While Farouk Hosni is best known for being Egypt’s long-serving minister of culture, he is also one of the country’s most prominent abstract painters. His most recent collection, now on being exhibited at a Zamalek art gallery, is a bewildering array of shapes and colors that, to the untrained eye, could be just about anything.

“His work demands of the viewer a considerable capacity for abstraction,” an Italian critic once wrote about the 71-year-old.

Much like his art, Hosni’s political career is open to interpretation. That was never more evident than during his unsuccessful — and highly controversial — bid last month to become director general of the United Nations’ cultural and scientific watchdog, UNESCO.

To supporters, Hosni is the long-standing steward of a cultural tradition that dates back 5,000 years. To Western media, he is an anti-Semite and a book burner. To the domestic opposition, he is dangerously liberal and out of touch with the general public.

Despite the criticism, his loss to Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova, after five contentious rounds of voting by UNESCO members, came as a shock.

The balloting was supposed to be a coronation for Hosni, who, along with his artistic credentials, speaks four languages and has headedthe Culture Ministry for 22 years. Not insignificantly, he would also have been the first Arab to head UNESCO.

But in the waning days of his campaign, Hosni was pilloried in the Western media. Much of the criticism centered on a promise he made to “personally burn” any Israeli book he found in an Egyptian library. He later apologized for the remark, which came during a heated exchange in Parliament in May 2008, but he would have been hard pressed to say anything more damaging to his campaign. With the comment, he managed to butcher two of UNESCO’s sacred cows: freedom of expression and tolerance of other cultures.

“He is the opposite of a man of peace. Farouk Hosni is a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds,” Nobel Peace Prize winner and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and French philosopher Bernard Levy wrote in the French newspaper Le Monde. Their heft commanded an international audience, and the editorial marshaled opposition to Hosni’s candidacy.

In what was widely seen as an attempt to burnish Hosni’s international credentials, the Culture Ministry has been refurbishing synagogues in Cairo and restoring Jewish artifacts. There are at least eight such projects in the works, including the restoration of a synagogue in Old Cairo that has been empty for almost 50 years.

Officials denied the work was motivated by Hosni’s UNESCO bid. “If you don’t restore Jewish synagogues, you lose a part of your history,” said Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which falls under Hosni’s ministry.

Still, it is a history that Egypt’s leaders do not always acknowledge; even the work on the synagogues was largely carried out in secret until June for fear of public backlash.

The book burning comment was not the only issue to dog Hosni’s campaign. Critics seized on his ministry’s role in censoring books and movies. In 2006, the ministry famously banned the movie The Da Vinci Code from being screened locally and pulled copies of the novel from bookstores, saying it was insulting to Christianity.

Opponents also accused Egypt of imprisoning journalists, bloggers and others critical of the government of President Hosni Mubarak. While those decisions would not have come from Hosni’s ministry, his silence, critics say, made him complicit.

The Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders called him one of the “leading protagonists” of government censorship. “This Egyptian government minister needs to demonstrate a full commitment to free expression by publicly condemning press freedom violations [...] something he has not managed to do during the past 25 years,” it said in early September.

That view, however, is not unanimous. The secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, Hafez Abu Saeda, calls Hosni’s record mixed. “There are still restrictions,” says Abu Saeda. “But he has supported [...] initiatives for writers and thinkers.”

Abdullah Ashaal, a former official in the foreign ministry, calls criticisms of Hosni’s tenure, including those by Reporters Without Borders, fair. But, he says, if the standard for top positions in the United Nations is an unwavering adherence to values like freedom of expression, the candidate pool would be shallow.

“If you follow these criteria [...] you will have to confine the spots to people from democratic countries.”

One of the obstacles Farouk Hosni faced during his campaign was his long association with the Egyptian government, which many critics have accused of being autocratic.

“He has served in a system of dictatorial rule [where] there is no space for differences,” says Gamal Heshmat, a former MP aligned with the banned Muslim Brotherhood. “The minister, who has lived in an [...] oppressive system like Egypt’s, cannot believe in freedom and democracy.”

But others disagree over how much blame Hosni deserves for censorship. Ashaal says that even if Hosni were inclined to stop it, there would be little he could do. The state’s true power brokers, Ashaal claims, are those who oversee the security forces. “He doesn’t have any authority. He is just a clergyman in our government.”

While opposition in the West has centered on his lack of democratic bona fides, Hosni’s 22-year-tenure as minister of culture suggests he is one of the most liberal-leaning members of the governing National Democratic Party.“He has an obligation as a part of this government, [to] defend all of its actions, all of its resolutions and all of its positions,” says Abu Saeda. “But it remains that Mr. Farouk Hosni is a more liberal part of this government.”

In 2006, Hosni sparked a major controversy when he said the prevalence of the veil in Egypt was a “step backward.” The comment drew the ire of members of Parliament affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, fellow NDP members, commentators and the public.

Heshmat says it demonstrates that he is out of touch with the common Egyptian. “He [has taken a] stand against religion in general,” he says. “[He] does not represent Muslims and Arabs.”

Hosni is viewed by many as an accomplished bureaucrat and agile thinker (an art critic once called him a Renaissance man).

During his years atop the culture ministry, he has overseen the renovation of some of Egypt’s iconic monuments, including the Sphinx, the construction of dozens of museums, the creation of film festivals and the introduction of art into school classrooms.

Supporters, which included a powerful bloc of Middle Eastern and African countries, viewed him as the best regional hope for a top UN post. There was a feeling that the time for a son of the Middle East to head UNESCO was long overdue.

And despite the controversy surrounding his bid, France and America refused to publicly condemn his campaign. Even Israel, after months of public umbrage following the book burning comment, dropped its opposition to Hosni (after reportedly obtaining border concessions from Cairo).

So, when the balloting began on September 17, he was viewed as a heavy favorite, but during the next five rounds of voting, Hosni was never able to muster the 30 of 58 votes necessary to win. When he lost the fifth and final vote on September 22, with 27 votes to Bokova’s 31, Arab leaders and commentators were shocked.

In the aftermath of the defeat Hosni lashed out, apparently missing the take-home lesson from his book-burning comment. “It was clear by the end, there was a conspiracy against me,” he told reporters after returning to Cairo. “There is a group of the world’s Jews who had a major influence in the elections.” et