Es is the first political thriller from the Arabic cultural area. In The Cairo Conspiracy, a young rural student finds himself caught up in the power games at Al-Azhar, the world’s largest university. A conversation with the Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh about his very special family history, the struggle between secularism and religion and the duplicity of the government in Stockholm.
WELT: where do you live
Tarik Saleh: In Stockholm. I was born there in 1972.
WELT: How did your family come to Sweden?
Saleh: My Egyptian grandparents were born in the Nile Delta in the early 20th century. They were the first in their villages to receive an education. My grandmother was born in 1910, and convincing her illiterate parents that she needed to go to school was a small miracle. My grandfather studied at Al-Azhar University, where my film is set. My grandmother went directly to the king and asked for a certificate that she was entitled to get married and at the same time to work as a teacher. Both then taught in a fishing village, the village where my film begins.
Regisseur Tarik Saleh
Source: X Rental
WELT: In your film, Adam, a young man, leaves his fishing village because he got a scholarship to Al-Azhar.
Saleh: My father left this village in the 1960s, he went first to Libya, then to Germany and Holland, and finally in Sweden he met my mother, who came from a middle-class family, with engineers and doctors. They had an affair, she got pregnant, they weren’t married. What’s interesting is that I have a lot of Swedish friends whose fathers were from Jamaica or Africa – and their fathers eventually disappeared. They don’t even know their fathers. My father stayed.
The secret service comes to the university: Ibrahim (Fares Fares) interrogates the students
Source: X Rental
WELT: Why did your father leave Egypt then?
Saleh: It’s complicated. He was an artist, went to the art academy in Alexandria, but later joined the police force. It was the Nasser era, the country was super-patriotic. My father had studied English, so he understood that much of the propaganda consisted of false claims. He couldn’t stand it, he didn’t fit into this mental climate. My Adam in the film is his likeness. That doesn’t mean my father despised Egypt. On the contrary, the stories he told me were filled with affection and I always pictured the country, I could see it, smell it, taste it. When I went there for the first time at the age of ten, I was shocked: it wasn’t like that at all.
WELT: Did you watch Egyptian films as a child? The fifties and sixties were the golden era of the local film industry.
Saleh: No. You couldn’t see them in Sweden. There was no video, no satellite. But when I turned 18, I went to Egypt to study. Then I saw those movies, I love them now. Then I gradually understood the country correctly, with the entire spectrum of its society, from Lutherans to Salafists.
WELT: Did you go to Al Azhar University?
Saleh: No, to one in Alexandria, a finance academy.
WELT: But Al-Azhar is the most prestigious university in Egypt.
Saleh: More: It is the most prestigious university in all of Islam, in the entire Muslim world. The main secular universities are the American University in Cairo and the Cairo University Faculty of Medicine. Al-Azhar is the Harvard for the poor. If you are a Muslim dignitary in The Gambia or a Malaysian businessman, send your son to Al-Azhar – to learn perfect Arabic and recite the Qur’an. Al-Azhar is the third oldest university in the world and the largest, with 300,000 students. The reputation of the institution is enormous, but anyone who mentions having studied there in Egypt probably comes from a village and from poor circumstances.
WELT: Where does this reputation come from?
Saleh: Al-Azhar had very progressive ideas from the start. Students do not have to pay for board and lodging, so they can focus on their studies. These regulations go back to the year 972! The students sit in a ring around their teacher – like in ancient Greece. In its heyday, Al-Azhar was incredible – but that’s not the case today.
WELT: When was this big time?
Saleh: In the twelfth century. Al-Azhar was established by the Fatimids, a Shia dynasty, then Sultan Saladin conquered Egypt, turning the university into a Sunni institution. Through the centuries, Al-Azhar always had to come to terms with the rulers, whether they were Turks, French or English.
Government official Ibrahim (Fares Fares, left) recruits Adam (Tawfeek Barhom)
Source: X Rental
WELT: Whoever comes from a study on Al-Azhar today, what kind of profession will he choose?
Saleh: He becomes imam. Graduates wear this red-tipped hat. Sheikh Abd ar-Rahman, the “blind sheikh” behind the first World Trade Center, also wore this hat.
WELT: Is Al-Azhar’s influence limited to religious issues?
Saleh: He goes beyond. If you want to make a difference in Egypt, you need some form of religious support. In Cairo there is a district called Shubra, as many people live there as in all of Sweden! (Around 10 million people – i. editor). As a government, you can send a decree to a village in Upper Egypt, according to which a law has changed. Nobody cares there, the village has its own laws. But when the Grand Imam sends a religious recommendation with the decree, people listen to it. And these “recommendations” are very specific.
WELT: I’m beginning to understand why the post of Grand Imam of Al-Azhar is so important.
Saleh: This is not specific to Egypt. Take Sweden and its king. It doesn’t represent rationality, God gave it its rank. When there is a serious crisis, it is not enough for the prime minister to take a stand. The king must say something, for the king is something permanent to depend on; the government changes every few years. The academy that awards the Nobel Prizes traces its authority back to the king – and he has his mandate from God. Many people who see my film tell me that they had never heard of Al-Azhar. But this is one of the most important institutions from which come many of the ideas that play such a large role in our discourse on Islam.
WELT: Sweden has a problem right now: it wants to join NATO, but it depends on the approval of a Muslim politician.
Saleh: That’s why we have to ingratiate ourselves with Erdogan. However, the current Swedish government came to power mainly because it attacked Islam during the election campaign. Then a man burned the Koran in front of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm, and the government proudly claimed he had the right to do so. I agree, because as an artist, I know the importance of freedom. These politicians didn’t care about the protests, Islam isn’t very important to us. Then Putin invaded Ukraine – and these politicians got nervous. Wanted to join NATO. Suddenly the same politicians were against burning the Koran. And then Al-Azhar issued a statement: “We do not believe that Muslims should take to the streets and protest against this terrible act,” it said. “We should boycott Swedish products instead.” That was the moment when everyone suddenly wanted to know what Al-Azhar is – and came to our film for that.
WELT: How do you rate this statement?
Saleh: What people don’t understand is that Al-Azhar didn’t attack Sweden with it. On the contrary, she tried to calm the situation down. And they don’t do it because of Sweden, they don’t care at all. She does this so that people don’t start protesting, because they know that a protest against Sweden could very quickly turn into a protest against the Egyptian government. With which they are extremely dissatisfied. Sheikh al-Tayyib, the current Grand Imam, issued a fatwa last year: A Muslim must undergo a ritual cleansing before touching the Bible, which is also a holy book in Islam. What he’s saying in essence is this: Don’t attack your Christian neighbors, they too are holy. And now think about the burning of the Koran in Sweden.
WELT: Is the authority of the Al-Azhar institution still undisputed?
Saleh: The biggest threat to their authority is, of course, television. The most popular imam in late 20th-century Egypt was Sheikh Al-Sha’rawi, and he preached on television. At that time, Al-Azhar began to lose influence. Today it is the YouTube imams. The new technologies are threatening institutions and, like everywhere else on the Internet, the most influential are the most radical preachers.
WELT: Last year in Cannes there were two films of a kind that we have never seen before: secular-religious thrillers from the Arab world, but which could not be shot on the spot. One was hers and the other was Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider”. You shot in Turkey, Abbasi had some hopes of shooting in Iran, but not for long.
Saleh: Ali is a close friend of mine. His film is a cult film in Egypt – and my film received an official invitation to the state-run festival in Tehran. So I could have shot my film in Iran and he could have shot his in Egypt (laughs). We share the view that we are not actually political filmmakers. Our loyalty is to the stories we tell. What I like most about Ali’s film is that I’m on the killer’s side, I don’t really want him to be caught. That’s a forbidden thought, of course – but it only comes up when it’s a great film.
WELT: Abbasi clearly lives in exile. And you?
Saleh: I do not consider myself an exile. I could enter Egypt, but probably not leave. When I watch Swedish films, I often ask myself: why don’t you guys tell more interesting stories? Why are you censoring yourself? Why don’t you go where it hurts? Nobody would stop you. There are women prime ministers all over Scandinavia. Why aren’t you making stories about them and Erdogan and Putin and the war?