19/01/2023
35995 times read
19/01/2023
35995 times read
The developed nations that respect their peoples seek to spread culture and literature among them and encourage them love their arts and the arts of other countries, because of their positive impact on public taste. The underdeveloped and dictatorial regimes do exactly the opposite, as their interest in culture fades away as long as it does not serve the agenda of the ruling party.
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As for the less backward countries, they give their people the husks of culture, and the edges of literature and the below par arts in order to claim that they are conscious and advanced and care much about these matters. Our culture lived and literature lived, and with them the arts, in clear ill health with the arrival of hordes of forces of underdevelopment, and the frequent entry and exit of culture to intensive care, and then it recently fell into what looked like a coma, which lasted for a long time, after the government refused to renew the tenure of its former director, Ali Al-Youha, who struggled to remain in office, but the forces of backwardness won the favor of the concerned authorities, so the National Council for Culture, Arts and Literature (NCCAL)was invisible on the radar and things became obscure. The means of communication arrived and some governments found in them a tool to spread what they wanted to ruin the culture, destroy literature, and decadent art, especially after it opened, with its tools, the door of religious issues and fatwas through, so we have “social media preachers”, who are managed from internal and foreign devices of unknown identity and affiliation.
In this regard, colleague Muhammad Tolba Radwan says that one of the most important proven and guaranteed game plans is to ask again and again trivial questions, after giving them deep, complex and dangerous dimensions, such as: “Is it permissible to congratulate Christians on Christmas? The question comes from the one who has preoccupied us for decades with questions such as, is it permissible for a woman’s to show her face in public, or for a man to shave his beard, or wear short trousers, and to drink water or urinate while standing… and thousands of similar questions, no less trivial and outdated, knowing that the dispute is about what is agreed upon and the opinions about it are known. Many have lost because of fatwas prohibiting subscribing in successful joint-stock companies, and others have issued fatwas prohibiting forfeiting loans, or forbidding a woman to leave her home, even to defend her country if it falls under occupation.
All of them are fatwas that are not required in a modern country that has various authorities that decide what is good for the citizen, but it seems that correcting the path has become an impermissible matter, and we must accept moving in a different direction, even to the path of our best protectors and brothers. Those with trivial questions, and strange and unnecessary fatwas, are among us because some party in the government, perhaps wants them to be present and infl uential. Is the state run by the government, and laws legislated by the parliament, or are we completely subject to the authority of the clergy and others?
By Ahmad alsarraf
e-mail: [email protected]