{"id":20745,"date":"2012-07-02T12:26:13","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T08:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=20745"},"modified":"2012-07-02T12:26:17","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T08:26:17","slug":"cultural-elite-fear-the-worst-in-the-new-egypt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/cultural-elite-fear-the-worst-in-the-new-egypt\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultural Elite Fear the Worst in the ‘New Egypt’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On Saturday, a group representing Egypt\u2019s current cultural elite \u2014 including acclaimed novelists Gamal El-Ghitani and Bahaa Taher, former culture minister Gaber Asfour, current head of the Egyptian writers\u2019 union Mohamed Salmawy, and poet Abdel-Moati Hegazy \u2014 met to vote on one of the country\u2019s biggest culture awards: the Nile (n\u00e9e Mubarak) awards.<\/p>\n

The 400,000LE \u201cNile\u201d prizes went (posthumously) to the poetic novelist Ibrahim Aslan (The Heron<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Nile Sparrows<\/em><\/a>, Two-bedroom Apartment<\/em>), to the controversial screenwriter Waheed Hamid (script for\u00a0The Yacoubian Building, Terrorism and Kebab<\/em>), and to social scientist Mohamed el-Gowhary.<\/p>\n

Ahram Online<\/em> reports<\/a> that, at the meeting, Gamal al-Ghitani announced that these awards were coming at a critical time. He said that the rise of Islamists to power \u2014 embodied by newly sworn-in president Mohamed Morsi \u2014 would likely bring fresh threats to freedom of expression. Al-Wafd<\/em> also reported<\/a> that the climate at the awards was one of fear over forthcoming censorship.<\/p>\n

Indeed, giving the award to Waheed Hamed \u2014 whose films depict religion in sometimes irreverant ways \u2014 was perhaps a message to Egypt\u2019s new leadership from the judging committee. (One could presumably say the same of last year\u2019s award to Ahmed Ragab.)<\/p>\n

Egypt\u2019s current, temporary culture minister is Mohamed Ibrahim; it\u2019s unclear who the new culture minister might be, or how the current cultural climate might change. But in the words of Mohammad Saad and Mary Mourad, in their report on the state culture awards:<\/p>\n

“Al-Ghitany warned that the Islamists may seek to change the structure of Egypt\u2019s cultural institutions, replacing the current members of the SCC [Supreme Council for Culture] itself with Islamists, saying that this maybe the last meeting to vote on state prizes.\u00a0Many of the audience agreed to what Al-Ghitany said, and vowed to fight any \u201cattempt to change to the cultural identity of Egypt.\u201d This seemed to have guided some of the votes.<\/p>\n

Of course, one should note that there are plenty of problems with the current SCC, and Morsi would not be \u201cfixing\u201d something that ain\u2019t broken<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. LYNX-QUALEY: At the unveiling of Egypt’s most prestigious cultural awards there was a pervasive feeling of fear at what’s to come<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":20746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,154,124,235,482,5],"tags":[3643,12940,18300,354,3129,5263,12917,1048,18291,2690,8159,13928,126,931,1959,1808,7841],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20745"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}