Adham Center News

Annual Awards Dinner 2000:
Regional TV Leaders Honor Memory of Sheikh Kamal,
Look Back at Eventful Year

JUNE 13, 2000  As more than one hundred guests silently recited the Fatiha or The Lord’s Prayer for the soul of Sheikh Kamal Adham, the first Adham Center Annual Awards Dinner since the passing of Sheikh Kamal was convened by Center Director S. Abdallah Schleifer at AUC’s Oriental Hall in the presence of Sheikh Sultan Kamal Adham, AUC Provost Dr. Tim Sullivan and outstanding figures from the Arab satellite broadcasting industry and the academic community.

Schleifer recalled how Sheikh Kamal’s son Sultan and other members of the Adham family and entourage along with AUC President Gerhart, Provost Sullivan, and others had gathered at the university’s Harmon Room to honor the memory of Sheikh Kamal some 40 days after his passing, and he repeated the closing words of the eulogy that he delivered on that day. Schleifer’s recollection was mirrored in the brief but intense remarks made in Arabic by HE Amb. Dr. Hamdi El Tahri, the late Sheikh’s personal representative in Egypt.

“Sheikh Kamal Adham sought to make this television center an international center. True enough, he was able to provide it with all necessary and essential equipment. And now the Kamal Adham Center enjoys worldwide recognition,” Dr. Tahri observed. He said Sheikh Kamal always intended to establish a private club for the graduates of this center, but God had taken him before he could accomplish this task.

“But he left nothing to chance. He passed on the responsibility for this center to his son Sultan Kamal Adham, who will assume this great responsibility. Sheikh Kamal Adham is gone but his works ands charitable deeds remain and they are acknowledged,” the ambassador said.

This year Sultan Kamal Adham took his father’s customary place at the Awards table along side the provost to present each of the nine graduates with their professional certificates testifying to the professional skills they have acquired at the Adham Center in the two-year master’s degree program in Mass Communication and Television Journalism. (The graduates received their MA diplomas at a ceremony in Ewart Hall the following day.) Following in his father’s footsteps, Sheikh Sultan (assisted by Dr. El Tahri) also presented each graduate with a watch as a present from the Adham family to mark the occasion. Other awards to students and alumni were to follow but the most important award the Adham Center bestows, the honorary faculty position of “Associate of the Adham Center,” was presented by Provost Sullivan and Schleifer to Mohammad Jasim Al-Ali, managing director of al-Jazeera Satellite Channel—the “hottest channel” these days in the opinion of both viewers and critics, in Arab satellite broadcasting.

Explaining that the Associates are honored for their ongoing contributions to the television industry in general as active broadcasters and for their moral support of the Adham Center in particular, Schleifer hailed Al-Ali as “the man who dared to do it, to develop a channel devoted, in Arabic, exclusively to public affairs programming, to free debate and independent journalism.”

As if to underscore the point Schleifer also announced that the center would present its rarely given “Kamal Adham Award for Professional Performance” to al-Jazeera’s leading investigative journalist and London bureau chief, the Adham Center alumni Yosri Fouda (1991). Schleifer noted that this award has only been given three times in the past twelve years, and that two of the three recipients worked for al-Jazeera. He was alluding to Lamees el-Hadidi (1990), business correspondent for al-Jazeera and managing editor of Alam al-Youm newspaper, who was present at the dinner like many other alumni.

In his customary report to graduates and guests on the year’s accomplishments, Schleifer noted that in this particular case his speech-making days were numbered since the Adham Center was launching its own website which would do the job far more definitively than he could. He introduced the designer and editor of the site, Sarah Sullivan, and announced her appointment to the position of manager of Adham Center publications in recognition of her work as co-designer (with Creative Director Shems Friedlander) and managing editor of the center’s biannual electronic journal Transnational Broadcasting Studies (TBS) and as editor of the center’s annual hard-copy bulletin In Focus. The home page and relevant sections of the site where displayed throughout the dinner on a large screen donated on the occasion by Gimpex.

Among the graduating students receiving special awards were Ibrahim Saleh, recipient of the Kamal Adham Award for Outstanding Effort, and Effat Kamel, recipient of the Kamal Adham Award for Outstanding Performance, for her exceptional work as student executive producer of the second year graduate program workshop, AUC News.

Effat was to be doubly honored. Earlier in the evening Peter Einstein, CEO of the Showtime DTH satellite network (and an Associate of the center) announced that Showtime was initiating an annual summer internship award for two outstanding graduates of the center. The first recipients were Effat Kamel and Dana Zureikat.

Schleifer also noted that the center had closely collaborated this past year with the Gender and Women’s Studies Advisory Group headed by Dr. Cynthia Nelson, Dean of AUC’s School of Humanities and Sciences, who had just been appointed by as director of AUC’s new Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies. One occasion was the co-sponsored screening of Adham Center alumna Alia El Bialy’s most recent documentary film “Portraits: Egyptian Women Writers.” The other occasion was a cosponsored lecture at Oriental Hall where Dr. Nelson introduced the Adham Center’s Visiting Consultant Marciarose Shestack, the award-winning TV journalist, who spoke to the university community about the “Past, Present and Future of American Women in TV News.” Both Dr. Nelson and El Bialy were present at the dinner.

Schleifer also congratulated Dr. El Said Mohamed Badawi, professor and director of AUC’s Arabic Language Institute, and his associate and advisor the veteran Egyptian journalist Louis Greis (for many years editor in chief of Sabah al-Kheir weekly magazine), who were also at the dinner, for establishing a series of professional Arabic language courses, including a course in professional Arabic language which Schleifer pledged would be offered as part of the TV Journalism MA academic program. Schleifer noted that the Adham Center had lobbied at AUC over the years to create just such a course and he thanked Provost Sullivan (along with Dr. Badawi and Greis) for providing strong support for this program.

Provost Sullivan took note in his own remarks, made when appointing Muhammad Jasim Al-Ali an Associate of the center, that this very much was a year for women at the American University in Cairo with the establishment of Dr. Nelson’s Institute, the predominance of women among this year’s graduates of the Center and as recipients of Adham Center awards and as participants in Adham Center special lectures and screening programs. Provost Sullivan said things were changing for women in Egypt and AUC was honored to be a major player in achieving change.

Provost Sullivan’s remarks were reflected by the presence among Annual Award Dinner VIP guests of Sanaa Mansour, head of ERTU’s Space Channels which include Nile TV, where a number of Adham Center alumni, most of whom are women, are employed in leading positions.

The dinner was covered by two satellite channel camera crews, one for al-Jazeera and the other for Orbit. Schleifer noted that the Orbit crew covering the dinner was part of Orbit’s Field Production Unit in Cairo, manned almost entirely by Adham Center graduates, and headed by Ali Belail (1996) and established by Orbit’s director of production in Cairo Tarek Al Kashef, who is also an Associate of the center.

The reporter for the Orbit team covering the dinner was Adham Center alumna Rasha El Sayed (1999), who put together a three-minute field report in Arabic on the dinner. The piece was broadcast later in the week as part of Orbit’s popular daily show “In Cairo,” produced and directed by Al Kashaf. El Sayed’s report included pictures of Sultan Kamal Adham sitting with the center’s guests of honor, and soundbites of Dr. Tahri’s eulogy of Sheikh Kamal and the appointment of Al Jazeera’s General Manager Muhammed Jasim Al-Ali as Associate.

Other soundbites included the remark by Dr. Hussein Y. Amin, senior associate of the center and Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) trustee, that the Adham Center “has a distinguished reputation in the Middle East, primarily because it introduced into the region the meaning of television journalism as it is practiced in the developed countries.” Prof. Amin, who is also chairman-elect of the International Division of the Broadcast Education Association in the United States and a guest lecturer at a number of American universities, noted that the level of training at the center was “as good as anything offered anywhere else in the world.”

Two of the graduating students, Ibrahim Saleh and Hessa Mulla, described the MA program as unique in their brief on-camera appearances, but it was the Orbit correspondent Rasha El Sayed who summed it all up: “The students who received their AUC master’s degrees from the Kamal Adham Center studied television journalism in all its aspects, from presenting to directing, from photography to reporting to editing. They have become serious journalists who can depend entirely on themselves.

Other prominent figures in the broadcasting and the academic community attending the dinner were Mohamed Gohar, CEO of Video Cairo Sat; Ezzat Shami, the editor-in-chief of Satellite Guide; Galal Zaki, CEO of Intermarkets Advertising; Milad Besata, director general of ART's Program and Channel Development and an Adham Center associate; Sanaa Mansour, head of ERTU's satellite channels Egypt Space and Nile TV; Prof. Saad Eddin Ibrahim (who rushed over to the dinner after commenting live on the Hafez al Assad funeral for Orbit); Dr. Hussein Amin, member of the ERTU Board of Trustees and senior associate at the Adham Center; Prof. Shems Friedlander, director of the Apple Graphics Communication Center at AUC; graduate Nihal Saad (1995), anchor and presidential correspondent at Nile TV; Enas El Shinnawi, producer for Asahi TV; graduate Neimat Kerdany (1992), associate producer at NY1; graduate Rania Bahaa El Din (1998), presenter at the Egyptian Space Channel; graduate Mirette Mabrook (1990), senior editor of Business Today, and many other alumni active in the industry and in journalism.