Hilmi Salem was associated with the poetic group "Illumination", which was accompanied by "Aswat"/(voices), one of the most famous poetry factions in the seventies, and among its poets Hilmi Salem, Hassan Talab, Jamal Al-Qassas, Rifaat Salam, Amjad Rayan and Mahmoud Naseem.
[1] In the winter of 2007, he published a poem entitled "Leila Murad's Balcony" that had previously been published in his poetry collection entitled "Praising of weakness" in the Cairo art magazine "Ibdaa" headed by the poet Ahmed Abdel Moati Hegazy.
As a result, the Islamic Research Academy (one of Al-Azhar institutions) accused him of "atheism and blasemphy" and he was to be subjected to a campaign calling for his "repentance", after a statement of the matter was signed by about a hundred Islamic personalities, only to be criticized by Egyptian intellectuals, describing it as "an apostasy campaign and the culture of terror".
Then Sheikh Youssef Al-Badri, a member of the Islamic Research Academy of Al-Azhar, filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council for Culture Ali Abu Shady, asking them to implement the decision to withdraw the award given to Hilmi Salem.
[1] Later in the same month, the Supreme Council of Culture appealed the court's decision, and the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Culture described the appeal as a "call for enlightenment and the fight against obscurantism that stops all creative work.