About our right to sing [Archives:2008/1137/Opinion]

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March 13 2008

By: Faisal Al-Sofi
After the Aden Artistic concert ended and the Syrian singer Asalah Nasri and her band, fans and policemen returned home safely, the opposing extremists turned out to be calm even for some time. But amid such calm atmosphere, I think that it is time for us to expose the scene once again and benefit from the lesson in our future activities.

Organized in Aden, the concert was supposed to be looked at as an ordinary or familiar event. Instead, it has been labeled by extremists and terrorists as a cause leading to a war as if the Yemeni people sang for the first time in their life. These extremists and terrorists launched offensive attacks against the singer and her fans in the platforms of mosques, depicting the matter to have relation with a new Elephant Battle that has Aden as its starting point to destroy social values and traditions of Yemeni society and damage its holy shrines. The matter, however, is related with a respected artistic concert.

We claim that the fundamentalists, who waged a fierce attack against the concert before it started, realize well that they have been exaggerative in their campaign, and a clear-cut evidence of this is that they stopped their criticism of the singer and the concert as soon as the event was over.

When the news started to tell the public that an artistic festival would be held in Aden on the eve of February 14th and that Nasri and another singer would take part in the event, the Salafi extremists came together forming a resistance front against the function and the Syrian singer. They made up a unified line including mosque preachers, religious clerics and Qaeda comrades and all of who belong to the Salafi (Wahabi) sect that entered Yemen for the first time in 40 years.

Additionally, such a resistance movement included Parliament members, university teachers and journalistic writers who are all extremely engaged in earthly affairs and are occupying invisible posts other than their real jobs. We don't know why such people, believed to be a mirror for other members of the society, joined the fierce battle against the reputed singer and the artistic festival, thus labeling certain things as taboo and other things as permissible, however, this is not their business.

All these extremist figures met at a unified goal, thereby becoming unable to resolve their own differences over jobs and viewpoints. What they could unanimously do is collectively opposing the artistic concert, saying it contravenes the teachings and values of Islam.

They claimed that singing is taboo and the singer has no right to sing in Yemen. They also vented their anger at the government agencies for organizing a futile event that might cost tens of millions of Riyals from the State's treasury while the government should have spent the money in favor of the poor and the needy families in Yemeni society. I would like to advise these people by saying that they are walking on the wrong path. They have to review their mistakes before claiming that others do wrong.

Source: Almotamar.net
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