what if the spanish picasso was kuwaiti? what if the italian painter salvador dali was kuwaiti? what if the german beethoven was kuwaiti? or the most famous american director, steven spielberg, kuwaiti? or were the russian ballet choreographer petipa, the ukrainian (russian) novelist leo tolstoy, the greek philosopher socrates, and thousands of others from that era, in philosophy, art, culture, literature, and dozens of other fields of thought, invention, and engineering, holding kuwaiti citizenship?
positive creativity is a difficult issue and needs a free climate. just as the artist, intellectual, novelist, writer, and journalist need creativity, the teacher, engineer, and government employee need a free climate to produce, innovate, and advance.
the climate of abuse, repression, and prohibition is against freedom, creativity, and human nature, and therefore picasso would have lost his desire to paint after painting two paintings when the ministry’s inspector objected to the presence of what looked like a breast in one of them
leo tolstoy would have torn up the chapters of his novel that he had handwritten if the censor refused to approve what he had written, and steven spielberg would quit directing if the censor banned a shot he did not like, and so it was with beethoven, chopin, muhammad abdel-wahab, umm kulthum and thousands of other creative people.
when kuwait excelled in theatre, sports, singing, novels, directing, stories, drawing, etc., there was freedom and there was a civil state. the day it became closer to the religious state, all those innovations disappeared, education retarded, corruption increased, the employee’s psychology deteriorated, and the citizen became a partner in ruin.
khaled al-nafi si, abdul-hussein, ghanima, suad, and hundreds of others did not come out of nowhere but rather came as a result of a free climate. other creative people preceded them by decades and before the advent of oil, such as fahd al-askar, khaled al-faraj, and the sons of ezra, saleh, and daoud alkuwaiti.
all of this is due to the climate of freedom that prevailed, which we replaced with a rough and harsh culture that even those who introduced us to it abandoned, so the margin of freedom diminished.
freedom gradually, with the support of influential parties, and in multiple stages, it continues to diminish, and we do not know when the turnaround will happen!
allow me, your highness, to give the following two examples:
the articles of the constitution stipulate that the state is civil, and common sense also calls for this. we lived for nearly half a century, and much before that, without hearing about “distance” education in the last ten days of ramadan..! how can this be accepted in this era in which we live, with all the backwardness that education suffers from? isn’t this the behavior of a religious state?
there is also the case of dr. nayef al-mutawa, who works as an assistant lecturer in psychology at the college of medicine at kuwait university, is a well-known person who has local and international creativity and is certified as a doctor, teacher, and therapist from several universities, inside and outside kuwait, and holds three doctorate degrees from recognized universities.
dr. nayef was surprised when a few days ago, a fatwa was issued by a “sharia teacher,” in response to a question from one of his students, stating that it is not necessary to attend his lectures, mostly because the “sharia teacher” doubts the positions and opinions of dr. nayef!
the latter, after a number of his students were absent from attending his lectures, protested verbally about what happened, then followed it up with a written protest to the administration of kuwait university, but no one has moved, as of the time of writing this article, to put an end to this disdain for the state’s systems and its condemning laws, noting that whoever issued the fatwa realizing that he “might” be exposed, in the worst case, to verbal reprimand, but he achieved his goal of severely insulting the reputation and status of a “creative personality”!
do we have to submit to the opinions of the mufti and others like him when we are in the year 2024?