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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 July 2000 Issue No. 490 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 July 2000 Issue No. 490
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Focus International Economy Opinion Interview Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Sound of silence
By Youssef Rakha
Others say it is the summer heat, but author Afaf El-Sayed explains it otherwise. The Arab Worl's most celebrated champion of women's liberation Nawal El-Sa'dawi's decision to recast herself in the role of women's rights activist and spokesperson, El-Sayed told the London-based weekly, Al-Wasat (3 July), is taken in response to both a general "regression" in the Arab woman's movement and, on a more personal level, the recent -- chauvinist -- bids on belittling El-Sa'dawi's pioneering contribution to the cultural domain. An "association for the intellectual renaissance of the Egyptian woman" is currently being negotiated, with El-Sa'dawi volunteering for the position of chairwoman. In the meantime a host of lesser-known writers, from Inas Taha to Ragia El-Ghazouli and Mustafa Mo'awad, among others, have acquired the status of founding members. Evidently as savvy as they are determined, the cocktail-party revolutionaries have placed an ever-controversial NGO billboard upfront at a time when this entire genre of cultural-political activism is undergoing the legal and press equivalents of a blitzkrieg, the most notable development being the recent, unrelenting higher-court ruling that the new NGO law is unconstitutional. The proposed institution's first fully-fledged conference, to be held at the Greater Cairo Library in October, will discuss "regressions in women's rights: visions and challenges". By this time, it is expected, the inevitable ifs and buts of the project will have been resolved, and the newly established institution will immediately commence minding its business of holding seminars, staging intellectual flurries and publishing a magazine to replace Noun, the publication of El-Sa'dawi's "Arab woman's solidarity association", corked for lack of funding.
What might be loosely termed the NGO scene -- recently the object of an ill-timed, partisan analysis following the trial of one of its pillars -- is evidently not about to give up the fight for existence. For a few months to come, the image of the Arab intellectual hesitating at the threshold of this No Man's Land of national culture is hardly likely to vanish from the mind. Yet other forms of cultural-political endeavour have been equally near the surface, and it is ultimately an editor's decision whether or not and to what extent a topic is worth illuminating for the reader.
For one thing, the hapless news item that claimed, nearly a month ago, that Algerian novelist Ahlam Mostaghanmi's award-winning Dhakirat Al-Jasad (Memory of the Body) was actually written by the older and more widely recognised Iraqi poet Sa'di Youssef -- along with the momentary hubbub it stirred -- have sadly remained in the dark. Sadly because, should the diverse vapours emanating from the make-believe bonfire at their centre collectively condense, Arab intellectual circles would be flooded with serious contention -- about the concept and practice of copyright in Arab society, about the factual validity of statements delivered informally and subsequently published as "interviews", about the majority of Arab news-mongers' perception of woman writers as fake literary personages incapable of independent intellectual accomplishment, and about what Mostaghanmi dubbed "the greatest crime an Arab writer can commit", i.e., success. While these questions remain in need of increased public awareness and a closer investigation of the (legal, cultural, social and literary) facts at stake, columnist and critic Piere Abi-Saab (in Al-Wasat) favours a more straightforward "defence of Ahlam Mostaghanmi". Abi-Saab points out that, had he responded in time to the Tunisian journalist's repeated request that he should give his opinion of the original article prior to publication, Youssef would have prevented the rumour from spreading. As it is -- Youssef's belated denial of his alleged authorship of the book notwithstanding -- Mostaghanmi must fight for an otherwise unquestionable right, her being recognised as the author of her own books.
Equally belated -- at least according to novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Megid and editor- in -chief Salah Issa, writing in the Ministry of Culture's weekly newspaper Al-Qahira (4 and 11 July) -- the celebrated political analyst Mohamed Hassanein Heikal responded to the crisis over Haydar Haydar's by now notorious A Banquet for Seaweed (in the July issue of Al-Kotob: Wughat Nazar, the monthly that, in the space of a year, has become the Arab World's answer to the London Review of Books, and to which Heikal invariably contributes the opening article). While Abdel-Megid was virulent in his censure, accusing Heikal of "a defective methodology", Issa had been suitably reverent when he took issue with Heikal for partaking in the kind of "post-mortem analysis" practiced by commentators who like to indulge the benefit of hindsight, finding pleasure in the act of dissecting the mistakes of each of the three parties involved: the Ministry of Culture imprint that published the novel in the first place, the Islamists who mounted the campaign against it, the intellectuals who responded. While Heikal's wizened and perceptive analysis conforms to the predominant view that the crisis was essentially political, Al-Qahira's compilation of writers' views on the issue emphasises "Egypt's cultural role", questioning the implications of the crisis for Egypt's received designations as a harbour for artistic endeavour and liberated creativity, an intellectual's haven. Writers like Mohamed El-Tohami and Shaaban Youssef, among others, responded in a range of registers from the instantly defensive (I don't feel that the crisis has caused any significant reduction in Egypt's cultural role) to the contemplatively critical (Is there any country other than Egypt where such battles take place?)
Critical, indeed, were the anonymous group of students who founded the internet site, Fad El-Kil (Tipping over), an openly oppositional -- and humorous -- take on the current political and social state of affairs, publishing shocking statistics alongside scathing analyses of particular issues. Now that the hackers have established ties with the paragons of the leftist 1960s who founded the spontaneous intellectuals' tagamu' and championed Haydar's cause, the tagamu has its own site, El-Awama (The Boathouse, www7.ewebcity.com/awama) on the World Wide Web, scheduled to provide a forum, a communications network and extensive news/developments and history sections (e.g., the history of censorship in Egypt). So -- while copyright laws are being violated to the point at which a novelist is denied her right to what she has written, and while the religiously inspired banning of literary works continues to resonate in Yemen and Jordan (Al-Wasat published an interview with Jordanian- Palestinian poet Moussa Hawamda who is currently being tried on charges of apostasy for writing a book of poems, Shajari A'la, "My trees are higher") -- Akhbar Al-Adab columnist Wael Abdel-Latif declares (in the 9 June issue) that "it is expected that internet sites will become the ideal answer for intellectuals in Egypt who are caught between mindless incitement and accusation [the Islamists] and calculations that deal cautiously with issues of freedom [the government]."
