Nihad Alaeddin, a pioneer actress in the Arab world who is famous for acting in the region’s first n udity scene, is not only a critic disparaging Islamic extremism after 15 years of self-imposed seclusion but also hurls calls to bring s ex back to a region she calls ‘frustrated’, according to a newspaper interview.
“We have to bring s ex to the cinema because our audience is frustrated,” she told the New York Times.
Mini-skirts prevailed more than hijab in university campuses during the 1960s and 1970s, as the Arab world enjoyed more of a free-terrain of openness influenced by the Marxist or communist school of thought, but conservative heat waves by the Islamists kept sweeping the region to bring the ‘liberal phenomenon’ into a sudden halt.
“There was a kind of bloom of freedom in those days,” said Nabil Maleh, a Syrian director who helped to make with Nihad’s career.
Alaeddin was nicknamed as Ighraa, Arabic for seduction, and left many people awed and inspired for her courageous roles. In 2009 the Syria TV aired a documentary about her life, and currently a prominent Syria director is working on a movie to showcase the same.
Never to ‘repent’
Strong in her views, and principled in her stances, Ighraa is a fierce critic of Islamists and unlike many of the actresses of her generation; she refuses to apologize for any of her seduction-laden, sultry roles.
“Men have this hypocrisy nowadays. If the girl wears a hijab she must be honest,” Ighraa said in a voice chipped from heavy smoking, during a late-night interview with the Times. Today’s Islamic conservatives, she said, are mostly “liars” who “criticize others but don’t truly believe themselves.”
With predisposition to defy the conventional, Ighraa is a great admirer of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, although she says that she does not share his Islamic principles, but admires his honesty. “If he asked me to sacrifice my blood, I would,” she added.
Ighraa dropped out from school in her fifth grade and moved to Cairo alongside her elder sister when she was 13 in the 1950s.
There she trained with the legendary Egyptian belly dancer Tahia Carioca which led to her acting in television dramas. But the ambitious, high-energy liberalism icon went on to become a leading actress, screenwriter and a director.
While an Egyptian impresario renamed her as Seduction, her elder sister was flattered as Charm. Nihad still keeps the nickname but Charm has left it behind and gone back to embracing religion and refuses to talk about her ‘hedonistic’ past.
“She is very important because she is not a liar,” said Khaled Khalifa, a prominent novelist and television screenwriter. “She never regretted, she never apologized.”
“In contemporary Syrian television and film you can barely even show a kiss,” he added.
Source: http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2010/10/02/121008.html?
