Welcome to the MoroccanCulture Blog

My recent visit to Morocco helped to flesh out, in three dimensions, what it means to be a Moroccan and Arab woman today

Khaled Diab

April 3, 2008 2:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/khaled_diab/2008/04/threed_moroccan_women.html

The Hollywood Casablanca is an enigmatic place of wartime intrigue peopled by a multinational cast of gin-swigging refugees and fraudsters, shady Nazis and heroic members of the resistance. The real Casablanca, Morocco's frenetic commercial hub, is quite a different place - for a start, it's inhabited by Moroccans, who are notable by their absence in the celluloid version of the city, excepting perhaps the doorman who lets people into Rick's Café Américain.

That said, the Moroccan Casablanca has been - given its size, cosmopolitan population and commercial status - a major ideological battlefield with its fair share of political tragedies and conflicts, particularly in the so-called Years of Lead under the late heavy-handed king, Hassan II.

Fatna el-Bouih, a quietly commanding woman with a solemn and earnest face, was, as a student and young activist, one of the many who fell foul of the regime in the 1960s and 1970s. As she drove us through Casablanca's broad and congested boulevards, el-Bouih recounted what happened to her during those dark years.

Born in 1955 in a small village about 60km from Casablanca, el-Bouih showed promise from an early age, earning herself a scholarship to the Lycée Chawqi, a prestigious girls' high school in Casa. Soon after joining the school, she discovered political activism and became a member of the Syndicat National des Elèves, Morocco's national union of high school students.

Her first serious run-in with the authorities was as a leader of a 1974 students' strike. "By a strange coincidence, the holding centre where I spent the night was next door to my school," she told me as we drove past the Lycée Chawqi.

She went on to tell me about the five years she spent in prison and how they changed her outlook on life. "Prison is a school you don't wish upon your loved ones but it is also a school where you learn a lot about life," she reflected. "In prison, my determination and understanding deepened and sparked my interest in women's issues."

However, it would be several years after her release before she recovered enough from the lead poisoning she got in jail to become politically active once again. Since then, she hasn't looked back. She has been involved in the campaign to force the government to face up to the legacy of the Years of Lead, which led to the establishment of an Equity and Reconciliation Commission, and she set up an NGO to help prisoners reintegrate into society. She was a leading voice in the successful campaign to make Morocco's family laws more friendly to women and she is in the process of writing her third book.

We continued through Casablanca's more affluent neighbourhoods and past the walls of the small historic medina - the fact that Moroccan towns still retain their original city walls adds a touch of beauty and timelessness to modern metropolises. Our destination was the crumbling masonry of decaying industrial buildings and the narrow alleyways that make up the working class Mohammadi neighbourhood, which was one of the half dozen or so areas in the country hit worst by government repression during the Years of Lead. Today, el-Bouih is coordinating a major initiative - funded by the EU's European Neighbourhood Policy - to rejuvenate this neglected district.

According to el-Bouih, Mohammadi - built originally to serve as the city's industrial hub by the French on confiscated farmland - was once a veritable talent production line churning out some of Morocco's greatest writers, artists, musicians and sportspeople. Today, the deprived neighbourhood is suffering the consequences of decades of neglect by the former regime as punishment for its obstinacy.

Our first stop was a place of painful personal association for el-Bouih. We parked in the courtyard of a nondescript concrete block with laundry hanging on the balconies. In the basement of this mundane-looking building was the infamous Derb Moulay Chérif "secret" torture centre where el-Bouih spent seven months in 1977 enduring psychological and physical abuse.

When I asked her how it felt to revisit the source of so much personal anguish, she went quiet for several moments, caught in her own thoughts. "Visiting this place affects me in a way that words fail to express," she confessed, struggling to maintain the customary calm of her voice as she gazed up at the freshly washed clothes fluttering on the balconies, concealing the dirty human laundry hidden in the bowels of the building and locked away in the vaults of time.

"So, people live here now," I remarked casually.

"People have always lived here," she responded with a hint of bitterness. "They just pretended that nothing was going on under their noses. Some of our torturers lived in those apartments up there."

I told her that I wasn't sure whether I would be able to endure what she had. "When people are faced with dire situations, they discover capacities they didn't know they possessed," was her response.

After taking the photographer, Mohammed Chamali, and me on a tour of the local youth centre - a rare space crammed full of local kids keen to express themselves in sports, music and culture - she drove us to the station.

On the way, we picked up her husband, Yusuf, from his office, who stepped into the car and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek. When I was doing some background reading before my visit, I learned that Yusuf, despite his busy life as an IT professional, found time to support his wife in her numerous activities by taking care of her correspondence and typing up her manuscripts.

When he found out I was Egyptian, he told me about how much he enjoyed visiting Cairo and that he felt that it was his spiritual home. We chatted about his favourite haunts in the city of a thousand minarets, a million contradictions and 20 million restless souls.

Not only is Egypt the spiritual home of Imane Masbahi, a young Moroccan film director and distributor, but she can also speak Arabic with a distinct Cairene lilt. This took me a little by surprise when she greeted me in the Casablanca office of her film distribution company, giving me an eerie sense that I had somehow stepped through a portal and fetched up in another town.

Masbahi studied filmmaking, with a particular focus on screenwriting, which she describes as the orphan art in Morocco, at Cairo's prestigious Higher Institute for Cinema. Although she has focused mainly on television films during her career, she released her debut film for the big screen in 2002, after some eight years of on-off production. The Paradise of the Poor (Paradis des pauvres) explores a theme familiar to many young Moroccans: the allure of emigrating and the tough reality of life on the margins in Europe.

Masbahi's love of Egyptian cinema and culture has sparked in her a steely determination to carve out a niche for Egyptian films in Morocco. Almost a decade ago, she set up a distribution company for Egyptian films and now she shuttles back and forth between Cairo, where she has an Egyptian boyfriend, and Casablanca.

This surprised me somewhat, since I had assumed that Egyptian films, produced in the "Hollywood" of the Middle East, would not need someone to champion them single-handedly. After all, it is easy, as a visitor, to come away with the impression that Moroccans are passionate about all things Egyptian and are well-versed in Egyptian popular culture.

As in Egypt, traditional teahouses in Morocco still resonate with the legendary vocal chords of Umm Kulthoum, the undisputed grand diva of the Arab world. People's televisions are as often as not tuned in to Egyptian satellite channels or channels showing Egyptian productions. Sometimes, with the sounds of Egypt all around, one could almost be lulled into thinking they were a few thousand kilometres east.

People also tend to become warmer and friendlier when they find out you're an Egyptian, particularly now that Egypt has been crowned African football champion for the second time running. This proved particularly useful at a checkpoint, when a bored gendarme started being difficult with Umar, who was driving us to the Rif Mountains. When Umar identified me as Egyptian, the gendarme called over his mates, all of whom started congratulating me on Egypt's victory and telling me that all Moroccans had rooted for Egypt and that the national side had done all of North Africa proud.

Masbahi was surprised that all Moroccans seemed so friendly with me. "Surely the women are friendlier than the men?" she asked. "Moroccan men are often jealous of Egyptian men because Moroccan women are so infatuated by them." I though to myself that perhaps Moroccan women would be somewhat less enthusiastic if they actually lived in Egypt!

Masbahi explained that this love for Egypt did not actually translate into bums on seats in cinemas. "In Morocco, most people go to see Hollywood, Bollywood or Moroccan productions," she said. "Another big problem for Egyptian films is widespread piracy. You can get knocked-off DVDs and videos everywhere in the market."

In addition, she explained, most Egyptian films that make it to Moroccan cinemas are lightweight and incredibly commercial. "The reputation of serious Egyptian films among Moroccan filmgoers was hurt by the so-called 'contract' films of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, when businessmen who had no idea about the industry financed highly formulaic films in search of a profit," Masbahi says. "In recent years, there have been lots of high-quality Egyptian films which Moroccans are not really aware of."

Being a small fish in a very large distribution ocean, Masbahi struggled to draw audiences to her first releases, many of which were highly political or focused on very Egyptian issues. But she puts much of the trouble down to her shorter reach compared with the distributors of American and Indian films. "Not only do they have a larger distribution budget, but they benefit from all the press hype and publicity prior to the film's release," she points out.

This led her to seek sponsors to finance the promotion of films, but she soon abandoned this because it was too commercial for her liking. Then she managed to get hold of some EU funding aimed at helping distribute films across the Euro-Med area. With better promotional campaigns, she soon discovered that there was a latent appetite for Egyptian cinema.

The veteran Egyptian comedian Adel Imam has proven to be a good investment for her. His latest satire, Morgan Ahmed Morgan, has been at the top of the box office takings for Morocco's main cinema chain for the entire first quarter of 2008.

The film, which she invited me to see, is about a billionaire of modest roots who believes he can bribe his way through anything. When his children express their shame at his uncultured and uneducated ways, he buys his way into parliament, and they join the opposition against him. He then decides to go back to school and joins the same exclusive university they go to and goes about trying to buy himself an education. When his son and daughter more or less disown him, he begins to reform.

This unexpected success has been uplifting for her small company. Masbahi is now considering setting her sights on the trickier challenge of promoting Moroccan films in Egypt. One major barrier is language, since most Egyptians cannot understand fully the Moroccan dialect. Another is the Egypt-centrism of the Egyptian cultural landscape, which often ignores the creative output of other Arab countries, particularly those to the west.

Masbahi is proud of the fact that Egyptian films are, thanks to her efforts, gaining in profile across Morocco. She is doubly proud of this achievement given the fact that she is the only woman boss in the Moroccan film distribution industry.

But it is not just women from Morocco's educated urban elite who are entering traditionally male domains.

Chefchaouen is a breathtakingly beautiful town of blue and white buildings perched in the luscious green of the Rif Mountains. In its hinterland, Chamali, the photographer, pointed out to me that up here in the north it was the women who did a large share of the work out on the fields, unlike in the south. "A lot of men in the rif are too lazy to work their land," he maintained. I hoped, but very much doubted, that these absent men compensated by doing more domestic chores.

Nevertheless, even in this traditional and very conservative environment, there are young women who are taking their first bold steps towards emancipation. For instance, I was surprised at a small co-operative goat's cheese factory I visited that the most technical job there, that of lab technicians, was being performed by two young female graduates.

One of them, Zeinab, was quite pleased that this place had opened up in the area. "It gives me the chance to practise my specialty, which is very fulfilling," she told me. "As a first job, the income also isn't bad." Betraying a healthy spirit of ambition, she remarked: "This is only a first step. I hope to develop my skills and find more challenging work in the future."

And the ambition to move onwards and upwards is one that is doubtless shared by many Moroccan women.

http://newmeaningsofpeaceconference2008.blogspot.com/2008/02/reserach-group-on-culture-and.html
Research Group on Culture and Globalisation (RGCG)
Abdelmalek Essaadi University
Tetuan, Morocco
Organises a conference on:

The New Meanings of Peace after 9/11, 2001
Call for Papers
The idea of peace cannot be adequately formulated in the absence of clearly identified territories of conflict, war, and violence. Peace is not applicable where it does not qualify as imperative and decisive. Different ideas of peace can be negotiated or devised for different zones of trouble. At the end of World War II, peace emerged as a follow-up to the military victory of the Allies against totalitarian regimes that advocated Nazism and dictatorship and exercised genocides and holocausts. With his extreme ideologies and unobstructed territorial ambitions, Adolf Hitler posed a serious threat for Europe and for humanity at large, and as such the restoration of peace in Europe was conditioned by a sweeping military victory of Western democracies and the complete destruction of Hitler’s apparatuses of power. During the Cold War era, peace was both sustained and endangered by the nuclear armament in which both the US and the Soviet Union ferociously and boastfully engaged for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In a context of heightened military and technological rivalry between Western and Eastern blocks, peace depended upon the imminent possibility of a planetary war, and as such was often defined and negotiated in such terms as reciprocal deterrence and parallel power. The supremacy of one side over another represented a fatal threat to the idea of peace in a world that continued to be bi-polar up to 1991, the date that marks the dramatic and unexpected disintegration of the USSR .
On September 11th, 2001, New York and Washington DC were subjected to a surprise terrorist attack that resulted in the death of three thousand civilians and the collapse of two majestic towers in the World Trade Centre, which were claimed by Al-Qaeda Jihadists as the miraculous success of a “divine” conquest at the heart of the West’s most emblematic and thriving of all metropoles. The West bemoaned the horrors of these terrorist attacks, and the Muslim world had to face the glaring reality that Islam had been hijacked by extremists and terrorists to be re-engineered into a tool of mass murder. The events of 9/11, 2001 supplied an alternative arena for the war of ideologies and ideas and hastened the transition from a fading conflict between the democratic camp and the socialist camp to a new and bloody clash between liberalism and Islamism. The most defining markers of the reality of such a new conflict of ideologies was the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the immediate overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Husein as well as the series of terrorist explosions that shook some of the world’s major capitals such as Casablanca, Madrid, London, and Istanbul. However, despite the fact that the conflict between Islamism and liberalism can be best denominated as ideological, the wars on the ground, the casualties, deaths, and serious threats looming on the horizon make the conflict a much more serious threat. The “global war on terror” is not a metaphorical expression even if the armies engaging one another in this war are not conventionally deployed on a neatly bounded battlefield.
The restoration of peace in a world made increasingly volatile by the exercises of terror and the excesses of military power is, however, not dependent this time on a neat military victory of one party over another as was the case in World War II. World peace depends primarily on the spread of a culture of tolerance and the reform of educational, social, and economic policies particularly in non-Western countries and most crucially in the Arabo-Islamic world. World peace is a global pact that cannot be envisaged and achieved with the will-to-power of the world’s most advanced states and in total disregard of the interests and future of poorer countries. The negotiation of world peace today must take place at the most fundamental level of social debate in view of narrowing the gaps between Western and non-Western countries, richer and poorer societies. Peace can only be a shared legacy and a common destiny for humanity. The world can no longer sustain more wars and regional conflicts.
The organisers of this conference invite papers on these proposed topics:
· The culture of peace in the post-9/11 world;
· Peace and democracy;
· Peace and public policy;
· Peace and globalisation;
· Peace and cultural discourse;
· Peace and religion.

Conference Director:

Dr. Jamal Eddine Benhayoun,
jamaleddinebenhayoun@yahoo.co.uk

Date and venue: 19-21 June, 2008 at the Faculty of Humanities, AEU, Tetuan
Abstracts deadline: 24th March, 2008

PEOPLE & CULTURE
[03/19/2008 - 11:10]
The history of Morocco in São Paulo

The Ministry of Culture of the Arab country, in partnership with FAAP College, is going to promote, starting on the 31st, exhibition 'Morocco'. Around 500 archaeological, ethnic, handwritten, painted and photographed objects are going to show the riches of the Moroccan people.

Marina Sarruf*
marina.sarruf@anba.com.br

São Paulo – Starting on the 31st of March, Brazilians will be able to learn more about the history of Morocco. The fact is that the Ministry of Culture of the Arab country, in partnership with Armando Álvares Penteado College (FAAP), brings to São Paulo exhibition "Morocco", to bring together 500 items from the most important museums of Morocco. The exhibition, to take place at the FAAP Brazilian Art Museum, should be open to the public up to June 22.

"The objective of the exhibition is to strengthen cultural relations between developing countries and also to show Brazilian people the rich components of Moroccan culture," said to ANBA the director of Cultural Assets at the Ministry of Culture of Morocco, Abdellah Salih, one of the organizers of the fair. According to him, this kind of action brings the nations closer together and permits greater mutual knowledge of each society for a true partnership.

The idea of organising an exhibition about the Arab country at FAAP arose in 2006, when the ambassador of Morocco to Brazilian capital Brasília, Farida Jaïdi, was invited to make an official visit to the college. At the time, FAAP museum was organising an exhibition about Greece. "It was a large exhibition and there were many objects. I was impressed, so I suggested the organisation of an exhibition about Morocco," said the ambassador. Since then, she has been working for the exhibition to take place.

According to Farida, the promotion of the fair in 2008 is not by chance. "This will be an important year as there will be the second Summit of Arab and South American Countries," she said. The meeting of heads of state is scheduled to take place in the second half of the year, in Doha, the capital of Qatar. "I hope that the exhibition may show a little more of the culture of Morocco, which is very rich," added the ambassador.

According to Salih, the exhibition should contribute not only to bringing two peoples closer together, but also to increasing the tourist flow between both countries. The director of Cultural Assets of Morocco should come to Brazil together with the minister of Culture of the Arab country, Touria Jabrane Kryatif, and with other representatives of cultural institutions in Morocco.

The exhibition

Morocco, which is located in North Africa, is close to the European continent, which resulted in centuries of reciprocal exchange and domination. Even with a strong mixture of cultures and great foreign influences, Morocco never lost its true identity. The works to be presented in São Paulo are going to try to show a little of this history, from ancient times to date.

The exhibition should be divided into four parts. First, "The Origins" which includes articles like decorated vases from the Neolithic period and cave drawings from the Bronze Age. Ancient times and the centuries up to the Muslim period are illustrated by Moroccan objects for daily use.

The second part, called "Traditional Arts", brings aspects of the spiritual and intellectual practices of daily life in the cities and the country. To represent this art, several objects should be exhibited, like jewels, embroidered products, fabrics, garments, ceramics and weapons. In this part, those visiting the exhibition can also see a scenographic space showing the interior of a Moroccan home. Rooms with chests, sculpted wooden shelves, a floor covered in typical Moroccan carpets, cushions and mirrors are also part of this scenery.

Then comes "The eye of travelling orientalists and painters", which goes from the second half of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. In this section, the exhibition is going to show the outlook of foreign artists, painters, writers and photographers who visited the country, considered an excellent destination that exerts strong influence on and fascinates visitors.

Lastly comes "Contemporary Art", which brings paintings and photographs of Moroccan artists who show a panorama of contemporary artistic production in the Arab country.

Service

Exhibition "Morocco"
Date: March 31 to June 22
Site: FAAP Brazilian Art Museum
Address: Rua Alagoas, 903, Higienópolis, São Paulo
Time: Tuesdays to Fridays from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm
Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Further information: (+55 11) 3662-7198
Free admittance

*Translated by Mark Ament

Magharebia
Published on Magharebia‎ (http://www.magharebia.com) ‎
http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/reportage/2008/03/07/reportage-01
Mounia Belafia discusses role of proverbs in perpetuating women's status in Morocco

07/03/2008

Writer and journalist Mounia Belafia spoke with Magharebia recently about her new book, "Women in Moroccan Proverbs". Belafia suggests that everyday phrases contribute to negative attitudes towards women.

Text and photos by Farah Kenani for Magharebia in Washington – 07/03/2008

Mounia Belafia, author of "Women in Moroccan Proverbs", says many commonly-used proverbs espouse negative opinions of women.

In the lead-up to the March 7th-8th Women's Book Fair in Fez, Magharebia spoke with Mounia Belafia about her new book "Women in Moroccan Proverbs". An expert in public perceptions and gender studies, the writer and journalist said that proverbs – even those used and created by women – reinforce popularly held negative perceptions about women and their role in society.

Magharebia: What prompted you to research the field of popular proverbs and their relation to women?

Mounia Belafia: My book was based on a conviction that the in-depth changes we desire for women's status in Morocco can't be achieved if we don't work on changing mindsets. A working woman would soon find herself no more than a housewife facing relatives that haven't necessarily witnessed the same development as the rest of society.

Based on that, I think we should work more profoundly in order to change mindsets and to achieve equality, not only on economic, political and other issues, but also in the patterns of behaviour that shape our conditions and influence our daily lives.

From this came the project of studying images of women and their relation to all types of discourse. I became interested in the topic at the media level, and I'm now preparing a study on women and theatre as part of my post-graduate studies.

The topic of popular proverbs, however, has intrigued me in a special way. I spent a lot of time studying it before I came to the conclusion that these popular proverbs, which are used by many of us in conscious or unconscious ways, embody many negative values regarding women. These negative values are passed from one generation to the next, and are reproduced in different ways. Popular proverbs and pop culture as a whole play a role in establishing and preserving traditions. This makes them act like established, deeply-rooted structures that are difficult to uproot.

Magharebia: Do you think that some women play a role in perpetuating the ideas contained in these proverbs?

Belafia: I was also concerned with the role women played in promoting offensive images of themselves. In my study, I posed the question of whether women used proverbs in their daily lives. The answer was yes. I posed another question, about whether they themselves were producing proverbs, and the answer was also yes.

Women are both consumers and producers of proverbs. Based on that, they are contributing, either consciously or unconsciously, to the dissemination of negative and offensive ideas about themselves.

In analyzing the body of these proverbs, we find ourselves faced with women who play a role in preserving traditions and passing them on accurately and honestly. A woman will replicate with her daughter-in-law what her mother-in-law did when she was young, in order to ensure that her son lives the same way his father did. The bride in turn hates the mother-in-law. Other differences within the community of women present an image of turbulence which resides in and engulfs that society.

Belafia's new book, "Women in Moroccan Proverbs", is based on the author's conviction that change in women's status in Morocco "can't be achieved if we don't work on changing mindsets."

Magharebia: What is the purpose of your study?

Belafia: My goal in this study was to attempt to transform the popular proverb from a product of its characteristics and status in society, outside the sphere of accountability and criticism, and from a product upon which society has imparted a type of sanctity, into a cultural product that is linked to social structure, justifications of behaviour patterns and existing hierarchal relations. In this way, we can approach the product in a critical way. We can read it based on a methodology of accountability that deals with it as a cultural product which perpetuates many social concepts and values and reproduces them in similar fashion to the way poems and wisdom are reproduced.

One of the conclusions of the study was that stereotypes about women are consistently repeated. These images take the typical form drawn by the type of thinking prevalent in the society. This "typical form" is dominated by negative images of women derived from a traditional culture that works to perpetuate women's inferior status in the social hierarchy. They are also derived from certain interpretations of religious thinking and from a special construction of tales and superstitions whose common divider justifies the inferior standing of women in the social hierarchy and in the predominant values surrounding them.

Even when a woman is mentioned in a positive way, we rarely find any other positive qualities except those that are related to her body and her "natural roles". Her standing is derived from her body, beauty, ability to give birth, care for her family and children, and skill in manual and domestic work.

Magharebia: As readers, what can we learn from this study? What are the points that must be dealt with?

Belafia: We can say that there are three major issues that can be presented through our study of prevailing popular proverbs about women. The first issue is that the proverbs produced by men and women alike reflect the balance of power within society. In this society, women are considered the weaker link, and they tend to be dominated by a masculine culture. Men are the stronger party, and everything revolves around them. Within this gender hierarchy of men and women there is another social hierarchy where the rich prevail over the poor, the strong over the weak, the master over the slave, the fertile over the infertile, the married over the divorced and widowed, and other steps on the ladder of prevailing social values.

The second issue is that no society can be studied based on its social and class relations alone. The prevailing culture must be taken into consideration. More importantly, my study of proverbs shows the extent of the role culture plays in preserving tradition. This brings us to a deep dilemma linked to the role of culture as a comprehensive anthropological concept in influencing social shifts.

The third issue is that pop culture often conforms to popular religious thinking in such a manner that it becomes difficult to discern between social cultural products, such as proverbs, and religious beliefs as understood by the public. As an expressive structure, the proverb is similar to wisdom. As we have shown in this study, the proverb, with its different time and place changes, is no more than a cultural product related to a certain historical situation with its own conditions and determining factors.

WAM
Published: March 01, 2008, 21:23

Abu Dhabi: Former Moroccan foreign minister Mohammad Bin Eisa has won the Shaikh Zayed Book Award for 2008 in the category of the Cultural Personality of the Year.

In a press release, Secretary-General of the Shaikh Zayed Book Award Rashid Al Uraimi said Bin Eisa has been awarded in recognition of his contributions to the cultural movement as well as for his role as a co-founder of Morocco's Aseelah Culture Season which was launched in 1978 as a forum for Arab, African and western cultural achievers and creative individuals and thinkers.

Bin Eisa will be presented a cash award of Dh1 million along with a certificate of appreciation.

Bin Eisa was born in Aseelah city, Morocco in 1937. He was Morocco's minister of culture between 1985-1992. He then became Morocco's minister of state for foreign affairs and culture between 1999-2007.

A prestigious ceremony will be held at the iconic Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi to honour winners of the second edition of the Shaikh Zayed Book Award (2007-8). The ceremony will be held on the sidelines of the upcoming Abu Dhabi International Book Fair from March 11 to 16.

Another Moroccan researcher and PhD holder won the Shaikh Zayed Book Award in the category of Young Authors for his book Future of international relations in the light of civilizations clash, which was described by the secretary-general as a remarkable contribution to Arab politics and philosophy.

The translation award went to Jordanian Fayez Al Sayagh, while the Arts Award went to Iraqi architect, Rafa Al Jaderji, and Publication and Distribution Award went to the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research.

The Libyan novelist Ebrahim Al Kowni won the Literature Award, while Huda Al Shawwa, a Kuwaiti, won the Child Literature Award.

In all, 512 candidates from 30 Arab countries contended for the second edition of the Shaikh Zayed Book Awards.
http://archive.gulfnews.com/nation/Heritage_and_Culture/10194100.html

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/08/02/24/10192316.html

02/24/2008 01:13 AM | WAM

Abu Dhabi: Moroccan Dr Mohammad Sa'adi won the Shaikh Zayed Book Award (young authors) in its second edition.

Rashid Saleh Al Oraimi, Secretary-General of the award, announced the wining of Dr Sa'adi for his book Future of International Relations in the light of Civilsations' Clash.

Al Oraimi also announced that the Shaikh Zayed Development and Nation Building Award would not be issued in this second edition.

The award recently announced that the translation award went to Dr Faiz Al Sayagh, a Jordanian, while the arts award went to Iraqi architect, Rafa Al Jaderji. Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research won publication and distribution award.

The Libyan novelist Ebrahim Al Kowni, won the literature award, while Huda Al Shawa, a Kuwaiti, won the child literature award.

The international and Arab cultural circles are awaiting the announcement of the Shaikh Zayed Award for general cultural personality for year 2007-8.

A book that is banned in its own country has become a leading contender for a new literary prize that aims to encourage wider reading of novels written in Arabic.

In Praise of Hate has been banned since it was published last year. By the award-winning Syrian scriptwriter and novelist Khaled Khalifa, it is set in Syria in 1982, and centres around the army's brutal shelling of Hama, where opposition groups were fighting the late President Hafez al-Assad.

It is one six titles shortlisted for the first “Arabic Booker Prize”. Khalifa describes himself as staunchly secular, and has said that the novel attacks political ideologies based on religion: “There is fierce and direct criticism of sectarianism which produces the culture of hatred.”

Another shortlisted title dealing with conflict in the Middle East is June Rain by Jabbour Douaihy, which explores the civil war in Lebanon.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is run in association with the Booker Prize foundation and is funded largely by the Abu Dhabi Emirates Foundation. None of the shortlist, announced this week, has been translated into another language, and Sigrid Rausing, owner of Granta, has agreed to fund an English translation of the winner.

The shortlist has touched other sensitive political nerves, with complaints that its geographical range is too narrow, with two authors from Lebanon, two from Egypt, a Syrian and a Jordanian, but none from the Gulf and Iraq.

There are also fears that encouraging authors to write with a Western audience in mind will undermine the authenticity of Arabic literature, and provoke authors to write belligerently or to hide social behaviour that may be controversial.

One judge, the Moroccan writer Mohammed Berrada agreed that this happened with some entries, but added: “Many of the novels deal with the position of women or sexuality. They seek to interrogate their own country.”

Some also feared that the novels' subjects will reinforce cultural stereotypes. But the judges see this as inevitable in the Middle East.

Another judge, the Palestinian author Feissal Darraj, said: “The themes may be pessimistic but the writing itself is a source of optimism: it is an act of resistance.”

The other shortlisted titles are The Land of Purgatory by Elias Farjouh, Walking in the Dust by May Menassa, Swan Song by Mekkaoui Said and Sunset Oasis by Baha Taher. The winner will be announced on March 10.

www.arabicfiction.org