1 - 7 February 2001
Issue No.519
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 February 2001 Issue No.519 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
'Ordinary people'
Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni is no stranger to criticism. Hardly surprising, then, that he exhibited a certain coolness in his first public appearance since last month's banning of three novels provoked a major rift between his ministry and a large number of intellectuals.
President Mubarak, in his speech inaugurating the 33rd Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF), expressed understanding for the Culture Ministry's new publishing guidelines, effectively pouring cold water over speculation that the minister's days in office were numbered. No wonder he looked unruffled.
Still, after weeks of coming under attack, Hosni arrived at the book fair determined to make public his claims of victory. Speaking at the opening he defended his decision over the novels as the only way in which to "dampen a situation that was in danger of overheating."
Dismissing claims that his actions were dictated by the desire to avoid clashes with Islamists, Hosni insisted that he had always sought to defend cultural life from "reactionary elements." "When I took over the ministry," he told his audience, "Egyptian society was controlled by reactionary and repressive forces. We had to confront these forces by opening up to both western and Arab cultures. Culture was terrorism's first victim. We had to deal with that then because, after all, the function of the Culture Ministry is to reproduce the dominant culture of society, and there was no way we were going to reproduce this culture of oppression."
Taking the book fair's theme, Modernising Egypt, as his point of departure, Hosni further argued that "culture is one of the most important components of state modernisation" and that "Egypt possesses cultural resources that place it among the culturally developed countries."
Building up a cultural infrastructure was one of his top priorities, he said, and this endeavour included introducing and promoting new, lesser-known intellectuals who were not part of the establishment but enjoyed integrity and a credible readership base.
illustration: George Bahgory
"Why, then, is it that the minister is always the target of attack by intellectuals?" Hosni was asked.
"I was never the cause of a crisis... all these crises are nothing but charges directed against the minister personally, and not against the policies of my ministry," he replied.
Whatever the niceties of Hosni's distinction between minister and policies, however, the fact remains that many Egyptian intellectuals do hold him responsible for the latest crisis.
Hosni insisted, though, that while he was not in the business of compromising freedom of opinion he nonetheless had to act in a manner in keeping with his responsibility as a minister. The reason why Ali Abu Shadi, the former head of the General Organisation of Cultural Palaces (GOCP) was sacked, he explained, was because he had breached the publishing regulations agreed on after the controversy over Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's A Banquet For Seaweed broke last May.
"There was an agreement which Abu Shadi did not respect and this," Hosni said, "was bound to create a chaotic situation had I not acted in the way I did." He added that the ministry does not ban books and that the actions taken against Abu Shadi and others were "disciplinary procedures" against staff who had breached "agreed-upon publishing regulations."
Keen to reassure the audience that "there was no ban on creativity," Hosni stressed that the only restrictions were those based in "the law and the constitution."
In an ironic piece of timing, the minister's reassurances came amid reports of the confiscation of several titles displayed at the book fair. Yet the minister remained unrepentant: "Authors know what boundaries they are not to overstep if they want to publish through a state-owned medium and if they don't accept these regulations they can publish their work elsewhere. We work for society and we should reflect and reproduce society's dominant cultural trends and not make state resources the exclusive property of a handful of writers."
While ministerial meetings at the book fair are generally promoted as arenas for dialogue, the fact that except in a few, predictable cases Hosni accepted only written questions, might go some way to explaining why the event passed off without any apparent hitch.
To a question on the function of the Ministry of Culture and whether or not such ministries -- including the Information Ministry -- display authoritarian characteristics, Hosni responded by underlining his earlier point: the basic function of the ministry was not to produce culture but rather to allow for its reproduction. The Ministry of Culture, argued its head, is only a medium for organising cultural action and the cultural infrastructure of museums, cultural palaces, centres, cinemas and theatres.
"Intellectuals," Hosni stated, "don't need the ministry. Ordinary people do. They need cultural palaces and centres to put them in constant touch with the world outside their villages and cities."
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page