| Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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| Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Two weeks after the Academy of Science announced the results of the State Awards in the basic and applied sciences, the Supreme Council for Culture (SCC) announced last Saturday the results for the arts and humanities awards. 24 June was the big day for the SCC -- and a sizeable portion of Egypt's predominantly Cairene literati with it. Not only was the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni presiding over a grand ceremony, surrounded by such pillars of the ministry as Gaber Asfour, the council's secretary-general, but the names of this year's winners of the government's most prestigious awards were announced to a large gathering of writers, artists and academics, many of whom had informally been told that they would receive the tribute (along with the prize money) they felt they deserved.
Angling for the trophy
By Youssef Rakha
Mahmoud Mursi
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters There are four classes of awards -- the State Merit and the State Incentive Awards, as well as the Mubarak Award and the Distinction Award. Regarded as the most prestigious of all and awarded only to veteran scholars and artists, the Mubarak Award (LE100,000) this year was the object of a fierce competition with a rather anticlimactic outcome.
The names of this year's candidates for arts included seven senior figures -- Hussein Bikar, Youssef El-Hattab, Samha El-Khouli, Mariam Abdel-Alim, Mustafa Shawqi and Youssef Gohar -- many of whom have featured frequently and regularly in the popular media (television, radio, the national press) for very extended periods. For literature, there were only three names, all of which are reasonably formidable: Anis Mansour (columnist and writer), Tharwat Abaza (former culture minister, translator and author of a number of encyclopedias), Shawqi Deif (head of the Arabic Language Academy). For the social sciences, on the other hand, the candidates amounted to 11 seasoned academics, two of whom are former prime ministers (Ali Lutfi and Atef Sedqi), one a former minister of planning (Ismail Sabri Abdallah), one a senior Azharite (Sheikh Mohamed Khater Mohamed El-Sheikh). Unfortunately the Mubarak Awards for both literature and the social sciences were withheld, because no one candidate received the required minimum of 24 jury votes.
Thus the veteran painter Bikar, at 87 perhaps the most senior of all candidates, emerged as the only winner of a Mubarak Award in arts and humanities this year. In fact, the phenomenon of withholding the prizes invaded the State Merit and Incentive Awards too, with 19 prizes withheld in the latter class alone. Two State Merit Awards in the social sciences were also withheld -- for the same reasons. While some were surprised that so many tributes should be ignored, others explained the phenomenon as a consequence of a democratic process. And yet, when thinking of this year's awards as a whole, one cannot help imaging Bikar as the sole survivor of a road accident, miraculously emerging out of the debris.
Bikar belongs with the earliest pioneers of modern Egyptian painting; the painting icons Ahmed Sabri and Mahmoud Said, both of whom he mentions in an Al-Ahram interview (25 June), were virtually his contemporaries. But he identifies more with the former, whose method of painting indoors suited his own timid and retiring temperament. However timid, Bikar has nonetheless been an adaptable and animated artist who wrote and illustrated children's books and reached out to audiences through journalism. For a long time prior to beginning his journalistic career, he taught art at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University. His spiritually inspired works favour brevity over expansion, the symbolic gesture over the exhaustive explanation. If anything, his specialty is the portrait -- "I have not understood nature as much as I understood the human being" -- an art through which he has steadily propagated an ever wider circle of admirers. Since the Mubarak Award is awarded for a lifetime's achievement, Bikar's triumph not only consolidates the position of one of Egyptian painting's more diligent elders, but also reflects the jury's appreciation of versatility and a multi-faceted career; one can only applaud wholeheartedly.
On the scale of intellectual prestige, the State Merit Prize (LE50,000) presumably comes next. Excluding the two social sciences prizes that were withheld, the winners of the 1999 State Merit Awards are Mahmoud Mursi, Gazbiya Serri, Hussein El-Gebali, Salah Fadl, Edwar El-Kharrat, Mahmoud Fahmi Hegazi, Milad Hanna and Raouf Abbas Hamid -- all well-known and widely acclaimed in their respective areas of interest (and, in some cases, eg, with painting icon Gazbiya Serri, even beyond).
The highlights, however, remain actor Mahmoud Mursi (destined to be a benchmark in the history of state awards, Mursi is the first actor to receive a State Merit Award as an actor, not a director) and writer Edwar El-Kharrat (whose profoundly modernist, multicultural approach to literature influenced generations of novelists and poets). Mursi, a relatively subdued public figure, is among Egypt's most ingenious actors. His distinctive personality, though it invariably seeps through, has not prevented him from playing an astounding range of roles in cinema, television and radio, from Naguib Mahfouz's Al-Shahaz (in the film version of Mahfouz's early novel, "The Beggar") to the elderly Dostoyevskian idiot transported to middle-class Cairo's 1980s, Abul-Ela El-Bishri (in a televised serial bearing its protagonist's name). In honouring him the council not only sheds light on a faithful practitioner who has not enjoyed as much stardom as many lesser actors, but also answers an implicit obligation towards a cultural figure whose contribution is sophisticated and indispensable, reaching more people than any writer and setting a quality standard of acting on television.
El-Kharat is a similarly major figure -- though in a different, less popular way; his many volumes of literary theory have demarcated the parameters within which a high-brow, (Alexandria-based) cosmopolitan and modernist Arabic literature could be established. Oft-quoted terms like Al-Hasasiya Al-Jadida (the new sensibility) are due to him, and many younger writers have benefited from his patient, expansive, often philosophical counsel and his unwavering moral backing as an increasingly acknowledged literary authority. El-Kharat's own fictional project -- staunchly modernist, involving highly eclectic strands of erudition -- began in the 1940s, his short stories gaining ground in the 1950s. For a long period during the 1960s and '70s he devoted himself solely to translation and literary criticism, only to become one of the most prolific fiction writers of the '80s. He produced an incredibly wide range of novels and short stories starting with his revolutionary self-referential novel Rama and the Dragon in 1981.
The 'withholding' phenomenon notwithstanding, 13 winners received 12 State Incentive Awards (LE10,000 each): Amr El-Halafawi (in distinguished tourist projects), Selim Kitchener Istawrou (in drama), Salah Abdel-Aziz Mahgoub (in translation), Mohamed Hamed Abul-Kheir (in children's literature), Miral El-Tahawi (in the novel), Ahmed Bikhit (in poetry), the late Magdi Hassanin (in the short story), Murad Abdel-Rahman Mabruk (in criticism), Hamdi Abdel-Rahman Hassan Atallah (in political science), Sherif Sayed Kamel (in law) and Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies' Ahmed El-Naggar (in economics). Sayed Qutb and Abdel-Mo'ti Saleh shared a prize in biography.
Taking the minimum age requirement into account, this year's State Incentive Awards suggest that the prize honours not the relatively young -- as is generally accepted -- but the lesser known, for with the exception of El-Tahawi none of these 40-and-above-year-old writers and academics (the strength of their achievement notwithstanding) have achieved any remarkable degree of recognition; perhaps this highly valued tribute will help make them known to a wider circle of readers and admirers.
The Distinction Award (LE25,000) was awarded to Samir El-Asfouri and Ahmed El-Sa'idi (in the arts), Abdallah El-Toukhi and Ahmed Mursi (in literature), Fathi Khalil Abdel-Fattah, Mohamed Atef El-Iraqi and Qasem Abdu Qasem (in the social sciences) -- a host of worthy intellectuals, none of whom has attracted as much attention as fiction writer Abdel-Aal El-Hamamsi.
Perhaps the most wryly amusing casualty of the road accident that Bikar survived, El-Hamamsi has been on hunger strike within the council headquarters since the names of the winners were announced, protesting his being excluded from the Distinction Awards nominations. While Asfour pointed out that the decision to exclude El-Hamamsi was made by a 10-member committee, headed by veteran critic Abdel-Qader El-Qott and including poet Farouk Shusha, head of the Writers' Union, Hosni called on El-Hamamsi to end his strike and resort to the courts if he had a case to present. So far, El-Hamamsi has made no response. He stays, alone, in the council headquarters.