Tag: culture

Abu-Assad and Paradise Now

Hany Abu-Assad, director of Paradise Now, responds to the Angry Arab’s critique of his film:

I attempted to repaint the story no longer from the mythological point of view but from that of current reality. To kill yourself with your enemy is a Biblical story. The story of Samson already tells us that people prefer to kill themselves together with their enemies rather than accept humiliation. I believe the story of Samson never happened, but was written as a fable in order to tell us something about human beings and humiliation. Unfortunately, the same story is now happening on the same land, with different people. It’s no longer a fable, but a reality. If I wanted to repaint it, I had to take it beyond its subject. Instead of concluding that people choose to kill themselves with others rather than accept humiliation, which has already been done, I began with this point and then tried to open the discussion about morality and its relevance. To be or not to be. The Last Supper also happened 2,000 years ago in Palestine, not in Italy. Leonardo Da Vinci painted as if the light came from God. I tried to repaint it in a new medium in a place not far from where it happened, but with the light coming from a neon lamp.

We the Palestinians are a human phenomenon facing a gigantic colonizer, and we refuse to give up. What’s more, our colonizer doesn’t simply want to pillage our resources under the guise of “civilizing” us, it wants us off the land altogether. We are facing a project of ethnic cleansing. Our only weapons are persistence, knowledge, culture and art. The role of art in this case is to be so creative as to change our specific case into a universal one without losing authenticity or the differences of details. It must feel real without generalizing or stereotyping. Oppression necessitates a militarily strong, organized group, but art necessitates talented individuals whose conscience is not for sale. A superior book or a beautiful painting will persist throughout history as a metaphor for humanity in all times and all places. Let the Israelis put all their energy into the science of oppression, serving the interests of a civilization that not long ago made them into soap in order to protect the narrow idea of a Jewish state. Let the Palestinians instead put all of their energy into the science of the human….

Revisiting the Beni Suef fire

Remember the Beni Suef fire scandal last September? Well a verdict has come out on who’s responsible:

CAIRO, May 22 (Reuters) – An Egyptian court sentenced eight government employees, including the head of a cultural body, to 10 years in jail each on Monday for negligence over a theatre fire last year that killed 46 people, a judicial official said.
The official said that Mostafa Elwy, head of the authority for cultural centres who was among those convicted, was also a member of the ruling National Democratic Party’s policies committee. The rest also worked for the Culture Ministry.
The official said the men were responsible for the running of the overall administration of state-run theatres throughout the country.

A lot of people were calling for Mostafa Elwy’s head back then. It was given to them instead of Minister of Culture Farouq Hosni’s. My question: what new fire safety procedures have been implemented?

See you at the next disaster.

Ahmed Fouad Negm in the NYT

A reader sends in this NYT profile of the great colloquial Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm:

Mr. Negm is a bit of a folk hero in Egypt, and has remained popular even while the street, his street, has turned away from his largely secular vision of modernity. The changes on the street have only fueled his contempt for the ruling elite. Their illegitimate government, he said, has made Egyptian identity less distinct and more defined by faith.

“The government has always been run by pharaohs, but in the past they were honorable,” Mr. Negm said, returning to one of his favorite topics. “Now, Egypt is ruled by a gang, led by Hosni Mubarak, and he is only there because America and Israel support him. He does not have the support of the street.”

It is that contempt for power, his giving voice to a desire for justice, that seems to keep him popular, keeps his books selling and recently led to a revival of a popular play called “The King Is the King,” which showcases his poetry.

HE had laughed and smoked his Merit Ultra Lights as he climbed the rickety wooden ladder through a narrow hatch onto the rooftop above his apartment in a public housing block. He loves to smoke. He loves to curse. He loves to boast with a wink and a smile that he was married six times, that his current wife is 30 and that his youngest daughter, Zeinab, who is 11, is not forced to adhere to the strict religious practices that have spread throughout his country in recent years.

“I am free,” Mr. Negm said, as he scratched his head with long, carefully cut fingernails. “I am not afraid of anybody because I do not want anything from anyone.”

And then, looking down from his rooftop perch upon a pile of rotting trash, where children, dogs and donkeys competed for scraps, he lamented what has become of Egypt.

“This is not Egypt,” he said. “I weep for Egypt.”

I received this Negm poem earlier this week:

Ahmadnegm1

Hitchens, maker of prophets

Christopher Hitchens decides who can and can’t be a prophet:

Hitchens, an editor for Vanity Fair, described himself as an atheist and issued a sharp rebuke of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

“Of course, he’s not a prophet,” he said. “He’s an epileptic plagiarist.”

He said the Quran — Islam’s holiest book — was full of “evil fairly tales” that were “unimaginably recycled.”

“It’s a boring plagiarism of the worst parts of Christianity and Judaism,” he added.

Hitchens said he has personally expressed concern to British Prime Minister Tony Blair about Europe’s accommodation of radical Islam. He said that some Muslim leaders have said their growing population means they will eventually take control of Europe.

Read on for the increasingly delusional mind-wanderings of a once-contrarian. It’s odd that the headline of the article says “Radical Islam criticized” when in fact it is Islam itself that is being attacked with apparently no other end but to offend and appear controversial. What a loss.

Some people have all the historical luck

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins on the European rediscovery of the Greeks that led to the Renaissance:

What else can one say about it, except that some people have all the historical luck? When Europeans invent their traditions — with the Turks at the gates — it is a genuine cultural rebirth, the beginnings of a progressive future. When other peoples do it, it is a sign of cultural decadence, a factitious recuperation, which can only bring forth the simulacra of a dead past.

From Waiting for Foucault, Still [PDF].

Omar Sherif back on Arab screens

Omar Sherif, the great Egyptian actor, has announced he will be returning to Arab cinema after a long absence. Sherif was one of the defining actors of golden age of Arab cinema in the 1960s, when he played doe-eyed heartthrobs in films by luminaries like Youssef Chahine (when he still produced good movies). But after the mid-1960s (when he starred in Dr. Zhivago), he mostly starred in Western movies, acting in a bunch of fairly poor or unknown movies until he made his comeback in the French film Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran and Hidalgo.

According to the UAE based daily, Al Bayan, the first film Sherif plays the role of a Palestinian man who is shocked when he hears his son’s voice on the radio vowing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his land. The film holds the title “Al Manfi” (The Vanished). In the second film, Omar plays the role of a lawyer who defends a Palestinian child and tries to return him back to his family after Israeli soldiers kidnapped him and changed his name into a Jewish one.

The third film Omar will star in is Egyptian under the title of “Ain Baba” (Where is Father), in which the actor plays the role of an immigrated businessman who discovers he has a daughter in Egypt. He returns to Egypt and goes on a quest in the hope of finding her and through the process more then ten different girls claim that they are his daughters.

Rethinking Cleopatra

According to new research from medieval Arab sources, Cleopatra may not be quite the femme fatale we imagine her to be. Okasha El Daly, an Egyptian Egyptologist working in the UK, says that she may have been one of the great scientific luminaries of her age:

Elisabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

“Cleopatra is a scientist, a medical doctor, a woman who had invented a theory of mathematics and, above all, a well-known philosopher,” Dr El Daly recalls from the many medieval texts he’s read, which talked of how she “used to hold courtly seminars almost every week in which she sat with fellow scientists and philosophers and would discuss with them, on the same level, all sorts of philosophical and scientific issues.” He adds that whenever they refer to Cleopatra, the medieval Arab scholars “always refer to her as a great eminent scholar and philosopher” and says they “thought very highly of that famous queen”.

Perhaps it’s time for a remake of the Liz Taylor movie most of us think of when talking about her.

Librarian diplomacy

James Billington, the librarian of Congress,visited Iran last week in what was the highest-level official trip by any US official since 1980, meeting with President Khatami (formerly the head of Iran’s national library) and other top officials:

Billington said the goal of his trip was to discuss acquiring Iranian publications.

“We have a large collection on the Middle East and Islamic world, and we want to expand our collection,” he said. “We’re a world library, but our collection is not what it should be. The trip seemed important given our collection deficit and because the amount of material Iran has published” since relations were severed.

Billington said he also met with top officials at Tehran’s parliamentary library, toured the national archives and had talks with experts on topics including Iranian films, Sanskrit and Russian architectural influences in Iran. He discussed sonnets with Simin Behbahani, one of Iran’s most famous female poets. And he consulted with architects about a new facility to house Iran’s national library and archives, similar to talks in other foreign capitals. He also spent two days touring Isfahan, about 200 miles south of Tehran.”

Good to see cultural exchange can still take place with the axis of evil.

Intellectuals vs. fundamentalist sheikhs

A group of over 3000 Arab and Muslim intellectuals wants to take to court sheikhs who they say encourage violence and terrorism:

Shaker al-Nabulsi, a U.S.-based Jordanian university professor, said about 3,000 Arab and Muslim intellectuals have signed the petition thus far calling for international trials. Iraqis, Jordanians, Libyans, Syrians, Tunisians and Persian Gulf intellectuals were among those who signed, al-Nabulsi said.

“The Arab regimes cannot put an end to these fatwas of terrorism; the international community can,” al-Nabulsi told The Associated Press in Cairo in a telephone interview from his Denver home.

Among those the intellectuals want to see tried are Qatar-based Egyptian Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi, who has condoned attacks on American civilians in Iraq and sanctioned kidnapping in wartime. Two prominent Saudi clerics, Sheik Ali Bin Khudeir al-Khudeir and Sheik Safar al-Hawali, also are mentioned.

Good for them. It would be great if a movement of liberal intellectuals took to court prominent Islamists in their own country (although I’m not sure on what legal grounds they could do so), much as Islamists in Egypt have taken liberals to court for publishing books that are “insulting to Islam.” Youssef Al Qaradawi (even if he is not guilty of all the things often attributed to him) would be a good start.