Further honours

NOBEL laureate Naguib Mahfouz was this week elected to the position of Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a title given, over the last two centuries, to a range of luminaries from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchil, Jawaharlal Nehru to Albert Camus, Günter Grass and Claude Levi-Strauss. With this development, a pleasant antidote to the health problems the quiet writer has recently suffered, Mahfouz's international recognition is more firmly established than ever.

For its part the American Academy, based in Massachusetts, clarified in its official statement that elections to its membership result from "a highly competitive process that recognises those who have made preeminent contributions to all scholarly fields and professions". The election comes in recognition of Mahfouz's outstanding intellectual achievement and creativity through the duration of his long career as a man of letters.

Accompanied by Aleya Surour, his literary assistant, the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press director Mark Linz -- publishers of more than 20 of Mahfouz's books in English -- visited Mahfouz on Tuesday morning to present him with the Academy certificate. For his part Mahfouz expressed his happiness to have received such an honour, thanking the Academy and the AUC Press.

Theatrical mourning

THEATRE director and actor Abdel-Ghaffar Ouda died at the age of 63 on Sunday, following heart failure due to kidney-transplant complications. His funeral took place on Monday in Mansoura, his birthplace.

Ouda graduated from the Theatre Arts Institute, completing his education in Hungary, where he was sent on a scholarship. Soon after he joined the National Theatre as both actor and director, contributing to some 50 plays, the most famous being Madad and Sahra ma'a Al-Hukouma (An Evening With the Government). He also acted in a large number of television dramas, most of them historical, his last role being Sheikh Gouda of the village mosque in Imam Al-Du'ah last Ramadan.

Ouda was head of the Actors' Syndicate for two consecutive terms. He occupied a range of official positions from Ministry of Culture deputy to founding director of the ministry's touring theatre.

Ouda received the state's Medal of Arts and Sciences.

Peaceful voices

THE CNN News Network has granted the pop singer Mohamed Mounir the title of "peace champion", having broadcast an extended documentary on his 25-year-long career. The Nubian-born Mounir, the programme argued, has effectively expressed not only the personal but social and political sentiments of millions of Egyptians and Arabs in a contemporary and accessible musical idiom. Mounir deserves the title of "peace champion" due largely to his last album, however, entitled Al-Ard Al-Salam (The Land of Peace), featuring Madad Ya Rasoul Allah (Help, Messenger of God), in which he spoke of the tolerance of Islam and Muslims' almost universal desire for peace.

Iraqi pop singer Kazem El-Saher, too, has joined the ranks of the peace champions, having completed filming the video of his duet with British singer Sarah Brightman. Addressing the end of all wars, the song exists in an Arabic and an English version, which will grace the upcoming albums of El-Saher and Brightman, respectively.

Belated opening

THE MAHMOUD Mokhtar Museum, located at the tip of the southern island of Zamalek, will be reopened finally in mid-March. To be attended by Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, the opening ceremony ends an extended programme of renovation and refurbishment undertaken by the Plastic Arts Department on an LE3,000,000 budget.

Department head Ahmed Nawwar announced that the new setup, while introducing state-of-the-art display technologies and facilitating a range of activities both indoors and out, will preserve the design of architect Ramsis Wisa Wasef's building as well as the sculptor's work.

Japanese blossoms...

A JAPANESE week in the Fayoum Cultural Palace opened last week in the presence of governor Saad Nassar and Kazayoshi Urabe, the Japanese ambassador to Cairo. A result of the Egyptian-Japanese partnership agreement signed by President Mubarak in 1999, it featured a wide variety of performances and discussions aimed at forging cultural links between the two countries. Perhaps the highlight of the event was the budding of Japanese cherry blossoms planted in the Palace garden.

...and Chinese tourists

CHINESE television is to begin shooting Egypt's principal tourist sites for a promotional film to be produced in collaboration with Phoenix television on 9 April. A media delegation will meet with tourism and archeology authorities to hold interviews and discuss the project, which will involve comprehensive coverage of Egypt starting in Salloum on the Libyan borders and ending in Aswan.

Hamed Saqr, the Egyptian media consultant in Peking, announced on the occasion that the Information Commission will publish a Chinese-language magazine entitled Egypt and two Chinese-language books about large-scale government projects in the age of Mubarak and investment opportunities in the country.

By Youssef Rakha