Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

Kuwaiti tunes

The Abdel-Aziz Saoud Al-Babatin Award for Poetic Creativity will hold a large-scale symposium in Kuwait on 17-19 October to discuss "the horizons of experimentation in the contemporary Arabic poem during the last quarter of the 20th century."
The seminar is part of the celebrations marking the occasion of the choice of Kuwait as the Arab World's cultural capital for 2001.
"This event," Al-Babatin, the head of the institution, announced, "will include a special tribute to the immortal [Lebanese] poet Amin Nakhla [d.1976] to mark the centenary of his birth." The tribute will assume two guises: a critical seminar on his work, and a poetry evening bearing his name.
The event will also witness the foundation of the Al-Babatin Central Library for Arabic Poetry, Kuwaiti playwright Abdel-Aziz Al- Saree', the institution's secretary-general, announced. "This library will be the first of its kind," he explained, "covering texts, criticism, history and translation."
Among the Egyptian literati invited to participate are poets Farouq Shousha and Ahmed Taymour and critic Ragaa El-Naqqash.

Babylon's rise
In the wake of the recent attacks on the US, the annual Babylon Festival opens in Iraq this Saturday. Its slogan being "From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein, Babylon rises again," this year the event has a busy programme featuring music, dance and folklore from Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Arab World.
Among the better known arts and media figures attending are Egyptian actors Samiha Ayoub, Soheir El-Murshidi, Gamil Rateb, Ezzat El-Alayli, Abla Kamel and Ahmed Bedeir, Syrian actors Mona Wasef and Asad Fadda and Lebanese actors Samira El-Baroudi and Heba Ghobashi, among many others.
The event will be held in a number of venues in the ancient city about 90km south of Baghdad, and will include exhibitions of contemporary Iraqi books and art.

Levantine roots
The first Lebanese screening of the famed auteur Youssef Chahine's last offering, Sukout Hanswwar (Silence, We're Shooting) took place in Beirut last Wednesday. Both Chahine and the Tunisian singer Latifa, the film's star, attended.
Earlier this week, in a celebration described as "both popular and official" in the Lebanese town of Zahla -- Chahine's birthplace -- the Lebanese Minister of Culture Ghassan Salama, on behalf of President Emil Lahhoud, gave Chahine the Cedar (Arz) Medal in recognition of "his role in enriching Arab culture and art." Present at the celebration were the Druze leader Walid Jumblat and Bahiya El- Hariri, a member of the Lebanese parliament.
In the course of the celebration Chahine, who left Zahla at an early age, pulled the curtain off the new sign of a street bearing his name.

A racist platform
The publication of French novelist Michel Houellebecq's Plateforme, by Flammarion press, heralded a campaign by the Muslim community in France to take the writer to court with the object of banning the book and receiving compensation for "insults that go beyond the framework of literary creativity," members of the community announced last week. Plateforme, they explained, teems with obscenities directed specifically at Arabs and Muslims.
They added that Houellebecq's trial will expose Plateforme for what it is -- "an unequivocal incitement to racist malice" -- and thus prevent Houellebecq from acquiring the status of a victim or "turning into another Salman Rushdie." Houellebecq's views have been further popularised through interviews in which the writer perpetuated his racist message.
Houellebecq, a one time employee at the French parliament who published his first novel in 1998, is well-known for resorting to provocative and sensational pronouncements to attract attention. Yet this time, many feel, he has overstepped all boundaries, exaggerating his hatred of Palestinians, for example, at a time when they are subject to Israeli oppression.
Condoning racism
Last week a number of Egyptian writers and critics -- Edwar El-Kharrat, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mohamed Salmawy, Amina Rashid, Atef El-Negmi, Ibrahim Aslan, Bahaa Taher, Gamal El-Ghitani, Mohamed El-Bisati, Gaber Asfour and Ahmed Abdel-Moti Hegazi, among others -- issued a statement protesting the French government's pro-Israeli position during the Durban Conference Against Racism. Describing France as "the Arabs' friend," the aforementioned writers alluded to the long and illustrious history of Franco- Arab culture, finding the French position on Israel "particularly disturbing" at a time when the Israeli government is practising the worst and most obvious forms of racism against Palestinians. The statement also protested Michel Houellebecq's recent novel Plateforme, its writer's unwarranted aggression against Arabs and Muslims and the importance the French media has attached to it.
The Arab response
On Sunday the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayat devoted its "Literature and Art" page to last Tuesday's attacks on the US, publishing reflections by writers from Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The five responses centred on the New World Order and globalisation, discussing issues of injustice and militancy and explaining the spread of violence variously as a decline in the principles of morality and civilisation. Where globalisation was perceived as a threat to the disinherited and the dispossessed -- and the New World Order has indeed had disastrous effects on the less fortunate peoples and nations -- the Bahraini writer Mohamed Gaber Al-Ansari saw the attacks on the US as an instance of globalisation boomeranging, as it were. Militancy as a reaction to injustice cannot adequately mask the immorality of violence, however, which remains a form of nihilism.
For his part the Egyptian critic Gaber Asfour asked, "Can we blame the dead man if he scratches the cheek of his murderer? Terrorism is ugly, it is true, and the souls of innocent victims are dear, no doubt. But before blaming the victim we should prevent his oppressor."
Compiled by Youssef Rakha

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