EGYPT: To publish or burn

The man who once threatened to torch Hebrew-language books now, in a twist of international literary diplomacy, apparently wants to publish them.

Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni is attempting to tidy up his past comments about burning Israeli books by offering a more conciliatory gesture: to print them in Arabic. The change came as writers and artists criticized Hosni’s nomination to head the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

“Farouk Hosni is the opposite of a man of peace, dialogue and culture, he is a dangerous man who inflames hearts and spirits,” went an open letter signed by filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. “We invite all countries dedicated to liberty and culture to take the initiatives necessary to avert this threat and avoid the disaster that would be his nomination.”

Hosni is trying to untangle himself from comments made last year when asked if there were Hebrew-language books in Egypt’s Alexandria library. He reportedly said: “If there are any, I will burn them myself.”

The quip fit the spirit of the artistic war Egypt has waged against Israel for decades. This nation may have been the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, but the Palestinian crisis prompted Egypt’s writers, intellectuals, musicians and artists to boycott the Jewish state. That sentiment may work for a novelist but not for a politician seeking the U.N. post for promoting cultural understanding.

Hosni has apologized. The ministry has announced it will publish in Arabic the works of  Israeli writers David Grossman and Amos Oz. Or will it? A report over the weekend in Daily News Egypt suggests otherwise.

Stay tuned for the next chapter. 
    
-- Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Photo: Farouk Hosni. Credit: BBC 

IRAN: Alleged female serial killer inspired by Agatha Christie novels

Iran is all astir over the sensational case of the alleged serial killer inspired to hunt her elderly prey by the mystery novels of Agatha Christie.

According to press accounts, Iranian police arrested the 32-year-old alleged killer in the city of Qazvin, about 60 miles northwest of the capital.

She has been identified only by her first name, Mahin. 

The suspect allegedly confessed to luring into her clutches elderly women by offering them rides in her car after prayers. 

She allegedly lulled her passengers into a sense of security by telling them how much they reminded her of her own mother. 

EGYPT: Religion and a defiant author

“Cut evil tongues, throw them with their sins into the sea. ... Know that our God, Jesus Christ, was addressing us, His children in all times, when He said: I did not come to bring peace to earth but a sword.”

With this incendiary sermon in his latest novel, Youssef Ziedan drew a portrait of St. Cyril, one of the 5th century's canonized popes of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. By projecting the image of a pope resistant to theological debate, and by shedding light on what the author contended were concealed moments of violence in the early centuries of the Coptic Church, Ziedan’s new novel, “Beelzebub,” has shocked the Coptic community. At first glance, some might conclude the novel targets the church exclusively. A deeper read, however, exposes a controversial Muslim author with  strikingly unconventional views on monotheistic religions in a society steeped in religious conservatism.

Ziedan, in an interview in Alexandria, said in a defiant tone that  his work aimed at challenging the monopoly claimed by different religious institutions over the truth of faith and history. “I don’t deconstruct the text, but I reexamine the religious institution and religious heritage,” said Ziedan. “I analyze religious knowledge and consciousness.”

Yet, this is not the crux of Ziedan’s views. His critique goes beyond the role of religious institutions to the essence of monotheistic religions: “The substance is the same; it is based on the superiority of oneself over others under the pretext of possessing a god who owns the truth. This element of superiority is the same in all three religions, which gives rise to violence. As long as religions last, violence will persist. ”

IRAQ: Intellectuals hail reopening of Baghdad's Mutanabi Street

The windows on the buildings just off Mutanabi Street in Baghdad are still shattered, remnants of a devastating car bomb that exploded in the city's cultural and intellectual core last year, killing 30 people and injuring dozens of others.

Turn the corner, though, into the storied street of booksellers and that bomb seems like a distant memory. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki re-opened the reconstructed street last week, welcoming Iraqis back and vowing that the will of the people is stronger than terrorism.

"The return back of life on Mutanabi Street is the return back of life of the Iraqi culture," bookseller Salam Mohammed Abud said Friday, as scores of people roamed the streets. "For any intellectual, any educated man, Mutanabi Street is considered part of his education."

EGYPT: Poet sees a storm coming

Iman Bakry has a fortuneteller's voice, husky and cracked. It coaxes you into her colloquial poems, which once were about romance but have since shifted to a cutting critique of President Hosni Mubarak's government and an Egypt plagued by self-doubt, repression, corruption and a dangerous divide between rich and poor.

"I see a storm coming," begins a stanza in one of her poems.

Bakry is a media-savvy wordsmith who has risen to national prominence through television appearances and public readings. Her politically barbed verse articulates the frustrations and false dreams that have embittered a cynical public and laced the air with hints of rebellion. Opposition forces are often silenced and intimidated by the authoritarian government, but Bakry senses the anger welling.

"The explosion is already happening," she said in an interview in her Cairo apartment. "There's demonstrations, political activism, labor strikes, protests over clean water and bread shortages. All this signals the collapse of the whole society. We are walking to hell, toward a very dark future."

Read the rest of the story in today Los Angeles Times.

--Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Photo: Iman Bakry in her Cairo apartment. Credit: Asmaa Waguih

EGYPT: New book captures a nation's angst

Thanks to content that hits a sensitive nerve with a highly disenchanted society, the book “Egypt Is Not My Mother, But My Stepmom” has been breaking sales records across the country.

The book is a collection of satirical pieces that tackle a plethora of Egypt's social and political ills, including corruption, political despotism, backwardness and human rights violations, questioning the validity of the sense of belonging to the country. The first edition came out in January 2008; in less than a year, the book went into a ninth printing, garnering an unprecedented success in a county with a slim readership.

"How would you expect people to have a sense of belonging toward a country where they cannot find food, clothing or shelter?" author Osama Gharib told the L.A. Times.

Gharib, a columnist with the independent daily al-Masry al-Youm, does not provide his readers with conventionally sophisticated analyses. On the contrary, his book, which relies on colloquial Arabic in many parts, has derived its popularity from being a ruthless mockery of Egyptian realties.

JORDAN: Poet arrested for insulting Islam

A Jordanian poet who published a collection of his works has found himself in hot water. He's been accused of apostasy, a crime that could carry the death penalty in some parts of the Islamic world.

Islam Samhan, 27, was arrested by authorities today. He could be sentenced to up to three years in prison. The specific charge?  Harming Islam by incorporating Koranic imagery into his love poems.

According to The National, the Abu Dhabi daily, Samhan's work, "Slim Shadows," caught the attention of Jordanian clerics, including Jordan's Grand Mufti Noah Alqdah Samas, who called him an enemy of religion for comparing his loneliness to that of the prophet Youssef in the Koran.

Suddenly, Samhan's nightmare began. His book was banned and he began receiving death threats.

IRAQ: Female bomber cartoon stirs anger

The weekly newspaper that calls itself Al Esbuyia, or Iraq Weekly, offers a regular diet of sports, culture, features and sarcasm to readers, and one of its key features is the cartoon that accompanies each new issue. Most of the cartoons poke fun at the hardships endured by regular Iraqis, but some Iraqi lawmakers found the one published Sept. 14 to be not very amusing.

It shows a Muslim woman clad in a burka holding a burning bomb fuse in her raised left hand, a la the Statue of Liberty, who stands beside her. The drawing reflects the growing number of female suicide bombers in Iraq, but members of Iraq's parliament denounced it as an insult to Iraqi Muslim women and voted Sunday to sue the newspaper for defamation.

It's too early to say where, if anywhere, the lawsuit will go. For months, Iraqi lawmakers haven't been able to pass pressing legislation to hold provincial elections or share the nation's oil wealth, so the chances of them getting organized enough to push through a lawsuit like this seem remote.

But the action itself is another sign of the Iraqi government's prickly relationship with the media, which were hobbled for decades under Saddam Hussein. His ouster ushered in press freedom, sort of. Iraqi journalists and media company employees get gunned down, kidnapped, threatened and roughed up with alarming frequency. They also get detained and held, sometimes for months, by U.S. forces.

ISRAEL: Laying Darwish to Rest

They came in the thousands to say goodbye--not just Fatah Party political hacks  and aging leftists, but a cross-generational gathering of Palestinians that showed the reach of Mahmoud Darwish 's appeal.

Palestine's unofficial Poet Laureate received what amounted to an unofficial state funeral. The 67-year old poet, who died in Houston from complications following heart surgery, was buried Wednesday in Ramallah.

"It was a great loss to us," said Shirina Rantisi, a 19-year old college sophomore who ,like many, wore a -shirt bearing Darwish's face. "Everyone loves him."

The sheer diversity of Darwish's reach was on display in the crowds that accompanied his procession and waited in the sun outside his burial plot on a hill overlooking Ramallah's Palace of Culture.

Rantisi said she and many others in the crowd didn't necessarily follow Darwish's poetry, but respected him as an icon of the Palestinian struggle.

"It's the symbolism, she said, comparing Darwish to Che Guevara.

-- Ashraf Khalil in Ramallah

Photo credit: Ashraf Khalil

LEBANON: A writer with many facets

Rabih Alameddine loves to tell stories, all sorts of them. Stories about intimate sexual experiences,  about twisted family gatherings and even ancient ones about an Arabian prince who failed to have a son.

And just like his diverse and multifaceted stories, this Lebanese American fiction and essay writer juggles various identities that he hates to label.

Alameddine, 48, is an openly gay writer, but that's not how he'd like to be categorized. He quickly adds that he also happens to be a writer with a hairy chest, and that he loves to play soccer. 

Born in Jordan in an upper-middle-class Lebanese family, he was raised between Kuwait and Lebanon. He went to the United Kingdom then to the United States after the civil war broke out in 1975, shifting his career from engineering to painting and writing along the way.

Today, Alameddine lives between San Francisco and Beirut, where he was recently promoting his new novel, "The Hakawati," or "The Storyteller."

Alameddine, also wrote the novels "Koolaids," and "I, the Divine," sat down for an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times: Your new book follows an old tradition in Arabic literature. Yet, what you present is a modern vision of the Arabian nights that seems more subversive and more overt. What is the book really about?

Rabih Alameddine: I am fascinated about how families start, where they come from.... In a large measure, the book is the stories I tell myself about myself. Those include personal stories.... Some are true, others are not true. But they are also stories that I tell about my family, how I fit among my family and my friends. There are stories that I tell also about my culture whether in the U.S. or Lebanon. It is the meeting of these stories that define a person, relationships and who we are as people. And that’s what I am interested in.