Culture : Banned in Egypt : A bid to censor a popular song reflects the extent to which the arts have become the victims of a widening wave of Islamic conservatism throughout the Arab world.

By KIM MURPHY

April 27, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CAIRO — No one among the thousands packed into Egypt’s national stadium was sitting down that night. Couples in the stands swayed back and forth. Young men in Levi’s balanced precariously on the edge of the seating banks, making frightening rhythmic leaps into the air. Women, heads covered by demure Islamic scarves, clapped and bopped and stomped.

One frenzied word was sung repeatedly into the Egyptian night: “Didi.”

No one knows exactly what “Didi”--Algerian singer Cheb Khaled’s hit song--means. Is it a woman’s name? Does it refer, as his manager says, to the Arabic word for giving, eddi ? Or as Khaled said in one interview, is it an Algerian dialect takeoff on the classic Arabic swoon, “Oh, night”?

In Egypt, where no one understands a single word of Khaled’s western Algerian Arabic, no one cares. “Didi” was voted the No. 1 song of 1992. You can’t walk down a Cairo street without hearing it blaring from a nearby coffee shop, a cassette stand or, siren-like, from a passing taxi.

But shortly before Khaled’s stadium concert in Cairo recently--his first in the heart of the Arab world after years of touring in Europe, the United States and Asia--you couldn’t hear it on Cairo Radio. It was banned.

The minister of information, according to a state radio disc jockey who got the order, was told that it “probably” had “unsavory lyrics.”

“How can we tell?” the jockey, Mohammed Shebl, who later persuaded the authorities to resume play on the air, wrote in a newspaper column about l’affaire “Didi.” “We can’t even understand what the bloke is yodeling about!”

“Didi” became the Arab world’s own version of “Louie Louie,” a song by the Kingsmen in the ‘60s that no one could understand the words to, but everyone suspected was dirty.

The authorities’ brief attempt to ban the song reflects the growing extent to which the arts have become victims of a widening wave of Islamic conservatism throughout the Arab world. Although “Didi” is back on the airwaves, there are a number of Egyptian songs, films and books--including one by Egypt’s own Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz--that have been banned or edited beyond comprehension for public consumption.

Try watching Egypt’s most popular nighttime television program, the American soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful,” without getting a headache trying to figure out what’s going on.

There are few Cairenes who can’t tell you the long, slow travails of the Los Angeles families featured in the drama, the Forresters and the Logans, but just ask one of them what happened during the 30-minute chunk that was excised earlier this month when the male lead, Ridge, slipped secretly into the bed of the female lead, Caroline, posing as her husband? No one knows. All they know is that Caroline is real angry about something.

Or, how is it that Margo is having Clark’s baby when we’ve never seen him do anything more than put his hand on her forearm?

During Ramadan last month, even the mention of character Donna’s posing for nude pictures was abruptly sliced. This in a country where the population grows by a million people every nine months?

“We have to adapt what is available to our society, with our traditions,” said Dalal Abdel Fatah, head censor for Egyptian television. “The bed scenes, scenes of kissing, scenes of making love, all these are forbidden. Usually, we omit one or two scenes, and it’s enough. Not all the kisses are cut. The over-kisses. You know, where they have some movement, by tongue, by lips. The extraordinary kisses. But the ordinary kisses, we have them, to teach people how to love.”

An Australian series, “Sons and Daughters,” was yanked from the air after 150 episodes because it started depicting young men becoming rowdy. Screenwriter Harold Pinter’s 1963 film “The Servant” never made it because it depicted a homosexual relationship between an employer and a servant. “Even the thought was difficult,” Fatah said.

But “Fatal Vision,” the true-life film about Army physician Jeffrey MacDonald’s trial for the murder of his family, did air on Egyptian TV, even after most of the people in the censor’s office recommended against its violence.

Fatah liked its message about MacDonald’s attempt to blame the murder on drug-crazed hippies and its suggestion that MacDonald himself might have been using drugs.

“If there is a moral, it doesn’t matter. There is the crime and the punishment,” she said. “This film shows that everyone dealing with narcotics needs to think 100 times first.”

Political censorship has been a fact of life in the Arab world since time immemorial, although Egypt’s press is considerably freer than most. Censorship of the arts hit the headlines in 1967, when a host of American actors were banned throughout the Arab world for their support of Israel: Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Barbra Streisand. Egyptian actor Omar Sharif was even banned for a while because he made the movie “Funny Girl” with Streisand.

Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s celebrated “open door” policy changed all that, but the problem has recently surfaced again. Ofra Haza, the Yemeni-born Jewish singer who emigrated to Israel, can’t usually be heard on Cairo Radio, though there is no official ban.

Michael Jackson, recently said to have made anti-Arab remarks, was boycotted completely for a while. Fatah still prefers to keep him off Egyptian TV.

“Now, we are not looking for exposing any of Michael’s things,” she said. “Not just the things he said about Arabs and Muslims. It’s the changes he made in himself. He became very ugly.”

The controversy over Khaled started in his native Algeria, where the pulsating, danceable rhythms of the western Algerian musical style known as rai became objects of suspicion to Islamic fundamentalists, who closed down several shows in the city of Oran, the home of rai.

Preceding Khaled’s first-ever tour of the Arab world outside of North Africa last month, one magazine put forth a preview ominously titled: “Didi: A Suspicious Song.”

“Most of the rai music and songs praise sex and drinking and all that is ugly,” Tunisian singer Walid Roesy is quoted as saying.

“Most of the big cassette companies are Jewish, and their most important goal is to undermine national cultures, especially in the Arab world,” he added. “They found rai to be an easy way to get it done.”

Khaled, meeting with reporters in Cairo, professed to be perplexed about what all the fuss was about.

“I myself don’t know. I wonder. I think of it,” he said, adding that he has not returned to Algeria since the assassination last year of former President Mohammed Boudiaf, who took over after an Islamic fundamentalist victory at the polls sparked a military coup and a growing wave of Islamic violence.

“I’m not involved in politics,” Khaled said. “As an Algerian, as a human being, I can say the problem is all over the world, it’s not only in Algeria or Egypt or India, it’s all over the world. The world has become crazy. Am I right or not? The youth in Algeria don’t know what they want, anyway. They don’t have work, they don’t know why they break or they burn or they ruin, where they’re going.”

One of Khaled’s most controversial songs in Algeria--because it so clearly depicts the dilemma of youth without hope seeking only to emigrate--was called “Where to Escape?”

In Egypt, the banning phenomenon took a more serious turn last year when a novelist was sentenced to prison for writing a book deemed blasphemous by religious authorities.

Alaa Hamed was ordered to serve eight years in jail for his book “A Distance in a Man’s Mind,” which contained fanciful anecdotes about heavenly prophets. Then he was sentenced to another year for a second book, “The Bed,” a collection of short stories about sex, which was deemed to question the sanctity of marriage.

Both sentences have been put temporarily on hold, but in a recommendation that Hamed also be fired from his government job, the head of the Egyptian prosecutor general’s administrative district in Cairo, Mohammed Abdel Salem Sayed, noted the requirements of Islamic law in such cases.

“Whoever disbelieves clear, fundamental signs of religion that are known privately and publicly is to be killed, because he is a nonbeliever. Because his disbelieving in these basics makes Mohammed the Prophet of Allah a liar,” Sayed wrote in his official report. “And if this is so, then there is nothing less to do than fire him.”

Indeed. Hamed spends most of his time now in a darkened apartment in the Manial district of Cairo, an armed guard at the door. Last year, a close friend, secularist author Farag Foda, was shot to death by Islamic fundamentalists. Foda, Hamed said, had been one of the few Egyptian intellectuals who rose to his defense.