If it is allowed to turn the biographies of prophets,
messengers and pious men into TV series... and scenario writers stopped at the
time when that prophet was contemplating about the nature of God, like prophet Ibrahim for example
who worshipped the sun and then moon until the truth dawned on him and he believed
that God is the one worth worshipping.
Another example, if those writers stopped at the time
when a pious man like Omar ibn al-Khattab was atheist and they gave some
details about this period of time in his life... Will anyone say that this is not true, thinking
that such thing may degrade the status of the prophecy, message or the stature
of those pious men who accompanied the prophet?... there is nothing shameful
that prophets like Ibrahim, Moses and others reached the truth after they experienced
times of atheism or did bad acts in their lives.
That is what I thought of when I followed
the controversy over the TV series called al-Gama’aa or muslim brotherhood; that series supposed to narrate the history of muslim brotherhood…
I did not care much as I consider this series a part of consecutive artistic works aiming at defaming the July, 1952 revolution and Nasser… such
series of artistic works started early and contained what one can describe as
inappropriate and untrue in terms of art critic and historical critic criteria.
If we are about to count the articles, seminars, lectures, series and movies
that had the same target of defaming the character of Nasser and smearing the image
of July revolution, we will have unlimited book volumes and CDs… adding to this
the efforts of other regional intelligence agencies here in our region and oversees
as well and the billions spent on this. However, Nasser and the revolution
stayed in the Arab and Egyptian collective conscience… also in other far
stretches in Asia, Africa and Latin America… both Nasser and the revolution still
occupy a great position in the heart and minds of people.
What I wanted to point to is the TV
series’ conceited author who behaves like a God accepting no criticism… also that one
whom they call the historian responsible for auditing the historical material and who described himself in his reply to what Dr. Khaled Montasser wrote in
Al-Wattan newspaper, as the professor committed to the strict rules of scientific
discipline… he also described Dr. Khaled as acting the same role of actor
Abdel-Fattah al-Asri in the movie titled “al-Ostaza Fatma”.
Such unbelievable conceited behavior was
not in any way present when we had noble knights like Alfred Farag, No’man
Ashour, Mikhail Roman, Mahmoud Diab, Muhammed Galal Abdel-Qawi, Mahmoud
Abu-Zaid, Abdel-Hai Adeeb, Faisal Nada, Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman, Osama Anwar
Okasha… and others. I mentioned those people without chronological or status
order as they will ever be a sweet-scented bouquet of flowers in the course of drama
in general.
Such conceited behavior can only be
found in those who lost their goal… and so they consider themselves sacred and above
critic and criticism and seek the help of others who have the same empty
conceited behavior and outrageous ability to misinterpret the historical
material in order to achieve their targeted goal.
In this regard, I recall a bad memory with
that so-called auditor of the historical material… it is a recorded episode you
can find on Youtube interviewed by media figure Toni Khalifa… in this
episode, I asked the other party; the auditor, to commit to the rules of
research discipline of the science of history when he used to give his
judgments and use the comparative form like “worse”, “dirtier” to the end of
this… his reply was that we are not in a research hall in the university… I then
replied that TV has more serious and profound effect on common people awareness than
research hall and so it is more mandatory to commit to those rules.
I discovered that one of the reasons
lying behind such behavior apparent in most of his interviews is that he was
taught by another one who once flouted the rules of scientific discipline in
studying history.
I remember the day when a PhD student was discussing a thesis about Sa’ad Zaghloul and his role in the political life… we were at the beginning of the seventies… the thesis supervisor – my professor, the late honorable Ahmed Abdel-Rahim Mustafa – wanted to do a favor to his student and so he brought someone whom he thought would sympathize ideologically with the researcher and enlisted him as a member of the discussion committee; that was the late great Ismail Sabri Abdallah who, once he finished his overall remarks over the thesis, throw his bombing words saying to then-PhD student: “You deviated from the proper scientific discipline when you dealt with Sa’ad Zaghloul as a revolutionary leader while he was a reformist one as he accepted to work in the regime institutions; parliament and cabinet… and so you kept misinterpreting the historical material to prove your point of view criticizing Sa’ad Pasha”.
I remember the day when a PhD student was discussing a thesis about Sa’ad Zaghloul and his role in the political life… we were at the beginning of the seventies… the thesis supervisor – my professor, the late honorable Ahmed Abdel-Rahim Mustafa – wanted to do a favor to his student and so he brought someone whom he thought would sympathize ideologically with the researcher and enlisted him as a member of the discussion committee; that was the late great Ismail Sabri Abdallah who, once he finished his overall remarks over the thesis, throw his bombing words saying to then-PhD student: “You deviated from the proper scientific discipline when you dealt with Sa’ad Zaghloul as a revolutionary leader while he was a reformist one as he accepted to work in the regime institutions; parliament and cabinet… and so you kept misinterpreting the historical material to prove your point of view criticizing Sa’ad Pasha”.
That student later became a professor
who supervised another student; that is the auditor of the historical material
of that TV series… he committed the same deviation in research disciplines
which his professor did before… and so I laughed when I remembered his description
of Dr. Khaled Montasser as I remembered another movie when the actor Stephan
Rosti said to Muhammed Tawfiq; another actor, who missed his target and shot him instead: “damn
the one who taught you how to use it”.
Indeed, the blame in this respect should
be for the one who did not teach his student how to use tools of scientific
discipline properly… also, he should have taught him not to impose his ideological
and psychological personal conceptions on the subject being researched… as in
doing so, he would have messed with the material being researched.
I hesitated a lot before writing about this
series… and then I chose to write some notes around it… the secret behind my
hesitation is that the case became like one forcing himself to eat rotten food.
Also, the image of Nasser and July revolution will not be affected in the collective
conscience of the nation and other free nations just because a drama writer thought he is one of a kind as there are no real efficient peers to compare
himself to… and so he decided to seek help from an unknown historian as the
knowledgeable and efficient ones do not reply quickly to his
requests… also, it is more difficult to deal with them unlike that unknown one
who will rush to answer the request.
The last thing that made me put an end
to this thing and not come back again to it is that our country needs every
effort to bring its renaissance back and push its social powers to work and get
busy interacting with the present and future more than opening the old files of
Salah ed-Din ibn Ayyub and messing with Egypt political history in the fifties
and sixties of the last century.
Translated into English by: Dalia
Elnaggar
This article was
published in Al Ahram newspaper on June 15, 2017.
To see the
original article, go to:
#alahram
#ahmed_elgammal #drama #history
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