When my father came back to
Egypt after working in Saudi Arabia for some years in the 1990s, he got rid of our
television and a box full of cassette tapes of Abdel Halim and Om Kolthoum because they were
haram. He also got rid of the living
room furniture, which was upholstered in velvet and decorated with carvings of Romeo,
Juliet, and flowers. He got rid of two needlepoint canvases, one portraying a
mix of fruits and the other portraying a belly dancer in her work outfit, with
a traditional oriental drum next to her. He made it very clear that all of
those things were haram according to
his new religious perspective.
At the same time, many
Egyptian homes were witnessing similar actions. Twenty-eight year old Mohamed
Refaat saw the same thing in his family’s house, and other relatives' and
friends' houses. "My mom used to do needlepoint portraits and my mom's
sister, who studied fine arts, used to draw using different materials. She painted
swans and animals on ceramics, and she used oil paints on different textiles to
draw many subjects, including human characters like female nudes and a girl
playing piano," Refaat said. Among the needlepoint pieces Refaat's mother
made, there was a portrait of a nude woman. This portrait disappeared from the
wall "after my aunt started that religion thing. She told my mom those portraits
are haram, and that they should not
be in front of kids," Refaat add.
On the walls of Refaat's
family home there were other needlepoint pieces not considered haram, like the still life of fruit. Those
"non-haram" pieces "also
disappeared with time, when the family started to receive paintings of Qur’anic
verses as gifts, or the 99 names of Allah, while the old frames deteriorated,"
Refaat said. Over time, everything his mother had made with her hands was
replaced with a religious item. Yet, the art pieces removed from Refaat's
family home did not disappear forever; the family keeps them in another apartment
they do not live in. In that other apartment there is a copy of the famous La
Gioconda, a panoramic view of London on canvas, and the bust of a female nude. Those
pieces are stored in the unoccupied apartment because Refaat himself stands against
getting rid of them, while his family refuses to display them because it is haram to do so.
Being haram is not the only reason for the disappearance of needlepoint
from Egyptian homes. "When I was in middle school we studied housekeeping—all
the girls did. We learned how to embroider canvas in different ways. We learned
tailoring and knitting pullovers. Some girls were able to learn how to knit
pullovers before the school year ended," Samia Zaki, a 56 year-old house
wife, said. She sees TV as one of the reasons for the disappearance of
needlepoint. "When I was young, every girl helped her mother with chores
at home, and when we were done we could not find anything else to do, so we
spent our time having fun with canvas embroidery. Every girl kept what she finished
for the day when she would display them on the walls of her husband’s home."
Khaled Abdul Aziz, a 48 year-old
taxi driver, sees changes in society over the last 20 years as another reason for
the disappearance of needlepoint. "The leisure time, in which girls used
to brocade canvas, has dwindled very much now since they started going to
university. They also have more freedom—more time to spend out of the home at coffee
shops. Now they have more jobs after graduation, which also limits the free time
they have to make something with their hands.”
The generations who grew up in
the 80s and 90s still remember needlepoint canvas in their homes. They still remember
watching their mothers working on it, and sometimes their fathers. Weaam
Mokhtar, a 24 year-old researcher, remembers the canvas pieces that her father,
an X-ray technician, used to do. One of them portrayed a female nude lying in a
fruit garden. It hung in "his bedroom for many years before he took it down,
when he became more religious," Mokhtar said.
Needlepoint canvases have started
to appear again in a different way. Already embroidered, the new ones are very expensive
for most people, and their images are different. They are mostly inspired by European
landscapes. The canvases that depict belly dancers with their drums, nude Eastern
women, and other images inspired by our society and environment, no longer
exist.
original article was published in Arabic at Almasry Alyoum newspaper.
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