A Different Drummer

Egypt's Minister for Culture, Farouk Hosny, has this uncanny ability to really annoy people about once every six months. I can't remember what the specifics where of the previous occasions, but I just remember a few times in the past few years when the name "Farouk Hosny" was connected with words like "outrage" and "controversy" in the headlines.

The special thing about this ability is that he can focus it sharp enough to annoy all the right kinds of people. This time, he has made some comments expressing his dislike for the veil - and he has the Muslim Brotherhood, along with the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, deeply unimpressed.

In Hosny's original comments he expressed personal disdain for women being veiled, adding:

"There was an age when our mothers went to university and worked without the veil. It is in that spirit that we grew up. So why this regression?"

And in his "I'm not apologising" statement:

“Morals and conscience ... are the strongest hijab (headscarf). That’s my personal opinion and I have not called on anyone to take off the hijab,”

Maybe the best thing about this whole episode is that it provoked the Muslim Brotherhood spokesman into showing some MB inner craziness - the spokesman, typically slick and smooth with enlightened, sanitised language, came out with a real doozy:

"In his appeal, Hassan urged the minister not to encourage 'the culture of removing clothes'.

'We urge you to keep your clothes on, and to encourage (people) to keep wearing their clothes because our Zionist and US enemy is determined to strip them piece by piece."

It is this kind of skill in strategic annoyance that makes me believe that more Abstract artists should be made government ministers....