الوزارة اتحجبت

...الفنان الموهوب فاروق حسنى نيّل الدنيا خالص

!بعد ما أوّمها...راح محجّب الوزارة كلها

(!هايبقى إسمها من هنا ورايح : (وزارة الثقافة – لا مؤاخذة

تقولش مثلاً دينا الرقّاصة واتمسكلها شريط فيديو؟ لكن دينا طلعت أجدع بكتير طبعاً , وانا بالمناسبة مبسوط منها جداً لأنها اتمسكت بالرقص البلدى كفن وتراث شعبى وبإستقلالها أولاً كإنسانة

.فؤاد نجم يتكلم

Ummmm...?

Today is Egyptian Gazzette day (or so I decided).

Actor apologises for anti-veil comment

Egyptian movie star Hussein Fahmi has apologised for a statement he had made during a recent phone interview with a TV talk show in which he said that veiled women were "mentally disabled".

Fahmi told a gathering at Cairo Opera House late Wednesday that he did not mean what he had said about veiled women and apologized for "any unintentional offence" his comment may have caused.

"Whatever happened on the programme was a bad choice of words on my part. What I really wanted to say was that wearing the hijab hinders a woman from doing some physical exercises," Fahmi explained.

Yeees...?....!...?....

Other oddities from the Gazzette...


What is a Supremo? Is that like the head pizza man or something?

Muchos love for the Gazette...

يا بلد رايحه على فين؟ ...

What is the word you would use to describe the expression on this man's face? I can't fully grasp the right word. Is it worry? Sadness? Anxiety? This is a statue from ancient Egypt.

أبشروا , أبشروا

This is divine comedy I tell you. If only some of our editors, writers and politicians of the region knew how funny they were, they would be legendary comedians of the billionaire club by now.

Allow me to translate this little gem for you:

Arab League prize for the writer of "The End of Israel"

Screenwriter Ayman Alshandawili won the Secretary General of the Arab League prize for best pan-Arab work in the gathering of the Arab Producers' Association which ended last Thursday, for the idea and scenario of the film "The End of Israel", as Riyad No'man Agha, Syrian minister of culture, handed the League's prize to Shandawili in place of Secretary-General Amr Moussa for his travels to Ethiopia.

The film acquired the acceptance of the censorship board to film under the same name in the year 2000 after many struggles with the censors. The events of the film revolve around a group of Arab youth immigrants to America who discover by coincidence an electronic plan by Israel to hit the Arab countries by nuclear weapons, and those youth take upon themselves the mission to save the region. They hack the Israeli systems through the internet to change the path of the missiles from the Arab region to Israel itself.

Things I find funny about this:

1) Just the imagery itself of the rockets changing their path in midair from "the Arab region" and, oops!, going to Israel itself...something you are likely to see when watching early morning cartoons.

2) The author and the prize-givers overlook the fact that if such a scenario were to happen, the Palestinians and a good chunk of the surrounding area would also be wiped out. As long as it's the end of Israel though; they're happy!

3) How the "censorship board" and the censors are so casually mentioned there in the middle of the article...and you would think that something a little more provocative would be produced after such a long tussle with the censors.

Bisho really should move to Hollywood...Move over, Borat.

*Courtesy of Almasry Alyoum.

On Sacrifice

Perhaps some of my readers will think that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed person, a pale dreamer, a meager, emaciated little fellow. On the contrary, Alyosha was at that time a well-built, red-cheeked nineteen-year-old youth, clear-eyed and bursting with health. He was at that time even quite handsome, slender, of above-average height, with dark brown hair, a regular though slightly elongated face, and bright, deep gray, widely set eyes, rather thoughtful, and apparently rather serene. Some will say, perhaps, that red cheeks are quite compatible with both fanaticism and mysticism, but it seems to me that Alyosha was even more of a realist that the rest of us. Oh, of course, in the monastery he believed absolutely in miracles, but in my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must also allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: "My Lord and my God!" Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: "I will not believe until I see."

Some will say, perhaps, that Alyosha was slow, underdeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he had not finished his studies is true, but to say that he was slow or stupid would be a great injustice. I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at the time it alone struck him and presented him all at once with the whole ideal way out for his soul struggling from darkness to light. Add to this that he was partly a young man of our time—that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish—such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them. Alyosha simply chose the opposite path from all others, but with the same thirst for an immediate deed. As soon as he reflected seriously and was struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist, he naturally said at once to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I reject any halfway compromise." In just the same way, if he had decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would immediately have joined the atheists and socialists...

from The Brothers Karamazov

Beasts of burden

"Do take it easy, old son of Ill-fated. I see you're ready to graduate to initiation into the high ninth stage of the philosophic system of the mystical Ismaili sect!

"Our forebears," he continued, "in the secret group of loyal friends known as the Brethren of Purity, the Ikhwan al-Safa, used to consider people like you to be like beasts of burden, tied together with heavy iron bridles and halters so that they could be led anywhere and could be kept from saying what they might want to say. Thus they would remain until God allowed them to emerge from their stupor, to rise up and resist. This would occur following the appearance of the voice of God personified. He would set free these people chained like beasts of burden, these people living in the degradation of captivity, humiliated and enslaved by those ruling them. He would then punish those who had abused them by placing them in chains in their stead."

"Give me that voice!" I exclaimed.

"Continue writing to your friend."

"But he introduces me to the people as though I'm different from them."

"But how are you different from one of their poets? You happen to be changed into a cat, they into poets. You each take flight to breathe and suppress your words in order not to perish. Many adopt literature because they lack power for anything more, while others avoid taking a stand by moving abroad.

إميل حبيبى
الوقائع الغريبة فى إختفاء سعيد ابى النحس المتشائل

Discourse on Wahhabism

Gayyash asked me what I meant by Wahhabism in my mufti post, and I guess this is my philosophical discourse on Wahhabism.

Wahhabism for me I guess is the uncompromising fight against "idolatry", and by this meaning I also include the similar aspects of Protestantism. Wahhabism for me is also the total decapitation of the human mind and its submission to the rulings of a man whose aims are directed to that end...or even if they aren't, all the same. In the first column the man asks if it's okay for his brother to deal in a dog farm, and the mufti in his serious thinking face that is illustrated above the column, gives him this long technical answer that I find difficult to understand. Although the mufti says it's okay in this case, I find the whole process absurd; the asker and the column and the answer...they are all equal participants but I blame the mufti here as the role model for engaging in this dance. So the mufti's role here is a pendulum of authority swinging between the purity of Islam on the one hand and the native culture on the other, decidedly moving in the direction of the former and away from the latter.

You can say in some sense that this is Islam, and arguing against the mufti's most well intentioned interpretation of the spiritual purity of Islam (which I think wahhabism originally intended but went terribly wrong) is therefore rejection of Islam. This Islam degraded of native culture, interpretation and traditions is not the Islam that Egyptians have proudly and lovingly borne for all these years. When Islam was planted in Egypt it sprouted a different product of nomadic interpretation of spiritual unearthliness, the Egyptian Islam was different; it was one of saints, festivals, and even miracles and magic. It was one that celebrated the Christian saints and even the animist ones all the same. This was the natural product of Islam to the Egyptians. Now when you ask any mufti, no matter how open minded he is, if it is ok to celebrate a Muslim, Christian or non-Christian saint, is he even allowed to say it's ok? He will be legally bound to say no. But it was always ok before for Egyptians to do all these things; this was their Islam that they loved and the Islam that they knew, not the one of today which they are meeting as if anew, and this I think is why Egyptians are pouring in with their questions to ask the Mufti what is ok and what is not ok with their new religion.

The interpretation you give of the Mufti's job is interesting; an authority similar to that of a lawyer arguing cases bound among other things by the precedents of his predecessors. But I'd like to think of the highest interpreter of the word of God as something higher than that, but that is probably too much to ask for, and maybe that's exactly the point; Maybe the native Islam that I speak of above was never the individual product shaped by a succession of men embodied in the capacity of mufti, but the shared collective product of a culture as a whole. This was the age before television and mass communication.

I've spoken of this mufti sometimes positively and sometimes neutrally before, but what tipped me over to the negative here is the second column where he says it's not preferred to visit the dead in the eid. In whose favor does he rule this? Are the dead grouchy and unwelcoming of their living family to visit them at their tombs? Egyptians have been doing this as tradition for thousands of years as a festive and spiritual experience, what is the harm in this? Is it against the Islam of this new mufti? It was never against the Islam of these people, and such a thought would have never crossed their minds.

I love your blog by the way and hope to see you here more often. Kol sana winta tayeb. (Hey you know what, I just re-read the mufti's words in the second column and they're better and different than what the title makes them out to be, but I'll keep what I wrote anyway as I think the concept still applies in one sense or another.)

* * *

It didn't take long after my return from the holidays to find more examples of what I am saying here. The scene does not involve the mufti this time, but one of those other celebrity sheikhs that co-guest in their own talk show programs where people call in and talk to them bel sout wel soura. The channel was el qana el saqafiyya, and the sheikh was not one dressed in the elegant gibba wel oftaan of the Azharite sheikhs, no no...this was a man in a purple suit and a moderne stubble beard.

These are the two consecutive questions I heard before the end of the show:

Lady Caller # 1: "lama gozi ye2oul inno ghadban 3alayya, da yibtil el sala bita3i?"

Just like that the woman so simply puts her husband not only in equal footing with God, but in a position superceding Him as the gatekeeper of what He accepts of her prayers and what He does not. And even though she must have engaged in some level of thinking to take the initiative to ask this question, her mind is so incapacitated that she needs the blessings of this man to tell her, "la la ya madam, rabenna el awwel, we ba3dein gozik."

Man Caller # 2: "lama emam el mossalleen yitwaffa asna2 el sala...ne3mel ehh??"

Now this was a good sheikh as I was told by my aunt who regularly follows his show. He received both questions with smiles (as I imagine trying not to laugh), and gently gave them logical answers to both questions which I will leave for you to deduce yourselves.

But being a "good sheikh" here is not enough. My idea of good here is for such a respected authority as this man or the mufti to come out and say: "Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but in your own interests I decline to engage in these kinds of questions; God gave you the greatest gift of all, called the human brain...I encourage you to use them before these precious organs in your bodies atrophy and your lines of offspring mutate into lemmings [this may not be physically feasible, but metaphorically I think this has happened already]. We fel akher ya gama3a, el deen yusr mish 3osr."

More proof that we are turning into lemmings.