28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001
Issue No.514
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Dec. 2000 - 3 Jan. 2001 Issue No.514 |
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Gyrating intellects
MILLENNIUM: JANUARY-DECEMBER 2000 begins on a note of latent contradiction: the coincidence of Ramadan and New Year. The latter, an immutably wintry event, is said to be Western and therefore untraditional. The former, whether sweltering or rain-soaked, is rooted in the Arabian peninsula and identified with grassroots Arab life.
On a parallel plane, the end of the millennium witnesses a complex interplay of secular and sectarian schemes. Where society has not made up its mind, old-guard ideological cartography no longer holds water. On one hand, religiously oriented forces take on the role of the left. On the other hand, even as they work to propagate literature and "enlightenment," governments resume their position on the fence regarding the call for inquisitorial bonfires.
The cyber era is neo-capitalist: so much is clear. And while multinationals target intellectual rights -- a controversial "logistic and corporate revolution" aiming at the privatisation of culture -- the Internet is fast becoming the leading opposition medium. Sites like Fadd El-Keil (Tipping Over) and Al-Awwama (The Houseboat), both authored anonymously by the same group of Egyptian students, are more openly and forcefully dissident than anything in print.
Edging gradually out of the scene, the intellectual left gives way to revisionist, experimental and purportedly non-ideological currents. The last of these, operating under the epithet "independent," comes frequently under fire due to the attempt to sidestep government institutions or obtain funding from foreign agencies. The literary generation of the 1990s -- pluralistic, individual, irreverent -- is finally hailed as the worthiest heir to the predominantly militant generation of the 1960s, but the bedrock of media and publishing remains conventional. Increasingly acknowledged by the establishment, '60s writers step tentatively into the limelight while the work of '90s writers and that of the institutions of independent culture remain largely clandestine. And an ever more clueless readership looks on.
The 32nd Cairo International Book Fair (January-February), the 12th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (September), the 24th Cairo International Film Festival (November): however wide their popular or media appeal, none of these government-supported events commanded as much public attention as the controversy over the publication of Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's A Banquet for Seaweed by a division of the Ministry of Culture (April), Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon (May) or the resurgence of the Intifada in Palestine (September). Responses to the last two events bear testimony to the notion that, apolitical developments notwithstanding, political awareness remains a central proposition in Arab cultural discourse.
The year began with contention as to whether the Ministry of Culture's Giza Plateau millennial celebration -- hi-tech, glitzy, New Age -- should be held during Ramadan. And by the time Jean-Michel Jarre's artificial sun had communicated its 12 far-fetched dreams, resentful MPs were pensively ruminating their Suhour. There was tension in the air, and a sense of disorientation shared by almost everyone. Through the year, official emphasis was placed on the tolerance inherent to this part of the world, the Holy Family's journey through Egypt being the topic of choice for these lavishly produced, tourist directed events.
The "national unity" theme persisted, culminating in Awan Al-Ward, a much debated Ramadan TV hit that affirmed peaceful coexistence in crudely moralising terms and, by portraying a Coptic woman's marriage to a Muslim in a positive light, aroused sectarian sentiment among Copts, notably overseas.
A Banquet for Seaweed and its protagonists, drawn by George Bahgory. Clockwise from top left: Al-Shaab editor-in-chief Magdi Hussein, novelist Ibrahim Aslan, Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar
SPRING: FEBRUARY-MARCH Spring was garrulous and intriguing, the seminar presiding over all genres of cultural activity. Against the backdrop of the biggest book fair to date, Samir Sarhan and Ibrahim El-Mu'allem (the biggest names in public- and private-sector publishing, respectively) gave their views on the state of Arab book publishing at the end of the millennium. While the first pointed up the fair's phenomenal popularity, stressing the obligation to edify a potential readership with little purchasing power, the second (one of a handful of players in the cultural business game) took issue with the infrastructure of the fair, the General Egyptian Book Organisation's policy of flooding the market with physically inferior books and transferring all the symptoms of bureaucratic malaise to the publishing world. Its quantitative achievements notwithstanding, the fair was as chaotic and disorderly as it had always been.
The fair's own seminars may have been uneventful, but Jacques Derrida in Cairo (the highlight of an interminable series of spring seminars at the Supreme Council for Culture) proved an all-absorbing event for almost every academic and intellectual faction. Centred around the relevance of deconstruction to the Arab world, the debates were stimulating. Yet beyond Derrida's concept of hospitality and the multiplicity of cultural identity, the Arab world, which evidently is peripheral to deconstruction, featured less prominently than it might have.
An American University in Cairo-initiated series of lectures and readings by Syrian poet and theorist Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said), held just after the end of the fair, was therefore particularly welcome. "Imagine that what is today called 'Arab culture' is completely purged of Western influence," Adonis posited. "What would we have left?" The foremost champion of hadatha (modernism) accused the vast majority of Arabs of functioning within a self-referential framework that, rather than allowing them to deal with the questions at stake, simply compels them to repeat what they already "know" -- a perspective of immense relevance to both sectarian and leftist discourse.
THE LONG HAUL: APRIL-SEPTEMBER By early April, a series of resignations from the Writers' Union protesting the institution's ineffectiveness had prompted '60s writer Ibrahim Mansour to call for an alternative, while the reopening of Café Riche, scheduled to take place at around the same time, brought back memories of the regular informal seminar held there until the 1970s, and the ardent activism that goes with it. Like former Café Riche seminars, the meeting took place on a Friday, the 28th of April. Digressive and multifaceted, it left both the form and the objectives of the tagammu' undefined.
On the same day, the biweekly newspaper Al-Shaab (mouthpiece of the now defunct Islamist-oriented Labour Party) inaugurated a press campaign against Banquet. On the basis of a few misinterpreted passages of the Syrian classic, it claimed that Ministry of Culture publications were endorsing apostasy and, by inciting like-minded parties to jihad (sacred battle), endangered the lives of Ibrahim Aslan and Hamdi Abu Golail, the two writers implicated in the book's publication. At its inception, the tagammu' thus stumbled on an ideal struggle, and the militant Riche of the 1960s-70s was momentarily resurrected.
Sunday 7 May saw a more inclusive meeting at the Cairo Atelier (a venue that lacks the left-wing connotations of Riche). With novelist Radwa Ashour, Mansour mobilised a counter campaign in defence of Banquet -- a growing list of names submitted to the prosecutor-general in solidarity with Aslan and Abu Golail -- that expanded so much it subsumed and eventually eliminated the role of the tagammu' itself. Hizbullah had just evicted the Israelis from southern Lebanon after two decades of popular resistance, and the statement drafted by the two writers urged religiously oriented parties to take example from the event.
Minor secular protestations notwithstanding, the emphasis had shifted to liberation. And while the sectarian witch-hunt rippled on through the summer, echoing in Jordan and Yemen and disrupting intellectual life, writers and artists rejoiced in this "Islamist" triumph, evincing how the secular-sectarian divide can be transcended through a shared sense of historical identity and national obligation. Despite large-scale demonstrations by Azhar University students (starting in the small hours of Monday night; by Wednesday morning they had been brutally put down), a committee set up by the Ministry of Culture to investigate Al-Shaab's claims and a proposed Press Syndicate conference on the freedom of expression to be organised by the tagammu' the following Sunday (the latter never saw the light of day), the crisis ended too soon to be adequately resolved.
The next three months -- an abeyance. June saw the first Arabic edition of Newsweek (with the headline "Palestine: State or Mafia?" on the cover), the first edition of the Ministry of Culture's newly revivified Al-Qahira -- no longer a highbrow magazine but a weekly newspaper with an eye on popular appeal, headed by the formerly left-wing writer Salah Eissa -- and the 11th round of the Reading for All festival. Bashar Al-Assad's instantaneous rise to power following his father's death may have raised a few cautious eyebrows, but it was the breakdown of the Camp David talks at the end of July that solicited a response from the cultural community, who railed against the peace process, Israeli expansion and American Middle East politics.
In August the Opera House came under the direction of ex-army officer Samir Farag, heralding more popular events and fewer world-class performances. Reflecting the Banquet controversy on a smaller scale, the hubbub surrounding the Opera's new orientation left the central questions about repertoire-building and production management unanswered.
Four days before the flare-up of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (28 September), the trial of Saadeddin Ibrahim, head of the Ibn Khaldun Centre and icon of the NGO scene, brought independent culture to the foreground in an unprecedented ideological debate. Accused of bypassing government regulations, soiling Egypt's reputation and even of espionage, Ibrahim was subjected not only to interrogations by the police but also to an extensive and often partisan cross-examination in the national press, notably by Egypt's leading literary newspaper, Akhbar Al-Adab, to whose declamatory wars Al-Qahira provided a happily level-headed counterpoint.
AUTUMN: OCTOBER-NOVEMBER
Intifada, Internet, intellectuals: however much weight the student demonstrations throughout the Arab world might have carried, world (including Arab) media failed to take stock of the Palestinian portion of the equation, and the intellectual insurgence of the summer died out.
It was in the orderly quietude of an office -- with both existing and emergent institutions arranging seminars, petitions, donations, journeys to the border, or before a computer screen (the World Wide Web offering more than one cyber alternative to each of the above) -- that the bulk of Palestinian solidarity work has been done. Multi-recipient e-mails abounded, and sites like Hanthala, Rightofreturn and Birzeit attempted to fill in the gap. Al-Ahram columnist Salama A Salama alluded to Arab-Israeli cyber wars in which the computer virus (to which many Arab and Arab-sympathetic servers fell prey) constitutes the electronic equivalent of biological and chemical warfare.
Highlighting two years of Egyptian enterprise acquisition by multinational companies, the purchase by Egyptian Financial Group-Hermes of a significant portion of Sawt Al-Fann (Voice of Art), Egypt's leading music production company, generated debate regarding this and other brokerage companies' role in a possible new world order "commodification of culture." It gave rise to concerns about Western business moguls inheriting the (cultural) earth, control of intellectual property and heritage.
Established by Hermes and headed by younger Egyptian lawyers-cum-intellectuals Ahmed Heikal and Ziad Bahaaeddin, the Arab Holding Company for Arts and Publication promised a nationwide chain of state-of-the-art libraries, a network of culturally oriented businesses and Internet book and CD sales. Dogged by bureaucracy and incompetence, Arab culture may well benefit from the trend, the abovementioned concerns notwithstanding. But, considering the political environment in which the move took place, it is hardly something to celebrate.
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