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| 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.
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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
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