The international media paid attention to the departure of the great broadcaster, “Abla Fadela”, and the intense interest in her did not stop at satellite channels and newspapers, but rather extended to “news agencies”, whose news service is usually more focused on interactive and continuous events, reflecting the exceptional importance of the late media woman.
“Abla Fadela” represented an exceptional sentence in media history, not only as one of the generation of Arab broadcasting founders in the sixties, but as the founder of an important school in the field of “children’s media” based on combining attraction with interest, and combining openness to the world with the development of our own culture.
Abla Fadila’s family life was the crucible in which various factors melted. According to the narration of her cousin, the poet Osama Farhat, from a Sudanese-Egyptian family, her paternal grandfather was Sheikh Tawfiq Abdulaziz, one of the great Quran reciters whose recordings were broadcast by the British Broadcasting Station “BBC”. He is the descendant of the well-known historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, whose roots go back to the Somali town of Jaberta, while his mother’s mother is Turkish. As for his wife, Abla Fadila’s mother, she is a Sudanese Nubian from the village of Mishkila, Darko Center in the Sudanese region of Al-Mahas. This unique cultural formation contributed to the emergence of Abla Fadila. As a formation that combines the influences of all these tributaries, it also contributed to the formation of her sister, the national serious actress, Mohsna Tawfiq, who was known as “Bahia” after she appeared in the movie “The Sparrow” directed by Youssef Chahine, in which Sheikh Imam Issa sang the famous song of Ahmed Fouad Najm. Egypt, oh, oh Bahia.”
The departure of Abla Fadila reminds us of the negative conditions that many “children’s programs” have reached in our Arab world, whether by not reconciling in creating content that represents the culture surrounding the child, or with the specific challenges that he is experiencing.
And as the specialist in children’s media, Issa bin Muhammad Al-Qaidi, sees in a journalist’s investigation in Al-Iqtisadiah newspaper, the defect is that some see these programs as “complementary and not essential, or that they are for entertainment only,” in addition to “the dependence of these programs on foreign production in terms of saving and dependence.” On the ready, despite the confirmation of many studies on the negativity of these programs due to the nature of the cultural difference between the members of the society that produces these films, and those who watch them.
Abla Fadila was concerned about this issue, and she felt that the flood of globalization and leaving the children in our societies in the wind, gradually creeping on her legacy and the planting for which she lived, and she always said that her dream, which she wished to see before she died, was for an Arab broadcaster to continue her program, “Ghinwa.” And his story.
Perhaps the days will witness the realization of this dream after her departure.
• “Abla Fadela” represented an exceptional sentence in media history, not only as one of the generation of Arab radio founders in the sixties, but also as the founder of an important school in the field of “children’s media”.