How is the cultural establishment adjusting to all-round reforms in the buildup to the presidential elections? Rania Khallaf attended a special Supreme Council of Culture board meeting convened by Minister of Culture Of the many issues raised during a special Supreme Council of Culture (SCC) discussion session last Monday, convened and presided over by Minister of Culture , it was the withholding of the state award for translation from an Eastern language to Arabic that initially generated controversy. Raised one week after the state awards were announced the jury, SCC chairman Gaber Asfour declared, had been in two minds about whether translator Abdel-Aziz Hamdy Abdel-Aziz worked from the original Chinese or from English this argument took up a significant portion of the session. By the time the session took place Abdel-Aziz had submitted all the necessary documentation and filed a complaint against the SCC to which Hosni responded by sending the text back to the jury for a final review. Yet jury head Fatma Moussa asserted that Abdel-Aziz had personally told her that, rather than translating the book, a play entitled The Café, he had edited an existing translation published some years ago in Kuwait. For his part historian Abdel-Azim Ramadan expressed revulsion at the whole endeavour: "This kind of blunder can no longer be tolerated. How could a book be submitted years after it had appeared? I think the regulations concerning the date of nominated books should be clarified and enforced very strictly. Otherwise the whole process becomes completely pointless." To improve SCC performance, Hosni had suggested the inclusion of 10 board members not affiliated with the Ministry or state institutions, to be appointed, rather, on the basis of intellectual merit and impartial orientation another point of contention among board members. Described as "a remarkably democratic step forward" and "an important aspect of reform" by critic Salah Fadl and poet Ahmed Abdel-Moeti Hegazi, respectively, it was commended in the context of more holistic efforts making the state award nomination quorum more inclusive, for example to make the SCC independent of government control. More courageously, Ramadan even suggested disqualifying members who are no more than representatives of the ministries, "helpless figures" who take up space better occupied by highly specialized scholars in the various fields. For his part novelist Baha Taher insisted that new members should fill the gaps in such hardly represented fields as music, the plastic arts and geography, explaining that, in the absence of such figures, the board remains unqualified to judge state award nominees in the sciences, for example. Playwright Mohamed Salmawy questioned the necessity of representing ministries like those of foreign affairs, tourism and planning, to which Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) secretary Zahi Hawass threatened to resign his post in protest. While rejecting the move to disqualify existing members, Hosni conceded that the council lacks the kind of "encyclopedic knowledge" necessary to make the nomination process accurate, defending the impartiality of jury members by, among other things, referring to the pressure the nominees tend to exert on them. It was at this point that Hosni urged those present to move to the more widely relevant issues on the agenda the Egyptian cultural scene. El-Sayed Yassin started provocatively: pointing to changes on the global stage, he identified the liberal-fundamentalist dispute as the principal conflict in Egypt "an unfair battle", he called it, "in which religion is exploited". He also recommended critical thinking, a more "scientific" approach to policy making that would prioritise the young. Ain Shams University philosophy professor Murad Wahba was rather more accusative: he held the SCC responsible for finding a way out of the current cultural "backwardness", pointing up the isolation of the council's 24 committees, which functioned "like separate islands" and thus failed to come up with a holistic policy. Asked by Hosni to specify the symptoms of backwardness, Wahba spoke of religious censorship and the deteriorating state of higher education; not one Egyptian university is listed among the 500 best universities worldwide. His critique of Islamic censorship drew in the former rector of Al-Azhar University, Ahmed Omar Hashem, who said freedom of speech should not violate "societal values." Religion should not be conceived of in isolation from other aspects of intellectual life, he said. Voicing the Islamist line, Hashem generated an uproar, with Hegazi pointing out that books of popular religion, a compendia of superstition, are more commercially viable than General Egyptian Book Organisation publications. For his part Sameh Mahran, a professor at Cairo's Art Academy, reiterated the notion that religious rectitude is no criterion of artistic or intellectual merit, affirming the necessity of multiplicity, while Fadl more contentiously pointed out that Egypt is the only Arab country with an organisation dedicated to book banning to which Hashem responded by taking issue with the Arab satellite channels' treatment of Islam and other topics. It was at this point that the performance of the Ministry of Culture came under attack, with Hegazi, for one board member, deploring the deterioration of the film industry since the 1960s. Hosni fielded with talk of the difference between "culture" and "cultural mechanisms", claiming that a failure of the latter should not imply a corresponding failure of the former: "We're doing our best to improve cinema and theatre, and the problem is that the rules of the game have changed. The industry is now in the hands of the private sector, and the industry is still recovering from the blow it received in the 1970s when relations deteriorated between Egypt and the rest of the Arab world, its principal market. At that time studios and theatres were in very bad condition, a situation that has improved, Hosni said. So has the quantity and quality of documentary and short films." Historian Yunan Labib Rizq seemed to second Hosni's opinion: "It is completely unfair to put the blame on the ministry, because culture is not exclusively the responsibility of the establishment. The SCC will not determine the future of culture in Egypt." Taher stressed "lack of freedom in our society," while Ramadan referred to terrorism and the worldwide image of Islam, seen only "from the viewpoint of Bin Laden and Al-Zarqawy." Salmawy called for more active dialogue between the cultural establishment and street politics as exemplified in the Kifaya movement. Ironically, it was at this point that Hosni decided to adjourn on the pretext that time was running out. Most of the disputes are yet to be resolved.
