 Pack of Cards
By Madame Sosostris
This week, my dears, the National Council for Women (NCW) -- in collaboration with the Supreme Council for Culture (SCC) -- organised a seminar about the historical soap opera Qasim Amin. My colleague Reham El-Adawi and I had a great time at the event, which took place at Cairo Opera House's small hall. The seminar was moderated by SCC Secretary- General Gaber Asfour and included a plethora of luminous speakers: NCW Secretary- General Farkhonda Hassan; poet Ahmed Abdel-Mo'ti Hegazi; General Egyptian Book Organisation head Samir Sarhan; Al-Ahram Historical Studies Centre head Yunan Labib Rizk; People's Assembly Foreign Relations Committee head Mustafa El-Fiqi; UN Human Rights Programme board of trustees head Laila Takla; and En'am Mohamed Ali, who directed the successful Ramadan soap opera.
The audience was just as packed with stars, including, of course, the wonderful actors and actresses who participated in the soap opera -- Kamal Abu- Raya, who played the leading role of Qasim Amin, Nadia Rashad, Merna, Gamal Abdel- Nasser, Tawfiq Abdel-Hamid, Ahmed El-Shaf'i, Manal Salama and Said Abdel-Ghani. Amongst the other attendees were Hawa' (Eve) magazine editor Eqbal Baraka and Al- Akhbar women's section editor Nahed Hamza.
The two-hour discussion that followed featured plenty of give and take about the show's script, written by Mohamed El-Sayed Eid, as well as many of the crucial women's issues that were raised by the drama. A debate regarding how influential Amin's revolutionary writings --Tahrir Al-Mar'ah (The Emancipation of Women) and Al-Mar'ah Al- Gadida (The New Woman) -- were, a century after he wrote them, also ensued.
I get so proud, my dears, whenever I see young Egyptians doing so well abroad. Mansour Iskander, for example, has just received the prestigious "Eon- Energy Scientific Award 2002". Eon is the third biggest industrial company in Germany with activities in the fields of energy, telecommunication and chemistry. Iskander, who works as a consultant and project manager for a German management consulting company, was given the award by the Bavarian minister of education and culture, and the president of Munich's Technical University. Iskandar's boss, Horst Wildemann, nominated Iskandar's MBA thesis --"Core Process Analysis in the Service Sector" -- for the award. According to the jury, Iskander's work is pioneering in the field of business process management.
The annual American University in Cairo's (AUC) Seminar on Community Service recently took place. Organised by Volunteers In Action (VIA), a student-led community service club which was first established in 1997, this year's event included a video conference with Georgetown University, where the community service programme has become part of the curriculum for the first time. Amongst those who attended this year's seminar were AUC interim President Thomas Bartlet, and the VIA's academic advisers, Dina Rateb and Marie Assad.
At the Conrad Hotel, Bahraini Ambassador Ali El-Maged recently held a reception to celebrate Bahrain's National Day. The party was attended by Prime Minister Atef Ebeid, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Moufid Shehab, US Ambassador to Egypt David Welch as well as ambassadors from several Arab and European countries.
My colleague Nader Habib gladly put his academic cap back on recently to attend an international conference about "Modernising management education in the era of globalisation" held at the Sadat Academy for Management Sciences (SAMS). Shura Council member Hoda Saqr, the dean of the school's research and information centre and head of the conference's organising committee, emphasised the importance of the conference to both SAMS and the German University of Potsdam with whom the event was co-sponsored. This sort of co-operation, she said, aims primarily at exchanging experiences, staying in touch with the latest developments, and helping to build a better future via high quality applications which can create more prosperous communities.
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