Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
Digging through my press cuttings I try to come up with something interesting to say -- hardly an easy task with such a heap of material before me. Still, I regularly set aside two or three clippings that capture my imagination. I only hope the reader shares my interest.
The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra (INSO), for example, who performed recently at the Kennedy Center before a high- profile audience headed by President Bush and including Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. It seems unlikely, I know. According to one Independent article, though, 60 musicians were flown from Baghdad to Washington by the State Department. Notwithstanding the cynical tone of the article -- "The Sweet Sound of Propaganda" -- I find the event significant. Introducing the performance, Powell stated that it testified to the power of the arts to keep hope alive even under the most cruel oppressor, for the arts, he said, are the stuff of the human spirit which no tyrant can crush. For his part the conductor insisted that the Washington performance was not politically driven. One double- bass player expressed happiness.
"We want to let Americans know that we have culture," he said, "that we have something to offer them in the way of art."
The article drew my attention because I had enjoyed the Symphony's performances in Baghdad. In the early 1970s, as under- secretary of state for foreign cultural relations, I organised an Iraqi cultural week in Cairo and an Egyptian one in Baghdad. It was in the course of the latter that I was invited to listen to the orchestra.
Formed in 1959, the Iraq National Symphony Orchestra remains one of the oldest in the Arab world. Like our own symphony orchestra it had many foreign players.
I don't really want to dwell on the details of the problems the INSO has faced over recent years: suffice to say that it sometimes seems little short of a miracle that the orchestra has managed not only to survive but to be able to perform, and credibly so, at a venue like the Kennedy Center.
According to The Independent article many people thought that the event "was the latest in a series of stage-managed stunts designed to boost the president's domestic ratings".
Given the sarcastic tone of the article it ends on a sober note. "Even if their visit to Washington has served the man who ordered the invasion of their country, it has also highlighted the plight of those struggling to produce art in Iraq."
Next I come to an article the subject of which is closer to Egypt. The Herald Tribune published an interview with Omar Sharif with the title "An irascible Omar Sharif rides again". In this interview Sharif expresses some rather frank opinions. I shall select only a few of what I might call "confessions".
"Four years ago," he says "I stopped acting. I was turning down the same rubbish I had been doing for 25 years because I decided that I wanted to keep some dignity in my old age."
Describing his latest film, Monsieur Ibrahim, a gentle tale about a lost and lonely Jewish boy and the elderly shopkeeper, Sharif says "it's a little movie, a fable."
"In these times when we are living with conflicts all over the place I thought it would be nice to make a small picture with tolerance in it and to say that we can live together and love each other, no matter what race or religion we are."
I like Sharif's philosophy. "Regret is something that should be taken out of the dictionary. It is the most illogical feeling in the world. My philosophy in life is that I am living every moment intensely as if it were the last moment. I don't think of what I did before or what I'm going to do. I think of what I'm doing right now."
