If nations are to become active contributors in modern civilisation, freedom of thought and expression is pivotal. If the shackles of past centuries are not removed there can be no prospect of creativity, development or social welfare.
As one of the beacons of enlightenment in Egypt, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in cooperation with the National Council for Translation, recently organised a two-day conference on “Censorship and Freedom of Expression in the Arab World”. A plethora of Arab writers and artists came to talk about their experiences with censorship. These included the Syrian writer Hayder Hayder, whose A Banquet for Seaweed led to a wave of protest from Al-Azhar University students some 10 years ago; Marcel Khalifa, the renowned Lebanese singer and composer who twice suffered from censorship intransigence; and Helmi Salem, whose poem Shorfat Laila Murad (Laila Murad’s Balcony) triggered an uproar in the corridors of the Ministry of Culture and led to a halt in the publication of the magazine Ibdaa (Creativity) which had printed it .
Democratic reform
In this speech at the inaugural session, the Bibliotheca’s director Ismail Serageldin said that freedom of expression was a must if democratic reforms in the Arab world were to take hold.
“The case of censorship has become untenable given the enormous developments in the area of telecommunications,” Dr Serageldin said. “All kinds of knowledge are now available to everybody, meaning that we have to reconsider our intellectual strategies and find a way to move forward.”
“Periods of stagnation,” he said, “have affected our way of thinking. We became fanatic, non-objective and intolerant vis-à-vis new ideas and arguments.” Our forefathers managed to become the vanguards of science and knowledge when they liberated themselves from Aristotle’s method and laid the ground for modern science based upon experiment as the ultimate arbiter of truth, he pointed out.
“Arab societies were once open and tolerant,” Serageldin reminded. “People were able to express their views, even in relation to faith. The Abbassid poet Abul-Alaa’ al-Ma’arri openly expressed his moments of doubt and disbelief in God.”
Between the hammer and the anvil
Dr Serageldin warned against the insertion of religion into everything we do, and stressed the destructive effects of the current chaos of fatwas (religious edicts) flowing from every direction. The logical outcome of this phenomenon, he warned, would be the insertion of religion into art. “A clique of narrow-minded clerics now gives itself the right to decide for the public what to read, see and hear,” he said.
Jordanian novelist Elias Farkouh stressed the necessity of listening to the voice of reason. He said that the “general mood” now played a hegemonic role in terms of evaluating literature, arts and other areas of creativity. When it came to the relationship between Arab intellectuals and their societies, Mr Farkouh said that intellectuals felt they were ‘aliens’.
“They are now trapped between the hammer of non-democratic governments and the anvil of intolerant societies that take religion as a justification for restricting freedom of expression and creativity,” he said.
Mr Farkouh added that censorship was based on misgivings and a common trend which refused to accept difference in opinion. He wondered about the criteria by which censorship claims the right to confiscate certain works, and argued that if our differences from generally accepted norms could be a reason to clamp the opinions of thinkers, then there was no such thing as freedom of expression.
“It is a big mistake to allow others to control what we read, or insinuate the ideas of what we write. This means that they have the authority to turn our minds into boxes filled only with what the higher authorities want us to know, not what we want to find out to comprehend the true state of affair,” Farkouh said. He added that the writer who thought on behalf of his audience warranted no respect since he or she did not respect the intelligence of the reader in the first place.
Bitter experience
Helmi Salem described the Bibliotheca as one of a handful of fortresses of the freedom of expression in Egypt. He suggested that three forces worked hand in hand to undermine freedom of creativity: fundamentalist salafi groups, an oppressive State, and the “collective mind”. Mr Salem referred to four sorrowful realities in the Arab world: the hegemony of religious authority over civil State; the failure on the part of parliaments to perform their role of monitoring governments and representing the people; the contradictions embedded in constitutions that prevented them from taking a strong position in defence of freedom; and the coalition between tyranny based upon nationalist pretexts and that based upon religious ones.
Kuwaiti novelist Laila al-Othman spoke of her bitter experience with censorship. “Retarded censorship apparatuses in the media ministries are responsible for the suppression of new talent,” she said, “When young writers feel that their writing is being hounded, they immediately sense their ideas are jeopardised.”
Ms Othman’s troubles began in 1982 when she brought out her third collection of short stories Al-Hub lahu Suwar (Facets of Love) which won her a literary prize. She was shocked however when the media minister informed her that a number of complaints had been made against her to the effect that her writing represented a ‘threat to the deep-rooted traditions of society’ and that her stories undermined religion. Ms Othman is till today bitter, feeling she is being equaled to criminals. “Exposing corrupt social practices is considered one and the same as treason, writing about women’s rights is seen as immoral, and talking about sex is equaled to committing adultery,” she said.
Divided among themselves
Jordanian poet Moussa al-Hawamda went through a similar experience after he published his collection of poems Shagari Aala (My Trees are Higher). He remembers how painful it was to stand in court facing charges and accusations of ‘crimes’ he had never committed. His deepest pain, however, was when he realised that most of those who stood against him were literary men. “I discovered that the hatred which lurks among the members of the literary clan is far more dangerous than rejection by the salafis,” he said.
Mr Moussa stressed that intellectuals should back one another instead of stabbing one another in the back. He believes that ignorance and poor education in the Arab World have bred an atmosphere of fanaticism and retardation and, worse, a tendency to belittle art and exploit artists in order that their work would serve the interests of the governing powers.
Samia Mehriz, professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, talked about the concept of freedom in education. She related her experience when teaching a class about the novel Al-Khubz al-Hafi (Barefoot Bread) by Moroccan writer Mohamed Shukri. She was accused by some conservative students, who leaked the matter to the media, of teaching immoral material and the book was no longer included in the curriculum.
Dr Mehriz said censorship was not the prerogative of government censors, but also carried the weight of public opinion. The State, she warned, avoids standing up to religious authority.
Participants concluded that freedom of expression was a precondition for our societies to move forward. Otherwise, democracy and pluralism would never go beyond the realm of mere talk.