Hossam Badrawi Official Website
One of my students asked me:
Is art supposed to elevate people or just make the unusual habitual by repeating it? Isn’t it better to avoid what is not accepted by the general society so as not to offend their feelings? ?
Did violent films, for example, add anything other than making violence normal behavior?
Reality is bad, so what is the role of art? That’s the question…
I said: Art is imagination and a vision that is broader and more comprehensive than a snapshot that depicts the moment. Art must do both: record reality and draw the future with its good, bad, and possibilities.
The story that the function of art is to elevate people is partly true, but it puts it in one mold, and elevating oneself requires seeing the bad and the beautiful, and preferably if there is a message and a different message. In the end we have to choose.
Choice is a human virtue.
I always told my students that I learned from the skilled teachers, and I learned from the ignorant ones as well. I used to help bad surgeons sometimes and I would say to myself, “I can’t do what they do,” as if the bad I saw taught me the good I could hope for.
Once again, art is not a camera that has to photograph a snapshot, but art has to show all of life in its different shades, and it does not deny the existence of what we do not like because we do not want to acknowledge its presence in our lives.. Art gives the right and opportunity to every follower to form his own understanding.
The idea is how to prepare society to play its role in choosing.
Here comes the role of education and the media in creating a neutral fabric of values in souls
The question here is: Isn’t it better not to put young people in front of multiple choices so that they do not make mistakes??..
The answer is clear: those who cannot choose are not qualified for life. Those who cannot choose are doomed to dependency and adherence to the beliefs of those who lived before them or those whose minds are based on them, and these are the soldiers of backwardness and terrorism.
I remember what Dr. Taha Hussein said in his great book “The Future of Culture in Egypt”: Illiteracy is not only the illiteracy of reading and writing, but of reading, writing, and understanding. He who reads and writes and does not understand is a mount for the one who understands…and a slave for the one who chooses a way for him because he cannot choose..
I return to art that opens minds and stimulates the imagination, with its palette, tone, story, scenario, shot, and acting. Only the narrow-minded are the ones who collapse the barrier between drama and reality, and judge the artist, for example, for his skill in impersonating the character written by the author.
Was Farid Shawqi a criminal as a human being because he assumed the character of a villain in his films, and do we place Mahmoud El-Melegy in the circle of heartless people and gang leaders? Should we retroactively judge Faten Hamama for her love for Omar Sharif while she was married to Zaki Rostom in the movie River of Love, or should we remove Ahmed Mazhar from the history of cinema because he was the engineer who seduced the little girl in the movie Duaa Al-Karwan? Or should we erase Hend Rostom’s films because they appeared As a night girl, in some of her films, or she danced with Farid Al-Atrash on the train in the movie You Are My Love, and we deny Abdel Halim Hafez’s Egyptianness because he sang his immortal song “Ya Qalby Hide” while drinking alcohol in a cabaret.
What is worse, and with the same logic, we have to exhume Professor Al-Aqqad from his grave to put him on trial for writing a poem translating Satan and imagining in it a dialogue between God Almighty and Satan, which was given to him by Dr. Taha Hussein, the leadership of poetry, and he was also accused of disbelief for writing a book of pre-Islamic poetry in which Descartes’ logic was used in doubt before. Verification. .
Gentlemen, art does not express the beliefs of each one of you, but rather it flies with ideas and imagination across time and events.
I read by Imam Sheikh Muhammad Abduh in 1903 about plastic art, acting, and music. He says that drawing is a kind of poetry that is seen, but if you look at drawing, which is silent poetry, you will find the truth apparent to you, and you will enjoy it as your senses enjoy looking at it.
Art revives beauty in souls, and beauty is a distinctive feature of this existence, manifested everywhere. It is a kind of order, harmony, and harmony with countless manifestations and manifestations. He can express it most of the time. This represents two different degrees of human abilities: the ability to sense, and the ability to express. Every human being is an artist to a degree of degree, and the uniqueness in art remains for the special talents in which one person is unique from another.
Freedom allows the artist to innovate and create without fear, and sometimes repression and injustice become motivations for the artist to create to get out of the darkness around him…
The next question came to me from one of the young people interviewing me: What is the relationship between art and politics…?
His colleague added: How do you work in politics when you are, at your core, a scientist and an artist?
I said: With all due respect to everyone, if the cultural depth did not match politics, it would be a disaster. Our real problem is that many politicians have no imagination. Art, culture and politics go hand in hand, if only people could understand…
Art is also linked to science, as the expression of artistic feeling requires the use of science and techniques to ensure quality in the material presented to the public. On the other hand, there are sciences such as medicine that open doors for humans that are not visible to the non-student, and introduce the doctor to new worlds all the time, and in most cases he ends up with Art and philosophy.
I quote a colleague of mine who said:
The intellectual performs a job that no one has assigned to him, yet history tells us of the necessity of the duality of the intellectual and authority.
Any political decision and any society that abandons its intellectuals and artists keeps this society an inmate in the recovery room.
My friend, the great artist, commented: Politicians who have no imagination lead us to intensive care. This is a genius sentence.
I said: Oh my dear, imagination entered the human mind only 30 thousand years ago with a change in the genes of a group of people who lived in East Africa. They imagined and traveled beyond the seas and imagined what was in the sky. Before this change, they were just groups living together for the sake of hunting, eating, and mating.
Imagination is the foundation of human civilization, and everything that humans imagine can happen, otherwise it would not have happened.
You may have noticed that we live in more life than our fathers and grandfathers imagined
Politics without imagination becomes mere operations of multiplication, division and subtraction, but art and imagination make one + one equal to more than their digital sum (two).
My message to those who want to transform art into a single version of their minds, and limit culture to their vision, and want to exclude alternatives for young people, is that Egypt is bigger than them and has a deeper history than just a flat society led by single-mindedness, demagoguery of a loud voice, and low expression of hypocrisy.
