Frank Devaney; Leader in Product Placement
Frank Devaney, 58, a leader in the field of product placement, in which cars, soft drinks, food and other items with well-known brand names are shown on television shows and in motion pictures. He had a lengthy affiliation with Ford Motor Co., placing its cars in several films, including an Explorer in “Jurassic Park.” In 1990 he founded the Entertainment Resources & Marketing Assn., which guides the ethics of the industry. In Burbank on Saturday of cancer.
Richard L. Rosenthal; Founder of Utility
Richard L. Rosenthal, 82, builder of a giant Connecticut utility that provided him with enough wealth to establish a nationwide foundation that catered to the arts. With his wife, Hinda, they gave cash to writers, painters and such young film directors as Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese. After graduating from New York University, Rosenthal began work at a Wall Street investment firm, where he learned to visit companies rather than rely on their published reports. Friends were impressed by his reports, and with him acquired three small utility companies in Connecticut, Michigan and New York. From that beginning, Rosenthal acquired 40 companies and formed Citizens Utilities, with revenues of more than $300 million when he retired in 1989. On Saturday in Stamford, Conn.
Sheik Sharawi; Leading Muslim Cleric
Sheik Mohammed Mutwall Sharawi, 87, one of the Muslim world’s leading clerics. Sharawi, who served as minister of religious endowments under former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, was called “a glorious imam” by that country’s leading Islamic authority, the Grand Sheik of Al-Azhar, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi. He said Sharawi’s death was a serious loss for Egypt and the Islamic world. Sharawi’s “fingerprints on Islamic teaching were matchless,” said Moustafa Mashhour, the leader of Egypt’s largest fundamentalist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Sharawi gave a televised lecture on Islamic teachings on Fridays that was widely watched because of the simple way in which he conveyed Islamic principles and the fact that he spoke in a colloquial dialect of Arabic. His teachings and rulings won him wide acclaim in the Muslim world, but they were also controversial. Moderate Muslims considered them outdated. He angered feminists and human rights activists by supporting female circumcision and by ruling that women should not be appointed to top government positions or become judges. He also condemned organ transplants and the paying of interest on bank deposits. Sharawi trained at Al-Azhar in Cairo, the leading religious institute in the Sunni Islamic world. He became a theological lecturer in Saudi Arabia and then rejoined Al-Azhar as a director of teaching. But he had to leave after a falling-out with then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser over Egypt’s increasingly close ties with the Soviet Union. In what was possibly his most controversial move, he gave thanks to God after Egypt suffered a calamitous defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Asked why, he said that if Nasser had won the war, Egypt would have become a communist country. In Cairo on Wednesday.
