Egypt Update from Nehad Selaiha

Ed. note: The following is an update from Nehad Selaiha on the situation in Egypt. Her article, “The Fire and the Frying Pan: Censorship and Performance in Egypt,” was published in TDR 57, 3 (T219) Fall 2013.

On 30 June 2013, the Egyptian army backed massive, nationwide popular demonstrations against the progressive “islamization” (or “brotherhoodization,” as it was popularly dubbed) of Egyptian society and culture carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood during their year in power. This led to the ousting of President Mohamed Mursi, the Brotherhood’s figurehead, on 4 July; the institution of an interim civilian government; and the drafting of a new democratic constitution that guarantees a civilian system of government. The new constitution was approved by public referendum on 14–15 January 2014. And currently the country is gearing up for new presidential and parliamentary elections.¹

In a different cultural context such moves could have been taken to augur well for freedom of thought and expression. Unfortunately, however, it takes more than a change of regime to dismantle the solid system of values and assumptions deeply embedded in Arab culture—a system that has allowed societal, even more than official, censorship to block any attempt at critiquing it in a fundamental way and continues to have an oppressive presence in all fields of human creativity. The recent attempts to ban Family Secrets, the first Egyptian film to seriously wrestle with the taboo subject of homosexuality beyond the farcical stereotypes common in Egyptian cinema and theatre, shows that official censorship has not substantially changed after two revolutions. Worse still was the general tendency of the film’s supporters to defend it in the media by fiercely claiming that it only represents homosexuality as a form of aberration from the “normal,” rather than simply “difference”—as a kind of mental illness, or “disease,” that should be sympathetically acknowledged and “treated” rather than ignored or condemned—a tendency that betrays the insidious way in which societal censorship is internalized, driving the leaders of public opinion to defend freedom of expression by distorting what is expressed to fit within the accepted rigid norms of the inherited culture. Indeed, more often than not, outwardly liberal views and statements betray the persistence, to one degree or another, of inherited cultural prejudices, perceptions, and attitudes.

However, Family Secrets, directed by Hany Fawzy, was finally released in January 2014, albeit with many cuts. La Mou’akhza Excuse My French (2014) directed by Amr Salama, another Egyptian film that harshly exposes the realities of the persecution of Copts in Egypt, another taboo subject, was chosen for the opening of the Luxor Egyptian/European Film Festival in January 2014; and an Egyptian/British short movie, entitled Odd, that deals with the more subtle aspects of the same phenomenon, bringing to the surface the ideological drive for uniformity and its concomitant intolerance of difference, was screened in December 2013 in the Ewart Memorial Hall of the Tahrir Campus of the American University in Cairo as part of the Ismailia Film Festival. This may be optimistically viewed as a first step in the right direction—a shy, timid, hesitant, faltering step, perhaps; but still a step on the road to intellectual freedom.