Dr. Mostafa el Feki, Director of the BA, is participating in this year’s round of the annual “Rimini Meeting for friendship among peoples” held in the Italian city of Rimini from 21 to 26 August 2017.
Dr. El Feki will give a speech at the meeting’s closing session focusing on the consequences of Pope Francis’ visit to Egypt last April. Ahram Al-Arabi 's literary editor Sayed Mahmoud will also give a speech on how social media press dealt with the Pope’s visit.
The annual event is organized by a spiritual, cultural movement called “Communion and Liberation”, which supports the Pope’s approaches toward reform and his openness to other religions and cultures. The event is chaired by Emilia Guarnieri, and its organization is supervised by a committee chaired by Father Julian Carron and that includes Dr. Wael Farouk, a Comparative Literature researcher from Egypt residing in Italy and the only non-Italian member of said committee.
The theme of this year’s event is taken from the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “What you inherit from your father must first be earned before it's yours.” Intellectual figures from over 60 countries will participate in the event to discuss human values amidst the cultural changes our world is presently going through.
Each year, the meeting is inaugurated by either the President of Italy or its Prime Minister and is attended by several Nobel laureates and artistic, intellectual and cultural figures from all around Europe. A number of eminent Arab figures have also attended the meeting over the years, including Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Amr Moussa, Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris, President of Algeria Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Egyptian thinker Nasr Abu Zayd, and Tunisian Minister of Foreign Affairs Taïeb Baccouche.