Nesmahar Sayed appreciates beauty in diversity A V-shaped flock of birds in the sky brings back the yearning to fly, the need for liberty. And so did the first round of Cairo Meeting -- whose logo is a bird in flight -- a two-day dialogue-of-cultures event to be held annually at several venues in Cairo. It opened up horizons of liberty and faith, feelings that despite being rare are evidently still possible. Through dialogue, communication and the appreciation of difference it gave a taste of peace and happiness: the very aim of our presence on earth. The event is modeled on Rimini Meeting, its 30-year-old Italian counterpart. "What we aim for," said Tahani El-Gebali, deputy president of the Supreme Constitutional Court and director of Cairo Meeting, addressing the audience at the opening, held at the Cairo University auditorium where Obama gave his speech, "is to enhance the acceptance of difference, using visions and thoughts as motives for dialogue and to create a wider space in which to understand the other." The idea, she added, is to communicate with the spirit of Rimini Meeting. Cairo Meeting is a public and intellectual response to UNESCO declaring 2010 the International Year for the Rapprochement of Cultures. For Emilia Guarnieri, director of Remini Meeting -- which gathered over two million participants this year -- "Human beings love dissimilarity. It brings us closer and moves our sentiments." Guarnieri teaches Italian literature to secondary-school students in Italy; she has done voluntary work in Rimini since the Meeting was founded. On this, her first visit to Cairo, she was struck by "the colour yellow" -- the desert and stone she had never seen before. "It is completely different from nature in Italy, but it is a main attraction." Italians and Egyptians are nonetheless similar, however, in "the enthusiasm of city people". The experience reminded her of the start of Rimini Meeting, when seven devoutly Catholic young men took the initiative to "create points of contact between experiences and people of different faiths and cultures who share a positive desire for knowledge and reciprocal enhancement," as one description of the event puts it. It is the desire for peace and unity that lies at the root of the endeavour, according to Guarnieri, herself a committed Catholic. "There is a passion to understand the identity of friendship that can bring us closer. There is a Catholic belief that the other, whom we see as different from us, can give us something new, a new sense of reality," she says. For Hossam Mekawi, the vice president of Cairo Meeting, the thrust of the event is in the way it brings together volunteers of various ages and nationalities: "The principle is that no one is poor; everyone has something to offer the other." The 23-year-old Marco Nembrini, one of 33 Italian volunteers, agrees: once his Arabic teacher told him of the event, he says, he grew eager to participate. "Many of us worked as waiters during the summer vacation to save up for our accommodation during Cairo Meeting," Nembri explains. This being his second visit to Egypt, he acted as a tour guide for his friends, showing them Khan Al-Khalili and other sites. "The event is not only for intellectuals and the elite; ordinary people benefit from it." Sahar Diaaeddin, a 16-year-old pupil of the British International School, is volunteering for the first time. "I heard about it from the mother of a friend of mine who is one of the organisers. I thought it would be a great opportunity to find out about others, especially the Italian people. And," she adds, "I did." Sahar did not feel the Italians she met had stereotypical ideas about Muslims; her headscarf did not come in the way of her interaction with them. "When I volunteered I wanted to show my colleagues from different nationalities how Muslims are different from the way they are portrayed in the media," she says proudly, happy to have managed just that. Yet Wael Farouq had a different experience. No sei egiziano, no sei musulmano, he was told: "You are not Egyptian, you are not a Muslim." He felt the words to be an insult but managed to understand them as a consequence of media misinformation. A professor of Arabic at the American University in Cairo, Farouq has been teaching in Macerata University, Italy since 2005, and has worked to emphasise reason and logic in the Muslim tradition; and it was this that first took him to Rimini where, he remembers, "many cultural projects and many friendships were born over lunch or dinner". For him as much for the businessman Abdel-Ghafar Henish, the vice president and executive manager of the American Muslim Foundation, Cairo Meeting is a dream come true. "A year and a half ago," Henish recalled, "I wrote an article in one of the Egyptian newspapers talking about Rimini Meeting and how we can do the same thing in Cairo -- and we did!" Here as elsewhere on the Egyptian side, voluntary work expanded out of the religious to the cultural arena, with 130 Egyptian students interacting with 30 and 12 of their Italian and American counterparts. Farouq -- also chairman of the Tawasul (Communication) Centre -- sees it as the birth of a generation with a new mentality, one better able to address the West in the language of reason, "not by citing verses of the Quran"; he feels the experience will make next year's Meeting an even greater success. Perhaps this will be the seed of true understanding. Anba Botrous Fahim, a vice patriarch the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria, believes the event has helped to show the world that Egypt's heart is open to all people, building bridges of communication across cultures. For Father Youhana George, it is Beauty that defines the event. "It was a wonderful opportunity to feel the humanity we share," he says. In this spirit the organisers honoured Father Christian Van Nispen, a pivotal figure in the process. According to Abdel-Moeiti Bayoumi, the former dean of the faculty of religious studies at Al-Azhar University who spent years discussing theology with Nipsen, the Dutch monk would ride his bike to visit him at his house on a daily basis. "On the Eid he asked me if he could join in our prayers at the mosque, seeking a spiritual experience," Bayoumi added. Nipsen arrived in Cairo in 1962, and as Farouq puts it, "the director of Al-Azhar institutes at the time, Sheikh Ragab, was the first to open his door to Nispen. He saw Islam and shared life with Muslims". Nipsen, who spent 40 years in Egypt, concluded his PhD at the Sorbonne on Ibn Rushd and Muhammad Abdou, and as the very embodiment of Muslim- Christian coexistence wrote a book on September 11. It was only appropriate that he should be honoured at such an event. But it was perhaps music, with performances by the Samaa Band and Italian strings featuring Andrea and Roberto Noferini, incorporating both Muslim and Christian musicians, that drove the point home most movingly. *** An exhibition of the work of the veteran cartoonist Toghan documenting Egyptian history in the 1940s and 1950s and held at the Opera House became part of Cairo Meeting on the recommendation of the cartoonist Gomaa Farahat, who was asked to contribute his own work but thought Toghan's exhibition was better suited to the event. The show, which opened two months ago, includes 30 colour cartoons of which 15 had already been sold; reproductions of these were displayed for Cairo Meeting. "I think it's an interesting way to document history," the art critic Wagdi Habashi commented. Born in 1926, Toghan started his career in 1948 with the magazine Al-Akhar (The Other), but he is better known for work published in Rose Al-Youssef ; he continues to undertake numerous social and artistic projects, and should be launching a caricature magazine in collaboration with Al-Sawy Cultural Wheel by January. As chairman of the pioneers union at the Press Syndicate, Toghan is also active in such matters as retirement benefits and the professional conditions of illustrators. He has been campaigning against laws that prevent retired journalists from participating in syndicate activities and elections. "It is well-known that, after years of experience, a journalist is in a better position to judge the conditions of things," he says. "How come he is prevented from sharing that experience?"
