For three months, Kuwait is hosting a unique exhibition entitled The Fourth Pyramid to commemorate the Star of the East , the icon of Arab song, Umm (Om) Kolthoum. It is one of the major exhibitions held last year by the Institute of the Arab World in Paris to mark the first centenary of her birth, then moved to Bahrain, and now it is in Kuwait, which promoted the idea of establishing the Institute and supported the project until it became a reality on the banks of the Seine, in the heart of Europe s capital of culture and art.

The exhibition, which runs for another month and attracts a wide audience, is not intended to be a review of her history as a singer, but rather art and cultural documentation of her long career in the world of Arab singing and the main landmarks in the life of that unique art phenomenon, who had long experience in Arab singing and possessed an exceptional larynx which was able to adapt Arabic poetry and make it accessible to the general public-even the illiterate all over the entire Arab world, with its cultural diversity and different dialects, to sing and memorize. She was thus an icon who played a key role in establishing a school of music, song and popular culture which attracted people everywhere in the Arab world. That massive popularity made her influence them not only in terms of art but she also promoted Arab nationalism from the 1950s until her death in February 1975. Her songs also helped boost the morale of the Arabs which was severely undermined following the Arabs defeat by the Israeli army in 1967. She made a tour of a number of Arab and non-Arab countries where she sang songs and launched a fund-raising campaign for rebuilding the Egyptian army, and as an attempt to restore Arabs dignity and self-confidence.

Umm Kolthoum in Kuwait

She visited Kuwait twice during her singing career: In 1963 to share in Kuwait Independence Day celebrations, and in 1968, as part of her national tour which started at the Olympia theatre in Paris, then moved to Morocco and Kuwait, where she received a warm welcome by ordinary people and officials alike in which Kuwait s women actively shared, in addition to their generous contributions, including jewellery, to the war effort, besides other contributions by other bodies, persons and financial institutions.

It is interesting that this unique exhibition attracted an audience of various age groups, cultures and nationalities who showed intense interest and appreciation in it. This reflects a sort of nostalgia on the part of those who lived in that era when culture and art were highly regarded. Furthermore, the huge popularity of the exhibition on the part of the younger generation who didn t witness her art reflected their thinking about that period, and perhaps found ample evidence about the effective role of Arab art during that stage of the Arab progress and development project. The exhibition might have provoked questions about how to restore that project or the ability to build a new cultural revival in line with the spirit and requirements of the age, and devise a new system of high art embodying such moral and social values that secure raising the society s political standard and achieving overall progress and development.

The exhibition aroused visitors curiosity and perhaps passion for great art and culture at a time when culture is a form of luxury and show, and art is reduced to something light and fast serving a time when technology has become a source of profit from sensuous pleasure and quick entertainment, boring comedy films, so-called youth music and song, music styles borrowed completely from the West, particularly the USA, with no consideration for cultural heritage which, no double, contains cultural, intellectual, philosophical and artistic ingredients suitable for building on and developing as required by modernization and innovation, particularly in areas such as music and song which appeal to taste and emotions.

A past of culture and art

The exhibition housed a model of past of culture and history which asserted the Arabs great art heritage of which Umm Kolthoum was an element, in addition to other famous singers in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, talented musicians and poets who inspired Arabs feelings and reflected their struggle for freedom and progress. Many of their poems were sung by contemporary singers.

The season of extinction of the Arabs

The exhibition coincided with a lecture given by the great poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) in Arbil, northern Iraq, in which he said the Arabs were extinct in terms of culture and civilization. The lecture received wide media coverage, as expected of such Arab media based on excitement without ascertaining the full meaning of what he said. In an interview with a Saudi paper later he reiterated what he had pointed out in the lecture: The Arabs have nothing to offer the world. We have disappeared as a civilization and exist only as a people. We are absent from the world s map today. Arabs civilization is extinct, i.e. their creative energy has been exhausted, and they, therefore have no creative presence in modern global culture.

What Adonis said truly and clearly reflects the current Arab cultural reality. Arab societies have for long been consumers of Western and other modern technology in all areas of industry and agriculture, in addition to culture and philosophy, without sharing in international cultural dialogue about major theories and ideas in criticism and philosophy and their implications. There are numerous examples indicating this,which made them stop posing questions about our life and existence, such questions which are behind any serious research and any creative human attempt concerning thinking, knowledge or the means and tools of life.

Adonis argument is sound: The contribution of Arab civilization is widely acknowledged in the West where Avicenna, Ibn Al-Haitham and Averroes are fully recognized. Averroes is carefully studied in the West more than he is among the Arabs. We study Averroes and even Ibn Khaldun through the West.

Until recently, we have been against Ibn Khaldun, and his works were banned. When the West began to take interest in his works and write about them, we were ashamed and showed interest in them and talked about him and were proud of him, he said.

From progress to exhaustion of hope

Following the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate, the Arabs launched an ambitious project for progress and development to enter the age of modern revival. That reflected in establishing journalism and modern universities, schools, allowing freedom of thought, speech and writing, encouraging drama, films, painting, sculpture, photography, music and song, building factories, roads, dams, hydroelectric power stations and modern railways. Prominent thinkers, philosophers, writers, poets and artists, including those living overseas, provided society with new ideas and values and created an atmosphere of progress. Non-profit societies fought illiteracy, promoted the values of equality among all sectors of society, defended child s and women s rights and built a sound political life. The project, which started at the end of the 19th century and continued to the first half of the 20th, suffered a severe setback at the end of the latter century. That situation has continued to date, and the Arabs image today is negative, having abandoned the project which pioneers of progress started, and as Arab societies we ceased to produce icons in any field or any knowledge or culture of any value compared with the rest of the world.

Observers of our conditions argue that our societies and regimes have exhausted what is left of hope for progress, as if they replicated the Ottoman regime whose values and ideals collapsed against Europe s Renaissance, progress and civilization.

Even the movement of overseas Arab intellectuals, which enriched the project for Arab cultural revival and was an added voice expressing Arabs aspirations and its ability to compare with cultural movements in the West, has diminished if not disappeared. Overseas Arab writers and thinkers do not have such influence as their pioneers had, and even many of them no longer regard themselves as representatives of Arab culture and prefer to be assimilated fully into the new culture. Most of them do not write in Arabic, and do not express their cultural specificity but their individuality and influence by the culture of the new societies they were integrated into.

No alternate to action and interaction

All the above is a clear indication that Adonis was right about the signs of cultural extinction. What use is our existence if we are unable to communicate with the outside world through knowledge, politics and culture? What use is counting us as one of the world s civilizations if we stop acting and interacting with the intellectual and cultural movements around us?

It is striking that some religious scholars (preachers) intentionally or out of ignorance help aggravate the state of indifference we are experiencing and disseminate the culture of intellectual stagnation and poverty of creativity through statements we would think were made by enemies of our Arab and Muslim societies unless we are sure they are published and documented and made by religious scholars. Here is an example of a preacher who was previously accused of being a Qaeda and Taliban activist in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and today he is an active preacher on satellite TV and in daily newspapers. He argues that the world does not expect us to offer anything new in arts or science, and our only honour which the world recognizes is the eternal mission of Islam; our only ID card is through Islam; we have no identity, pioneering role, sovereignty, leadership, specificity, glory or science except by Islam. He also maintains that the world does not expect us to offer any wordly philosophies, social theories, national approaches or political ideas.

That only means that we have to give up learning and scholarship, a call which contradicts the history of Islam and its cultural achievements which flourished under the patronage of the Muslim state. The achievements of Muslim scholars and scientists in philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, music, linguistics and poetry in various periods of Islam were the main source of modern human civilization. How do we allow ourselves today to call for indifference, isolation, despair and inability to conduct research in our young men and women s minds and cessation to contribute to modern progress? Isn t this a replication of the age of Ottoman domination of our Arab societies and closing all doors on opinions and scholarship in science and thought and applying new regulations that meet our new requirements in today s world?

Don t such calls echo Western views that our present Middle Eastern (Arab) societies are totally incapable of managing themselves and contributing to the world s issues, and that the West and its American leadership have only one option: to form leadership for these societies from two politically, industrially, economically and militarily successful experiments, namely Turkey and Israel?

An invitation to think

The Umm Kolthoum Exhibition in Kuwait and Adonis statements both call on us to think deeply about our cultural, social and political realities and about the sources of our power in our cultural heritage which we should not abandon by answering such frustrating calls. In addition, it s no use crying over spilt milk or evoking feelings of distress and nostalgia, but that should drive us to think about how to restore that culture and investigate it according to current criteria and build on its assets. Our civilization has rich, untapped resources in terms of lessons, implications and significance, and abandoning it in favour of foreign products will not achieve any cherished progress, as we will be like those burning ther field to eiat from their neighbour s.