals.
I remembered this as the police recently canceled the funeral of the journalist Hani Shukrallah, and the mother of Khalid Said, the icon of the revolution of January 25. In face, funerals shouldn t be prevented under any conditions.
