Cairo’s Soviet-Style Silencing
The paranoid, authoritarian regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has turned the cultural capital of the Middle East into Brezhnev’s Moscow.
BY FEBRUARY 11, 2016
This week, dozens of Middle Eastern artists and performers are being welcomed and celebrated at Bill T. Jones’s renowned annual Live Ideas event. This year’s festival, titled “MENA/Future — Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region,” is focused on cultural transformations in the region and features films, lectures, panels, and community dialogues with MENA artists, addressing ideas and ideals through the lens of culture, all in an effort to forge a third way forward, in a world engulfed by terror and tyranny.
On Monday night, I had the privilege to co-host the opening keynote event of the festival with the Arab world’s most recognized comedian, Bassem Youssef, a.k.a. “Egypt’s own Jon Stewart.” Sadly, Egyptians no longer can enjoy Youssef’s work — or many of these other national treasures — in their own country. If you are an artist or intellectual in Egypt, your choices are stark: Give up your creative freedom, or be forced into exile by the vicious authoritarian regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whose government murders, imprisons, and intimidates would-be critics into collective silence.
The Sisi regime’s systematic destruction of Egypt’s cosmopolitan cultural vitality has resulted in an epic, generational loss. Cairo has historically been the cultural capital of the Arab world. It is home to one of the world’s oldest opera houses and, since the 1920s, has been the Hollywood of Arab cinema, responsible for more than half of all Arabic-language movies ever made. The first Arab Nobel literature laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, was a lifelong Cairene. The director Youssef Chahine has been hailed as a giant of world cinema; the songs of Umm Kulthum have brought tears to the eyes of people across the Arab world for the best part of a century.
