Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		23 -29 May 2002 Issue No.587 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Recommend this page

Briefs
Compiled by Youssef Rakha

Egyptians in Tunisia

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THE NEXT round of the Carthage Film Festival (18-26 October) will have more Egyptian films participating than ever before. Three films will take part in the official competition: Magdi Ahmed Ali's Asrar Al-Banat (Girls' Secrets), Radwan Al- Kashef's Al-Saher (The Magician) and Dawoud Abdel-Sayed's Muwaten wa Mukhber wa Harami (A Citizen, a Detective and a Thief). Inas El-Deghidi's Mudhakirat Murahiqa (Adolescent Girl's Diary) will be screened in the Panorama programme while the short films competition features five Egyptian entries.

Book fair progeny
THE MINISTRY of Culture is to organise the first International Book Conference at the Citadel in mid-July. A month-long event, the Conference will bring together some 1,000 publishers from 30 countries including China, Britain, France, Germany and Turkey as well as the Levant and the Maghreb.
The Conference includes 10 poetic evenings to which the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) has invited poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mamdouh Adwan, among others. GEBO chairman Samir Sarhan announced that many Arab figures will contribute to seminars on the Palestinian question and other issues.

Mahfouz's pen
AS PART of the Adwaa Al-Madina (City Lights) celebration, dedicated this year to the Palestinian cause, the Ministry of Information has organised donation collection facilities online. An online charity auction offers potential donors the opportunity to acquire, among other things, the late actor Ahmed Mazhar's Cavalry Shield and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's pen.

Literary festivities
LAST WEEK the Faculty of Arts, Minya University, organised a "loyalty day" on campus to honour literature professors including Medhat Gabr, Safwat El-Khatib and Ahmed Haridi as well as a small number of students. The celebration was presided over by Maher Mustafa, president of the university and Mohamed Naguib El- Tallawi, dean of the Faculty of Arts.

Ancient institute
THE SUPREME Council for Antiquities' new Institute of Egyptology, a hitherto unused part of the Egyptian Museum, will finally open in June. For a nominal fee the institute will offer a one-year diploma in Egyptology geared towards non-specialists.

Historical Sinai
MINISTER of Culture Farouk Hosni has approved the founding of a National Antiquities Museum in Sharm El-Sheikh, part of a project to boost tourism in Sinai. Head of the Museums Department Hamdi Shehata declared that plans for the LE10 million project will be submitted to the relevant consultative bodies at the beginning of June. The museum, he said, will be built on four acres of land and will be set in an additional six acres of gardens. The project is expected to take 18 months to complete.
Mohamed Abdel-Maqsoud, the official responsible for antiquities in the Delta and Sinai, said that a committee of experts will select 4,000 objects for display in the museum, concentrating of jewellery and the area's geology.

Yemini controversy
THE YEMENI Ministry of Culture has closed down the Abbadi Centre for Studies and Publishing following its publication of Wajdi Al-Ahdal's Qawarib Jabaliya (Mountain Boats), an allegedly pornographic novel. Yemeni writers and artists issued a statement condemning the decision, taken following the lodging of complaints by religious extremists. Yemeni Minister of Culture Abdel-Wahab Al-Rawhani insisted that the closure was legal and that it remains up to the court to decide whether the novel offends public morals.
Some critics have supported the latter view, while others claim that the book is "perfectly ordinary" and point out that the banning of the novel, like the closing of the Abbadi Centre, had been decided upon without reference to the courts .

Islam on show
AN EXHIBITION of Islamic art, with artefacts drawn from the Museum of Islamic Art, opened at the Arab League headquarters on Saturday to mark World Museum Day. The exhibition, according to Hamdi Shehata, head of the Museums Department, is intended to showcase some of the nation's most significant holdings of Islamic art.

Railway art
ON SUNDAY Prime Minister Atef Ebied and Al-Ahram chairman Ibrahim Nafie inaugurated an exhibition of art held in the Al-Ahram building to commemorate the recent train accident in Upper Egypt. Sales of the art works on show, which were donated by the artists, will go towards helping the families of the victims.
The artists include Omar El-Nagdi, Nagwa El-Ashri, Ahmed Nawwar, Ibrahim Abdel-Malak, Ali Ibrahim and Suheir Osman.

El-Abnoudi in Lebanon
VERNACULAR poet Abdel-Rahman El- Abnoudi presided over two poetic evenings in Lebanon last week, in the Beirut UNESCO headquarters and Sidon. El- Abnoudi recited poems written in solidarity with the Palestinians.

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