A conference on freedom of expression in Egypt tackled many thorny issues, Mohamed El-Sayed attended The Cairo Centre for Human Rights Studies held a two-day conference on Thursday and Friday to tackle freedom of expression in Egypt over the past few years. Entitled 'Freedom of Expression Across Cultures', the conference brought together many researchers, journalists and human rights activists from Egypt, the Arab world, as well as international research centres. The papers presented by participants tackled issues such as the crisis of the Danish cartoons defaming Prophet Mohamed and how the Egyptian press dealt with it, as well as censorship by religious authorities in publishing. While most of the Arab participants scathingly criticised the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten for publishing the cartoons, they also held the Egyptian press responsible for further igniting the crisis. "Given that Jyllands-Posten was faced with difficult competition from other newspapers, its main concern was to sell more copies, which also applies to all Egyptian newspapers," asserted Egyptian journalist Khaled Salah. "In handling the Danish cartoons crisis, the owners of Egyptian newspapers were either preoccupied with distribution figures or influenced by the political goals of the Egyptian regime." The publishing of these cartoons, Salah argued, served as a golden opportunity for Egyptian newspapers to exploit religious sentiments to raise distribution figures, and for the political elite to slam the Western democratic system. "Politicians capitalised on this opportunity to make the people reject all kinds of democratic reforms suggested for the Arab world by the West," he opined. Salah blamed the Egyptian press for further aggravating the situation by failing to adopt a clear-cut, objective approach to the crisis. "None of the newspapers sent a reporter to Denmark during the crisis to follow the events on the ground; and they depended mainly on hardliners, like Muslim Brotherhood MP Ahmed Abu Laban, as the only source of information," he said. This escalated anti-Danish sentiments in the Egyptian street. Radwan Ziyadeh, director of the Damascus Institute for Human Rights Studies, concurred. "Violent reactions in the Arab world were instigated by politicians to achieve certain political gains rather than defending Islamic figures," believes Ziyadeh. "We defend the freedom of expression in newspapers, but this right shouldn't be abused to stir animosity towards [the Muslim minority] in the Danish society, especially if we take into consideration that this minority feels that they are not properly represented in society." Salah viewed that all the parties concerned with the crisis were "preoccupied with achieving their end goals, and nobody cared for the values of freedom of expression or tolerance between the two different cultures." Freedom of expression and creative writing in Egypt were also thoroughly debated during the sessions of the conference. Hafez Abu Saada, secretary- general of the Egyptian Human Rights Organisation (EOHR), held the view that since Al-Azhar began censoring creative writing in 1994, it has since used its status as the supreme Sunni authority to ban many literary works. "Not only has Al-Azhar banned novels and poems it deems contradictory to the tenets of Islam, but it also began to ban intellectual writings like Gamal El-Banna's The Islamic State's Responsibility for Failures in the Modern Age," noted Abu Saada. Since the number of banned books was on the rise, he wondered whether the role of Al-Azhar has evolved from "merely reviewing copies of the Holy Quran and hadith (the prophet's sayings) to one of censoring all kinds of books, especially literary works, and interpreting the content of some as grounds for banning." Abu Saada also questioned whether the role of Al-Azhar has been turned into an "inquisition that defies the principles of a civil state." Abu Saada cited many examples of Al-Azhar bans on literary works in recent years, including dozens of novels, poems, academic researches and books tackling religious discourse. For example, in June 2004, the Islamic Research Academy recommended that five books be banned, including The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El-Saadawi; Freemasonry: A Religion or Fiction by Iskandar Shahin; Conscience Call by Ali Youssef and The City of the Miracles of the Twelve Imams by Sayed Hashem El-Bahrani. Abu Saada urged the government to renounce all laws restricting freedom of expression and creativity, which "is protected by the Egyptian constitution". He concluded that Al-Azhar "should not play the role of Inquisition, and men of religion should be stripped of the right to ban literary work."
