Adham Center News

Schleifer (C) and HRH Prince Turki Al Faisal (R) at Royal Saudi Embassy reception at Claridges in London following RUSI conference.

Adham Center Director Abdallah Schleifer
Here and There

Adham Center director S. Abdallah Schleifer is the executive producer - Middle East of the documentary Control Room which had its world premiere at the Sundance Festival for independent films in January 2004. The documentary, shot in Doha during the recent war in Iraq, operates within a field of force that links the control room at Al Jazeera and the Coalition's Central Command headquarters. Schleifer also appears as a character in the documentary; he is filmed interviewing officers and journalists at Centcom for TBS 11. Control Room's director Jehane Nujaim discusses Schleifer's role as executive producer in an interview by Danny Schechter for Filmmaker magazine, in the Winter 2004 issue that is also available online at --http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2004/features/counter_programming.html#top. The film, which was not in competition, screened four times at Sundance and was well received by critics and the trade press. At the end of the final screening Control Room received a standing ovation from the audience.

That same month Schleifer was back in Qatar, participating in the U.S.- Islamic World Forum in Doha. The Forum was described by the organizers -the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy - as a gathering of 150 U.S. and Muslim world leaders and opinion makers in politics, media, and education to analyze and come up with concrete proposals to bridge the growing gap between the USA and the Islamic world. Schleifer participated in the Forum's task force on public diplomacy and the task force on Muslim minority communities. A few months earlier (October 2003) Schleifer participated in the conference in Whitehall on "Countering Terrorism: The Experience of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" organized by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies and Saudi Ambassador HRH Prince Turki Al Faisal.

This past semester's major exhibit at the Sony Gallery (where Schleifer serves as director) was the joint show with the Rare Books Library, Creswell's Cairo . Schleifer chaired a press conference on campus just prior to the opening, and both the press conference and the opening received major media coverage by the Arab satellite channels ETV- Channel One's Good Morning Egypt, Nile TV's Cairo Café (where Schleifer was interviewed live in the studio in addition to a taped news report of the event), CNN World Report, a Nile TV Special, and an Orbit special report that has yet to screen, as well as significant coverage in the print media. On December 18, less than a week before the opening, Schleifer's own personal account of Creswell's importance in the conservation of Islamic monuments appeared as a full page article in Al Ahram Weekly. Schleifer also co-chaired a press conference at the Foreign Press Association (of which he is honorary chairman) to introduce Radwan Masmoudi , director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) in Washington DC, who was touring the region. Masmoudi flew into Cairo for a hectic round of weekend meetings with the then Grand Mufti of Egypt Sheikh Al Tayyib, the present Grand Mufti of Egypt Sheikh Dr. Ali Gumaa, the head of the Umma Party of Sudan and Imam of the Ansar, Seyyed Sadik al Mahdi, and the Interfaith and Media Advisor to the Sheikh of Al Azhar, Dr. Ali Samaan. As a recently named non-resident Fellow at CSID, Schleifer accompanied Masmoudi to nearly all of his meetings.

Several years ago Schleifer was a keynote speaker at a conference in Kuala Lumpur. That paper - " The Impact of Global Media Upon Society" -- has now been published in the book The Impact of Globalization on Social and Cultural Life, IKIM, Kuala Lumpur. Another paper presented at a conference at George Washington University two years ago, has also recently been published. The paper is entitled "The Problematic Ironies of Islamization" and it now appears in the book Beacon of Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, published by Fons Vitae. Some of the contributors to that book were in Cairo in the early part of January and participated in a symposium on the topic "Islam, Fundementalism and the Betrayal of Tradition." The symposium was co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science and the Adham Center. Schleifer co-chaired the symposium with Political Science department chair Dr. Dan Tschirgi.

Schleifer has frequently been quoted in both the local and international media over the past year on such issues as the recent war in Iraq, terrorism and Islam. This past semester Schleifer participated live as a panelist in two different programs on National Public Radio's hour-long show Global Journalist - both shows were devoted to the media's treatment of the war and occupation in Iraq. Schleifer's articles and interviews have appeared this past year in the Adham Center's own electronic journal Transnational Broadcasting Studies (TBS 10). His article "Satellite Television News - Up, Down, and Out in Doha, Dubai and Abu Dhabi" along with interviews at both Central Command and Al Jazeera in Doha during the war in Iraq appeared in the same issue with his interviews with the CEO of Associated Press Television News (APTN) and the editors in chiefs at Abu Dhabi TV and Al Arabiya.

In TBS 11, published this past November Schleifer and TBS managing editor Humphrey Davies interviewed the Director (Ali al Ahmed) and the News Director of Abu Dhabi TV (Nart Bouran), the CEO of CNBC Arabiya, Zafar Sidiqi, and his director of programming as well as Al Jazeera's interim managing director, the editor in chief and their Baghdad correspondent. Several of the interviews were conducted at the Arab Media Summit held in Dubai, which Schleifer attended early in October.

This past year Schleifer wrote catalogue essays for two Sony Gallery shows - " The Berbers of North Africa :Viable but Barely Acknowledged" which appeared in the catalogue for the Sony Gallery show Berber! in December-January 2003 and "Moments Before the Bombs Began to Fall" for the show Baghdad: Before the Bombs Began to Fall in the Sony Gallery catalogue of March 2003 .

Last Spring Schleifer conducted a seminar on "Development and Media in the Arab World" for the entire UNDP staff in Cairo and appeared in two documentaries, Tom Friedman's "The Roots of 9/11" for Discovery Channel and CNN and a documentary Hollywood and the Muslim World exploring anti-American sentiment in the region directed by Charlie Stuart for the Classic Movies Channel which featured Schleifer and a group of Adham Center graduate students in an informal discussion with Stuart about anti-Americanism.

By Azza Enanie