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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters 'Historical compromise' resuscitated?
By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed
Shortly before his death in 1964, Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti issued a document that has since come to be known as his political testament. In one of the most famous passages of the document, the self-avowed atheist wrote that, as a politician, he was primarily concerned "not with what happens in the heavens but with the consciousness of people on earth. And because one third of the Italian people are members of the Christian Democratic Party, I cannot ignore that at least one third of Italy's citizens believe in God. This means that, whether I like it or not, I have to deal with Him and, that, by the same token, I cannot deny His existence".
I recalled Togliatti's words in the context of the raging controversy over the republication of Haydar Haydar's 1983 novel, A Banquet for Seaweed, which has gone beyond the book, its contents and its author to touch on the very fundamentals of Egyptian society. In my column last week, which dealt with the growing communication gaps we are witnessing in the communication age, I held the book up as an example of how difficult it can sometimes be for contending viewpoints to find a common language of discourse. The controversy over the book has polarised Egyptian society into two camps, neither one of which is willing to hear the arguments of the other. This is not surprising, given the mutually exclusive frames of reference from which they proceed. For the camp that adopts religion as its all-encompassing frame of reference, artistic or literary freedom should not be used as a cover to denigrate religion, while for the advocates of a secular outlook religion should not be invoked to repress freedom of expression and creativity. Bridging the communication gap here is no easy matter, if only because religion is based on absolutes, while secular knowledge, derived from human experience, involves not only objective reality but also the human observer's subjective appraisal of that reality. As this necessarily differs from one person to the next, the line of demarcation between what is 'absolute' and what is 'relative' becomes somewhat hazy.
This gray area lies at the heart of the impassioned debate provoked by Haydar's novel. If we are to find a common language of discourse that can be understood and accepted by all the protagonists, we must begin by identifying the elements of the dispute that are relative, that is, the concrete elements that belong to the realm of Man not of God. For, no matter how sharp the differences over temporal matters can become, they remain legitimate. One element that is clearly relative and not absolute is the timing of the row. After all, the book has been on the market for 17 years during which none of its present critics saw fit to challenge its supposed defamation of Islam. As many of those critics are highly literate figures, they cannot invoke ignorance of its contents to justify their long silence. In other words, A Banquet for Seaweed was not the triggering factor of the dispute, but was used as an excuse to initiate the dispute and bring it to the fore for considerations of political, and hence temporal, expediency. These considerations can be summed up as follows: first, parliamentary elections are scheduled next November, and the state has given assurances that they will be 'fair'. Second, to ensure that elections will in fact be free and fair, more is needed than technical reforms to the electoral process; voices are being raised on the need to reform the political aspect of the process, which entails a complete restructuring of Egyptian party life. Third, the ambiguities surrounding the Labour Party (it is not clear whether it is a party in its own right or a party representing parties that are not legally recognised, particularly the Muslim Brothers) expose inconsistencies and shortcomings in the very structure of party life that can no longer be ignored.
Fourth, it is no coincidence that the Labour Party spearheaded the campaign against the book -- and its publisher, the Ministry of Culture -- shortly after three of Al-Shaab's journalists were sentenced to prison terms. Clearly designed to embarrass the government, the campaign seems to reflect the Labour Party's belief that the arrests marked a turning point in its relationship with the government and a violation by the government of the tacit arrangement on which party life is built. The arrest of the journalists was condemned by both the Press Syndicate and the Union of Arab Journalists, on the grounds that any abuse of press freedoms should be punished by a fine, not imprisonment.
It is in these circumstances that A Banquet for Seaweed was 'discovered' and used by the Labour Party to test the attitudes of all the actors concerned. Without going into the intentions of the various actors, two facts stand out very clearly:
The first is that Al-Azhar's espousal of the Labour Party's critique of the book made it difficult for the authorities to liquidate the party on those grounds. To disqualify the party, there remained only one possible procedure, that of encouraging its explosion from within. The process in question is already underway. But as borne out by the demonstrations of Al-Azhar students, it is a dangerous procedure that could get out of hand.
The second fact is that freedom of thought, expression and imagination has become a basic tenet of our contemporary world. There are many examples of this. Take the field of mathematics, which is no longer an ever-growing consistent structure whose component elements are irrefutable, but has undecidability standing at its very core. This is a challenge to the very logic we are accustomed to. Moreover, modern physics, particularly quantum physics which deals with the infinitely small, is governed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is also a challenge to our logic. These are facts that cannot be denied, if only because the achievements of modern technology in all walks of life (the exploration of the cosmos and the electron, the production of nuclear weapons which can expose our planet to total destruction, etc) are expressions of the implementation of these theories.
Then there is the field of genetic engineering, where humans and not only mammals or crops will soon be cloned; and the field of computers, where robots articulated by artificial intelligence will soon become commonplace. It is not enough to acquire state-of-the-art technology, it is also necessary to assimilate the very logic of how it is created. This will become all the more true as technology becomes ever more sophisticated and complex. Indeed, nothing less than a revolution in the field of education can meet this need.
Egypt is aware that it cannot afford to neglect the startling achievements of modern technology, especially with the growing need to confront Israel in that field, whether in conditions of war or peace. The authorities are thus faced with the need to develop imagination and creativity. For either to develop in the field of science and technology, they must also be set free in the field of culture. Today, the European Space Agency has created an organ whose task is to scan, classify and test all literary works produced in the field of science fiction in search of new ideas that could be operational outside the already experimented paths of scientific and technological endeavour.
Instead of letting things slide in the direction of confrontation between the religious and cultural establishments, a no-win situation for all concerned, an idea worth considering is to convene a conference which would include prominent representatives of both establishments, personalities whose credibility is above reproach, to undertake a dialogue where the religious establishment will be asked to clarify how far it is ready to go in recognising the need for creativity and freedom of imagination, in exchange for a commitment from the cultural establishment to curb expressions of free thinking that are offensive to believers. This would be a sort of 'historical compromise'; along the lines that Berlinguer, Togliatti's successor at the head of the Italian Communist Party, advocated as a means of neutralising a problem of global dimensions, that of the incompatibility of religious and secular thinking. The conference could eventually create a permanent body, with representatives of both sides, whose task would be to arbiter disputes whenever they arise, as an alternative to a situation which could easily degenerate into all-out strife and chaos.
