Osama Anwar Okasha might have liked to write the closing scene of his own life story himself. But as death does with everybody, it availed him no opportunity to do so. Yet, Egypt's iconic scriptwriter who took the craft to new heights over more than three decades of diligent work, left millions of admirers around the Arab world in shock when he passed away on May 28 at a Cairo hospital. Okasha was born in July 17, 1941 in the Nile Delta town of Tanta. He completed four years of sociological studies at Cairo-based Ain Shams University's College of Arts in 1962. After graduation, he worked as a government employee until 1981. But when he felt scriptwriting gnawing at him, he decided to leave public service and start a career as a fill-time writer. And this shift proved a seminal decision for Egyptian drama in general. With more than 40 TV works to his name, Okasha is seen as the scriptwriter who revolutionised TV drama in the Arab world with serials that mixed realism and philosophical meditation. “He is a really creative writer who managed to reach unprecedented heights in scriptwriting for years,” said Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman, a leading Egyptian scriptwriter, about Okasha. Abdel-Rahman had known Okasha since he was a secondary school student. Then when they grew up, they continued to be friends. They met from time to time. “Over 50 years, Okasha was the same friend I knew for the first time when I was a young school student,” Abdel-Rahman said. But as he was a kind of revolutionary in his writing, he was so in his personal life. Abdel-Rahman says Okasha used to rebel against the advice his doctors gave him. He even detested drugs. In the 1960s, when Egyptian TV drama was a virgin territory, soap operas like Al-Qahira wal-Nass (Cairo and the People) began to appear, along with screenwriters like Assem Tawfiq and directors like Nour el-Demerdash. Back then, everything was on a much smaller scale: TV channels ��" only one in the beginning; transmission hours; the number of episodes and the number of advertisements. There was less of everything. Then, beginning in the late 1970s, the number of produced soaps increased and the names of directors such as Mohamed Fadel and Inaam Mohamed Ali, and the scriptwriter Osama Anwar Okasha, became household names. These names suddenly had a pulling power, attracting viewers to their TV sets and advertisers to pay huge fees, initially to place ads before and after episodes of the serials with which they were associated and then in the commercial breaks that began increasingly to interrupt the episodes. “Okasha was a great scriptwriter,” says Youssri el-Guindy, a scriptwriter who had known Okasha for years. “Even those who disagreed with him used to respect him,” he adds. El-Guindy credits Okasha for turning TV scriptwriters into stars who were no longer overshadowed by actors and actresses. “But this was not everything about this great man,” el-Guindy says. “This man will always be remembered for writing about the Egyptian middle class and bringing it to the centre of attention,” he says. Okasha was a master of sequels. He was actually the first to conceive of a series that would extend over several years, following the lives of the same characters. One of his works, Ziziniya, is set in the Alexandrian neighbourhood of that name. In the widely popular serials Al-Shahd wal-Dimou (Sweet and Sour) and Layali Al-Hilmiya (Nights of Al-Hilmiya) shown in the 1980s, Okasha sought to trace the upheavals of recent Egyptian history through, respectively, the experiences of a single family and a single Cairene neighbourhood. Not that such an enterprise is without its hazards: Okasha has attracted criticism from Wafdists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasserists and supporters of late Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat ��" a broad coalition if ever one existed. None of this fazed Okasha, a writer who believed that "the truth hurts", and who believed, as well, that it is impossible to divorce his writing from politics, since to do so would drain it of any depth and real value. “He wasn't a scriptwriter only,” says Wahid Hamed, a prominent Egyptian scriptwriter. “He belonged to a distinguishes calibre of thinkers,” he adds. Hamed used to pity Okasha for spending his time thinking of solutions to Egypt's social problems. “He was so preoccupied with the problems of his country,” he says. “These problems were actually the fuel of his writing,” he adds. Okasha's last TV drama, Al-Masrawia (The Egyptians), might actually reflect this clearly. The two-part epic, which was shown on TV in 2007, made tens of millions of Arabs sit glued to the TV screens for bringing the lives of Egyptians before and after the 1952 July Revolution to light. Okasha was a staunch supporter of the Nasser era (1954-1970). He wrote the screenplays of a host of Egyptian films tackling corruption, power abuse, unemployment and oppression during that era. He also wrote several plays shown on State and privately owned theatres. These works and others brought him the prestigious State Merit Prize for Arts in 2008. “He used to write about things that interest the people,” said Mohamed Fadil, a TV director. “That was why people liked him so much,” he added. Years before his death, Okasha turned to newspapers to express his views about what was happening in Egypt. He published articles criticising the Egyptian Government. But his bitter criticism brought him criticism too. In recent years, he infuriated Islamists when he accused one of the companions of prophet Muhammad, Amr Ibn el-Aas, of playing a role in fomenting inter-Muslim wars. All the same, his friends and critics alike liked to draw similarities between him and Egypt's late Noble Laureate novelist Najuib Mahfouz in terms of the everlasting output and the indelible imprint.
