Arab Occidentalism: Images of America in the Middle East 9780755608775, 9781780769387

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This book is dedicated to my father, AHMED ABDELWAHAB MOHAMED – the best teacher I ever had

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1: ‘This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq’ al-Zaidi yelled. Courtesy of New York Times.

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Figure 2.2: Courtesy of Al Jazeera.

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Figure 2.3: Courtesy of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

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Figure 2.4: Courtesy of BBC.

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Figure 2.5: Courtesy of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

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Figure 2.6: Courtesy of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm.

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Figure 2.7: Courtesy of Maktoob.com.

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Figure 2.8: Courtesy of the Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh.

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Figure 2.9: Courtesy of Al Jazeera.net.

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Figure 2.10: Courtesy of the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan.

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Figure 2.11: Courtesy of Shepard Fairey’s ‘Hope’ poster which was adopted by the Barack Obama campaign during the 2008 election.

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Figure 2.12: Courtesy of Al Badil (Egypt) (After Before).

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 2.13: Courtesy of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Gomhoria.

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Figure 2.14: Courtesy of Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt).

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Figure 3.1: Burning the US and Israeli flags in Al-Assifa (The Storm).

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Figure 3.2: Awadheen being tortured in Abu Ghraib. Courtesy of The Baby Doll Night film website.

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Figure 3.3: Awadheen being tortured in Abu Ghraib. Courtesy of The Baby Doll Night film website.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgments can never be made to all who have nourished one’s intellectual life. I owe an especially heavy debt of gratitude to Melani McAlister, who provided counsel and encouragement that helped me to turn my dissertation into a book. From across the Atlantic, I owe thanks to Marwa Ibrahim and Talaat Mohamed for their invaluable assistance. I also appreciate the efforts of Kevin Lacey at Binghamton University and Abderrahman Beggar at Wilfred Laurier University for their interest in the topic and investment in time and effort. My thanks go to Ivy Ken, Sandra Heard, and Rami Fawaz for their willingness to sit down and provide me with their support, encouragement, and interest. I am also so grateful to my copyeditor, Christina Thiele, who read the book with meticulous care, called attention to matters that needed correction or revision, and made thoughtful suggestions that resulted in an improved treatment. Thanks should be extended to Aliaa Dakroury, who put me in touch with Christina. I also appreciate the help of Wendy Monaghan. This project would not have been possible without the help of Maria Marsh, the I.B.Tauris Middle East editor. I am particularly impressed by the incredible spirit, wisdom, and strength of the Egyptian people, who provoked the 25 January Revolution (2011) that changed so many of the preconceptions held by Westerners about Arabs. I am indebted to those young people who came together, demanding the personal rights and freedoms that Egyptians have so long been denied. Their message of peace and hope was easily delivered to the rest of the world through their cheering, singing, praying for their freedom in Tahrir Square.

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Among those who have given me sustenance, I cannot fail to mention my colleagues at al-Azhar University in Cairo for their friendly spiritual support. My heart-felt thanks to all those unnamed others, too many to be named personally, who encouraged me to continue, who supplied ideas, and took the time to carry on useful discussions, thereby helping me through the completion of this book. My parents, my brothers and sisters, my wife Mona, and my kids Adam, Noah, and Lina, gave me confidence to soar beyond my expectations. Finally, all praise be to God – through His Blessings all good deeds are completed. Eid Mohamed

FOREWORD

It was my pleasure to meet Eid Mohamed in the summer of 2003, when he was still a graduate student at al-Azhar University in Cairo. With my encouragement, he soon came to study for his PhD at George Washington University’s American Studies department. Over the course of several years, this impressive scholar developed an innovative and valuable dissertation examining how the Arab world has represented the United States in the years since 9/11. That dissertation is the core of this exciting book. Arab Occidentalism: Images of America in the Middle East is an important contribution to the scholarship on US –Middle East encounters. The research and writing show remarkable range, as the diverse chapters examine sources ranging from Arab news media to Egyptian film to contemporary novels. Mohamed’s study unpacks the multiple and sometimes conflicting ways that Arab intellectuals and cultural producers have represented the United States and its relationship to the Middle East. Mohamed analyses these texts as being neither simple reflections of pre-existing opinion nor unilateral producers of such opinion, instead they are viewed as participants in a conversation – a conversation that also includes policy makers’ opinions, news media, and the writings of public intellectuals. This book is a truly innovative and important contribution to Middle East studies, American Studies, and transnational cultural studies. The high points of this book are its systematic, integrated analyses of Egyptian media, literature, and film, as they evolved in the context of the critical early twenty-first century years of transformation in the

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public sphere in Egypt. Mohamed maps the overarching concerns and structural commonalities that influenced both new and old media during the years that Egypt and the rest of the Arab world were shaped by US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. This study never assumes, however, that Egyptian or Arab media were merely reactive or passive in the face of US and European power; Mohamed’s analysis of ‘Occidentalism’ examines critically the construction of epistemologies and interpretive frameworks about the West that have been generated in the Middle East. Without claiming that images from the Arab world had the political power that Orientalist images in the West did, Mohamed nonetheless shows us how representation, and misrepresentation, by Arab media has had great political importance. The first chapter on Arab fiction shows how a number of authors challenge the East/West binary, while also representing the United States in ways that capture shifts in class, gender, and religious identity within Egypt. The second chapter, a treatment of the Arab news media, examines two key issues: the first was an incident in which an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at George W. Bush during a 2004 press conference; the second is the election of President Obama. Analysed together, the press reports illustrate the wide variety of opinion in the Middle East about the invasion of Iraq, President Bush, protest, decorum, hospitality, and the politics of insult. In the third chapter, Mohamed shows how Arab, particularly Egyptian, films attempt to demonstrate that the oppressed, the excluded, and the demonised pose a constant threat to any dialogue between the United States and the Arab world. These filmmakers almost uniformly emphasise that US– Arab relations cannot be understood outside the centrality of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the war in Iraq, and anti-Arab sentiment in the United States. In the haunting final chapter Mohamed analyses two Arab-American literary texts, Mohja Kahf’s emails from Scheherazad and Laila Halaby’s novel Once In A Promised Land. Mohamed shows how theses writers construct rich frameworks for understanding the transnational flows of people and ideas, frameworks that challenge any simplistic binaries of East versus West. This book should catch the attention of the growing number of academics, graduate students, undergraduate students, and policy analysts who are interested in the nexus of culture and politics in

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US– Middle East relations. I was honored to work with Eid Mohamed when he was earning his PhD; this book shows that he has emerged as a fine scholar whose expertise in Middle East literature, culture, and society is matched by a solid grounding in media and literary studies. Arab Occidentalism is a useful and necessary intervention in the field of transnational history, and an elegant contribution to our understanding of the cultural politics of international relations Melani McAlister, PhD Chair and Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs The George Washington University

INTRODUCTION

When I started reading Edward Said’s Orientalism,1 I began recalling so many of the images we in the Middle East carry about the West. I felt as though I was deconstructing what I was reading, having a conversation with Said and arguing with him, ‘but we are not as passive as you think . . . we have consumed the Western culture and turned their stereotypes about us Arabs into materials to use as we in turn offer our critical perspective of the West’. Arab Occidentalism lives in a paradoxical relationship to the discursive practices of Orientalism with which it shares methods and strategies. If Orientalism, according to Said, is a Western way of destroying the ‘other’ and achieving domination, Arab Occidentalism is a discourse of oppression and a form of resistance. This book investigates post-9/11 US –Middle East encounters in order to map out how they balance the conflicting pressures of internal dissent and external threats. It specifically explores how Arab culture, in particular Egyptian culture, continues to believe in the value of America as a potential model, especially after Barack Obama’s election, for ‘change’ while attempting to renegotiate the position of the Arab and Muslim worlds in the international system. This undertaking fills a niche in attempting to understand the relationship between the Obama era in the United States and the Arab Spring – a series of movements for social and political change that spread throughout the Arab world and included Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Egypt’s Lotus Revolution, and other pro-democracy movements in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. However, I would like to stress that the research and analysis presented here end before the Arab Spring,2 and I think the material here can help

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explain the many ways in which people understood the United States in the almost ten years between 9/11 (2001) and January 2011. Unlike many other studies and publications, this book presents a fully fledged comparative perspective as it focuses on works with politically charged content, asking pointed questions about how cultural stereotypes produce texts. These texts, largely Egyptian, offer new political visions, which challenge how US cultural texts have created the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Egypt is central to these discussions because of its historic centrality to the Arab world and the prevalence of its filmmaking and cultural industries. There are, of course, other significant countries in the Middle East, and it would be of great interest to expand or even revise some of my work to examine a broader, more representative sample of the opinions and/or cultural productions of the Arab world, perhaps highlighting North Africa or the Levant. My reading of Egyptian/Arab news media, cinema, and fiction has demonstrated that contemporary Arab culture presents a complex counter-narrative of US– Arab encounters. Moreover, what Egyptian/ Arab cultural producers communicate in their works about Arab societies is often part and parcel of the discourse about the East– West encounter. This is evident in the way many Egyptian/Arab novels and films convey the details of Arabs’ daily lives, not only exposing superficial differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the US– Arab encounter but also exposing profound similarities. Of course, there are many cultural texts that do not do this, that are not particularly interested in the West, or that do not have a humanist conclusion acknowledging similarities; however, I have selected certain texts that share this approach. I unpack these Western/American narratives that present the interactions between Arab Muslims and Western modernity as an impetus for them to assimilate Western cultural values. For example, the chapter on Arab media shows how many Arabs use Western news media to foster intercultural interactions and enhance national media performance. This book engages with popular Arabic texts that contribute to the Arab perception of the ‘other’. I base my choice of texts – literary, filmic, and journalistic – on their popularity; they include bestselling novels, blockbuster movies, and a collection of the most popular columns, cartoons, and images from photojournalism. In selecting the texts, I have also considered their engagement with US foreign policy in the Middle

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East and what they reveal about the US political and social construction of Islam as a religion and of Arab Muslims as a group. As a major cultural and political centre in the Arab world, Egypt has been the main source of these texts. Home to one of history’s first great civilisations, Egypt is considered the cultural capital of Arab world, with its strong Islamic traditions, cosmopolitanism, modern pan-Arab political and intellectual history, and regional leadership. Egypt’s film and television industry, the largest in the Arab world, dominates Arab television and cinema as does popular Egyptian music. In addition, Egypt has produced some of the most prominent twentieth-century Arab writers, from Taha Hussein and Tawfiq al-Hakim to the 1988 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, novelist Naguib Mahfouz. In this book, I pose several questions: How do Arab Egyptian popular fiction and film discuss, depict, and represent America and Americans in the post-9/11 era? What central themes underlie their conception of Americans? Has the current representation of Arabs and Muslims in US media, literature, and film caused any significant change in the way Arab Egyptian popular fiction and film represent the United States? To answer these questions, I analyse a range of cultural texts, including several novels, films, cartoons, and journalistic columns, examining them within their historical context – that is, the post-9/11 world shaped by the US ‘War on Terror’,3 the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, and, more broadly, by US hegemony in general. In this context, Arabs need to negotiate two realities: the history of Orientalism and Occidentalism on the one hand and the longing on the part of many Arabs for mutual understanding and connections between the United States and the Middle East on the other. Despite the ongoing critiques of US policy at the heart of much Arab cultural productions after 9/11, this longing remains strong.

Orientalism Revisited and Occidentalism Redefined In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said argues that the ‘East’ underwent ‘orientalization’, a transformative process of stereotyping that occurred over centuries, brought about by religious wars, literary depictions, and a scholarly discourse and body of knowledge constituting Orientalism. Said asserts that Orientalists formed the idea of the Orient, defining it as an aberration from Western norms. Said delves into questions of alterity

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(‘otherness’) informing the relationship between the Western ‘self’ and the Eastern ‘other’ in relation to Orientalism; that is, sometimes the ‘other’ is constructed not as an ‘other’ but as a distorted image of the ‘self’. Therefore, Said underlines the success of this Orientalist construct of the Orient by sustaining the Western ideology of superiority and at the same time rhetorically making the West the norm from which the Orient has departed, all in an effort to alienate or isolate the ‘self’ from the Occident. In this way, the ‘other’ was introduced and known only through texts written by Western writers. With the absence of the ‘other’ in their writings, the Orientalists’ presence is all-pervasive. While Orientalism is revisited in the West, Occidentalism is invoked in the East, resulting in cultural texts – literary, filmic, and journalistic – that reflect Occidentalist viewpoints. The post-9/11 colonial presence of the United States in the Middle East contributes to the replacement of negative images of the old colonial powers (i.e. English, French, and Italian) with new American ones. Jokes about English soldiers in Egypt are substituted with jokes about Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as jokes about shoe-throwing and President Bush.4 As mainstream Westerners have Arabised all Muslims, so too have mainstream Arabs Americanised all Westerners. This indicates the absence or silence of European countries from the Eastern map of encounters and the emergence of the United States as the sole power in the world at the end of the twentieth century. This is a fundamental problem because, on the one hand, Arab cultural producers are all sensitive and trying to create new humanistic encounters that differ from the one-dimensional portrayals produced in the West. This humanistic approach focuses on shared human values and concerns. On the other hand, Arab cultural producers equate US Orientalism with Occidentalism, which is its own kind of stereotyping. Before 9/11, Orientalism was revisited many times during the twentieth century, resulting in views that stereotyped and dehumanised Arabs/Muslims. Post-9/11 Orientalism and Occidentalism have been invoked through the use of the ‘objective correlative’, a term coined by the poet T.S. Eliot5 to describe a concrete or specific situation, location, or object that a poet uses to evoke a particular emotion in the reader (as opposed to attempting to describe the emotion itself). For example, in Arab texts, representations of the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the unbalanced nature of US policy, and support of undemocratic regimes in the region are to

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evoke anger and to signify an absence of ethics in the US approach towards the Middle East. Conversely, Western texts have used images of the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts that have been linked to Muslims to evoke the emotion of fear by portraying both the religion of Islam and the nations of Arabs/Muslims as violent. In Covering Islam,6 Edward Said reflects on how, in the late twentieth century, US politicians and the mainstream media discovered the value in marketing Islam as a threat, sparking a plethora of books, articles, and television programs.7 In this book, I explore the way in which such themes have been received in the Middle East and how they have affected the way Arabs and Muslims perceive and redefine the Occident. To explore and expand such perceptions was, in fact, the purpose behind a report published by the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Based on a research trip in December 2002 to Egypt and Saudi Arabia (countries allied to the United States), the Institute8 report assessed Arab perceptions of the United States as being shaped by what it called ‘the Six Cs’: [. . .] cowboys, colonialism, conspiracy, Coca-Cola, cowardice, and clientitus. The client is Israel. The cowardice is the perception that we are a schoolyard bully. Coca-Cola is the symbol of an alien consumer society; conspiracy is based on unrealistic expectations of US capabilities; colonialism is premised on a US drive to control oil; and cowboys is drawn from a Hollywood style perception that the [Bush] Administration shoots from the hip. The reality is that when Arabs think of the United States they think of Israel. The six Cs that summarise the perception of the United States in the Middle East have their counterpart in the three Bs of Arab stereotypes – bombers, belly dancers, and billionaires – as discussed in a report by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian professor.9 However, I argue for a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to the Arab world’s cultural engagement with the United States. I attempt to show that Arab representations of America and Americans have been sophisticated, diverse, and historically fluid, both before and after 9/11. I seek to demonstrate and exemplify the heterogeneous nature of categories such as ‘Occidentalism’ and ‘the East’. As such, this book instantiates my conviction that, just as Occidentalism represents the USA and the West as

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homogenous, the critique of Orientalism must entail a departure from Orientalist discourses that represent the Arab and the Middle East as homogeneous, thereby ignoring the diversity of mainstream Arab social discourses. The selected texts challenge the view of Islam/Arabs as passive victims of Orientalism. The representation of the Middle East not only paves the way for a new colonial era but also plays a crucial role in ‘the construction of postwar US nationalism and the contest over the meanings of ‘Americanness’.10 As Margaret Nydell explains, after 9/11, ‘one of the greatest dangers for Americans in deciding how to confront the Islamist threat lies in continuing to believe – at the urging of senior US leaders – that Muslims hate us and attack us for what we are and what we think, rather than for what we do’.11 This belief has emerged from writings such as those by Samuel Huntington,12 who popularised the thesis of the ‘clash of civilizations’ first raised by Bernard Lewis, a British-American historian. Such a perception indicates not only a change in the location of the Arab world on the political map of power but also in American selfidentification regarding global politics and power. Since 9/11, Americans have increasingly been told to believe that political Islam is a fatal threat to the West and is antithetical to the Westphalian international system13 and its underlying Western liberal norms and values. Said asserts that the Islamic world also contributes to the Western media’s negative representations of Islam, Muslims, and political Islam.14 The revolution in Iran (particularly the hostage situation at the US embassy in Tehran) and the militancy exhibited by some extreme groups (the most notorious being the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda) are frequently cited as examples. In addition, gains made in elections by nominally Islamist parties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks have reinforced the perception in the West that political Islam is ‘inexorably on the march’.15 Political Islam has indeed taken the path of democracy to achieve political objectives, an action promoted by the US government and, in particular, by the Bush administration.16 On the other side, there is a trend in the Arab world to base one’s opinions of America and Americans on Hollywood movies and the political attitudes of the US government.17 For example, many Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East assume all or most Americans are antiArab and anti-Muslim, while the belief that all Jewish Americans are pro-Israel is another example of the many stereotypes widening the gap

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between the two sides.18 Moreover, Hollywood exacerbates the Arab world’s perception of Americans as morally corrupt, by featuring atheists, criminals, and perverts in many of its movies. For many Arabs, the history of failure of US foreign policy in the Middle East has further reinforced their beliefs about the immorality of American society.

Post-9/11 Images Soon after 9/11, the mainstream media in both the United States and many other Western countries began to link Islam, and Muslims in general, with the attacks. Islam and Muslims have been described by US media as the source of terrorism, religious fanaticism, and cultural backwardness. This was evident when President Bush used the term ‘crusade’ to describe his war against terrorism, calling to mind the famous wars waged by the West against Arabs and Muslims in the High Middle Ages (eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries). In spite of recent Western scholarly reassessments of the Crusades,19 the English word ‘crusade’ continues to have positive associations in the West; in the East, however, the term has strong negative associations. Lawrence Pintak’s Reflections on a Bloodshot Lens examines the rhetoric that can be found in American media. Televangelist Marion Gordon Robertson (usually known as Pat Robertson) said Muslims were worse than Nazis.20 Televangelist and Christian leader Jerry Falwell described the Prophet Muhammad as a ‘terrorist’, while the American preacher Jerry Vines described him as a ‘demon-obsessed pedophile’.21 Ann Coulter, one of America’s most controversial commentators, wrote in a column published on 13 September 2001 and which was widely quoted around the world: ‘We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.’22 In this book, I have chosen texts produced in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era that contribute to a cultural encounter between the United States and the Arab world and have attracted the attention of literary and cultural critics in the United States, sparking debates about the US – Middle East encounter. For example, I chose works by Alaa al-Aswany, whose world-wide popularity, thanks to his novel The Yacoubian Building (2004; made into a movie in 2006), brought his novel Chicago to the attention of many American readers and literary critics. Along with Chicago, I also examine Birds of the South (2005) by Amani Abu Fadl.

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Indeed, because such texts are capable of directly reaching many people, they can establish a transnational dialogue with the power to affect people’s knowledge of the ‘other’. The Arab actors participating in such dialogues hope to legitimise their attempts at renegotiating the position of the Arab/Muslim world in the international system. Al-Aswany and Abul Fadl approach the worries of Arabs/Muslims in both the United States and the Arab/Muslim world, vividly portraying a picture of the clash of cultures and religious sects in Chicago and New York, two typical multicultural US cities. Each novel features realistic Arab and Arab American characters, revealing the crisis of identity in post-9/11 America. In addition to these two novels, I examine the following Arab movies: Al-Assifa (‘The Storm’, 2000), Alexandria . . . New York (2004), 11’09’’01 – September 11 (2002), Laylat Soqut Baghdad (‘The Night Baghdad Fell’, 2005), and Laylat El Baby Doll (‘The Baby Doll Night’, 2008).

Approach and Methodology Rather than apply any single theory uniformly to such a diverse body of texts, I locate many interrelated theories that speak to various texts, in order to gain a greater understanding of culture and power in relation. For instance, the works of Edward Said23 led me to interrogate the liberatory potential of representation and its simultaneous disciplining and surveillance by governmental and policy-making authorities. This is evident in Said’s attempt to study how the West has used this surveillance and Western thought to map that stereotyping onto a wider political culture. I am interested in applying theories that can analyse the ways in which such mappings occur in visual, literary, and social realms. Veering away from traditional formalistic approaches, I employ the scholarship of visual and cultural studies to illuminate how Arab media, fiction, and cinema have been vehicles for critiquing the American cultural and political (and imperial) presence in the Arab world. Building on Foucault’s theory of discourse, Said concludes that the discourse created by Orientalism reinforces – moreover, constructs – European imperialism: ‘No more glaring parallel exists between power and knowledge in the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism.’24 Said sees Orientalists’ major contribution to the study of the Orient as fixing the Orient as an entity whose sole identification is

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its deviation from Western norms, which is essentialised not by characteristics but by existence: ‘they’ are different from us; ‘they’ are not us. In The Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan draws attention to the importance of culture that ‘has gone unrecognized in historical studies of American imperialism’ and argues that ‘the role of empire has been equally ignored in the study of American culture’.25 Kaplan stresses that imperialism is inseparable from ‘the social relations and cultural discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at home’.26 Thus, the formation of the idea of nation as home is related to the imperial distinction between home and abroad. This remains the most consistent piece of knowledge in what Kaplan describes as otherwise anarchic and chaotic perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ in an imperialistic context. Imperialism permits an interchangeability of roles whose sole commonality is the need to affirm the stability of the American ‘self’ against a threatening foreign ‘other’. Kaplan advances her argument through two analytical rubrics: gender and race. In ‘Manifest Domesticity’, Kaplan argues that this American ‘self’ is fully differentiated by gender – not one self, but at least two.27 Significantly, she focuses on the ‘anarchic and chaotic’ perceptions of empire, and she often stresses the diversity of imperial projects. These theorists produce new cultural spaces where the utopian possibility of solidarity across difference, the reappraisal of historical atrocities, and the reassertion of politically liberatory modes of thought can be represented textually as well as visually. The key arguments of scholarship in the field of US– Middle East cultural relations revolve around whether the United States has achieved what Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations describes as ‘elements of commonality’ that constitute, according to Michael Hunt, ‘a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests’.28 In American Orientalism, Douglas Little directs our attention to the cultural misunderstandings that constitute real obstacles to US foreign policy, resulting in many negative consequences that get the United States into trouble. According to Little, Americans have exerted great effort to make Middle Eastern societies ‘modern’ and ‘Western’. Little writes, ‘Yet early in the new millennium many Americans remain frustrated by the slow pace of social change, disturbed by the persistence

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of political autocracy, and appalled by the violent xenophobia of groups such as al-Qaeda emanating from a part of the world whose strategic and economic importance remains unsurpassed.’29 This makes the US encounter with the Middle East ‘the by-product of two contradictory ingredients: an irresistible impulse to remake the world in America’s image and a profound ambivalence about the peoples to be remade.’30 In beginning and ending his book with references to Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, Little provides a long-range perspective. He observes how Americans continue to perceive Arabs as ‘backward, exotic, and occasionally dangerous people who have needed and will continue to need US help and guidance if they are to undergo political and cultural modernization.’31 Little refers to the iconic publication National Geographic and the Disney film Aladdin (1992) to demonstrate the difference between the image of Arabs in American popular culture as ‘backward, exotic, and occasionally dangerous folk’ and Israelis as Western and ‘modern’. Little concludes that ‘it should come as no surprise that since 1945 the US public and policymakers have ostracized Arab radicals who threaten Israeli security or challenge Western control over Middle East oil’.32 At the end of his book, Little asserts that US relations with the Middle East have become problematic because of American Orientalism, which makes Americans ‘underestimate the peoples of the region and overestimate America’s ability to make a bad situation better’.33 Zachary Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East gives historical context to current Western attitudes towards the Middle East, Islam, and Arabs, attitudes that, he argues, have embraced and espoused crude prejudices. Lockman’s arguments, while not particularly new or unique, provide a historiography of some of the past arguments about the Middle East and assert the role of history in shaping the relationship between the mainstream ‘us’ and the majority ‘them’. Lockman attempts to draw our attention to the importance of reading current events from within a historical framework – contemporary facts and events are not isolated from their historical roots. If the present is built upon the past, our vision of the present should extend beyond the limits of its space and time. While Little’s account of US – Middle East relations focuses on the twentieth century, Lockman contributes a broad survey of the development of Western knowledge about Islam and the Middle East, from the time of ancient

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Greece and Rome to the post-9/11 era. In addition, Lockman’s book is about the theory of Orientalism rather than its practice. Rashid Khalidi pays no attention to culture when he historicises the US– Middle East relationship.34 He emphasises the importance of exploring the past to help us find better ways of dealing with current situations. He commences with the US occupation of Iraq, asserting that this war served the interests of the Bush administration. Khalidi then turns to historical relations, analysing the failure of both the British and French colonisations in the region because of the Iraqi peoples’ determination to achieve independence. Indeed, much of the scholarship on the US role in the Middle East looks to the past and examines the history of colonialism. Khalidi also traces twentieth-century relations between the United States and the Arab world through a reading of the history of the region. However, in failing to analyse the colonial presence of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East during the early twentieth century, Khalidi’s analysis might be seen by some as unbalanced and a promoter of the East versus West scenario, despite the fact that Khalidi’s book, by historicising US power, challenges the clash of civilisations thesis. Other scholars examine the present through the events of 9/11, reading 9/11 and its aftermath as a new stage in the history of the United States and the world. The ten essays in Mary Dudziak’s edited volume35 reflect on 9/11 as a watershed moment in the history of the United States, Islam, and international relations. Other scholarship describes and assesses the complexity of anti-American sentiment. Denis Lacorne and Tony Judt36 follow the complexity of anti-Americanism in six distinct parts of the world: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South East Asia. David Farber37 offers a broad international perspective on anti-American attitudes. Interesting and unique about Farber’s book are the commentaries on US foreign policy by foreign writers, who identify and explain the roots of antiAmerican sentiment. This type of analysis comes close to my intentions with this book; however, my focus is the Arab world. In Epic Encounters, Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies, discerns in domestic diversity a major factor in US representations of the Middle East. Again, the domestic and the foreign are interwoven. Determining the ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’ of Arabs in the United States plays an important part in the way all Arabs of the Middle East are perceived by Americans. McAlister shows how culture works as a social

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and historical phenomenon that shapes both identity and politics. Her close readings of popular culture as a means to probe US foreign policy are a departure from the US domestic politics of race. McAlister illustrates how various cultural products have shaped the public’s perception of the US– Middle East encounter. Expanding upon and unearthing further layers of Said’s Orientalism, McAlister demonstrates how representations of the Middle East have been infused with US domestic racial ideologies. It seems that the challenges of twenty-firstcentury globalisation, anti-colonialist resistance, decolonisation, and nationalism erase any possibility of retaining the conceptions of race and colour as proposed by earlier Orientalists. McAlister argues that US discourse relating to the Middle East since 1945 is marked by ‘postOrientalism’, wherein ‘American power worked very hard to fracture the old European logic and to install new frameworks.’38 Most surveys in the field are one-sided, for their authors barely draw from any Middle Eastern sources, confining themselves instead to mainly American cultural and political sources. Of course, there are exceptions; Brian Edwards’ Morocco Bound and Ussama Makdisi’s Faith Misplaced are important examples.39 In the bibliographies of many prominent works in the field, the ‘other Arab’ is completely absent. This is largely due to either the inaccessibility of translated literature or the unavailability of any translations at all. The transnational approach necessitates cultural translation to bridge the gap between the two worlds – that is, the Middle East and the West. The frame within which theorists in the field typically operate is characterised by relativism. This field is therefore in dire need of synthesis, because, while the existing scholarship successfully relates American experiences of 9/11, it positions the rest of the globe not as an active participant but as a passive space within which American imperialism moves freely every day, in every way. Synthesis would present a fully fledged comparative perspective on the field. My study begins by introducing particular sources that typify the intellectual and cultural exchange in twenty-first-century cultural anxieties. It is strange to find in these cultural exchanges that Islam, which is a religion, is held in comparison with the West, which is a geographical area. Geographising Arabs and Muslims according to religion is a mark of the long history of Western Orientalism: Every Arab is a Muslim and every Muslim is an Arab. Both belong to Islam, whose

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reform is perceived, as noted by Said, from an Orientalist perspective, as an oxymoron.40 Muslims and Arabs are required to change, but their Islamic system of thought is beyond any reform, whereas the West’s values and culture are stable and beyond any need of change. In Chapter 1, I discuss how al-Aswany and Abul Fadl contest American-centric texts by writing about Arabs from the viewpoint of US-educated Arabs. They refuse to believe that Arab and American identities are natural opposites, a view promoted by Orientalists. The two Egyptian writers repudiate claims of a clash of civilisations; rather, they focus on reconstructing the historical conditions that have contributed to the binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The novels Chicago and Birds of the South trace the formation of differences, the practice of exclusion, and the emergence of stereotypes. Arab novelists focus on particular instances of self-criticism and delve into the process of producing and reproducing stereotypes. Moreover, they counterbalance these stereotypes by giving expression to moderate voices usually concealed and silenced by the rhetoric of the clash of civilisations. Both writers resist the totalising representation of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The appeal of al-Aswany’s novels lies in the diversity of the broad spectrum of human, political, and social themes that appear in his works. In addition, his ability to record the modern social and political history of Egypt appeals to readers. Through his characters, al-Aswany relates Egyptians’ hopes, successes, failures, frustrations, disappointments, and pain. His novels attract audiences of both literature and cinema because they can easily identify with his characters. The main characters in Chicago are Egyptian, but this does not necessarily matter; being a citizen under an oppressive government is not unlike being an Arab in the United States. The characters share important commonalities and can be seen as a kind of Everyman or Everywoman. However, there is no one Arab experience, Arab history, or Arab viewpoint. When such convergences occur – when ‘Arab’ is a truly meaningful category – it operates across and against national and religious differences as well as differences of political opinion and, as such, is a more complicated category. In Chapter 2, I analyse two post-9/11 events, revealing their repertoire of stereotypes about the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Drawing from Said’s Orientalism, I address the role of representation in the construction of the Occident. I show how media constitutes a redemptive site through which stereotypes can be mimicked and appropriated. I raise important

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questions about the relation between the long history of stereotyping and knowledge production that hinders interaction between the United States and the Arab world. My aim is to bridge the gaps in our understanding of the ‘covered other’. I bring together a range of material to reflect on two incidents – the shoe-throwing episode involving President Bush in Iraq and the election of President Obama – which I analyse in terms of textual minutiae as a means to interpret competing worlds. In doing so, I emphasise a mode of analysis that investigates the world in which text accrues meaning. A meticulous reading of a wide variety of writings – Islamist, secular, liberal, and so forth – focusing on opinions and critiques and the consideration of representation as a series of practices and perspectives, has revealed that, despite the very different backgrounds and investments of these Arab writers, their reactions to the two incidents are remarkably similar. In Chapter 3, I analyse the ways in which Egyptian/Arab films attempt to demonstrate that the oppressed, the excluded, and the demonised pose a constant threat to any dialogue between the United States and the Arab world. Their films show gaps and fluidities in that discourse. It is a controversial discourse, emphasising the centrality of the Arab– Israeli conflict, the war in Iraq, and anti-Arab sentiment. And there is the hammering away at the stereotypic cultural differences between Arab and American, with the depressingly familiar oppressive and tyrannical attitudes towards one another. In sum, Arab filmmakers offer new interpretations of history, presented from the perspective of the oppressed ‘other’. They attempt to construct a world without ‘war’, a world where, as Sam Keen points out the real enemy against which we must struggle is the war system. This system includes both the political institutions through which we educate and habituate ourselves to war and the psychological defense mechanisms . . . The immediate impediment to ending war is the mindset, which convinces us that war is inevitable and any hope of a world without war is Utopian.41 Keen’s insights into the workings of the ‘war system’ help us to understand the challenges Arab filmmakers pose to the Arab–US encounter. They promote alternative discourses that question and replace the rhetoric and claims of the clash of civilisations and war with the new

INTRODUCTION

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terminology of justice, tolerance, and protean human interactions. In an attempt to respond to the globalised spirit of the age, Arab filmmakers link the ‘inside’ with the ‘outside’. In Chapter 4, I analyse two Arab-American literary texts for their repertoire of stereotypes and exile fantasies. In emails from Scheherazad, Mohja Kahf creates a representational space from the legendary Thousand and One Nights to thematise the hardships faced by Arab/Muslim minorities in the United States. An Arab-American writer, Kahf depicts the lives of those who are not heard within the normative national discourse of both the United States and the Arab world. Kahf’s work calls for a return to a self-supporting Arab woman, for a move towards independence, and for the rejection of male rule. Moreover, it calls for a return to the tradition and self-reliance of the past. emails from Scheherazad shows that Arab-American women have much to offer to the United States in its post-9/11 dilemma – by restoring tradition while reconciling the myriad effects of modernity. The American Scheherazad uses her traditional ways of the past to create a modern mirror of herself. Laila Halaby structures her novel Once in a Promised Land as a prolonged flashback, emphasising how the past informs the present, culminating in a futureless world. Halaby’s heroine, Salwa, is damaged by the experiment of freedom. Once in a Promised Land allegorises what is otherwise a simple story set in a specific historical and social landscape. In many ways, the tension between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ is played out in the encounter between the couple Salwa and Jassim and the ‘foreign other’. The events of 9/11 become a trope for the steady march towards alienation taken by Salwa and Jassim and the tragic and confusing consequences, which result in a colonial outlook that continues to inform the present. At the very heart of postcoloniality, Once in a Promised Land examines the tensions produced by the interconnection between independence and the colonised subject. Traditions can protect the couple, but the loss of traditions leaves them vulnerable. It is this loss of tradition that disrupts the very idea of the Arab-American; as identity calls for redefinition in the novel, tradition no longer has the ability to protect and instead becomes another source of conflict. An allegory for the larger world, Halaby focuses on the small, familial space, within which she investigates the postcolonial dilemma. In the way that globalisation has come to explain the hybrid nature of Arab-American writers, there is a third national (or local) dimension, a new cultural

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hybrid, integrating the two national cultures through a process of cognitive and emotional bricolage. In their writings, Arab-Americans attempt to explicate for the exiled and the hybrid a way of negotiating identity. They seek to construct alternative and subversive identities that focus on the moment and attempt to dislodge the ways in which identity is constructed within the constraints of history and time.

CHAPTER 1 THE UNITED STATES IN POST-9/11 ARAB FICTION

Objectivity can mean a selfless openness to the needs of others, one which lies very close to love. It is the opposite not of personal interests and convictions, but of egoism. To try to see the other’s situation as it really is an essential condition of caring for them . . . Contrary to the adage that love is blind, it is because love involves a radical acceptance that it allows us to see others for what they are.1 Well-known literary theorist Terry Eagleton identifies a link between the objectivity of literary artists or critics and their social role. To be objective requires creative artists, as well as critics, to care for the outer world – rather than the inner self – and to look beyond the text. In this way, they are social benefactors, whose success in literature and criticism is measured by their study, evaluation, and interpretation of written works of art in relation to the current social, cultural, and political conditions. Thus, in taking on the social concerns and issues of the time, writers may unearth other problems that lie beneath the surface. As early as 1975, Syrian sociologist and novelist Halim Barakat articulated that Arab writers not only reflect but also determine change in an Arab society:

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A writer could not be part of Arab society and yet not concern himself with change . . . the theory of influence which sees writers as agents of social change applies more accurately to contemporary Arab novelists than the theory of reflection, which sees writers as objective and detached observers holding a mirror to reality.2 Continuing in this vein, Barakat adds that ‘literature can subordinate politics to creative and reflective thinking, and undertake the task of promoting a new consciousness’.3 A novel in any language can be studied as a source of knowledge about the novel’s ‘nation of birth’. Such knowledge can be historical, social, political, anthropological, and so on. Many Arab writers are determined to create, above all else, a literary vehicle for their convictions. This vehicle might be a novel, a play, a poem, or an article on culture, politics, science, criticism, or history. Arab novels are placed within their relevant historical, social, and generic contexts. Contemporary Arab novelists use narrative much as Scheherazade did in The Thousand and One Nights – her aim was survival and liberation, not only for herself but also for the kingdom’s women. In the contemporary Arab world, the process of creating narrative is also liberating. It is a trope of real-life decolonising, of a quest for independence from Western colonial powers. Arab writers have consistently commented upon their social world. This is evident in the works of Egyptian-born author Naguib Mahfouz,4 in which we can trace the main Egyptian social concerns of his time. Modern Arab writers vary in their literary styles and perspectives, but they share a rejection of certain aspects of the material concerns of their time. If the function of literature is not only to represent experience but also to offer possible worlds that may expand and/or critique our vision or understanding of human life, then modern Arabic literature not only reflects the present but also indicates a desired future. Arab novelists use fiction as a redemptive site through which colonial stereotypes can be mimicked, appropriated, and ultimately, subverted.5 The contemporary Arabic novel has shifted from imitating the tradition of Western novels with respect to a wide variety of genres – attempting to demonstrate the same virtuosity in diversity – to exploring problematic Arab realities from within a specific regional and cultural context. The contemporary Arabic novel explores social reality not by imitating Western narrative patterns and strategies nor by

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evoking Arab/Islamic triumphal historical events but by applying a groundbreaking and self-critical approach.6 During the first half of the twentieth century, anti-colonialism was a common theme in many popular and influential Arabic novels that attempted to interpret the different facets of the East–West encounter. More recently, however, Arab novelists have focused on the changing political and social conditions in the post-independence Arab world. In the second half of the twentieth century, they turned their attention to corruption, social dissent, and political upheaval. For some novelists, such as Sonallah Ibrahim and Abdelrahman Munif, their determination to take up such themes with frankness resulted in imprisonment or persecution. In his 1,500-page Cairo Trilogy7 – arguably his most famous work of fiction – Mahfouz depicts life in Cairo through the struggles of one family, across three generations, in the face of enormous social, economic, and political change.

Arab Intellectuals’ Engagement with American Culture For Arab writers, the Western colonial era in the Arab world has engendered a deep desire to free their literary production from Western domination. Their overriding passion is the particularity of their own social and cultural contexts and their own language, with its distinctive idioms, rhetoric and rhythms. For Ibrahim al-Maˆzinıˆ, an Egyptian novelist, ‘the belief that it is desirable for the Arabic novel to be analogous to the Western novel is a mistake; each community has the particularities of its life’.8 Siddiq argues: The Arab novel continues to suffer from the congenital stigma of its putative origins in the West and its subsequent importation into Arab culture under the auspices of Western colonial domination. Many classics of Egyptian (and Arabic) fiction go to great lengths to dramatize the psychological and intellectual paralysis that grips fictional characters who venture into the hazardous terrain of encounter with the cultural ‘Other’.9 Taha Hussein, one of the most prominent Arab intellectual figures in the twentieth century, wrote an introduction to the Arabic translation of his book, Studies in American Literature. Hussein’s introduction exemplifies

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the early work of Arab writers ‘in contact with’ American culture and literature. Written during the period of English and French colonialism, it explores the United States as a model of justice and democracy. The introduction displays an optimistic view of the United States as a positive force for change. Known as the ‘Dean of Arabic literature’, Hussein had already challenged literary traditions in the Arab world by examining classical Arabic poetry and Arabic culture through the lens of modern literary and cultural theories. This shocked many of his contemporaries and provoked attacks against his work, some of which are still invoked today. In his introduction, Hussein argued that Arabs were excluded from American cultural and literary productions by the English and French colonisers who attempted to control not only the natural resources of Arab nations but also their cultural and intellectual resources. Hussein challenged the Arab preconception that Americans were materialistically inclined. He asserted that Americans could not have achieved technological advancement without a strong ethical, cultural, philosophical, and literary foundation. He added that he spent much time trying to convince ‘some educated Egyptians that North Americans have a sublime spiritual life that lies behind their embroilment in the Great World War. Their sole motivation in the two world wars was to safeguard the very same values that have enlightened civilized nations for long.’10 Hussein called for Arabs to be open to all world literatures but especially to American literature, which he claimed could teach important lessons about American values. He also encouraged Americans to be more open to other nations by translating their national literatures into English, advising Americans that in this context it is not enough to introduce yourself to the world through your economic, political and military power since nations are better known through their intellectual achievements. Reverting to military power as the only way to affect the world will result in imaging the US as a monster to be feared rather than a nation to be loved. Fear will produce hatred and dubiety towards you.11 Hussein’s work shows how Arab intellectuals writing in the first half of the twentieth century found in American literature and culture a valuable and inspiring source of knowledge for democratic values.

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However, this perspective began to change in the second half of the twentieth century in response to US military involvement in the Middle East and with the rise of Arab nationalism. Rasheed el-Enany’s Arab Representations of the Occident challenges the claim that Said’s critique of Orientalism (in his Orientalism) focuses exclusively on Western perspectives and neglects to mention the resistance to its distortions and hegemony. However, el-Enany also asserts that Arab culture has never been instinctively anti-Western and that Arabs’ perception of the West has never been static: ‘Unlike their Western counterparts of the colonial age, studied by Edward Said, Arab intellectuals have displayed a very rational and appreciative attitude towards Western culture despite the colonialism of modern times and older clashes.’12 Mahfouz elaborates on the same theme: ‘We were in conflict with the English; we used to demonstrate against them and shout, “Complete independence or violent death!” But at the same time, we valued highly English literature and English thought . . . We made distinction between [Britain’s] ugly colonial face and its radiant civilized one.’13 Mahfouz clearly draws a line between the repercussions of Western foreign policy in the region and Western literary and cultural production. He underscores that, although Arabs may oppose the legacy of Western colonial presence in the Arab world, they are able to appreciate Western values. This reflects an objective attitude towards the West and asserts a civilised approach on the part of many Arab writers. In Orientalism, Said claims that Western knowledge about the Orient is used primarily to serve Western colonial ends: ‘European and then American interest in the Orient was political . . . but that it was the culture that created that interest, that acted dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales to make the Orient the varied and complicated place.’14 El-Enany asserts that Said’s critique of Orientalism came to represent the sole Western perspective and is a perspective that pays no heed to the Orient’s counter-response and resistance to the Western cultural onslaught. The Orient’s perception of the West has always been varied and complex. Some Arab writers are pro-Western whereas others are anti-Western; still others admire Western technological advances while rejecting Western moral stances. Some are Occidentalists in the sense that, like the Orientalists whom Said criticises, they sometimes advance stereotypes and cliche´s and essentialisms. El-Enany presents a systematic, chronologically ordered

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account of Arab writers’ encounters with Western culture, including Alaa al-Aswany and Amani Abu Fadl, the two Egyptian novelists who are the focus of this book.

Alaa al-Aswany I saw 9/11 as a crime, and I have written against it. But I believe that events are always manipulated by regimes for their own purposes. Just as the American government has used Osama Bin Laden to deflect attention away from its own problems, many of the Arab governments used 9/11 to play on anti-American emotions. They were hoping to convert the negative emotions people harbored against their regimes and channel those emotions onto a foreign entity.15 Born in Egypt in 1957 and educated in French schools, Alaa al-Aswany was exposed to Western culture at a young age. The Egyptian dentistturned-writer is not only a novelist (and still a practising dentist) but also a journalist who writes prolifically for Egyptian newspapers on literature, politics, and social issues. It was The Yacoubian Building, his second novel, published in 2002, that brought him worldwide fame. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and in 2006 was made into a film of the same name – an Egyptian production – which has proved as popular as the novel. Through its depiction of residents living in a once-fashionable building in downtown Cairo, The Yacoubian Building delves into the problems of modern Egypt: From the pious son of the building’s doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, to the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy its ground floor, each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt – where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail.16

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After the University of Illinois in Chicago offered him a place in their master’s programme in dentistry, al-Aswany spent three years there, starting in 1985, and travelling in the United States, exploring American culture and society. In 2007, he wrote the novel Chicago, in which he explores the relations among Egyptian scholars living in Chicago. In this work al-Aswany weaves various characters, Egyptian and American, on a single loom to demonstrate their commonalities suffering shared problems. Pluralism is a common theme in al-Aswany’s writings; he acknowledges that literature is more pluralistic in the modern age and that society ought to be so, too. Such views have influenced his perspective on the global war on terrorism, which he sees not as a binary East – West encounter but as a conflict between the majority of human beings and the interests of some groups who are not human at all. Most people are on the human side. They want to work, they want life to be better for their children. Some are artists and thinkers. On the non-human side, you find the big corporations, George Bush and fanatics like Osama Bin Laden. I think human values will overcome in the end. That’s why we are here, after all these centuries. Bush, bin Laden: they have no vision; they see the world through a pinhole. The rest of us, we have a better view. So I’m optimistic.17 Al-Aswany believes that the notion of a clash of civilisations (see Introduction, p.9) is not determined by a reality, by an innate and inevitable radical incompatibility between Islam and Christianity, but functions as a fabricated instrumental element in foreign-policy interests and priorities, which lie behind any conflict. His main concern in his fiction is thus something else, namely uncovering the hidden struggle within Egyptian society between power, religion, and love. He also explores corruption and the abuses of power that permeate society within Egypt as well as Egyptian communities living overseas. In Chicago, for example, al-Aswany depicts two generations of Egyptian immigrants, the older generation’s pessimism and lack of patriotism juxtaposed with the younger generation’s idealism and optimism. The novel portrays different experiences of immigration, mediated by a negotiation with connections to Egypt, the homeland. Characters emerge along the

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spectrum of assimilation: in his determination to become fully ‘Americanised’, one character refuses to acknowledge his Egyptian/Arab roots, while another experiences deep guilt about leaving Egypt to escape its repressive political and social system. In creating the character of Nagi – a student who was once a political detainee – as the firstperson narrator, al-Aswany creates an intimacy with his readers and hints that the novel might be loosely based on real events.

Scene Background: Arab Immigrants as ‘Frozen Cells’ in America’s Melting Pot Stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims focus the attention of many Americans on whatever and whoever seems to correspond to these stereotypes, all too often resulting in a refutation of whatever is inconsistent with the stereotypes. Eyes look around to catch what is not ‘integrated’ and pay less attention to the elements of integration. After 9/11, the representation of Arabs in American media affected Arab/ Muslim immigrants living in the United States, who began to think of themselves as a problem in American life to the extent that many felt compelled to exclude themselves from social and political participation, as if they were second-class citizens or undesirable aliens. Social exclusion with respect to Arabs generally, but more specifically Arabs who are Muslims, is based on notions of the cultural incompatibility of the Arab ‘other’ and the threat he or she presents to the local culture and identity. Manifestations of social exclusion vary according to generational differences among Arab/Muslim immigrants, with the first generation citing broader issues, such as a lack of positive role models for youth, low self-esteem caused by negative media representations, feelings of victimisation, passivity within the community, and isolationism. In Chicago, al-Aswany depicts the social exclusion of these generations of Arab immigrants living in Chicago within a framework encompassing a range of issues including the negative stereotypes associated with 9/11 and its aftermath. Al-Aswany reveals his characters’ different relationships with American values/culture as elements subject to integration and appropriation in their own lives. When immigrants are incapable of interacting with their new society because of social exclusion, community ghettoisation and identity crises (for following generations as well) are a risk. This only serves to

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contribute to ignorance of other cultures, which inevitably results in xenophobia and racism, if not the institutionalisation of intolerance. Arab/Muslim immigrants living in such a situation in the United States find it difficult to abandon their negative self-perception as second-class citizens. This phenomenon exacerbates the social exclusion, resulting in further stereotyping, invisibility, and discrimination. Arab-American writer Joanna Kadi states: ‘It’s tough to name a group when most people aren’t aware the group exists . . . that’s why . . . I coined this phrase for our community: The Most Invisible of the Invisibles.’18 This invisibility is largely imposed on Arab-Americans by non-Arab-Americans, although Arab-Americans sometimes find that, indeed, some of the cultural, political, and religious values of their homeland or family’s homeland are in tension with mainstream American culture. This tension in identity, this duality, is evident in the explanation given by Abdeen Jabara, a lawyer and political activist, about his Arab and American experiences: When I tell my fellow Americans that my immigrant grandfather homesteaded in North Dakota, I am seen as the descendent of a pioneering American. When I say that I was born in Mancelona, Michigan, graduated from Wayne State University’ s Law School in Detroit, I am regarded as an urban professional. When I brag that my brothers have done well in business and local politics, I am congratulated for their success. But when I pronounce my name, I see people pull away. When I reveal that I am a Muslim, they seem to wonder if I might be a terrorist. When I state that I have been politically active on behalf of the Palestinians, they look as if I am surely a terrorist and subversive. My ‘problem’ is that I am an Arab American and, therefore, I am one of my country’s betterkept secrets.19 Jabara’s words refer especially to the way in which Arab-Americans, in the aftermath of 9/11, are caught between two worlds – on the one hand, the American world of which they constitute a part and in which they live and succeed and, on the other hand, the world of a perceived identity marked with discrimination that has suddenly been assigned to them because of their name, appearance, ethnicity, or religion. They are considered ‘good’ citizens until their identity is uncovered through their name or religion, and then they become mere ‘subjects’ (as in ‘subjects of

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the realm’). That is why many Arab-Americans place emphasis on educating their fellow Americans about Arabness as a culture and Islam as a religion. They stress the crucial role that proper representation plays in fostering understanding and bridging the Middle East– West divide. Set in an academic environment, al-Aswany’s Chicago draws attention to education as a primary force and strategic initiative for achieving any possible change in the way Arabs/Muslims are perceived in the United States.

Chicago Evidence suggests that the title of the novel, Chicago, reflects the fact that the city of Chicago has been the scene of a number of important events in American history whose impact is still felt today. During his time as a student in the city, al-Aswany undoubtedly would have met controversial characters and witnessed various events that would have inspired the various plot threads woven into his novel. It is therefore probable that Chicago contains some autobiographical narrative along with biographical sketches of people al-Aswany had met during his stay. One of the characters in Chicago, Nagi Abd al-Samad, a leftist poetscientist, appears to share some characteristics with al-Aswany. Chicago weaves together the stories of various Middle Easterners who ‘anchor their ships’ on the coast of Western civilisation, only to find it in opposition to their values, traditions, cultures, and political systems. Their simultaneous desire for and hatred of Western values generates a clash that bleeds the heart before the body. They are a community of immigrants unable to abandon their Arab culture even after spending decades in the West; the gap between East and West is simply too great for them to bridge. A central allegorical site for this gap between East and West, between ‘self’ and ‘other’, is a science laboratory – al-Aswany invites his readers to consider the ‘other’ as a ‘living cell’ in need of close study. The close study reveals the impossibility of the ‘other’ ever being an exact copy of the ‘self’. When the events of the main plot escalate, alAswany takes his reader to a sub-plot and another ‘living cell’, where different versions of Arab and Arab-American lives and experiences that defy the monolithic image are all too often represented in mainstream US media, Hollywood cinema, and culture. Time, in Chicago, is mostly a time of internal movement, the movement of the characters and events despite the fragmentation of the

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chronological order by the retrieval of history and self. The setting represents a geographical extension of the author’s interest in the dialectical relationship between East and West. Al-Aswany is particularly interested in unravelling the East–West encounter. In his previous novel, The Yacoubian Building, a European-style building built by a Greek architect in downtown Cairo is home to its main characters. The building was originally intended for Egyptian aristocrats who had adopted a Western lifestyle, but soon after the 1952 revolution (which puts an end to the English occupation and the Egyptian monarchy and ushers in the era of Arab socialism under Gamal Abdel Naser), ordinary working-class Egyptians manage to take up residence alongside the Western-influenced Egyptian aristocrats. A scathing satire of Egyptian politics and society, The Yacoubian Building provides a microcosm of modern Egypt, especially with respect to the East–West dichotomy that is very much in evidence in the country. Al-Aswany transfers that dichotomy to the United States of Chicago, with a particular focus on American culture within the East– West divide that Egyptians grapple with. Setting part of Chicago in the department of histology at the School of Medicine is significant. On the one hand, it presents Egyptian scholars dutifully working in a neutral and objective field of study, spending most of their days reflecting on the cells and tissues of the human body, without any political aspiration that might disturb the status quo. (Their daily life, before and after immigration, is vigilantly tracked and monitored via the long arm of political surveillance in their homeland.) On the other hand, the setting suggests the dispersion of Egyptians, each one of the scholars acting as a separate ‘living cell’ surrounded by the residue of hatred and conflict carried over from the troubled Egyptian political and cultural scene. The situation in their home country not only obstructs them from uniting or finding commonalities but ultimately succeeds in dividing them. Like individual living cells, all of the characters live apart, their meetings no more than fleeting moments, never amounting to anything approaching a profound experience. We observe a divided community of Egyptian academics and students living in the United States, struggling to adapt to an American lifestyle while maintaining conflicted relationships with their homeland. The lives of these Egyptian immigrants are constructed around two main emotions: devastating regret at having abandoned one’s country, evidenced in the character of Dr Salah, or

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immense pride and happiness at being a ‘genuine American, pure and without blemish’, as represented by Dr Thabit. By the end of the novel, immense happiness and pride are proven to be illusory. As the character Dr Karam Doss puts it, after 30 homesick years, American life is just like its supermarket fruit, ‘shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless’, reflecting the deep sense of homesickness Egyptian/Arab immigrants harbour despite the veneer of brilliant success they achieve in their adopted country.

Chicago: A Dramatic Plot In the early part of the novel, al-Aswany presents a brief history of the city of Chicago and its environs as a microcosm of the entire United States. He recalls historical events, from the massacres of Native Americans in the seventeenth century to the fire of 1871 that left 300 dead and 100,000 homeless and destroyed $200 million worth of property. The small fire at Mrs O’Leary’s, which spread to engulf the entire city of Chicago, parallels the small fire that one of the novel’s characters accidentally starts. More than that, the accidental fire provides a foundation for the intersection of Egyptian, Egyptian-American, and American characters in a unifying locale – the University of Illinois in Chicago. The novel begins and ends with Shaymaa Muhammadi, a 33-year-old religious, diligent, and intelligent doctoral student in the histology department at the University of Illinois. Shaymaa, who hails from the city of Tanta in Egypt, has a scholarship, funded by the Egyptian government, which allows her to study in the United States and escape ‘the psychological pressures that she is suffering because of her failure to get married . . . as if she were running away from her situation or postponing facing reality’.20 The move from Tanta to Chicago is not easy, especially for a veiled Muslim woman in the post-9/11 era. After her flight lands at O’Hare Airport, she battles feelings of dejection as waves of Americans – men and women ‘streaming forth from all directions’ – shy away from her, because, as she claims, ‘I am Arab and because I am veiled.’ Hostility characterises her first encounter with an American when an airport security officer perceives her as a threat because of her veil. A kitchen accident brings another Egyptian student, Tariq Haseeb, into Shaymaa’s life. Tariq, from a middle-class family in Egypt, is excessively studious. However, his attitudes towards women

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are not above reproach, his desire for physical intimacy apparently fuelling an aggressive streak, and his first encounter with Shaymaa is filled with tension. However, Shaymaa, an idealistic Muslim woman who finds herself wrestling with unmatched grip a world that is completely different from the one she has left behind, is comforted by Tariq and becomes his lover. Like The Yacoubian Building, Chicago has a large cast of characters with various levels of social and psychological depth. Ra’fat Thabit, an Egyptian-American professor of histology, is pursuing the ‘American dream’. He has an American wife, drives a Cadillac, and owns a large house, complete with dog, in an affluent suburb. After 9/11, Thabit publicly denounces fellow Arabs and Muslims, using language that some fanatical Americans may be reluctant to use: ‘The USA has the right to ban any Arab from coming in until it is certain that such a person is civilized and does not think that killing is a religious duty.’21 Thabit expresses his contempt for all that is Egyptian, but he cannot escape his Arab background. He despises his culture and yet carries it with him at the same time. These internal contradictions burst through to the surface when his only daughter, Sarah, decides to move out of the family home and to live with an artist. Thabit cannot bear the thought of his daughter having a sexual relationship outside marriage. He is also shocked when he discovers his daughter has developed a drug addiction after her boyfriend introduced her to drugs. Although he regularly criticises the cultural values relating to marriage and sexuality with which he was raised, when it comes to his daughter, Thabit ultimately cannot shake them off. Muhammad Salah’s character stands in contrast to Thabit’s. After three decades in the United States, Salah is overwhelmed by nostalgia for Egypt. Unable to let go of the past, Salah is described by al-Aswany as a man who had ‘bought American clothes but . . . couldn’t bring himself to get rid of his Egyptian clothes’. Rather than live in the present with his American wife, he retreats to memories of his Egyptian sweetheart Zeinab Radwan, who considers Salah’s immigration to the United States as an escape from national duties. ‘I regret to tell you that you’re a coward’, Zeinab tells him. Her words continue to resonate with Salah, causing him much psychological pain. Salah decides to re-establish links with his homeland and, in a desperate attempt to revisit the political ideals of his youth, he agrees to Nagi Abd al-Samad’s plan that he (Salah) sacrifice his career and disrupt the Egyptian president’s visit to Chicago as an act of protest

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against the president’s oppressive policies. However, Salah is a product of Egypt’s culture of fear created by its police state, and he ultimately surrenders to his fears. Refusing to deliver a statement on rights and freedom before the Egyptian president, Salah fails his fellow Egyptians, a failure he bitterly regrets for the remainder of his life – a life that ends in suicide at the closure of the novel. A former 1960s radical, John Graham is one of Ra’fat Thabit’s colleagues in the histology department. He is a professor of statistics and bears a considerable facial resemblance to the American writer Ernest Hemingway. Graham lives with a younger African-American woman named Carol and her five-year-old son, Mark. Carol experiences racism, is unable to find a job, and is forced to work as a prostitute to earn a living. Another American professor, Dr Dennis Baker, is a towering figure in his field of research and advisor to a corpulent Egyptian student named Ahmed Danana, the head of the Egyptian Students’ Union. A failed student, Danana owes his academic standing to his long-term collaboration with security officials in Egypt. He works for the government intelligence agency by spying on his fellow students, and dreams of securing a good political position back in Cairo. Prepared to do anything to fulfil his dream of achieving power, Danana turns a blind eye to Safwat Shaker’s attempts to sexually abuse Danana’s wife, Marwa. Shaker is a womanising sadist who preys on the poor, broken wives of the Islamist activists he persecutes and imprisons. Al-Aswany heaps bilious contempt on Danana and Shaker, two agents of the corrupt regime in Egypt. Nagi Abd al-Samad, a poet and master’s student of histology, establishes a romantic but short-lived relationship with a JewishAmerican woman, Wendy Schor. During a visit to Professor Graham’s house, al-Samad meets Dr Karam Doss, a Coptic heart surgeon who migrated to Chicago in the 1970s to escape discrimination in Egypt. Doss and al-Samad initially dislike each other, but they eventually become close friends and together conspire to embarrass the Egyptian president while he is visiting Chicago. They encourage Salah to deliver to the president a public petition for democracy and freedom in Egypt. However, their plan fails when Salah, unable to overcome his fear of the Egyptian regime, refuses. Chicago ends tragically. Overcome with remorse for his inability to confront the Egyptian president about the lack of freedom and democracy in Egypt, Salah kills himself. Thabit’s daughter Sarah dies from her drug addiction, while Shaymaa, unmarried

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and pregnant to Tariq Haseeb, resorts to an abortion to avoid a scandal that would haunt her family forever.

Memory, Home, and Exile in Chicago A committed pluralist, al-Aswany has thus far set his novels in locations where extraordinarily diverse individuals face the task of living together without resorting to violence. In The Yacoubian Building, it is an apartment block in downtown Cairo; in Chicago, it is the University of Illinois, where al-Aswany studied dentistry in the 1980s.22 Both Chicago and The Yacoubian Building revolve around two principal forces: a corrupt regime in Egypt that aims to erase the memory of the past, and a people who struggle to keep that past alive to help bring about democratic change. At the heart of Chicago lies the recourse to memory as a political act. In the novel, memory not only serves to keep the past alive but also functions as a lens through which to view the present, which, in turn, helps to secure a more hopeful future. Within the past is the key to identity, which is inescapable. Memory is the link to this identity, which provides a bridge between past, present, and future. Remembering the past allows a more in-depth understanding of the present and hope for the future. Chicago is a striking book that constitutes a bold call for social change in Egypt as well in the United States. It is an Arab attempt to introduce us to the world of Arab expatriates living in the West, particularly in the United States, and to the complexities of the cultural encounters in that world. Sociologist David Pollock defines a ‘third-culture kid’ as ‘an individual who, having spent a significant part of the developmental years in a culture other than the parents’ culture, develops a sense of relationship to all those cultures, while not having full ownership of any’.23 The Lebanese-born French author Amin Maalouf argues that our identity is not straightforward but ‘made up of many components combined together in a mixture that is unique’.24 Moreover, each person is ‘a meeting ground for many different allegiances’, which might be in conflict with each other.25 After residing for a long period in the United States, most characters in Chicago feel an allegiance to the country that allows them to freely pursue their personal and professional lives and reach a level of prosperity not possible in their home country. However, because they continue to feel ties with their country of origin, they may

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be said to have alternative allegiances. This is what Edward Said calls ‘contrapuntal consciousness’ – the double cultural vision gained from being exposed to two or more cultures.26 No matter where they travel or to which country they migrate, many Egyptians carry with them their concerns for Egypt. Chicago traces the journey of a group of Egyptians as they move to and begin to settle in the heart of Chicago. Even when they have succeeded in the United States, their eyes remain directed towards their homeland. This looking back not only involves longing and homesickness but also the hatred and resentment that many feel towards a regime and nation from which they believe they have been expelled or excluded to the point of suffering the humiliation of migrating to a ‘foreign’ land. This hatred and resentment foster a desire for regime change back home. In Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction, Roberta Rubenstein argues that home is not only a physical structure or a geographical location but always an emotional space . . . home is among the most emotionally complex and resonant concepts in our psychic vocabularies, given its association with the most influential, and often most ambivalent, elements of our earliest physical environment and psychological experiences as well as their ripple effect throughout our lives.27 Moreover, Rubenstein asserts that when notions of home, loss, and nostalgia recur in certain narratives, they do so to ‘fix’ the past by attaching it firmly in the recipient’s imagination and simultaneously correct it by revisiting it. In doing so, such narratives can bridge the gap between longing and belonging.28 In Chicago, we witness characters vacillating between past and present and between belonging and longing. They arrive from Egypt with many social, psychological, and political troubles; they attempt to overcome these troubles in Chicago, in the so-called land of the free. But despite the seemingly open environment of Chicago, they remain imprisoned by the ‘limited’ relation to their country of origin. Rubenstein reminds us that, through their characters, authors attempt to bring back or fix the ‘emotional architecture of that multivalent space’.29 In Chicago, al-Aswany continues what he began with his novel The Yacoubian Building – a scathing criticism of contemporary political and

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social developments in Egypt. That Chicago focuses on the stories of a group of Egyptian scholars sponsored by the Egyptian government to study medicine in a histology department is central to his criticism: Histology is a Latin word that means the science that uses a microscope to study living tissue, which forms the basis of medicine since the discovery of treatment of any disease always starts with the study of tissue in its natural state’.30 Chicago, if nothing else, is about disease – social disease. The novel is set during a period of confrontation between the United States on the one hand and Arabs and Muslims on the other. It is a time when Arabs/ Muslims are subjected to American imperialism under the guise of a global war on terrorism. But Chicago neither begins nor ends with the events of 9/11; rather, it moves back and forth between past and present, between the United States and the Arab world. The use of the words ‘past’ and ‘present’ here accords with the actual divisions of time, but the reality of time in the novel, despite the clarity of those rebounds between past and present, seems a single seamless space. Time for the present generation of young scholars is paralleled by the past and present of the old generation of professors, which is wider than the time of the young generation according to the physical mechanism that counts the ongoing passage of time. Experiences, practices, and conflicts are open to all times, regardless of this real – mechanically measured – division of time. The real value of time is measured not by the passage of sequential events but by the depth of the characters and the magnitude of their struggles, conflicts, and interactions with the surrounding world. In the novel, place is not limited to the city of Chicago, although the city is the main centre of the narrative. Al-Aswany’s setting traverses a broad historical spectrum as he takes readers from the Chicago of the past with the seventeenth-century struggles of Native Americans to the Chicago of the present with its giant skyscrapers and racism towards AfricanAmericans. Al-Aswany’s Egypt, depicted through the various immigrant characters, is also diverse, from the simple Egyptian city of Tanta to more-bustling Egyptian urban centres. There is a love of place in Chicago, whether it is a large city such as Chicago or a small confined area such as the School of Medicine at the University of Illinois. The unifying, common characteristic between time and place is the

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individual character facing social injustice and political oppression: whether in the past or present, whether in a bustling modern city in the United States or a dark and desperate prison in Egypt. Through the oscillations of time and the spatial heterogeneity lies a rejection and repudiation of political persecutions in all forms and manifestations, which constitutes an important link between the various times and spaces and generations. In opening his novel with a simple retelling of Chicago’s history, al-Aswany reveals the greatness and glamour of the city to be sure, but scarcely conceals the tragically violent and racist trajectory of American history as it concerns Native Americans and African-Americans, both past and present. The novel renders a ‘histological’ study, comparing the new generation of Egyptian researchers with the older generation of Egyptians who migrated to the United States in the 1960s to escape political oppression or religious persecution. The two generations face similar problems globally and regionally but exhibit diversity in their political ideologies and intellect. Immigrants in al-Aswany’s novel are of two types: ‘native’ and ‘foreign’. Examples of native immigrants in the novel are the American-born professors. They are born and raised in America but nonetheless are like immigrants in their own homeland because they suffer the adverse effects of a dog-eat-dog laissez-faire capitalist system. Examples of foreign immigrants are the Egyptian professors, who suffered in Egypt but continue to suffer after they migrate. Although most of their life is spent in the United States, they remain homesick. In The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Rosemary Marangoly George argues that home, ‘along with gender/sexuality, race, and class, acts as an ideological determinant of the subject’.31 In her view, the term ‘home country’ represents the ‘intersection of private and public and of individual and communal that is manifest in imagining a space as home’.32 Chicago is formed at the junction of intimate relationships between men and women. Through these relationships, we observe the characters attempting to resolve the political problems prevalent in their communities, despite the failures they sometimes encounter. The many male– female entanglements wherein men and women disclose the emptiness of their relations suggest that these relations can only lead to separation and disaster, perhaps to an extent because of personal incompatibility but more remarkably because of the societal context and power that impinge

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upon their lives, as well as depression and alienation – normative manifestations of a bourgeois lifestyle.

The Conflicts of Binaries Chicago revolves around three main axes: sex, power, and alienation, which many characters experience, coming as they do from different countries and social strata. Specific locations provide a framework for the author’s managing the debates, events, and people in the novel. With these axes in mind, we are introduced to Shaymaa Muhammadi, who is rooted in the rural history of Tanta, a city in Egypt. When Shaymaa is cooking Egyptian food in her apartment in Chicago, smoke rises from the vessel of bubbling oil, triggering the apartment’s fire alarm. With this scene – a warning on several levels – al-Aswany begins to reveal his characters. When the commotion calms down, we meet the rich world of characters: Egyptians, Americans, and EgyptianAmericans, the latter representing a range of attitudes and cultural traits of both Egypt and America. From its beginning, Chicago illuminates the conflict between binaries, whether the binary of citizencountry or man-self. This poses a serious question about the nature of migration: Does it occur only from one’s homeland, or does a parallel migration occur – from the ‘self’? Alienation emerges in Chicago as a deep trauma exacerbated by the distance from the homeland. The migrant characters bring with them unresolved stories, whether positive or tragic, for which they seek closure in a new land where the parameters of freedom appear more expansive and control over their lives appears more certain. In Chicago we see divided characters, torn between their past and their present. Whether social climber Ahmed Danana, revolutionary Nagi Abd al-Samad, ruthless intelligence agent Safwat Shaker, or cowardly fugitive Muhammad Salah, each is a ‘living cell’ – a separate entity. The reader is in search of and eagerly follows up on not only the fate of those characters but his/her own fate that they exemplify.

Political Reality It is notable that in Chicago there is a strong identification and connection between the author and reader. This occurs through the

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living characters, who have rich, multifaceted ideas. Al-Aswany also inserts a note on page 6 of the Arabic edition stating that ‘pages and paragraphs that are italicized and written in bold are a replica of the notes written by Nagi Abd al-Samad during his trip’.33 This authorial intrusion, along with the autobiographical elements and the fact that alAswany is a political activist, results in a novel closely related to the current political reality in Egypt. Nagi Abd al-Samad makes a direct analysis of the Egyptian political situation that, in all likelihood, is largely the author’s own personal analysis. Other characters also share observations that could arguably be alAswany’s personal views. The current Egyptian political and social arena is the outcome of ‘repression, poverty, oppression, having no hope in the future, the absence of any national goal: Egyptians have given up on justice in this world, so they are waiting for it in the next.’34 This is how Egypt is described by Zeinab, whose work as an idealistic student activist caused a rift in her relationship with her former lover, Salah. These words by Zeinab parallel the mindset of many Egyptians expatriots. Illuminating the deficiencies of Arab society overall, not merely those found in Egypt, is at the core of al-Aswany’s novel. Chicago compares the mentalities of three different groups: Egyptians/Arabs, Egyptian/Arab-Americans, and non-Arab non-Egyptian-Americans. The 9/11 attacks have affected all of them. The global war on terrorism has hardened the American public’s phobia about Arabs and Muslims and added to the immigrants’ feelings of alienation. Deep-rooted loyalty to one’s country, whatever the circumstances, is in evidence, as are the connections between home stability and citizen loyalty. The inner workings of Arab educational missions are less than laudable. Opportunists are at the head of these missions. It is notable that Nagi Abd al-Samad, the Egyptian political activist, has a romantic relationship with a Jewish girl (Wendy). In creating this relationship, al-Aswany is suggesting that, in the Middle East, religion may not be as critical a cause of conflict as one might think. At one point, Nagi tells Wendy: Read the history. Jews lived under Arab rule for many centuries without problems or persecution. They even enjoyed the trust of Arabs, as evidenced by the fact that, for a period of a thousand years, an Arab sultan’s personal physician was most likely to be a

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Jew . . . In Muslim Spain, Jews lived as citizens that had full rights, and when Andalusia fell into the hands of the Christian Spaniards, they persecuted both Muslims and Jews. They gave them the choice between Christianity and death. Then they went as far as coming up with the Inquisition for the first time in history, to get rid of Jews and Muslims who had recently converted to Christianity. The priests would ask them theological questions, and when they failed to answer, they gave them the choice between being burned or drowned.35 Al-Aswany is suggesting that the most important element contributing to the division between Arabs and Jews is the absence of trust. He invites both parties to reread history in order to confront their current problems more responsibly and constructively. He also emphasises that terrorism has no religion and is not confined to a certain culture or nation.

The United States through the Eyes of al-Aswany Here they use genetic engineering to make the fruit much larger and yet it doesn’t taste so good. Life in America, Nagi, is like American fruit: shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless.36 These are the words of one of al-Aswany’s characters, Dr Karam Doss, an Egyptian physician who achieves brilliant success in the United States but nevertheless thinks that ‘all success outside one’s homeland is deficient’. It is interesting to see Egyptian-Americans’ inability to feel the happiness of success in America away from their motherland, while believing in the inability to achieve this success should they choose to stay in Egypt. This contradiction is all around them. America itself is full of contradictions. As Nagi Abd al-Samad, the narrator of the story, says: ‘kind Americans who treat strangers nicely . . . who help you . . . and thank you profusely for the slightest reason? Do they realize the horrendous crimes their governments commit against humanity?’37 America is depicted as a peaceful society with an aggressive government. The positive side of America that al-Aswany portrays in Chicago may shock many Arab readers, who suffer on account of unbalanced US

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policies in the Middle East. But one must realise that throughout Chicago al-Aswany is more concerned with the trials and tribulations faced by all humans and the possibility of achieving political change through the will of the people. He reveals both Arabs and Americans as being humane, compassionate, and empathic towards one another. He differentiates between the policy-making United States and the United States of people with everyday problems and issues. He portrays Americans as victims of the media, a media almost as biased and as controlled by government as that in some Middle Eastern countries. However, in Chicago, al-Aswany often offers an uninformed narrative about the United States, its people, and its academic life. The Egyptian author appears to have gleaned most of his knowledge about the city of Chicago and the United States from old Hollywood movies. Originally written in Arabic, Chicago’s target audience was Egyptian/Arab readers; however, due to the international acclaim garnered by The Yacoubian Building, Chicago was later translated into English for an international audience, and this secondary audience cannot be ignored. In Chicago, al-Aswany seems determined on many occasions to simply reinforce his target audience’s rather stereotypical expectations and views of the United States, with little attention to its nuances. He paints the United States as a place where dreams can be fulfilled but also as a place marred by capitalist greed and rampant racism – not much different from the greed and racism exploited by dictatorial regimes to dispose of political activists such as Nagi Abd al-Samad. Although the scenario in Chicago is not completely unrealistic, the novel does suggest that the circumstances are typical of the United States and its political climate. Also, by establishing a black female as a character who can survive only by selling her body, within the context of American history, al-Aswany is verging on racial victimisation and negative stereotyping. In fact, while eroding stereotypes about Arabs/Muslims, al-Aswany appears at times to be reinforcing – if not inventing – negative stereotypes about the United States and Americans. Americans (non-Arab-Americans) in Chicago are often rendered as Arabs ‘at heart’ but with American names. This is evident in various conversations between Professor Graham and Carol, an African-American woman who faces racist attitudes while looking for a job in Chicago. In painting Carol as a helpless and desperate victim with no other choice than to accept a job that compromises her integrity, al-Aswany analogises her to a helpless Middle Eastern woman. Assuming

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that authors reveal themselves through their characters, this is another indicator that, when he lived in Chicago, al-Aswany remained on the margins of a community to which he did not really belong – namely, American society. In his novel, al-Aswany attempts to analyse this Western society by applying a kind of counter-Orientalism, that is Occidentalism in the sense of looking at the Occidental ‘other’ in the same narrow, confining, and cliche´d manner by which the Orientalist all too often looks at the Oriental ‘other’. He delves into American history and its figures, only to view them through the eyes of a Middle Eastern writer determined, above all else, to discredit Orientalism. In particular, with some of the more controversial issues in Chicago – such as racism and laissez-faire capitalism – al-Aswany’s novel reads less like fiction than a polemic of counter-Orientalism – that is, Occidentalism.

Birds of the South Birds of the South by Amani Abu Fadl38 introduces readers to the divided community of Arab expatriates living in multicultural New York, although overall the city emerges as a generic, typical American city. The Muslim minority is fragmented by religious, sectarian, class, and racial differences. A romance and love are used as a metaphor for freedom and religious tolerance, an experimental zone in which the dynamics between an Arab/Muslim Shi‘i woman and an Arab/Muslim Sunni man are explored and bridged. Birds of the South, an endearing blend of rich melodrama and criticism of self-righteous political and religious views, illustrates how members of one Islamic sect refuse to recognise members of other sects as being fellow Muslims. These divisions, and the overarching climate of religious hypocrisy, play out on the busy streets of New York. Birds of the South has a structure and broad canvas similar to those of Chicago. The religious and political plots are interspersed with tender tales of unexpected love between the Shi‘i woman and the Sunni man, notwithstanding the discriminatory hatred that attempts to end the relationship. As with Chicago, the characters are drawn from the comfort of their own culture into a more troubled world of exile. The atmosphere of freedom in the United States strips the Arab/Muslim characters of their fantasies, prejudices, and limitations, and leaves them laid bare. The novel’s introduction raises the question: Is the crisis of our nation

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the product of the ‘other’? Through her characters and plots, Abul Fadl explores the absence of both democracy and freedom of expression in the Arab world, and suggests that ethnic and sectarian divisions lie behind what she considers conservatism and repression in the Arab world. The novel conveys a warning that these divisions represent the real danger within the Arab/Muslim world; it also implies that these divisions have been subjected to a long history of Western manipulation, aimed at weakening Arab/Muslim influence and empowering imperialist aspirations in the Middle East and North Africa. The schism between Sunnis and Shi’ites reflected in Birds of the South dates back to the seventh century when a dispute erupted over who would succeed the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. While Sunnis regard the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali as the fourth and last of the caliphs,39 Shi’ites believe that Ali was named as the first caliph and that his descendants are therefore divinely ordained to lead the Muslim nation. Over centuries, the gap between Sunnis and Shi’ites has widened, with differences relating to ritual, jurisprudence, and Islamic doctrines increasing with the passage of time. Shi’ites form a majority in Iran, Bahrain, and Iraq. They constitute a substantial minority in Lebanon, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

Plot Salah, a young religious Sunni Egyptian from Upper Egypt, manages to make his way to the United States – the land of dreams – to work as a physiotherapist. He lives with an Iraqi family, who he later discovers are Shi’ite. Salah soon engages in Islamic activities in New York, where he experiences difficulties with contentious sects and Islamic groups in ways he has never experienced in his tranquil home city of Aswan on the banks of the Nile. Salah finds himself in a harmonious relationship with the Iraqi Jawad, but knowing that Jawad is a Shi’ite also makes him feel conflicted between the respect and love he feels for the Shi’ite Iraqi family with whom he lives and the hatred towards Shi’ites instilled in him by Sunni fundamentalists. Salah’s Sunni friends, Ibrahim and Diaa, consider Shi’ites worse than ‘Zionists’.40 Although Salah likes Jawad and his family, he continues to feel uncomfortable about his relationship with them. Even an encounter with a religious teacher, Sheikh Hassan, who explains the historical commonalities and the solidarity between Sunnis and Shi’ites, does not ease Salah’s discomfort, and he decides to move elsewhere.

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However, after Salah moves out, he and the family continue to maintain good relations, and their friendship deepens until the events of 9/11 come into play, stirring up feelings of hatred towards all Muslims and Arabs – whether Sunni, Shi’ite, or Arab Christian. Amidst this animosity that 9/11 has forced upon all Muslims, the love story of Salah and Laila unfolds, when they decide to marry, despite the critical attitudes of friends and acquaintances and the escalation of tension between Shi’ites and Sunnis. This becomes apparent in the chapter ‘Umm el Maarek’ (‘Mother of All Battles’), a term Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, used to describe the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, claiming it as an Iraqi territory (actually a province). This gave the United States justification for becoming involved in the conflict. Initially, it was an Arab– Arab conflict, and Abu Fadl shows how other parties used this conflict to fuel hostility between Sunnis and Shi’ites through contentious public debate. After tensions escalate between the two sects, the Sunni Sheikh Hassan and the Shi’ite Mr Mustafa agree to meet for a peaceful dialogue. They want to establish a committee to bridge the gap between the two sects in the diaspora. However, the hand of treachery undermines this reunification. The novel ends tragically when Laila is killed on her wedding day, a victim of the conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites. At Laila’s funeral, the bereaved crowd, realising the futile destructiveness wrought by sectarian discord, are unified by her tragic death.

The Fictional ‘Arab’ New York City Many Arab novelists adopt an ‘Arabised’ approach, as evident, for example, in the works of Abdelrahman Munif, especially his Cities of Salt, which show a preoccupation with the traditional themes of desert life and culture. The social and political disasters that followed 9/11 encouraged writers such as al-Aswany and Abul Fadl to deviate from that literary tradition and to focus instead on contemporary settings and social concerns. According to American author Stefan G. Meyer, this has ‘led to experiments on the part of some authors with a radical fragmentation of form, in an attempt to express the sense of complete dislocation caused by the conflict’, the objective being to ‘disrupt the relation between the reader and narrative voice in order to create a heightened level of awareness on the part of the reader towards the

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subject matter that they wish to convey’.41 It is notable that Abul Fadl is able to provide a novel of ideas without falling into the trap of being overly didactic or ‘preachy’, although directness is a prominent feature in her work. In Birds of the South, Abul Fadl creates at least the main characters – Salah, Jawad, and Leila – as compelling, convincing, and complex human beings, not fictional cardboard cut-outs whose role is to do little more than declaim certain ideas (as is the case with the characters Ibrahim, Diaa, and al-Safawi). Abul Fadl sets her novel in the city of New York, a melting pot much like Chicago where presumably there is freedom and justice for all, with many cultures and nationalities living and working together without fear, hatred, or clashes. However, it emerges as a place where hatred and religious fanaticism thrive among a group of Arab/Muslim immigrants. Unlike Chicago, the reader rarely encounters American characters contributing to the main plot or sub-plots in Birds of the South. Abul Fadl presents New York as an Arab city in the United States where street names and place names are the only reminders that this novel is set outside the Arab region of the Middle East. When Salah asks Jawad to take him to a mosque where he believes he can socialise, Jawad takes him to a street with two mosques side by side: one for the Sunni community (the mosque of Ahl el-Sunnah wal-Aljama’a or Adherents to the Sunnah and the community) and the other (the mosque of Bilal bin Rabah) not for Sunnis. Salah is surprised, given that ‘the neighborhood is mighty big geographically, and it doesn’t have any other mosques, so why did he who built the second mosque choose it to be adjacent to the first’. When he later discovers Jawad praying in another mosque in New Jersey, Salah is further surprised, pointing out to Jawad that it would take ‘an hour to reach your mosque, while the mosque is here on the corner’. The Sunni– Shi’ite conflict, evident in the separation of their places of worship, has been transferred from homeland across transnational boundaries. Unwittingly, Salah begins to decipher the map of sectarian differences. Bilal bin Rabah mosque, with its run-down appearance, represents the ‘Nation of Islam’ (for predominantly African-Americans), whereas the the mosque of Ahl el-Sunnah wal-Aljama’a is the place of worship for the more universal Sunni community. However, there are two further divisions within the Sunni mosque itself. One of these two divisions is headed by Ibrahim, an Egyptian military deserter, and Diaa, a Pakistani from a poor family, whose funding for his expensive tuition

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at American universities remains a mystery. Both are radicals in upholding the trivial while terrorising anyone who debates them intellectually. However, they believe that religion has nothing to do with politics and should be kept within the mosque. Anyone who disagrees with them is ousted from the Saved Group, which the two represent. They persistently raise age-old issues of Islamic religious thought, such as the debate about the creation of the Qur’an issue and the views of the al-Asha’ira.42 Sheikh Hassan represents the other division in the Sunni mosque from Gaza, who fought the Israelis alongside the popular resistance in Suez in 1967, under the leadership of Sheikh Hafiz Salama. Sheikh Hassan finds that the areas of agreement with the Shi’ite other are far more numerous than their points of difference and that the purpose of dialogue between various groups and sects should be to search for common ground rather than to raise issues of difference. Put another way, for Hassan, the purpose of dialogue should not be to attempt to ‘dissolve’ the other party into one’s own melting pot. The Committee of Muslim Community Support, of which Hassan is one of the most prominent activists, contributes to the education of youth and children through camps, sports, and teaching the Arabic language and the Qur’an. Hassan’s friend, a Turkish man, considers the committee the most important institution serving Islam and Muslims in New York, whereas Ibrahim and Diaa consider it the ‘House of Satan, where women participate as activists, and some men are of shaven beards, and where they have art exhibitions, sublime concerts, albeit within the limits of Islam! And the worst thing about it is talking about politics.’43

Sectarianism and Extremism Know No Religion In New York, Salah becomes acquainted with an Orthodox Christian couple, Sobhi and Mona, when he delivers them a letter on behalf of their Egyptian son-in-law, Salah’s friend Munir. Munir has displeased his mother-in-law by taking her daughter (Munir’s wife) back to Egypt with him. Through his kindness and sense of humour, Salah manages to charm the older couple, with whom he shares an admiration for the renowned Egyptian poet Abdel Rahman al-Abnoudi. Thereafter, they meet to read together the poetry of al-Abnoudi in the Upper Egyptian dialect, which gives each of them a sense of having never left Egypt.

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Salah discovers that Christian Copts are not a united group. For example, Zaki and his son Michael trade in what they call ‘the problem of Copts in Egypt’. They argue that there is an Islamic plan, implemented by the Egyptian government, ‘aimed at making an ethnic cleansing of Egypt’s indigenous people’.44 Zaki and Michael even claim the existence of massacres that never happened, in order to win American public opinion and urge American military intervention in Egypt on behalf of its Christians. They also view the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria in Egypt as a traitor, because he prevents Christians from going to Jerusalem as long as it is occupied by Israel.45 On the other hand, despite his weak character, Sobhi opposes Zaki and his son in inciting hatred and propagating an extremist viewpoint. The Copt versus Copt conflict in New York coincides with a Muslim Sunni–Shi’ite divide over claims of belonging to the Saved Group.46 When Salah discovers that Jawad and his family are Shi’ite, he is so disturbed that he decides to move away, but his reaction is mainly due to the influence of the prejudiced Diaa and Ibrahim. Diaa confides in Salah about his discriminatory attitudes towards Shi’ites, saying that people do not realise that ‘nine-tenths of this nation are non-Muslims’, that meat slaughtered by Shi’ites ‘is not permissible, since they are not even from the People of the Book’, that they ‘do not worship God, but worship the Imams’, and that ‘the Zionist is a clear enemy, while Shi’ites constitute a hidden one’.47 Salah falls into a deep confusion. Unable to reach a decision, he goes to Sheikh Hassan, who assures him that ‘our permanent fault is the lack of knowledge. Shi’ites are of various groups and sects, and each one has a separate rule.’ Salah asks Hassan, ‘Do you accuse them of infidelity, as Ibrahim and Diaa did?’ Hassan responds, ‘I do not accuse anyone of disbelief, God forbid, and what Ibrahim and Diaa did is just like your stance which is based on no knowledge.’ Salah replies, ‘But Diaa told me that they harbor disbelief and demonstrate faith, so how do you judge them?’ Hassan replies, ‘I judge people according to their outward behavior since we are forbidden to split their hearts to see their intentions.’48 Salah returns home to find Jawad and Leila sitting in the park. Jawad is reading the Qur’an in a pleasant voice, imitating the famous Egyptian reciter Sheikh al-Hosiery. Salah casts off Ibrahim and Diaa’s influence and restores his friendship with Jawad. When he accompanies Jawad to al-Hadi Mosque – the Shi’ite mosque in New Jersey – Salah discovers

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there are two groups there, too: a moderate group led by Mr Mustafa Anwar, a Lebanese who studied in Iraq and fought alongside the resistance in Lebanon, and a narrow-minded extremist group headed by Sheikh Ali al-Safawi. Salah discovers the existence of non-observant Christians, Sunnis, and Shi’ites and of Zionists fighting Islam and Muslims. Moreover, he realises that the 9/11 attacks have left some Americans with the desire to eradicate all that is Arab, Muslim, or Eastern. A radical American assaults Leila in the street, and others attempt to break into the Christian home of Sobhi and Mona, with the intention of murdering them. After the attempted break-in, Mona fights with Sobhi, accusing him of carelessness: ‘You’re the reason, O Sobhi! I told you to attach the cross on the door of the house from the first day they began the attack on Muslims’ houses.’ Sobhi replies, ‘I will not do that; they want to kill us because we are Arabs, so do you want me to hang on the Star of David on our door?’49 In Birds of the South, extremists from all sides exacerbate the clash and rupture in the Arabic-speaking community. Surprisingly, in the poisonous atmosphere, love does grow – between devout Sunni Salah and religious Shi’ite Leila. Salah asks Jawad for Leila’s hand in marriage, but it is a marriage opposed by the whole community. For the first time, extremists from both sides agree on one thing: the marriage would be a catastrophe. They organise a public debate between Sunnis and Shi’ites at the Holiday Inn, which, says Mr Mustafa: is owned by Robert Cohen. I bet that he gave you the room free of charge, and might have paid for you to do this mockery of religious dialogue, in order to call newspapers and television stations to show the backwardness of Muslims and their culture, who deserve nothing but genocide, invasion, and the loss of their undeserved wealth.50 At the debate, Dr Adnan, head of the Muslim Community Support Committee, admits, ‘I am terrified of what happened, those people are neither Shi’ites nor Sunnis; they are paid.’ It seems that Dr Adnan’s fears are well founded, when the American–Middle Eastern Cooperation Organization offers to sponsor the activity and turn it into a monthly debate. Sheikh al-Safawi proudly announces that the organisation ‘hired us and Sunnis as experts, and made us a fixed budget allocated to our

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travel throughout the United States of America, and to extend our debates to Europe too.’51 Following these negative images of extremists on both sides, the author of Birds of the South shows his readers that hope does exist, as represented by moderates on both sides. A dialogue between Sheikh Hassan and Mr Mustafa leads to genuine debate between the two sects. They eventually discover common ground and clarify the points of difference that could constitute a barrier between the two sects. They agree on the need to initiate a committee in the diaspora to teach Sunnis and Shi’ites about their commonalities and about the ways to deal with points of difference. Abul Fadl’s Birds of the South suggests that political regimes in Arab and Muslim countries – as well as in the West – have had a long interest in expanding the rifts between adherents of differing religions and sects and in strengthening extremism on all sides. Dr Adnan declares: Oh my God! I have not seen hatred fomenting and filling our lives as it is doing now. When I shook hands with Jawad at the symposium, Kuwaitis rebelled against me . . . Why? Because he is from Iraq! They didn’t notice that he is here because of his being a victim of the same regime that destroyed our country! They forgot that I myself was a victim of the same regime . . . my uncle and my cousin are still prisoners in Iraq and we do not know anything about them. Whoever leads us to this hatred is for sure neither an Arab nor a Muslim; it is a devil! We no longer worship God, rather we worship princes, leaders and Sheiks. We lost our monotheistic faith and we all become polytheists.52 Despite the atmosphere of hatred, anger, rivalry, and rejection, Salah and Leila insist on going ahead with their wedding and travelling to Aswan in the south of Egypt for their honeymoon. Many shun the couple’s wedding, and so Salah takes his bride to the Brooklyn Bridge, which he has loved since his arrival New York. As they discuss Aswan and the Nile, and their dreams for the future and having children, they begin to forget the sorrow wrought by the inflamed and bigoted atmosphere they have left behind. However, although love allows Salah and Leila to forget the hatred surrounding them, the religious hatred does not forget them. Two masked men interrupt the loving couple; they attack Leila, stabbing her in the neck and killing her. In the sectarian, post-9/11 Islamophobic

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climate of hostility, the two lovers are prevented from a ‘common’ shared life together. Although many shunned Leila’s wedding, the repentant Muslim community of more than 3,000 Sunnis and Shi’ites attend the funeral. Even Michael is there to console Salah on behalf of Sobhi and his wife Mona and to give condolences to Leila’s family on behalf of the church in New York.

Conclusion Chicago provides an image of Arab/Muslim immigrants that, despite its many true aspects, does not do justice to the many successful immigrants who are more cohesive and resolute in their lives throughout the diaspora. The novel sticks to certain perceptions of Arabs/Muslims; virtually all of the characters are stereotypes compatible with Western negative views about Arabs and Muslims. Even the revolutionary Nagi Abd al-Samad seems weak and broken in front of his Jewish girlfriend, who appears more powerful than he. Does al-Aswany want to seriously interrogate an essentialising binary of Arabs/us and the West/them? Most probably the novel is written for the Arab reader, and the writer is bound to unite with the other West, by supporting his statements and scenarios. So the story features Arab characters who stimulate the appetite of Western publishing houses and pay an impetus to further tarnish the image of Arabs and Muslims. Although most of al-Aswany’s American characters are intolerant, some are not. There is Graham, who calls for a pluralistic and open approach towards other cultures and defends the rights of minorities. Through such characters, al-Aswany implies a division between cultured Americans and their government’s policymakers. Throughout Chicago, al-Aswany refers to the political coalition between totalitarian Arab regimes and the United States, and condemns both American intolerance and dictatorial and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. Al-Aswany’s characters in Chicago emerge, as they do in The Yacoubian Building, from the Egyptian street, revealing its pulse and speaking its language. In Chicago we witness citizens in crisis. For various reasons, they have chosen to leave their homeland and seek a better life only to face the cruelty of alienation. In Chicago, the character Ra’fat Thabit disassociates from all that is Egyptian; instead, he throws himself into American culture, glorifying its values and venerating its

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ideals. However, in the hidden depths of such a character, love for the homeland continues to survive. For Ra’fat Thabit, this internal conflict reaches its peak after the loss of his daughter Sarah – an outcome of the collapse of his Arab values and ideals, which he has tried for decades to smother. Al-Aswany’s novels have a cinematic quality, with sexual content, and as such they invite comparison with many contemporary US/ Western texts. Abul Fadl’s novels are didactic and rooted in moral values, whereas al-Aswany’s writing is more inclined to delve into human emotions and lay them bare. The characters in Abul Fadl’s novels become lost in the contemplation of the tragedy of sectarianism between Sunnis and Shi’ites. There is an obvious criticism of political and moral corruption and its consequences for ordinary people at the mercy of ignorant leaders – whether Sunni or Shi’ite. In presenting the bare bones of life, al-Aswany helps us reach an understanding of contemporary Egypt and ‘modern’ imperialism; Abul Fadl, however, criticises the passivity and ignorance of Arab/Muslim society, which modern imperial powers can exploit to gain control over the Arab dispersed body. Both authors examine the current situation in the Arab world through a lens of materialistic motives masked by the collusion between imperial interests, dictatorial regimes, and religious interests. Roger Allen wrote that, in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘the majority of Arabic novelists chose to engage . . . social and political realities in the most obviously available fictional mode, that of realism’.53 Both al-Aswany and Abul Fadl adopt a realist approach in their tales of Arab/Egyptian migrant communities in Chicago and New York, respectively. Both take their characters to America to determine whether they can cast off the identities into which they were born and become fully ‘Americanised’. It is worth noting that some of the characters in both Chicago and Birds of the South fail to achieve a satisfactory balance between their Arab and American selves. Moreover, both authors fail to separate themselves from their narratives and to allow their characters to reveal the story. This is despite the authors’ attempts to portray the main characters’ viewpoints as neither the same as nor different from their own. This is due to the realist approach, which is clear in both novels. A literary critic of modern Arabic fiction, Fabio Caiani has said that:

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the metaphor of art as a mirror held up to the world is generally still valid . . . even if at times the mirror which the innovative Arabic novel holds up has two glasses – one reflecting the world and the other itself and its own history, with reference to the non-Arabic novel and the Arab literary heritage. The nature of such texts seems to be further enriched (and complicated) by a necessity born out of certain socio-political circumstances typical of the Arab world.54 In considering al-Aswany and Abu Fadl on balance and within the framework of modern Arabic novelists overall, it is important to concede that complete objectivity for a literary critic is inconceivable. Personal likes and dislikes, religious and political commitments, and the complex nature of the literary work itself tend to disturb the objectivity of any ideal critic. Moreover, it is not always profitable for literary artists to draw upon the past. The Zeitgeist or spirit of the contemporary age is often more appealing. But writers are inclined to choose subjects from the world of their own experience. The works of the past may embody cultural or symbolic meanings, which are not fully clear to any artist and may emerge only through historical or other cultural perspectives. Thus, it is difficult to compare the works of the past with contemporary ones, as the historical and cultural context is totally different. Moreover, sometimes the works of the past are read in a new way that matches the contemporary scene that is itself different from the old one. Artists may not be conscious of all of the motives that attend their own work as they write; hence, new interpretations of their work are possible at different times. This is evident in Shakespearean plays that are still subject to different readings. We find writers such as Tom Stoppard and others rewriting the Shakespearean tragedies, adding to them a new tone that fits this present age.55 Thus, in different time periods, with different cultural perspectives, we can arrive at different readings of works. However, any literary work, even the most meagre, will necessarily refer to and draw on preceding works in its genre, in its culture and traditions, since any work is inevitably part of the circulation of discourse in its culture. Although some are really impressed by the two writers presented here, overall the jury is still out on them. Judging the objectivity of Chicago and Birds of the South, as expressions of the Oriental’s experience in the Occident with the Occidental ‘other, is very difficult, because objectivity itself is not a neutral category, is in fact impossible, because of factors I have cited.

CHAPTER 2 THE UNITED STATES IN CONTEMPORARY ARAB MEDIA AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE

Until the mid-twentieth century, representations of the West in the Arab world were always of Europe. In Arab Representations of the Occident: East–West Encounters in Arab Fiction, Rasheed el-Enany states that Europe constitutes ‘the geographic home of the colonial powers which dominated the Arab world for so long and challenged it with their different worldview’.1 Arabs first encountered the United States through Hollywood; it was a ‘soft’ encounter that has had a profound impact on Arabs’ perception of America as the promised land. It may be true that since its inception the distorted lens of Hollywood has always vilified Arabs/Muslims, but at the beginning Arabs were more concerned with knowing this remote ‘other’ than with how this ‘other’ was portraying them. After 1945, a long period of mistrust and misrepresentation began. The deadly attacks in New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001 and the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that this period of mistrust and misrepresentation had culminated in hostility between the Arab/Muslim world and the United States. The 9/11 attacks were followed by an anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment in the US media, which was transmitted instantly to the Arab world via Al Jazeera and other Arab media outlets. This view has prompted many calls in the Arab world for a new dialogue between ‘us’ and ‘them’, evidenced by the launch of English-language media outlets, such as Al Jazeera English, and of English version of newspapers, such as

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Al-Masry Al-Youm (Egypt Independent). Many Arabs believe that dialogue with the West should take a clear political, religious, and racial form. They believe that an unambiguous knowledge of the realities of the Arab world is essential for new understandings. Politically, the majority of Arabs and Muslims strongly oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq. Religiously, they believe Islam’s image in America has been distorted by claims that Islam is the primary source of all terror and that this image needs correcting. Racially, they believe that Americans need to recognise that not all Arabs are Muslims and that not all Muslims are Arabs. Incidents that may be isolated or appear trivial can reflect the larger intellectual climate in the Arab world within a historical and political context often neglected, misunderstood, or ignored by proponents of the clash of civilisations theory.2 Understanding Arab views, and the complex ways in which Arab media has represented and shaped those views, can lead to a broader understanding of how Arab reactions to US foreign policy and US media have shaped perceptions of the West in the Arab world. Over the past 60 years, the dominating issue in the US – Middle East encounter has been the Arab– Israeli conflict and its consequences. Even the invasion of Iraq was seen by some Arabs as a way to protect Israel from Saddam Hussein, who had threatened to attack Israel.3 On Al Jazeera English in 2009, Ahmed Janabi stated, ‘For many Arab countries, the US-led invasion of Iraq signalled the loss of a strategic asset in their conflict with Israel.’ He elaborated: Iraqi ties with the US were cut after the US supported Israel in the 1967 war, and although they were restored in 1984, commercial deals with the US were kept to a minimum. Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq endured 13 years of UN sanctions. During this time speculation was rife that one of the aims of the sanctions was to force Iraq into a peace process with Israel. Al Jazeera has obtained a document written by Saddam Hussein’s secretary, which conveys Hussein’s rejection of an offer to partake in a peace process with Israel in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.4 Such observations, as well as the fact that President Bush’s claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction had proven false, consolidated the Arab view that the Arab– Israeli conflict was central

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to US policy in the Middle East. In fact, since the 1967 war, which saw the comprehensive defeat of the Arab armies, the Arab–Israeli conflict has been understood as central to the entire region; most US presidents have recognised this as well, even if they have avoided pressing Israel for a just solution. But it is notable that some Arabs are mixing 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq into the same discursive pot of pan-Israel American policy. Two events captured the attention of cultural critics in the Middle East, sparking debates that sometimes resulted in counter-narratives, with orientalisation and occidentalisation as equal and opposite reactions. The first occurred in Baghdad in December 2008, when Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, threw his shoes at President Bush during a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri alMaliki. As he pitched his shoes at the former US president, al-Zaidi shouted in Arabic, ‘This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog.’ Although an isolated incident, al-Zaidi’s action not only evoked memories of all the atrocities witnessed by people in the Middle East in general, and in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, but also tested the democratic era and the freedom of expression that Iraqis were promised by President Bush and his administration. Moreover, for the average person on the street, this incident came to mirror the general frustrations most Iraqis and Arabs felt about the Bush administration. The second event was the election of Barack Obama as the first black US president. Obama was supposed to take the US– Middle East encounter into a new era of realist policies upon the demise of President Bush’s ‘freedom agenda’. Obama’s election was accompanied by unprecedented interest from the Arab world. Arab media provided intensive coverage of the election campaign and presidential debates that, despite being broadcast live during the early hours of the morning, attracted large numbers of Arab viewers.5 Many Arabs thought of President Obama’s election as the beginning of the end to the ‘9/11 mentality’ in the United States. Like many citizens of oppressive governments all over the world, most Arabs believed President Obama would bring ‘hope and change’ – as promised by his campaign slogan. Obama’s African origins explain some of his popularity in the Arab world. Abdel Moneim Said, then chairman of the board of Al-Ahram, compared President Obama to Mohamed Ali (the boxer, formerly known as Cassius Clay), who gained popularity in the Arab world because of his African-American origins as well as his Muslim religion. Said wrote in

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Al-Masry Al-Youm, ‘I also believe that the massive popularity that Mohamed Ali Clay achieved in the Arab world stemmed from the fact that he was a Muslim, as well as black.’6 Obama’s middle name, Hussein, raised much interest among many Arabs, who thought his heritage automatically gave him Muslim religious qualities. Although one of the events may be considered insignificant in the US context (the shoe-throwing) and the other highly significant (the election of Obama), both are notable because of the lively, extensive, and often heated discussions they engendered in the Arab media. They represent two problems that Arabs face in their own homelands and that lie behind their current political and economic failings: the failure on the part of Arab governments to oppose US policy in the Middle East and the longing of Arab people for a change for democracy. Both the shoethrowing incident and Obama’s election established themselves as central to any discussion about the US– Middle East encounter. Many Arabs suffer from feelings of powerlessness and ineffectuality, whether inside or outside or with their ‘fellow other’ or the ‘foreign other’. The shoe-throwing incident bolstered the confidence of many Arabs to express their anger and to resist, as had al-Zaidi. The election of Obama – a man considered by some to have an Arab appearance and an Arabic middle name – resulted in many Arabs feeling enthusiastic about the US president. The two events were sources of hope that raised the possibility of real change in Arabs’ attitudes towards the ‘fellow other’ and the ‘foreign other’.

Sources This chapter examines newspaper columns and cartoons that dealt heavily with the shoe-throwing incident, and the election and reelection of the first African-American US president and the new Arab perception of America. My choice of these texts is based on their popularity and their engagement with American images in the Middle East. The study will focus on articles taken from two Egyptian newspapers, Al-Ahram and Al-Masry Al-Youm, the London-based Alsharq Alawsat, as well as the news website of Al Jazeera. On occasion, I also examine other newspaper articles written by very well-known authors or that gained wide response among Arab readers. Egypt is the main source of these texts due to its geopolitical and historic pre-eminence in the

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Arab world and the primacy of its cultural institutions (e.g. universities, publishing houses, theatre, and television). The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram is considered an influential source of news and opinion in the Arab world. It has many notable writers even if it no longer has the cultural authority that it once had because it is viewed as a voice for the Egyptian government. Al-Masry Al-Youm is an independent Egyptian newspaper that has gained an influential and unique position in the Egyptian community in the last few years, making it a competitor to Al-Ahram. Alsharq Alawsat is an independent Arab newspaper launched in London with many notable writers from across the Arab world. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, has made much more of an impact on the formation of opinions of the ‘Arab street’. Al Jazeera revolutionised Arab television news and broke many taboos. The post-9/11 English version of the Arab news channel broadened its accessibility and appeal to the West to challenge the US monopoly on the global marketplace of news and information. Al Jazeera (‘the island’), based in Qatar, warrants a more lengthy presentation as a news source. Its existence is due in large part to the technologies which sprang up in the 1990s – technologies which were being rapidly adopted as almost the sole source of information by people around the globe – as well as to its stance of fierce independence from any government censorship pressures. A news satellite television station, broadcasting in Arabic initially,7 Al Jazeera was launched in 1996 to mark a new era of ‘independent’ media. Right from the beginning it ‘offered a combination of international news agency video plus video from its own camerapersons, correspondents, and stringers. But it also offered discussions, debates, and confrontations involving studio guests and interviewers. Both news and discussion featured conflict on several levels.’8 Al Jazeera has been demonised by Arab governments for being an intellectual avenue for opposition figures. Al Jazeera’s popularity has been boosted worldwide in the post-9/11 era, especially after the war on Iraq and after the Bush administration’s attack on the channel. It has revolutionised news coverage and media work in the Middle East, but at the same time it contributes to widening the gap between the United States and the Arab world. For example, on 10 July 2001 (two months before the 9/11 attacks), in one of the most famous programmes on Al Jazeera, ‘Al-Ittijah al-Mu’akis’ (‘The Opposite Direction’), Osama Bin Laden was portrayed as an Arab hero who stood up to the West. Faisal Al-Qassim, the anchor

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of this controversial political debate show, started his talk by saying that ‘bin Laden has made the greatest power in history shudder at the sound of his name, while the . . . heavyweights [Arab leaders] arouse only America’s pity and ridicule.’9 Al Jazeera’s tone and viewpoints have drawn Western media criticism for being a source of misperceptions about the United States and its allies. The New York Times reports that, although Al Jazeera claims a viewership of over 35 million Arabic, and is thus the most influential television station in the Middle East, and ‘has sometimes been hailed in the West for being an autonomous Arabic news outlet, it would be a mistake to call it a fair or responsible one. Day in and day out, Al-Jazeera deliberately fans the flames of Muslim outrage.’ Moreover, the New York Times claims that al-Jazeeera’s independent ‘reporters see themselves as “anti-imperialists” . . . convinced that the rulers of the Arab world have given in to American might’.10

Frame Analysis Framing constitutes an important factor in studying media coverage. Daniela Dimitrove and Colleen Connolly-Athern state, ‘Making certain aspects more salient than others in media content leads to different construction of reality. Ultimately, framing has implications for the worldview of those exposed to it’.11 The importance of framing is also affirmed by Dietram A. Scheufele, who defines media frames as ‘a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events . . . The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue.’12 In short, media frames set up likely interpretations and expectations for news coverage. Scheufele affirms that ‘not only are agenda setting and framing effects related, framing is, in fact, an extension of agenda setting’.13 The role of framing is significant in any political discourse and the way it emerges from a certain objective or agenda. In this case, mass media keenly establishes ‘the frame of references that readers or viewers use to interpret and discuss public events’.14 Pan and Kosicki (1993; quoted in Scheufele) establish four main news structural dimensions that influence the formation of frames: (a) syntactic structures, or patterns in the arrangements of words or phrases; (b) script structures, referring to the general newsworthiness of an event as well as the intention to

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communicate news and events to the audience that transcends their limited sensory experiences; (c) thematic structures, reflecting the tendency of journalists to impose a causal theme on their news stories, either in the form of explicit causal statements or by linking observations to the direct quote of a source; and (d) rhetorical structures, referring to the ‘the stylistic choices made by journalists in relation to their intended effects’.15 The current book will attempt to use these four framing strategies to analyse Arab media responses to the two events that are the focus of this chapter: the 2008 shoe-throwing in Iraq and Obama’s election a few weeks earlier in the United States. Cultural differences between the Arab world and the United States result in differences in ‘thematic structures’ used in Arab media when compared to their counterparts in Western media. This is extremely evident in the shoe-throwing incident, interpreted in the West as a violent act while seen in the Arab world as an act of opposition against oppression and occupation. Moreover, cultural differences can be discerned in the reception of Obama’s election, perceived in the West as proof of American racial equality while seen in the Arab world as a living example of American democracy. In other words, Obama’s election is associated with the maturity of race relations in America, while in the Arab world it is associated with political reform. The Arab media revolution in the post-9/11 era and its appeal to people in the West illuminates the encounter between the Middle East and the West. People in the West can get a glimpse behind the unfavourable Arab views of the non-Arab ‘other’ when they see, for example, Arab media focusing on pictures of the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. The rejection of the US-led invasion of Iraq is easily captured by the images of the shoethrowing incident and the support it gained on the ‘Arab street’. The 9/11 attacks invited people in the West to look at this ‘passive other’ to know the answer to the question raised at the time of the attacks: ‘Why do they hate us?’ The 9/11 era in the United States coincided with the Al Jazeera era in the Arab world. What the majority of Americans most likely have not heard or read about in their popular news media would be carried by Al Jazeera, which has marked the end of an era of a type of censorship or filtering on the Arab state media part and the

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beginning of an era of more ‘close-ups’ of the encounter between the Middle East and the West.

Media Explosion after 9/11 Arab interest in America surged dramatically early in the mid-twentieth century. At that point in time the Arabs became more aware of America’s role in the Arab–Israeli conflict. In What the Arabs Think of America, Andrew Hammond states that, after 9/11, The Arab world realizes as much as America does that their relationship has reached, if not its historical nadir, then at least a situation of raw, close-up anger. One might say that a bust-up that had been brewing for at least three decades has finally erupted and both parties have been forced to ask with brutal honesty what they want and what they expect to get from the other side.16 I think what Hammond declares applies to Americans more than it does to Arabs. While many Americans are oblivious to the Arab– Israeli issue, or only superficially aware of the root causes and how the issue has had a lasting troubling impact on all Arabs and not just the Palestinians, the mainstream Arab public is preoccupied with the on-going conflict and is shocked at the way their concerns are neglected by US policy in the region, which seems to celebrate and defend freedom on its own land while opposing it in Arab Palestine. Arabs and Muslims want American policy in the Middle East to be fair so long as America plays the role of mediator in the Arab– Israeli conflict. US foreign policy has been met with disapproval and disappointment in the Arab/Muslim world, particularly in the struggle with Israel and in attempts to garner support for democratic governance in Arab countries. The US government is perceived to be following a biased policy in the Middle East while most Americans are perceived to be uninformed about many facts on the ground there. The 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington DC tragically directed Americans towards a heightened interest in the area, and forced them to ask the question that lingers to this day: ‘Why do they hate us?’ What followed were the invasion of Iraq and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that drew Americans’ attention to the discrepancy between their ideals and their government’s foreign policy.

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President Bush’s legacy of failure in Iraq, including the loss of the common will of Americans, paved the way to a new spirit and direction for US foreign policy, buoyed by the first African-American presidency in the United States. The spirit of change born in post-Bush era America found its way to the Arab world, which, since the end of the Bush administration, had seen more calls for democracy and ‘change’, domestically and internationally. Although millions of Muslims worldwide denounced and condemned the 9/11 attacks, the image of the Arab/Muslim has increasingly suffered since then. Scenes of crowds celebrating in Gaza or individuals expressing approval in Cairo over the violent attacks reflect a minority. But scenes of this nature were used by Western media to exacerbate the tensions of the US– Middle East encounter. The results could be seen in a 2006 poll conducted by ABC News/Washington Post that showed that almost half of Americans expressed an unfavourable opinion of Muslims and Arabs. In the poll, 45 per cent thought Islam did not teach respect for the beliefs of non-Muslims. Nearly six in ten thought Islam was prone to violence.17 New media and new technologies have paved the way for a global society of almost instantaneous interactions and exchanges that stimulate profound cultural transformations and realignments. ‘Images, films, performances, and other youth media representations can function as tools for activism and advocacy at the regional and international levels. At these levels, participatory media communicate stories across borders that raise awareness about local issues and often inspire them.’18 The minds of Arabs and Americans minds are forcefully directed and shaped by the powerful impact of mass media and the hyper-interconnected world. While many Americans showed interest in Al Jazeera only after 9/11 attacks, Arabs have long distrusted their broadcast media channels and turned to foreign ones that broadcast in Arabic, to follow up on domestic and international news that they might hear on local channels. In Shirley Biagi’s Media/Impact, she quotes the following from the Los Angeles Times: Because of tight censorship, newspapers and television stations in the Arab world frequently reflect the biases or outright propaganda of their government. But radio broadcast from outside the region travel easily across borders and long distances,

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and many Arabs regard those stations as the most reliable sources of unbiased news.19 In Biagi’s view, the BBC (based in London) and Radio Monte Carlo Middle East (based in Paris) are the main transnational programme sources sought out by many in the Arab world. It is evident here how Arabs who are at odds with the Western policy in their region nonetheless are shaped by the powerful Western global media-driven culture that influences their attitude towards ‘self’ and ‘other’. Many factors have impeded the progress of Arab mass media despite its lengthy history,20 principally the control that undemocratic regimes have used to permit only state-sponsored and state-approved television, radio, and print media.21 The 1990s witnessed the spread of satellite television channels, privately owned and non-governmental, which put an end to the monopoly held by traditional state-run television and historically stringent censorship. These channels, particularly Al Jazeera, have become the primary sources of information in the Arab world, rebuilding confidence between Arabs and the media and challenging both Arab regimes and American hegemony: ‘The horizontal proliferation of information undermines vertical lines of control. Day by day, it seems, the ministry of information becomes more important as a sources of employment than a means of control.’22 Along with Al Jazeera’s influence in shaping the new direction in the US– Middle East encounter, the Bush administration itself had a hand in this shift, with its policies in the region. In a speech about the global war on terrorism, President Bush referred to ‘crusades’, recalling the wars waged by Christians against Arabs and Muslims centuries ago. The connotation of ‘crusades’ in English is still fairly positive in spite of recent Western scholarly reassessments of these wars, while in the Arab world the term has strong negative associations. Many Arab media channels took President Bush’s statement about the global war on terrorism to refer to a new war against Islam and Muslims. Moreover, President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech strengthened this view since two-thirds of the axis (Iran and Iraq) that he condemned is Muslim, and all of the organisations he classified as ‘terrorist’ during the speech were Muslim.23 The Kuwaiti liberal parliamentarian Ahmad al-Rubei stated in the newspaper Alsharq Alawsat that, due to media reports,

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the Arab person is waking up and going to sleep every day with the different and exaggerated analyses that are not based on realities but rather on wishes and prefabricated positions. Every news item in any US newspaper is being treated as a complete truth, every US statement is taken as part of the official policy, and every analysis, though very imaginative, is taken very seriously.24 Al-Rubei asserts that, ironically, Arab audiences almost exclusively follow US news stories to form their perceptions of the United States. This reveals that only addressing domestic audiences is no longer realistic – there are no exclusively domestic or international news agencies; the media landscape has expanded globally to become a more open public space. In November 2006 the Al Jazeera network launched Al Jazeera English, with the objective of reversing the flow of information from West to East, to that of East to West. Josh Rushing, a former US marine who joined Al Jazeera English in 2005, stated that Al Jazeera English’s mission was to cover the developing world, which had been largely ignored by other global networks.25 This change in direction has been explored by Dawn Kawamoto, who wrote about the way the war on Iraq encouraged many Americans to explore overseas channels for war news. To better serve those ‘news seekers’, Al Jazeera launched its English news website in 2003, which was relaunched with the emergence of its English television channel in 2006. At the beginning of the Iraq War, there was heavy traffic from Americans on the Al Jazeera website; observers estimated one million visitors during March 2003.26 This marked an important change in Americans’ attitude towards the Middle East, a new way of looking at the ‘other’, as an independent entity capable of self-expression. The globalised media initiated what could be called ‘self-manufacturing’ or ‘homemade image’, and United States and Middle East media clearly aimed to represent local or domestic interests during critical incidents in order to declare the importance of ‘self-definition’ in a globalised world. Arab cartoonists have always been very popular in the Arab world. They translate many political events into the unique language of their craft. They play an important role in educating people about the political scene and the social conditions in the Arab world and worldwide, using creative strategies that enable them to deliver their messages despite censorship and suppression. Cartoons have played an important role in Arabs’ struggle against the authoritarian Arab regimes

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and the deterioration of current political, economic, and social conditions in the Arab region: ‘The appearance of cartoons in the Middle East during the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the rise of Western Influence.’27 Using a ‘Western’ product with a universal language refers again to the importance of ‘self-definition’ in giving the US– Middle East encounter a new dimension. Cartoons constructed as tools of Western cultural imperialism are used by Arabs to deconstruct the Western reading of Arab culture and nation.

The Shoe-throwing Incident: A Threatening Iraqi ‘Intifada’ or merely Freedom of Expression? In response to the shoe-throwing incident, most Iraqis – and most Arabs in general – showed their opposition to the American occupation of Iraq by celebrating the journalist who threw his shoes at the US president. For their part, Americans expressed resentment towards the US war efforts in Iraq by choosing the first black American president who, they hoped, would mend the US image that had been distorted by the Bush administration’s Middle East policies. Various anti-US and pro-Arab sentiments framed the shoe-throwing incident (Figure 2.1). In the Arab world, hurling a shoe at someone is considered to be one of the most insulting acts possible. President Bush made light of it by describing it as a ‘way for people to draw attention’ to themselves, but in the Arab world it represented more than attention-seeking. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw the shoe at President Bush, was sentenced to one year in prison for assaulting a foreign head of state during an official visit, but he became a ‘hero’ in Iraq and many

Figure 2.1 ‘This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq’ al-Zaidi yelled. Courtesy of New York Times.

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parts of the Arab world. This was evident in the way hundreds took to the streets to demand his release. Al-Zaidi, in the eyes of many Arabs, became a symbol of victory over oppression. In his testimony before the court, al-Zaidi asserted that it was President Bush’s ‘bloodless and soulless smile’ while talking about his victories and achievements that motivated the shoe-throwing. President Bush was discussing victories and achievements while al-Zaidi was recalling all the mosques that had been destroyed and all the women who had been raped. Al-Zaidi claimed he was spurred on by the ‘violations that are committed against the Iraqi people’. He stated: ‘I could only see Bush and feel the blood of the innocents flow under his feet, as he was smiling that smile.’ He continued: ‘At that moment, I felt this is the man who killed our nation . . . the main murderer and the main person responsible for killing our nation.’28 Elsewhere, he was reported to have said that he ‘wanted to restore the pride of the Iraqis in any way possible, apart from using weapons’.29 Iraqis brought their support of al-Zaidi to the street, as exemplified by the picture in Figure 2.2. The image shows an Iraqi displaying the bottom of a shoe where President Bush’s name is written.30 Writing President Bush’s name in English publicised the message in the West and made it more accessible worldwide. This realisation of the importance of reaching out to audiences in the West started even before 9/11, when English-language signs were held up in Iran in 1979 during the overthrow of the Shah or when many English signs were displayed at Palestinian protests. But it is evident now more than ever that Arabs are aware that the West is no longer dominating global news reporting. All new media have become

Figure 2.2

Courtesy of Al Jazeera.

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the common tools of political protest, domestically and internationally. Domestically, for example, Egyptian Internet torture videos were able to open up a debate on police brutality. Internationally, the images of Abu Ghraib, initially revealed by CBS and the New Yorker rather than by Arab media, and showing Iraqis being brutally tortured and sexually abused by American soldiers, shocked most Americans and distorted the US image worldwide. Many stereotypes about Arabs in the United States emerge when they are presented as the ‘other’ who is ‘passive and unreachable’. However, new media present varied responses to the Arab ‘other’, who has more recently appeared in US media. Many researchers have noted the emergence of positive representations of Arabs/Muslims in US media in the post-9/11 era, against all expectations. Due to the global expansion of Arab media, Americans have been able to see the Arab world differently, through categories and images that the Arab media has itself produced, in addition to representations produced by US media. More and more Arabs are able to speak for themselves and express their being at odds with the United States, for example with respect to the military presence in Iraq. This is evident in Figure 2.3, which appeared in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. The 2008 image shows Iraqis calling for al-Zaidi’s release and the departure of US forces from Iraq.31

Figure 2.3

Courtesy of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

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The Iraqi protestors are raising banners written in English and Arabic. One banner reads ‘Go Out U.S.A.’ and another (misspelled) banner reads ‘We Wunt Freedom to Zaidi’. Another banner, in Arabic, reads ‘Release al-Zaidi Now in Line with Democracy and Freedom of expression’. The image shows how the shoe-throwing incident is indicative of broader views, and not just one that represents one faction or political party. The US war in Iraq led to what Edward Said described in his introduction to Orientalism as: the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like ‘America,’ the ‘West,’ or ‘Islam’, and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and

Figure 2.4

Courtesy of BBC.

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must be opposed, their murderous effectiveness vastly reduced in influence and mobilizing power.32 My central concern is how the shift in public opinion after the war on Iraq contributed to reframing news in the United States and in the Arab world about an emerging and increasingly influential anti-war movement. The counter-frame is determined by the emergence of war news concealed or downplayed by the Bush administration. Images were used to create news frames, thereby contributing to a redirection of public perceptions and opinions. Al-Zaidi’s defiance was not the first instance of well-publicised shoethrowing in the Iraq War. Long before, pictures of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad on 9 April 2003, captured cheerful crowds of Iraqis who bombarded the statue with shoes, thereby affirming the earlier war rhetoric of the Bush administration that US-led forces would be welcomed as ‘liberators’.33 The insult intended by a thrown shoe was turned against the United States when Iraqis threw shoes at a picture of President Bush. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar published the picture in Figure 2.5 of an Iraqi throwing his shoe at President Bush’s portrait.34 The image of George W. Bush coming under ‘shoe attack’ demonstrated the disapproval of many Iraqis, who viewed him as a ‘liar’ and a ‘killer’. The US invasion of Iraq produced many iconic images, such as the invasion of Baghdad, the fall of Saddam’s statue, torture in Abu Ghraib, and the shoes thrown at President Bush during his farewell visit to Iraq.

Figure 2.5

Courtesy of the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

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Figure 2.6

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Courtesy of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm.

Across the Middle East the shoe has become a symbol of anger against policies emerging from the White House. Raising a shoe in an Arab demonstration is now seen as being as powerful as burning the American flag. Al-Zaidi received vocal support not only from fellow Iraqis but also from many if not most Arabs. Hundreds went to the street demanding his release. Even in Canada, the anti-war protest group ‘Block the Empire’ invited Canadians to hurl their footwear at the US Consulate in Montreal in solidarity with al-Zaidi.35 The image in Figure 2.6 shows a man having a shoe and al-Zaidi’s name shaved on his head to express his support for the Iraqi reporter.36 Due to cultural differences, there are different ‘thematic structures’ in understanding the shoe-throwing incident. President Bush said in an interview that he thought al-Zaidi threw his shoes at him because he wanted to become famous. Despite the fact that there are many Americans who disagree with President Bush’s policies, for the most part they did not approve of al-Zaidi’s act: ‘There were many Americans who don’t like Bush but were uncomfortable with this action because they saw it as rude.’37 Many Americans were unable to understand the logic behind al-Zaidi’s act: they saw it as an act of violence rather than as a form of protest. On the other hand, it was used by much of the Arab media to exalt an Arab who stood up and made public a collective anger

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and resentment against the American president. Analysis of the different responses that this incident elicited in the Middle East showed significant changes in representations of the United States in Arab intellectual life. This change was best exemplified by the way Iraqis celebrated Saddam Hussein’s overthrow by the Bush administration but ended up expressing approval for the shoe-throwing incident. Arab newspaper caricatures about the shoe-throwing incident not only drew attention to the image of the United States in the Arab world but also highlighted many US stereotypes about Arabs/Muslims. This change in representations, with more attention to displeasure or anger about the Western ‘other’, is based on the observation of the current image and representation of Arabs/Muslims in the US media. Arabs cannot help but think about their negative images in the US media against the backdrop of American actions in the Arab world. They regard the 9/11 attacks as an unacceptable violent action executed by some Arabs/Muslims who should not be viewed as representative of the mainstream Arabs/ Muslims. The American occupation of Iraq as a response to 9/11, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib, left Arabs startled. They could not believe that the United States could become so base on so many levels. A caricature published on maktoob.com38 refers to suicide bombers using shoes instead of bombs (Figure 2.7). The stereotype of the violent,

Figure 2.7

Courtesy of Maktoob.com.

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aggressive Arab bomber, a stereotype to be found in the West in general and the United States in particular, is re-appropriated in the cartoon, which indicates the way Arab powerlessness, evident in the US invasion of Iraq, has generated a new type of suicide bomber, the shoe-bomber.39 The way many Iraqis responded to the incident marked their contempt for President Bush, who, in their view, had invaded their country under false pretences. Many found in the incident a kind of cathartic release for their frustrations with the Iraq War. For them, the success that alZaidi’s act had in terrifying President Bush was fair exchange for the terror he had brought to them. The cartoon showed the symbolic power of the shoe-throwing incident, portrayed as being as effective in terrorising the United States as suicide bombing. The palm tree in the background of the cartoon and the word ‘Iraq’ at the top, which establish the setting, represents Arabs defending their homelands rather than attacking others. The cartoon implied the difference between the ways Arabs and Westerners read the scene in Iraq: what was considered terrorism in the West was regarded as a defiance of occupation in the Middle East. Another cartoon (Figure 2.8), published in the Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh, referred to the incident as ‘December 14’, echoing 9/11, to mock Bush. Instead of symbols of America’s economic supremacy (the World Trade Center) and of its military power (the Pentagon), al-Zaidi’s shoes were hurled at the living symbol of the American nation (George

Figure 2.8

Courtesy of the Saudi newspaper Al Riyadh.

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Figure 2.9

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Courtesy of Al Jazeera.net.

W. Bush, the then-President of the United States). On 14 December, he had come under ‘shoe attack.’40 Figure 2.9 brings another cartoon from the Maktoob site. The image shows a shoe, usually left on the floor, but now framed and hanging on the wall, al-Zaidi’s act by framing and hanging a picture of his shoe on their walls, thereby a sign of the dignity it had brought to Arabs. Indeed, as a framed symbol on the wall, after Bush’s eventual departure from the White House, al-Zaidi’s shoe would remain hanging, a token for the Iraqis of victory over oppression. Hanging a picture of the shoe on Iraqis’ walls reflected the ‘honour’ the shoe had gained–the only weapon to be launched against Bush. The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan published the caricature shown in Figure 2.10. It shows Bush bearing al-Zaidi’s shoe on his back and entering the door of history surrounded by myriad forms of destruction in Iraq/Middle East.41 The cartoon suggests that history will remember the president not as a liberator (as he tried in vain to promote himself and his administration) but as a humiliated shoe-bearer who left behind a legacy of war. To Iraqis, the bearing of a shoe connotes bearing death and destruction. The cartoon indicates that the shoe-throwing incident will remain as a reminder for all atrocities committed by Bush and his administration in Iraq. The shoe that missed Bush will accompany him

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Figure 2.10

Courtesy of the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan.

into the history book, a witness for the ‘unwelcomed’ presence of American troops in Iraq. Arabs found that the incident helped globally publicise the view that Bush was a disaster for Iraq in particular and the whole Arab world in general. Yet the way many Americans looked at this event is entirely unlike the way many Arabs perceived it. Even Laura Bush, then first lady, looked at the 14 December event positively: ‘bad as the incident is, in my view, it is a sign that Iraqis feel a lot more free to express themselves’.42 Bush came to Iraq on 14 December to claim success for the war, but Iraqis insisted on exposing him in front of the world. That an Iraqi journalist publicly assaulted the leader of the United States with a pair of shoes was characteristic of the regional perception that the United States had been weakened after its invasion of Iraq. Arab public opinion polls showed that Arabs believed that ‘America is now weaker than it was before the Iraq War’.43

Arab Media Coverage: Occidentalism, or a Counter-Orientalism of Sorts The shoe-throwing incident has been interpreted differently by Arabs who have written about it. Some have seen it as a way of protesting the death and destruction the Bush regime had unleashed on Iraq. They perceive it through the lens of the occupier/occupied encounter during

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war. Others have looked at the shoe-throwing incident as striking the very personification of American imperial authority in the Middle East. For them, it was an opportunity to recall the history of the relationship between the Middle East and the West; they considered al-Zaidi’s act as the most apt response to US policies, which had constituted the source of violent repression in the Arab and Islamic worlds. A few Arab writers considered the incident childish and unprofessional, undermining the ethics of journalism, while other Arab commentators concluded that the incident was a sign that the United States had succeeded in bringing democracy, with its freedom of expression, to Iraq. This last was a view repeated by some American media, proudly proclaiming that protest of this sort would have been unthinkable under Saddam. Most Arab writers, however, consider the shoe-throwing incident to have been a brave act worthy of praise rather than criticism. To them, alZaidi threw his shoes at the US president to express and release justified anger towards the Bush administration’s destruction of Iraq. But commentators such as these are not looking at the shoe-throwing incident through the lens of an East–West encounter or one reminiscent of the clash of civilisations thesis. They are simply looking through the lens of an occupied–occupier encounter, in which the occupied publicly displays contempt for the occupier, whether the occupier is Eastern or Western. Mohamed Salmawy, president of the Writers’ Union of Egypt and Secretary General of the General Union of Arab Writers, wrote an Al-Masry Al-Youm article entitled ‘Shoe of Massive Destruction’ in which he asserted that it was not only al-Zaidi who threw his pair of shoes at Bush but rather ‘hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people who are standing against the US occupation, which has upset all human, cultural, and legal values that Baghdad used to embody before the arrival of the Americans (such as the father of all laws Hammurabi, the Mesopotamian civilization, and the Islamic Caliphate)’. Salmawy emphasises that what al-Zaidi faced after the incident pointed to the falseness of Bush’s claim that the United States had brought ‘democracy’ to Iraqis.44 In Al-Ahram, Ramzy Baroud claimed that most Arab and Muslim media ‘framed Al-Zaidi’s deed within its proper context, that of an horrific, genocidal war, bloody and humiliating occupation and the colonial hubris of a superpower that gave itself the right and “moral” justification to devastate a sovereign nation for the sake of oil, Israel and its desire for sheer hegemony’. Baroud, editor of PalestineChronicle.com,

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concluded that al-Zaidi is ‘a typical Iraqi who was merely responding to the subjugation of his own people’.45 Baroud expressed his dissatisfaction with the way Arab media had turned the story into an ‘amusing’ narrative about the Arab response to a bloody US war in Iraq. He added, Al-Zaidi’s action was reduced in the mainstream media perhaps because he was an Iraqi fighter of a different type, the kind that fails to fit the media’s stereotype, that of the sectarian militant, blowing people up, gunning them down, or detonating their homes and houses of worship. Indeed, al-Zaidi didn’t only challenge Bush, the occupation, and the quisling government of Iraq, but the media’s perception itself.46 Baroud showed his anger at the way Arab media were responding not just to political events but also to the representation of events in the US/Western media. Other Arab writers pointed out that it was easy for some Western media to think of the shoe-throwing incident as an act of violence, but that this perception detracted from the subjugation that has been an integral part of the East– West encounter through which the act can be observed. Shoe-throwing is an Arab way of refusal, of demonstrating angry resistance, or at least a way of expressing powerlessness in the face of subjugation. The incident was really neither testimony to freedom of expression nor an adequate expression of anger. It was too aggressive to qualify for protection as mere freedom of speech but not nearly aggressive enough in many Iraqis’ estimation. In the Middle East the throwing of shoes is a grave display of contempt and disrespect far weightier than the physical act appears to be. Magdy El-Gallad, editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm wrote, ‘The shoe is the only winner; it has become a memorial of US brutality and Arab incapability.’47 El-Gallad implies al-Zaidi’s shoe, or the expression of resistance, will retain a secure place in history while the American invasion and Arab regimes’ cowardice will remain on the wrong side of history. Amin Howeidy compares al-Zaidi and former President Bush: ‘George W. Bush walked into history without dignity. Al-Zaidi walked into history barefoot. Who is better off?’48 The shoe had become a symbol of dignity and victory for the Arab world, and Arab writers celebrated it not as a means of defiance against the occupation but as a tool to avenge the dignity of all Iraqis/Arabs.

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Some Arab writers read the shoe-throwing incident in the context of a truly outraged person protesting the deaths, injuries, and massive destruction that had taken place in his country. The protest was directed squarely at the one man most responsible for that death and destruction. Al-Zaidi made a visually dramatic criticism of Bush’s recent legacy, hoping that his act would reach Americans, the ones who had the power to discredit Bush’s war (which, eventually, they did). Bush’s image in Iraq and the entire Arab world has been a symbol of foreign aggression, imperialism, religious heresy, death, and the division of the Iraqi people. Most Iraqis had hated, feared, and privately loathed Saddam Hussein, but now they longed for his iron-handed stability. During the 14 December press conference in Iraq, Bush faced the real anger of the people he had harmed. Muhammad bin Mukhtar El-Shanqiti wrote on Al Jazeera.net that ‘The incident recalls the question posed by George W. Bush awkwardly after the events of 9/11: “Why do they hate us?”’ Perhaps the shoe-thrower himself gave a clear answer to this question: ‘This is from the widows and orphans.’ After such an answer, it would be an ignorant question to ask, ‘Why do they hate us?49 El-Shanqiti considered the message delivered through al-Zaidi’s shoes powerful even though the shoe missed Bush, because the shoe hit the American flag, thus successfully registering the insult against the most powerful country in the world. He framed the shoe-throwing incident as a response – encompassing not only the US occupation of Iraq but also the whole US– Middle East encounter – to the US post-9/11 question, ‘Why do they hate us?’ This reading reflects the anti-American sentiment that soared in the Arab world at the time. On the other hand, there were a few Arab commentators who perceive al-Zaidi’s shoe-throwing quite negatively. They considered al-Zaidi’s act as vain, meaningless, and detrimental to the image of his profession, country, and culture. Amr Hamzawy, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Institute, was a notable example of this mind set. Aware of the way the Arab media was taking the incident into a direction he could not support, he wrote an article under the title ‘A paper hero’ in which he stated, ‘Many media pundits in the Arab world . . . have portrayed al-Zaidi as an Iraqi hero that our part of the world had been waiting for. By throwing his shoe, this hero became a great fighter who undermined Bush and the USA’s dignity in the Middle East and the world as a whole.’50 But Hamzawy went on to argue that attacking or attempting

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to jeopardise the personal safety of any human being, whoever s/he is, is an action to be condemned and cannot be justified, as this contradicts human rights. The Carnegie researcher also asserted that the fact that it was a journalist who had thrown the shoe was another reason why this action should be rejected, since journalists’ tools are questions, answers, and verbal opposition – not tossed shoes. Finally, Hamzawy stated, ‘Indeed, being overjoyed at this act and getting it surrounded with a false halo of heroism shows a lack of both depth and meaning. We need to listen to reason and consider how to cope with the US presence in Iraq, and the bad policies of the current world superpowers.’51 He called upon the Arab media to render a more sober judgment of the incident and that journalists should resort to logical reasoning to determine if the act was correct or not. He believed that Arabs should focus on providing serious intellectual opposition to the occupation, not empty incidents such as shoe-throwing. Discussing the shoe-throwing incident in terms of ‘human rights’ then led As’ad Abu Khalil, a professor of political science at California State University, to attack Hamzawy in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar. Abu Khalil mocked Arab writers who considered al-Zaidi’s act as a violation of human rights, or as not being the best way to deliver a message to the West. To him, the ‘flying shoe’ spoke louder for Arab public opinion than all the despots/puppets that Bush had met during his travels in the Middle East.52 Abu Khalil’s viewpoint reveals how some Arab writers resented having al-Zaidi’s hero status questioned. The shoe-throwing behaviour would likely be considered offensive by most average Iraqis and Arabs, because of traditional Arab/Iraqi customs: President Bush was a guest, and hospitality norms frown upon openly insulting a guest regardless of one’s personal views, sentiments, or animosity. Thus Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh, a Lebanese journalist, also took a negative view of al-Zaidi’s actions. Saleh wrote in the Lebanese newspaper Al Mustaqbal that ‘al-Zaidi’s shoes thrown at the US President George W. Bush revealed a serious problem in the mentality of the contemporary Arab nation’.53 Saleh went on to criticise the many Arab writings on the incident that presented al-Zaidi’s act as a symbol for dignity and victory. He believed that al-Zaidi was merely looking for fame, which echoed Bush’s statement about the incident. Saleh emphasised the silence of the Arab world with regard to the many

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atrocities taking place in Gaza and Iraq while at the same time it was giving formidable support for an ‘individual’ act by an ‘unknown’ journalist. He considered the shoe-throwing act a symbolic action with no effect whatsoever on political reality. Another journalist, Alaa ElGhatrifi, also questioned the effectiveness of the incident, attacking al-Zaidi for raising a shoe instead of a pen: It is so strange to find Arabs celebrating the shoe-throwing incident without paying heed to the naivety of their reactions that came out in jokes, poetry, etc. Moreover, a Saudi rich man offers ten million dollars to buy al-Zaidi’s pair of shoes, and television stations devote hours for telephone interventions that talk about the heroism of al-Zaidi, who restored the dignity for Iraq and the Arabs. This is nothing but nonsense and a kind of backwardness.54 He asserted that al-Zaidi’s shoe missed its mark, and that it was not Bush who deserved this shoe but the Arab leaders who had welcomed Bush, the occupier, into their palaces. One might wonder why commentators came to such starkly different conclusions. It had nothing to do with any regional differences since the Lebanese, for example, showed views no different from those of the Egyptians. Moreover, although criticism of al-Zaidi’s act came from members of Western-educated elites such as Hamzawy, support of the incident came also from American-educated Arabs such as Abu Khalil. There does not seem to be any obvious extreme political difference among the responses, especially across the East–West divide. Arab writers were split not along regional, religious, or political lines, but simply in terms of their individual assessments of strategy and symbolism. Arabic writing on the shoe-throwing incident can be regarded as counter-Orientalism, which is to say Occidentalism as understood by this study. US policies have contributed to Arab public perception of the United States as being immoral, greedy, and bent on colonising the Arab world. This perception has been bolstered by the war on Iraq, a war that was justified by the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that, in fact, were never found. The perception has also been reinforced by what were perceived to be hypocritical US policies on democratisation, as evident in the longstanding US support for undemocratic regimes in the Middle East. The great irony in all of this, notwithstanding the

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Occidentalism countering Orientalism, has been that, according to polls conducted by Gallup and other US organisations, most Arabs actually admire American values, people, and culture while disliking its policies in the region.55 In any event, a significant number of journalistic commentators in the Arab world considered the shoe-throwing incident a truly historic moment that delivered a clear anti-war message to Americans, a message applicable especially to their presidents, including current President Obama. Although it involved only the United States, the incident created much discussion surrounding the East– West encounter in general. Moving on to the second event, it must be remembered that they occurred during the transition between presidents: Obama elected in November 2008 but not taking office until January 2009, and Bush visiting Iraq in December 2008 but not leaving office until January.

‘Obamaism’ and a New Perception of the United States in Egypt The election of Barack Hussein Obama came to reflect a substantial desire for change that started in the United States and then crept into the world, due to the unique status the United States holds in the contemporary world and its huge impact on international politics. This desire followed the negative effects that came out of the foreign policies of former President Bush, which had affected the mental image of the United States worldwide, especially for the Arab people. This spirit of ‘change’, born in post-Bush-era America, found its way to the Arab world, which has since then seen more calls for democracy and ‘change’, domestically and internationally. It is interesting to explore how Egyptians in 2008 viewed the United States as a potential model for change, especially after Obama’s election. This filled a special niche in its being an attempt to more fully understand the relationship, if any, between the Obama era in the United States and the social/political change movements throughout Egypt, as well as other Arab Spring countries. Here I refer to Obamaism as a phenomenon that raised Egyptians’ dreams to its utmost when they saw an African-American leading his way to the White House while in Egypt the only way to the Egyptian presidency, it seemed at that time, was to be the son of Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak. Obamaism increased the Egyptian population’s hunger for change. The remainder of this chapter

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attempts to explain the phenomenon, particularly with respect to the many ways in which ‘the Arab street’ – not to mention the more formal, conventional channels for self-expression in the Arab world – vented opinions about the United States. It attempts to describe how Arabs have become enamoured of Obamaism the phenomenon, while they criticise and distrust Obama the president. We can break this explanation down into three parts: .

.

.

How the election of Obama, the first African-American US president, took the US –Middle East encounter into a new era of ‘realist’ policies upon the demise of Bush’s ‘freedom agenda’. By ‘realism’ I refer to the way many believe that US foreign policy under Obama is still driven by self-interest, but not in a way that places interests over ideologies. This is evident in Obama’s policies that have been undertaken with caution, an outcome of the war launched in Iraq under false pretences and the mishandling of Afghanistan, both by his predecessor G.W. Bush. Thus, in my view, Obama relies neither solely on military strength nor on abstract American values. The second part attempts to understand irreconcilable thematic elements while trying to document Obamaism in the Arab world, especially after his first election, with a focus on the Egyptian case. This includes discussing major attitudes towards Obamaism, dividing them into two analytic categories of ‘positive’ (mostly within the early period of Obama’s election) and ‘negative’ (after a few months of his presidency). The final section includes recommended steps to be taken as the reelected Obama seeks to revitalise the partnership between the United States and the Arab Spring countries, especially Egypt.

Obamaism and the Demise of Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ Bush’s legacy of failure in Iraq, including the loss of the ‘common will’ of Americans, paved the way for a new spirit and direction in US foreign policy, buoyed by the first African-American presidency in US history. The Arab Spring, which had been driven by many internal atrocities and had erupted because of the incessant oppressive measures taken against the people of the countries so affected, made it clear that the Bush claims on behalf of the ‘Freedom agenda’, which held Arabs up as helpless and

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always in need for the West to get them out of the doldrums of tyranny and oppression, were false. In fact, the agenda’s reliance on military intervention to protect the American nation from real and imagined threats was one of the main factors that deepened the suffering of those same people. Obama came with a new vision of America’s role in the world. ‘It’s an American leadership that recognizes the rise of countries like China, India and Brazil,’ Obama was quoted as saying of his own policies. ‘It’s a US leadership that recognizes our limits in terms of resources and capacity.’56 Realising the failure of Bush’s ‘Freedom agenda’, Obama seemed a disbeliever in American ‘exceptionalism’ and a strong supporter of a ‘realist’ approach to a new world order. The 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey, in looking back at their 2009 survey, ‘found that many believed the new American president would act multilaterally, seek international approval before using military force, take a fair approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and make progress on climate change’.57 Arab writers and journalists have been attempting to re-evaluate the Arab position in a post-9/11 world that has been shaped by the global war on terrorism, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and US hegemony, more broadly. The post-9/11 colonial presence of the United States in the Middle East has contributed to the replacement of negative images of the old colonial powers, i.e. English, French, and Italian, with new American ones. In this context, many Arabs are having to negotiate two realities: the history of East – West encounters, on the one hand, and the longing on the part of many Arabs to create terms of mutual understanding and connections between the United States and the Middle East, on the other. This longing remains strong, despite the serious and ongoing critiques of US policy that have been at the heart of many Arab/Egyptian newspaper columns and caricatures since 9/11. The texts selected for this book challenge the view of Arabs as passive victims of Orientalism, which is a shallow Western discourse that strokes the simple minds of some demagogues. Such a position is neither traditional nor orthodox.

Obama and Obamaism: Two Irreconcilable Thematic Elements Obama’s representation in Arabic cartoon and caricature has some irreconcilable thematic elements. After his first election, Obama was

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rendered either as an exact copy of G.W. Bush in his policies regarding the Middle East or as a saviour from the injustices Arabs were facing internally and regionally. In contrast, Ali Younes wrote for Al Arabiya. net that, ‘Arab states expect too much from President Obama and treat him almost as if he is their savior and their deliverer.’58 These different views can be categorised by two types of Arab writers: those who acknowledge that Obama cannot make a crucial change in US foreign policy because presidential executive power is not like the absolute dictatorial power enjoyed by most Arab regimes, and those who look at Obama as an African-American with a Muslim father and someone who will be able to change the whole situation in the Middle East by adopting a fair US policy in the region. Obama’s election was accompanied by unprecedented interest from the Arab world. Arab media provided intensive coverage of the campaign and the presidential debates, which were broadcast live and watched by many Arabs, even though it was the early hours of the morning.59 The election of Obama, who is considered by some to be ‘Arab-looking’ and who has an Arabic middle name, made many Arabs feel enthusiastic about him. Obamaism constituted a source of hope, and opened up the possibility of a real change in Arabs’ frozen political scene. The failure of most Arab governments to oppose Washington’s policy in the Middle East, as well as the longing for change, made Obama’s first election central to discussions about the US– Middle East encounter. Many Arabs suffer from a sense of powerlessness and being ineffectual whether inside or outside, or with their fellow ‘other’ or the foreign ‘other’. According to Anas Alqassas, the ex-Director of the General Administration of Research and Studies at the Egyptian Republican Palace after the 2011 Revolution, Obama’s difficult road to the White House has inspired many people around the world, especially those who are encountering concrete stumbling blocks on their way to essential and unalienable rights. Alqassas added that Obama’s ‘Cairo University speech gained too much reputation and also interest of the MidEasterners at least while the public hoped in these times [the] US would end its coverage of tyranny and despotism and support the demands of the free nations.’60 In Egypt, for example, the Mubarak regime took many actions that led to the loss of its credibility and faith by Egyptians. Agencies of the state began to disenfranchise many Egyptians, who then viewed their

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regime members as outsiders within Egypt and a threat to Egyptian security. As Said put it, the denial of rights and legitimacy acts to reinforce the notion that those being denied those rights and legitimacy are less deserving of a place in a society and therefore are treated as the ‘other’.61 The Mubarak regime in a similar way separated itself from its people, casting many Egyptians into the role of ‘other’ and thereby perpetuating the idea that the people were not to be trusted or allowed to participate in governance. The effect of this, however, backfired. Looking at the first election of Obama, many Egyptians began to promote alternative discourses that questioned ‘civilisational clashes’ and war in order, displacing such rhetoric and claims with new terms such as ‘justice’, ‘tolerance’, and ‘protean human interactions’. They link the ‘inside’ with the ‘outside’ in an attempt to respond to the globalised spirit of change that seemed to come with the election of an American black president. In this context, it seems that most Arabs looked at Obamaism more than they looked at Obama himself. Here, I refer to the way Obama became a phenomenon capable of reaching out to people all over the globe not as a person but as a ‘case’. Obama the case is much more important to most Arabs than Obama the person. ‘A black man who could make it was like a dream becoming reality’, observed Shereen Abuelnaga, a well-known Egyptian critic, in a personal interview. She pointed out that ‘having read Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, one could not believe that history is really making and taking its own course of change. In addition to such euphoric feelings then, there was his age.’62 When Pew Research conducted a survey in Egypt in 2011, Obama received the confidence of 44 per cent of those between 18 and 29, the ones who were the makers of the revolution taking place in Egypt.63 Those young Egyptians were interested in the case of an African-American young man who was able to ‘change’ what had been perceived as ‘unchangeable’, that is becoming a ‘black’ president in the White House. This invited many of them to believe in their own ability to change the repressive situation in their country. This belief was reflected even in social media. A Facebook page under the name ‘We are all Khaled Said’ was the main source for a call to demonstrate on 25 January 2011. Quotes by African-American leaders, including Obama himself, kept being posted, showing to what extent Egyptian youth had become infatuated with the African-American movement and been

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impressed with the way this movement had been crowned with an African-American US president. Many Arabs believe in the existence of the value of ‘democracy’ in the United States and believe that Bush came to the presidency through fair elections, but Obama’s victory broke many ‘taboos’. This explains why Arabs looked at the election result as a different ‘version’ of democracy and a pioneering step in the US ‘land of dreams’ to lead the whole world into a new era of change. This was evident in the way global attitudes

Figure 2.11 Courtesy of Shepard Fairey’s ‘Hope’ poster which was adopted by the Barack Obama campaign during the 2008 election.

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towards the United States became generally more positive in 2009 than in 2008, the final year of the Bush administration.64 It was also evident in the way Arabs became more optimistic about their future and more comfortable embracing democracy in their political life. In a 2012 Pew Research Center poll, two out of three said democracy is the best form of government, while just 19 per cent said that in some circumstances a non-democratic form of government is preferable.65 For some Arabs, Obama’s election seemed to constitute the beginning of the end to the ‘9/11 mentality’. Just like other oppressed nations all over the world, many Arabs thought of Obama as a source of ‘hope and change’ for them, which had been his campaign slogan. His campaign poster design became a theme appropriated by people around the world for their personal photos. Obama has remained a source of ‘hope’ for oppressed Egyptians, even if they are certain about the difficulty of changing US policies with respect to the Arab–Israeli conflict. The cartoon in Figure 2.12 appeared in Al-Ahram, the leading Egyptian government-controlled newspaper, and provoked a strong reaction from the Egyptian regime. The cartoon shows President Obama saying, ‘Change has come to America’, while a rural Egyptian woman, looking up to the smiling Obama, congratulates him and reminds him not to forget the people around the world who had been hoping and praying for his victory. The woman says, ‘Congratulations my son . . . May the same [change] happens to us . . . And, don’t forget that we prayed for your success.’ The Egyptian opposition weekly Sawt al-Umma reported that Al-Ahram quickly removed 150,000 copies of its first edition from the streets to destroy, and the second edition came without the troublesome

Figure 2.12

Courtesy of Al Badil (Egypt) (After Before).

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phrase, ‘May the same [change] happens to us.’ The uncut version of the cartoon was picked up by the Egyptian independent newspapers Sawt alUmma and Al Badil, as well as other news websites.66 It was an example of how the mantra of change from outside the country could trigger swift reaction from the Mubarak regime. This cartoon also exemplifies how Arab cartoonists were trying to empower rural Egyptian women to participate politically. In fact, it was referring to all neglected minorities in Egyptian society whose political participation was needed for real ‘change’ to come about. The rural woman represented the authentic voice of the majority of Egyptians who do not follow avant-garde political groups, with their abstract theories and subjective motivations, but instead use their common sense and collective reason to inform their political views. Thus, Obamaism urged Egyptians to think not only about US policy in the wider region, but also about their own frozen political scene under Mubarak at that time. As well, Egyptians and Arabs in general, were becoming more aware of the importance of political ‘change’ as a way of raising Arab status internationally, and of transforming the blind support for Israel that the United States was perceived to be locked into. It seems that Arab journalists and cartoonists look with respect at US values of democracy; however, they think America’s foreign policy has distorted its image in the region. The Egyptian newspaper asserted that, by winning the US presidential elections, Barack Obama had improved America’s image across the globe. The piece went on to say: ‘America’s tarnished image had been transformed overnight. And despite the cynicism many here have long felt towards the American dream the elections had the power to alter sentiments as a black American, with Muslim, third-world roots, made it to the White House.’67 Shortly after his election, a cartoon from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Gomhoria (Figure 2.13) showed Obama rejuvenating America’s image by dusting off the Statue of Liberty, which was interpreted as restoring America’s neglected values of freedom and democracy. Morover, the positive view of Obama’s election in 2008 came from Arab reformers who drew hope from his victory. For example, Ayman Nour,68 an Egyptian political activist and journalist, expressed his enthusiasm in an open letter to Obama upon the latter’s official nomination by the Democratic Party: Written while still in prison, Nour appealed to Obama for his support for Arab reformers who were

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Figure 2.13

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Courtesy of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Gomhoria.

also aspiring for ‘change’ under their current dictatorial regimes. Nour ended his message with the following: Senator Obama: We await much from you as a Democratic candidate and president expected to lead the whole world towards a real and fair change. Your generation and all the powers of reform, democrats and liberals in Egypt and the Arab world hope that January 20th becomes a day of freedom and democracy, not only in the United States of America but in the whole world primarily by rectifying the wrongs caused by long years of supporting dictators under the pretext of protecting interests at the account of principles.69 Nour refers to the way Arab reformers were renewing their confidence in America as a pro-reform world superpower. Before Obama – and due to

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the legacy of Bush’s wars, his approval of torture in Guantanamo, and his support for domestic surveillance – all of this made any pro-reform calls by the United States during Bush’s presidency devoid of any value. It seems that many Arab reformers viewed Obamaism as a power that could bring about change in their own countries. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian living in the United States, wrote about the similarity between Obama and Mohamed El Baradei, the ex-Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who was considered a possible candidate for the Egyptian presidential election in 2011. Ibrahim suggested that while Obama was ‘outside the box’, since he was the first black US president born to a Muslim father, the Egyptian ‘box’ had remained immutable, a military rather than civilian construct of authority since July 1952. El Baradei, a civilian, was compared to Obama in representing ‘a fresh new face’ whose background and position were also ‘outside the box’.70

Obamaism: A Breath of Fresh Air or the Winds of Change Desire for Obama to change policies and not just tone was evident in early responses to his 2008 election. Samir Farid, an Egyptian film critic, wrote one such response. His piece claimed that people in the Arab world were under the illusion that an individual in power can bring about significant social change. Farid explained that, while this may be applicable to non-democratic regimes (such as those in the Middle East), this was not the case in democratic regimes such as the United States71 Farid referred to the required roles of Congress, the Senate, and the House of Representatives in shaping US policies, as opposed to what existed in Egypt and other undemocratic regimes, where the president had absolute power over foreign and domestic policies. The election of Obama was such a momentous event in the Arab world that a remarkable number of commentaries about his anticipated transnational role expressed excitement about his call for change but still doubted his ability to export this call beyond US borders. Obama’s victory provided the rationale for an Arab hope of change, which, in some commentators’ views, was a kind of failure on their part. Many Arabs expressed the hope for change in Washington’s policies towards Arab and Islamic issues in light of what they extrapolated from Obama’s Islamic roots.

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On the other hand, there have been those in the Arab world who were certain that there would be no radical change in US policy towards the Middle East. Many Arabs, while hoping for more balanced and acceptable policies than the pro-Israel stance by the Bush administration, were under no illusions there would be a change concerning the Middle East. As stated in Al Jazeera, ‘Many Arabs were cautiously optimistic about Obama’s election victory in November, in the belief that a fresh face in the White House would be better than Bush, who invaded Iraq and gave strong support to Israel.’72 In an interview, Said reacted to Obama’s controversial statements at an AIPAC conference in 2008, in which he attempted to address the issue of arms smuggled into Gaza. Some of Said’s comments indicated his perception that Obama was ‘not aware of the details of this issue’, highlighting the scepticism of Obama being able to fully understand the Arab–Israeli conflict. Additionally, Said purported that although Obama’s statements reflected the common attitude of American presidents, the possibility that he would be able to bring change still exists. This points to the small, yet existing faith that Said still had towards Obama back in 2008.73 The passage of time without seeing change eventually saw a negative image of Obama forming in the Arab world. According to the Shibley Telhami survey conducted in several countries, 47 per cent of Arabs were hopeful about the Obama administration policy in the Middle East in 2009 while 52 per cent became discouraged about Obama administration policy in the Middle East in 2011.74 In 2009 only 24 per cent of Arabs had negative views of President Obama while in 2010 it became 62 per cent.75 The only perceived change in that two-year period was the abandonment of Bush’s fiery political rhetoric, Obama’s attempt to restore a positive international image of the US. Just before Obama’s inauguration, El-Sayed Amin Shalabi, the Director of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, wrote an opinion piece that stated that: Obama won the elections largely on the strength of his pledge of change, and people in the US and around the world are eager to see whether he will fulfil his pledge. How will this apply to the Middle East? Specifically, will the Obama administration be able to break free of Washington’s tradition of blind support for Israel that

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has long obstructed the realisation of a just solution to the Middle East conflict that will guarantee Israeli security and simultaneously meet the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians?76 Shalabi explains that past US administrations had their hands tied due to the overwhelming support for Israel in American society, whether due to the powerful Jewish lobby, whose influence permeates the highest echelons of the policymaking process and strongly influences presidential and congressional elections, or due to popular perceptions of Israel as sharing the same cultural values or being, for a growing and increasingly influential segment of US society, central to the religious vision of the second coming of Christ, which has generated a close relation between the Christian fundamentalist ultra right and Zionist forces in the US and Israel.77 Here the writer is not blaming Obama so much as he is blaming Arabs for waiting on Obama to solve their problems. Shalabi warns against misunderstanding US foreign policy and overestimating the power of individuals over tradition. US support for Israel is part and parcel of its foreign policy and no change is expected in this regard with just a change in the head of state. Shalabi ends his article by inviting Arabs to ‘take the initiative to produce a cohesive Arab vision on the principles that should govern a settlement. Such an action would go a long way to persuading the new administration that it is dealing with an Arab partner with a united stance.’78 Not much later, Fahmy Howeidy, a well-known Egyptian columnist, wrote that the way Arabs were relying on Obama’s election was indicative of their own sense of powerlessness and hopelessness: The despair and frustration we suffer from make us wait for a saviour from outside as we lose hope of seeing such a saviour from amongst those who are in power in our [own] countries. In addition, Obama, unlike Bush, expressed respect for us, and by doing so, it seems he has struck a chord, and raised the ceiling of our expectations from him. This is due to the fact that our experiences with the US has left us with a belief that the word ‘respect’ was not included in the lexicon of Arab American relations.79

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Howeidy asserts that Obama’s positive words about the Muslim world indicate that his administration might change the tone but the goals and strategy would remain unchanged. Many Arab writers were aware that the United States would not change its policy in the Middle East as long as there were no ‘strong’ Arab foreign-policy partners. Howeidy also explains that much of the admiration that Obama had gained in the Arab world was due to the respect he showed towards Arabs/ Muslims and towards Islam. In this way, Howeidy is referring to the long history of aggression and negligence that has marked US policies towards Arabs/Muslims. The United States has made strong allies in the region but shown no respect for most people’s welfare. The problem has not been a general neglect or disrespect, but neglect of the lives of ordinary Arabs while at the same time maintaining support for their dictators. In mid-2009, Howeidy published another article, pointing out the naı¨ve way in which Arab media had welcomed Obama’s visit to Egypt as ‘historic’ as well as citing the challenges Obama faced in realising the goals he had outlined in his Cairo speech.80 In 2009, Burhan Ghalioun, a French-Syrian professor and activist who was the first chairman of the Syrian National Council,81 wrote an article which is not only situated in the contemporary Middle East but also recounts the longer history of Middle East– West encounters, in which the West has attempted to gain control over the Arab world. Ghalioun proposed a new vision deeper than other Arab reactions to Obama’s speech to the Arab/Muslim worlds. These ‘ranged from viewing Obama as a saviour, or Mahdi, and finding in his visit and the content of his speech [at Cairo University in Egypt] nothing but a reiteration and defence of the US policies, while phrasing them in sweet words that tickle Arabs/Muslims’ emotions’.82 Ghalioun believes that Obama’s rhetoric presented no more than an artificial truce compelled by the current deteriorating US strategic position in Iraq and Afghanistan. He ended his article by inviting Arabs to respond to Obama’s speech, not by celebration or degradation, but by rising to the level of political action and acting as strategic players in the international scene.83 The spirit of optimism that came with the arrival of Obama and the departure of Bush disappeared as we entered the second year of Obama’s presidency. Returning again to the Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey, this one for 2010, results showed that positive views of President Obama had dropped from 45 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2010, with his

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negatives rising even further.84 Most Arabs, as well as many Americans, began discussing his unfulfilled promises. An article written by Munir Shafiq, a Palestinian writer and analyst and the General Coordinator for the Nationalist Islamic Congress, opened with the following: With the approach of one year after Barack Obama became the President of the USA, no one can notice any fulfilment of even some of his pre-election promises . . . When Obama came to the US presidency with many promises of change, some interpreted that he would change substantially the policies of his notorious predecessor, George W. Bush. But practically Obama walked in Bush’s footsteps, using only a different language of discourse while keeping the same content of policies.85 Shafiq goes on to argue that the last two years of Bush’s presidency were better than Obama’s first year with respect to US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The writer criticises those who welcomed Obama’s victory. He states: Surprisingly, those who rushed to welcome Obama and his promises of ‘change’ were already aware of the long-term foreign policy calculations that outweigh the US policymaking and its presidential electoral system. They, however, opted to suspend this awareness in favour of their own prioritized aspirations. It seemed timely indeed to un-write their support for Bush’s policies while celebrating their conception of America’s self-correcting capacity.86 Yousri Fouda, a well-known former reporter for Al Jazeera, wrote that, since imperialism has taken different forms in the modern age, there was a possibility that Obama, with his oratory skills, had been imperialised. He indicated that if one could not occupy a country militarily, one could invade it culturally, politically, and economically. Similarly, if one could also not assassinate a leader, one could not ‘kidnap’ him morally and make use of him politically. Fouda concluded that ‘the difference between Obama in December 2008 and Obama in December 2009 compels us not to expect from Obama in December 2010 what could please us, with all due respect to Obama as a person and for his principles’.87 Most Arabs’ expectations with respect to Obamaism are

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beyond the realm of Obama the individual, who is presumed to be more liberal than he is. The first black US president, when nominated as a candidate by the Democratic Party, was chosen to serve the agenda of his party rather than act upon his own views, which have never been very far from the Democratic Party overall. In February of 2009, Fouda wrote another article in which he offered a twist on ‘Mama America’, outlining how salient the Obama figure was becoming. Nevertheless, his perspective focuses on Obama’s incapacity to tread the path he had outlined for himself in the short amount of time available to him and with the enormous challenges he was facing.88 The issue was also examined by others, such as Dr Esam Abdel Shafie, a professor of political science at Alexandria University. For him, Obama’s first term did not reflect the size of the great expectations from him, whether inside the United States or abroad, with promises and oratory, unsupported by actual implementation on the ground. Abdel Shafie believed that major issues (Palestine, Afghanistan, the economic crisis, terrorism, the Iranian nuclear programme) remained undecided, with the exception of completing the final withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.89 After the Egyptian Revolution of January 2011, some Egyptian writers hoped to see a change finally appear in US policies towards the Middle East. In July 2011, Shalabi wrote that Washington was fully aware that the Egyptian Revolution had changed US –Egypt relations forever. He asserted that When Obama took office, many expected Egyptian – US relations to improve because of Obama’s vows to support the peace process, help create a Palestinian state, and bring Israel’s building of settlements to an end. What mattered most, however, for the Egyptian regime, was Obama’s more lenient approach to democracy. Obama’s administration, like so many US administrations before it, preferred stable partners to democratic ones.90 Shalabi supports his claim by recalling Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009, where ‘the US president said that every society must seek its way to democracy, for its values cannot be imposed from abroad’.91 Following the Egyptian Revolution, the writer believes, US officials

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should ‘expect Egypt’s foreign policy to be influenced by its public opinion’.92 Actually, Obama’s response to the Egyptian Revolution was marked by hesitation, duality, and vagueness, reflected in the US stand during its early stages. Such hesitation was associated with a number of factors and considerations: 1. Surprise, in light of its knowledge of the security and authoritarian nature of the Egyptian regime. The US administration did not expect either the size of these demonstrations or their repercussions, just as it did not expect the swift collapse of Egyptian securities forces. 2. The close relations between the United States and the Mubarak regime, where the latter was actually a true subordinate rather than a strategic ally in all issues of concern to the United States in the region. 3. American distrust of the alternative political parties that could have replaced Mubarak, because they were convinced that, if elections were free and fair, then it would be the Islamists who would play an active role. 4. Lack of seriousness on the part of the United States in applying its cherished slogans about the circulation of democracy and promotion of human rights, in any country or any region in the world, except in accordance with its interests. These slogans have only been a tool for achieving US foreign policy objectives; this was the reason behind their hesitation in dealing with the crisis – taking the necessary time to study all possibilities. 5. President Obama’s personal experiences: Obama’s decisions were driven by the feeling that these transformations had been the product of several negative accumulations over years, which could not be stopped, just as the clock could not be turned back in Egypt. It was also driven by (a) his conviction that the US response should not be like that of any other country, and (b) his personal, experience-based realisation that change in developing countries cannot be met – during its intensity – by force, and that it is not a given that every popular movement will turn into a disaster. For there are positive models of movements in the past that have removed corrupt regimes and installed new ones that have had a prominent role in development and reform for their country. On the other hand, Obama’s expertise and personal experience regarding the presidential election he had

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won, granted him a unique opportunity to connect with a generation of young people, those who had triggered the Egyptian Revolution. So, the great challenge was how to use his life experience and manifest ability to communicate with them, to support the process of change, and to balance sympathy with the revolutionaries on the streets, on the one hand, while reassuring the world that American power was stable in the face of the transformations taking place in the world, on the other. Between these two polarities came Obama’s hesitation in dealing with the repercussions and transformations of the revolution. Obamaism has been used to reflect on the larger intellectual climate in the Arab world within an historical and political context often neglected, misunderstood, or ignored by proponents of the ‘clash of civilisations’ argument.93 In 2009, 39 per cent had an unfavourable opinion of the United States while in 2012 they became 51 per cent.94 Also in 2010, 44 per cent had confidence in President Obama while in 2012 it had dropped to only 24 per cent.95 Understanding Arab views, and the complex ways that Arab media represented and shaped those views, can lead to a broader understanding of the ways in which US foreign policy and US media shaped Arab perceptions of the West. Post-9/11 anti-Arab/Muslim Western media that projected Arabs/Muslims in a negative way has been followed by Arab scepticism and conspiratorial mentalities that deepen popular distrust of the West and virulently turned their perception of the West to be negative in recent years.

Obama’s New Era in US Leadership President Obama came to the White House in 2008, at a time when the image of the United States was appalling, especially in the Middle East, because of the actions of the Bush administration, which had led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, Obama wanted to safeguard US interests in the region and, at the same time, change the nature of American policies in the Middle East, to correct the distorted image of the United States. For example, the Obama administration avoided showing any hostile reaction towards the Arab Spring, which represented the biggest challenge to American strategy in the region. Even when some incidents took place that would have necessitated a display of anger, the US administration did not do so.

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Two examples of this new, more restrained response occurred in 2012. The first was in January, when Egyptian authorities accused several Americans, including the son of US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, of receiving illegal foreign funding and barred them from leaving the country.96 Later in the year, in September, US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, along with three other embassy staffers, were killed at the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya (in fact, several US embassies in other Arab countries were also attacked), during the furious demonstrations against an anti-Islamic film trailer made in the United States, which they viewed as insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Despite these incidents and overall, the Obama administration continued to maintain a balanced and cooperative relationship with countries of the Arab Spring, since their revolutions. There was a perception by many Arabs that the United States wanted to extend its influence, while the people of the region wanted to regain control over their choices and decisions. In March 2012, Shalabi outlined that Obama’s administrational approach to dealing with the waves of change in Egypt highlit how mutual benefits were being prioritised to overcome the growing tensions after the revolution. He concluded, What the recent crisis teaches us is that future US –Egyptian relations are likely to be strewn with differences, but that both countries will strive to resolve these differences in a pragmatic matter. Too much is at stake, and both Cairo and Washington are aware of the mutual benefits they obtain from their continued cooperation.97 In a television interview, Saad Eddin Ibrahim said he found that the US presidential elections attracted the attention of the peoples of the region. He explained that Obama’s visit to the region, and his knowledge of its affairs, had earned him a spiritual ‘closeness’ to it that Romney did not have. He welcomed Obama’s re-election as being important for the region and predicted that lobby groups would bear less influence on Obama’s policies in his second term.98 It is interesting to find that Amir Taheri, the Iranian analyst, wrote that ‘Paradoxically, Obama’s first four years may prove good for the Middle East in the long run. Obama’s confusion sapped the morale of

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Washington’s despotic allies, allowing speedy change in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. Having come to power in alliance with the United States, Islamists could no longer use xenophobic populism to justify their probable failures.’99 After the inauguration of President Obama officially on 21 January 2013, many Arabs again expected that US foreign policy, especially towards the Middle East, would be more liberal in Obama’s second term. On 10 November 2012, Munir Shafiq wrote a poignant article about the manner in which many Arab commentators had failed to consider the role of US imperialism and interests when placing so much hope in Obama. He provided examples of US hypocrisy, double standards, and meddling in world affairs that occurred during the Obama administration in a manner similar to, or even worse than, the Bush administration.100 It is interesting to see some Arab writers looking at Obama’s win as a result of the absence of a strong candidate. It seems that Obama’s unclear agenda in the Middle East left some Arabs with a belief that Obama’s eloquence was beyond doubt but the articulation of his promises of change was questionable. Some Arab writers looked at both Obama and Romney as inadequate leaders for the post-Arab Spring era. For example, on 11 November 2012, Hassan Naf’a’s op-ed explained that the positive reaction to Obama’s win was not attributed to a belief in his capacity to achieve progress, but rather to the absence of a better candidate. Also, on 30 October 2012, Abdel Moneim Said wrote about the disappointing language adopted by the competing US presidential candidates in the election debates, which revealed the candidates’ lack of sophisticated understanding of world affairs, including events in Egypt. However, this time, instead of hoping for change, Said lowered his expectations of the United States and accepted the realities of today’s world.101 However, GulfNews.com published a summary of some reactions tweeted by individuals from the Arab world which were a ‘Mixture of enthusiasm and caution greets re-election with many decrying US foreign policy.’102 It is evident that while the United States has carried around an irrational anti-Muslim mentality in the post 9/11 era, younger Arab generations are accepting different cultures. The influence of technology and media, along with immigration has created a situation for social growth and development.

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Courtesy of Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt).

The cartoon in Figure 2.14 was published soon after Obama was re-elected. The editor’s caption relayed his optimism about Obama’s re-election: The new face of United States President Barack Obama is somewhat different from the man who against all odds won the 2008 presidential race. Well, let us first congratulate the great and charismatic political personality. He is the first African American to occupy the White House and assume the top office in the US. I illustrated him brimming with self-confidence and a toothy smile of pride. He is characterised by conviction in his political principles and I am certain that he will rise up to the challenges of the second term in office.103 In January 2013, Fahmy Howeidy wrote about the prospects of making progress on the Palestinian crisis in the coming year. He identified Obama’s preoccupation with domestic matters, specifically the US economy, at least in the first two years of his second round. Therefore, Howeidy was notably doubtful about Obama’s ability to assume leadership on the Palestinian crisis, or world affairs for that matter.104 It is interesting that Obama initiated his second term with a visit to Israel, as if he wanted to send a strong message to Arabs after their ‘Spring’ that

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America stood with Israel. Obama 2013 was different from Obama 2008, who had made a demand to Israel at the beginning of his first term to freeze settlements, and promised Arabs the establishment of a Palestinian state in 2011. As if starting a new era of presidency, the Obama administration succeeded in distancing itself from Arabs’ internal affairs. It realised the following, in time: .

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The United States should instead use the Arab Spring as an opportunity to rebuild their own image as a superpower and do away with negative perceptions of the United States in the Arab world. The United States should allow the Arab Spring states to develop into nations that would benefit themselves as well as the United States. Someday, they could be America’s democratic partners on the world stage – on their own terms. There is a serious need to create terms of mutual understanding and connections between the United States and the Middle East, based on a humanistic approach that focuses on shared human values and concerns.

That is, East– West needs to be redefined in the post-Arab Spring era. The roles played by foreign interests in the Arab Spring in Egypt – be they Arab, regional, or international – and how they managed to achieve their objectives are extremely important in understanding the complex scene of contemporary Egypt. The neglect of these issues has resulted in the absence of national agreement, evident in the confusion in administering post-Mubarak Egypt, as well as the failure of opposition to offer national alternatives and to agree to a national project to move the country beyond the instability of the Revolution. In contrast, some have pointed out that the US had begun conversations with the Muslim Brotherhood back in 2005 – long before the outbreak of the Revolution in 2011 – as an example of the Brotherhood’s willingness to engage in more open democratic discussions. Seeing that the Mubarak regime might collapse, and understanding that it was not in its interests to provoke a confrontation with Arab Spring nations over the choices of their voters, the US had wanted to safeguard a stable transition of power in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

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In the summer of 2013, Tamarod, another young people’s movement, took to the streets with many of the same goals as the April 6 movement105: a return to a respectable liberal-democracy. But unlike the April 6 movement, they were happy to accept the old guard as Egypt’s saviour once again. In cahoots with the military, Mubarak-era cronies, elite backers, and the aging liberal secular elites such as Mohamed El Baradie and technocratic members of the interim cabinet, the Tamarod movement used its bottom-up signature collecting campaign to overthrow Morsi and the Brotherhood. ‘It’s not a coup, but a continued revolution!’, cried Egyptians, celebrating the military’s removal of President Mohamed Morsi from power after the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square. The Brotherhood refused to accept the outcome of the June 30 protests, denouncing all those who marched against their leader. The ‘us’ vs ‘them’ narrative propagated by both sides has become entrenched and what little middle ground was left after 3 July 2013 has been eroded. The Egyptian Revolution was an expression of public discontent with internal corruption and despotism, but these are themselves linked to global economic and political structures, as evident in Western geopolitical interests that prop up authoritarian leaders in the name of ‘stability’.

Conclusion Recent events in international politics clearly have driven both Americans and Arabs towards rethinking their cultural approaches, as well as their national and international priorities. In the United States many scholars address the most challenging element of US influence and imperialism in the Middle East, as the recognition of the ‘other’ and as a ‘subject’ rather than an ‘object’. On the other side, some Arab writers have turned to reason in dealing with accusations of ‘backwardness’ and ‘fundamentalism’. Arab intellectuals use the US invasion of Iraq and all atrocities committed there to accuse Americans of ‘backwardness’ and ‘evil’, the same words attributed to Arabs by some Americans. Some Arab intellectuals found in the Iraq War an opportunity to prove to people all over the globe that Americans are ‘barbaric’ and ‘racist’. While George W. Bush has been used as a representative of the American nation, other intellectuals do not and see Obama as an opportunity for image improvement and self-correction.

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A notable example is the prominent Arab poet Farouq Goweida, who wrote a scathing poem on the American support for the war in Iraq, accusing Bush of having committed crimes against humanity that he bore disgracefully when he left office: On your hands is the blood of an armless people When it disappears, it will not depart your eyes. All the children lost in Baghdad’s seas of blood Become a stain of shame on your forehead.106 Obama’s slogans of ‘hope and change’ were embraced not only by Americans but also by many Arabs and Muslims with whom Bush’s policies had left many unhealed wounds. The different responses to Bush’s departure – with a ‘farewell shoe’ – and the arrival of Obama – with ‘cheering’ – show that the two incidents represent very different moments in time and highlight the ambivalence and diversity of opinion in the Arab world. Arab coverage of Obama’s election was enthusiastic and gradually optimistic, looking at the US – Arab encounter in its historical perspective, as well as taking into consideration the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at that time. The re-election of Obama did not get the same amount of interest from the Arab world, which was busy with its ‘Spring’: ‘Global publics are much less interested in the 2012 US presidential election than they were in the 2008 contest.’107 In 2008 Egyptians had been looking at the Statue of Liberty with thirst but in 2012 their attention was directed towards Tahrir Square, where the Egyptian Revolution was being born and then flourished. They now have their own ‘statue’ of freedom and they are busy creating their own example of democracy. It is Egypt now that draws the attention of Americans and their policy makers. As Adel Iskander put it: The unyielding strength of the [Egyptian] protesters forced the US administration to undergo one of the most startling U-turns in diplomatic expression in many years. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the Egyptian government was ‘stable’ and Vice-President Biden asserted that Mubarak was not a ‘dictator’. The tone would change dramatically as the Egyptian people who poured into the streets and liberated Tahrir Square in their

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millions rendered the realities on the ground. For once, the Egyptian street, usually either ridiculed or lamented, erupted in a show of force unparalleled in the nation’s history.108 Egypt has been changing and Egyptians are representing a new image of themselves. The whole world is unable to decide the direction of the Egyptian ship of democracy that runs very fast. On the same day as Iskander, Amr el-Shobaki wrote in the Egypt Independent that ‘Not only did the revolution succeed in ousting the head of the old regime, it also succeeded in presenting the image of the ‘‘new Egyptian’’ that has been marginalized for the last three decades.’109 The United States has realised that and has begun to act accordingly.

CHAPTER 3 THE UNITED STATES IN POST9/11 ARAB CINEMA

Any discourse, whatever it be, is constituted by a set of utterances which are produced each in its place and time.1 We think and produce cinema in the same way as the Americans do . . . We’re trying to work internationally because we need to communicate. This is the glamour or the magic of cinema. We know the jeans or the hamburger, everything from the American movies, so I think people will know us.2 The film scene in Egypt is somewhat shallow. Some of its participants seem to have no values and yet are influencing public opinion and tastes; some producers aren’t even fit to be viewers. There are those who speak about freedom and those who defend slums and sympathize with sexual promiscuity. There are the idiots who use misuse language to excite laughter, and promote drugs as a fun and wonderful lifestyle.3 Perhaps not since the Vietnam War has the world witnessed events as dramatic and shocking as those of 11 September 2001 and their repercussions. The 9/11 attacks were filmed and viewed by people worldwide and have gradually become pivotal in many international films. Arab cinema, too, found rich material in the 9/11 attacks, especially after the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Film makers attempted to show Arab culture as rich and receptive – and American culture as less receptive – to the ‘other’, especially if Arab or Muslim.

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Many Arab intellectuals have called for new channels through which Arabs can redress their current negative image, to provide a more accurate model of their reality, a model that more effectively counters the misapprehensions. Arab film makers realise that Hollywood dominates the film industry and that it tell Arabs’ ‘stories’ from the Hollywood perspective. There is a need to more successfully market to current and future generations – both in the Arab world and in the West – stories about Arabs, told by Arabs themselves. Arab film makers are aware of the difficulty of popularising their movies in the West, given the overwhelming appeal of American products and the cost of marketing in the United States. Therefore, they focus on attracting local/Arab audiences, paying less attention to exporting films to the West, where it is difficult to find venues for their films. Arab society is currently facing a sociopolitical and economic dilemma that affects its attitude towards both the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The third millennium is witnessing a media revolution that widens the gap between Arabs and their governments while narrowing it between them and the outside world. The political suppression in Egypt, for example, has led to a new wave of satirical comedy films that allow Egyptians to watch their daily pain on the screen and laugh it off – at least momentarily. Cinema is reaching its peak in popularity as the country faces its worst sociopolitical-economic crisis in decades. Moreover, because this crisis drags on, it leaves people with the belief that, without the portrayal of the negative side to life in contemporary Egypt, their society cannot be as beautiful or intimate as it should be. In other words, when people find that their social problems are ignored and snowball into permanent ones, they feel that finding a solution to their troubles become more difficult, if not impossible. A renowned film scholar and documentary film maker, Viola Shafik has stated that ‘the political and economic stagnation common to the largely autocratic Arab regimes has been affecting culture and film continuously’.4 The appearance of what is known as ‘new comedy’ in Egyptian cinema has allowed people to cope with their troubles through laughter. The way Egyptians laugh at their pain also shows how the line separating agony and ecstasy has disappeared in the face of the darkness of the ‘political and economic stagnation’ to which Shafik refers. Known in the Arab world as ‘Hollywood of the East’, Egypt’s film industry is the largest and most popular in the Middle East and North

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Africa. After the 1952 Egyptian revolution, which put an end to a long history of foreign colonisation, there was the era of the US– Egypt ‘soft’ encounter, characterised by much cooperation, both political and military. This paved the way for a cultural open-border on the part of Egypt. A US cultural ‘onslaught’ ensued, evident in the way Egyptian cinema followed in Hollywood’s steps. Galal Amin, an Egyptian academic and writer, summed up US influence on Egyptian society in the wake of their ‘soft’ encounter: All Egyptians . . . were suddenly exposed to a cultural onslaught that seemed to be coming from a number of directions, but all of which originated in the USA: fast food and Coca-Cola bottles in restaurants and coffee shops, big American cars in the streets, novel ways of presenting the news in the media, new types of songs on the radio, and the Hollywood films in the cinema.5 Amin goes on to affirm the manner in which Egyptian films in the 1970s and 1980s were following American cinema, ‘allowing for more sexual permissiveness and violence as well as giving longer rein to their obsession with pure technique’.6 The flow of American cultural productions into Egypt and other Arab countries does not mean that all Arabs are a homogeneous group that can easily be slotted in one ‘Westernised’ category. Many Arabs have expressed their belief that the United States continues to widen the gap between Arabs and the United States by its blind support for Israel. Arabs certainly partake of the cultural effects of globalisation as they drink Coca-Cola, wear the latest American fashions, and watch Hollywood films; however, their opinions of the United States are still very much influenced and shaped by US involvement in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and US alignment with undemocratic Arab regimes. At this level – that is, the level of US foreign policy in the Middle East – there is much anti-Americanism in the Arab world. A difficult dilemma faced by Arabs in the late twentieth century is the lack of a unique ‘language’ capable of addressing properly the West in general and Americans in particular. By ‘language’ I refer to the cultural, political, and, of course, economic tools that would allow Arabs to affect US/West policy in the region. This dilemma emanates from a sense that Arabs fail in attracting US interests that will guarantee a fair policy while it assumes the role of broker in the peace process between

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Israel and Palestine. Realising that the Arab world is lagging behind the West politically and economically, many Arab film makers produce films that discern the way Arabs become easy prey for Western and US hegemony, dominance, and, of course, negligence. Directly or indirectly, many Arab films urge their Arab audience to refuse to submit in any way to Western/US hegemony. There is a rejection of any type of ‘supremacy’ to be exercised by ‘white’ nations. Responding to this expanding spirit within the Arab world, Arab films are highly critical of all forms of oppression; and yet, while they show Arabs as strong and defiant in the face of the West/United States/Israel, they also show them as weak and pitiful in the face of their own dictatorial regimes. This has changed after the social/political change movements in the Arab world, culminating with the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and the Lotus Revolution in Egypt, along with other movements for democracy in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria. As the first to erupt, Tunisia’s uprising invigorated frustrated people throughout the region. Arab films typically portray Arabs as being smarter and stronger than their Western counterparts, who are often shown to be naı¨ve and gullible. However, Arab films also show Arabs beset by a ‘khawaga [‘foreigners’, in slang or colloquial Egyptian] complex’, which refers to the way Arabs overvalue everything and everybody Western, European, or white. This is extremely evident in the following films; Amrika Shika Bika (America Abracadabra), by Khairy Bishara, 1993, The City, by Youssri Nassrallah, 1999, Hammam in Amsterdam, by Said Hamid, 2001, and Hello America, by Nader Galal, 2000. The remainder of this chapter will examine some evolving aspects of Arab film, providing examples for the readers to consider for themselves.

The Beginnings of Egyptian Cinema Exploring Egyptian cinema, the world’s third oldest and fourth largest film industry, requires investigation into many of the conditions it has faced from its inception to the present, especially with regard to its representation of the West in general and the United States in particular. Egypt became familiar with cinema soon after its invention in Europe. The Lumie`re brothers of France made one-minute films in Egypt and showed them for the first time in January 1896 in Alexandria and then in Cairo a few days later. In 1908, ten movie theatres (five in Cairo and three in Alexandria) were established in Egypt; by 1917, there were 80. As early

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as 1912 foreign films with Arabic translation were shown in Egypt. By 1918 Egyptians started to produce their own films. The first film, a silent film, al-Azhar al-Mumita (Mortal Flowers, 1918), was banned by authorities because it showed Arabic Qur’anic verses upside down.7 Other silent films were produced, including Leila (or Layla), which remains the most well known. Released in 1927, Leila is Egypt’s first feature-length film, directed by a woman, Aziza Amir. The first Egyptian sound film, Awlad Al Zawat (The Children of Privilege), was screened in March 1932.8 Egyptians’ first significant encounter with US culture in the twentieth century was through Hollywood. Cinema in Egypt was seen as a means through which Egypt could compete with the United States. The Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Ahram published an article on 1 November 1927 that stated the following: Silent acting has finally been born in Egypt. In the Egyptian sky a shining star has arisen, a star, which seems to serve Egypt and the children of Egypt . . . which wants to carry out a great propaganda service . . . what is this propaganda, which will serve the homeland in the greatest possible way? It is cinema . . . pure Egyptian, national cinema . . . What is preventing us from having, within a few short years, a city like Hollywood?!9 Al-Ahram discerned in cinema a mirror being held up to Egypt’s national face, taking the country on a fascinating and rewarding adventure. Egyptians could soar beyond their current circumstances and build what should belong to them, separate from their existing lives. Unlike other arts, cinema would be able to transport its audience towards a world different from their own. In this way, cinema would help ‘the children of Egypt’ to see Egypt as it should be rather than as a country occupied by the British. The first national breakthrough in investing in the realm of cinema came from the Egyptian economist Talaat Harb, who founded the Egyptian Company for Cinema and Performance in 1925, his greatest achievement. But it was not until 1935 that his fully equipped Egypt Studio (‘Masr’ in Arabic) came into existence.10 Initially, Egyptian cinema was dependent on the West, the only supplier of raw film stock; World War II reduced these supplies even further. However, after the war, Egyptian cinema was able to produce an average of 45 films annually, with a drop during the World War II years

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due to an interruption in the supply of raw film stock, only available from the West. Moreover, Studio Masr was keen to help Egyptian directors acquire the necessary qualifications by sending them to Europe on scholarships.11 Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 revolution marked the end of British influence on Egyptian affairs and the end of the Egyptian monarchy. The Free Officers, led by Nasser, showed great interest in cinema, but this resulted in much interference in the industry on the part of the new republican state. This interference culminated in the nationalisation of Egyptian cinema in the 1960s, which entailed transferring the ownership of all companies and studios to the state. The nationalisation of Egyptian cinema was intended to improve film quality either by involving the state in film making or by supporting the private-sector companies. But the result was not as expected, as the nationalization policy led Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian producers and distributors to withdraw from Egypt and invest in Lebanon instead. This resulted in a temporary increase of Lebanese production during the 1960s, which in turn made extensive use of Egyptian stars and technical talent.12 When Anwar al-Sadat came to power in 1970 and inaugurated an opendoor policy that brought Egypt closer to the West while distancing it from Nasser-inspired socialist policies, state-sponsored feature film production came to an end by 1971. This was followed by a privatisation movement that is still in effect today. However, the state has maintained its control of the means of production. Since the 1970s most Egyptian films have been made by private film makers who have no option but to rent production facilities from the government. Nevertheless, privatisation has helped film makers to create their art without the strangling limitations that might be ordained by the state. This is evident in post-9/11 films that deal quite openly with governmental corruption and police brutality.

Egyptian Cinema Before and After 9/11 Cinema, with its visual impact, can connect with an audience otherwise thwarted from reading books. This is probably one of the reasons cinema

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was taken more seriously in post-revolution Egypt, under Nasser. With the aim of improving the quality of Egyptian film making, the state took over the film industry in the 1960s, directly involving itself in film making as well as supporting companies in the private sector. Because of state censorship laws, however, the results of this investment were not as fruitful as hoped. With the arrival of Sadat, and the emergence of Egyptian films critical of Egyptian society at the time, censorship faded, allowing the release of films by such cinematographers as Youssef Chahine and Khaled Youssef, which portrayed the negative aspects of Egyptian society. Given that films are based on fictional works, they deal with an invented reality based on the author’s ideological perspective. The film maker’s role, therefore, is to reproduce the original invented reality using another medium and to redefine that reality in accordance with his/her own ideological perspective. Films can be viewed as artefacts of historical events; the 9/11 attacks provided Arab film makers an opportunity to present their own subjective readings of those attacks and their subsequent repercussions worldwide. These can be explored, to see how Arab films construct certain ‘Truths’ in the context of the history of US– Arab encounters. The most prominent feature of this Arab ‘reading’ of the 9/11 attacks is the way films link ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. According to this reading, undemocratic regimes, unfair Western policy in the area, corruption, police brutality, etc., could not help but produce a terrorist. Note that this is not an expression of sympathy or pity towards what the terrorists do so much as it is an attempt to delve deep into the process of manufacturing terrorism in as much as terrorists are not born but made. Cinema cannot help but keep pace with the spirit of the open-space age. New media break all taboos and Egyptian cinema walks in their steps to take the Egyptian film into new markets around the globe. Such films as The Yacoubian Building (2006) and Heya Fawda (Chaos, 2007) were able to tackle the sensitive issues of homosexuality and police brutality and corruption. In this way the Egyptian film industry can be used as a reference point, reflecting the general attitudes, perceptions, ideas, and self-definitions – the concept of ‘me and the other’ – and events and values in the Middle East in general. Moreover, the Egyptian film industry has served as a model for other Arab film industries.13

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In addition, Egyptian cinema has played an important role in feeding Arab nationalism, as had been called for and defended most notably by Nasser. This resurgent Arab nationalism, as construction of the ‘self’, has resulted in anti-Americanism and in deconstruction of the ‘other’. Defining identity requires an ‘other’. Resurrecting the past with the brutality of the colonial West and the brave resistance of the colonised East has dominated the trajectory of Arab cinema. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson provides an historical background for the emergence of nationalism, which has resonance with the way Egyptian cinema has attempted to create or forge an Egyptian Arab ‘nation’ through disparagement of other nations, especially those that have exercised the most influence upon Egyptians, i.e. the United States. Anderson defines the nation as ‘an imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.’14 To Anderson, the nation is ‘imagined’ because its ‘members . . . will never know most of their fellow members . . . yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.15 Each member of this community is ‘imagining’ the existence of the nation’s boundaries that might not be physically there; Palestinian nationalism in diaspora is an example of this. The nation is ‘limited’ because ‘even the largest of them . . . has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’.16 These boundaries encompass only the citizens of one national identity that excludes its ‘others’. This exclusion does not mean hostility in any way but, as Anderson explains, ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible . . . for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.’17 Thus, according to Anderson, to become ‘sovereign’ in the newly emerging nation states, however, is to gain freedom from traditional indigenous religious structure.18 In Egypt’s case, one way to achieve this is through immersion in the cultural productions of the West, especially those of the United States. Actually, what Jaap Kooijman states about the Americanisation of European cultures is applicable to the United States–Arab case: Traditionally, [it] has been perceived in two seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, Americanization has been equated with American cultural imperialism. In this way, European consumers are seen as passive victims of a globally

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mediated American mass culture that threatens local and national cultures. On the other hand, Americanisation has been equated with an act of liberation.19 In other words, Americanisation can interact in two different ways with the consuming culture. If the culture remains completely passive, it will gradually be ‘Americanised’. But if it can actively strive to exercise some control over inflowing American culture into the local one (even as it incorporates elements), the national identity has a chance to be preserved. Egyptian cinema attempts at maintaining the second option through a constant connection to Egyptians’ daily lives and an ‘Egyptianisation’ of the largely American cultural influxes that come through Hollywood movies and other cultural products. Nationalism in Egyptian cinema attempts to disseminate a collective national identity, capable of transcending any different intra-national identities based on class, gender, and religion. This collective identity can be found only when an ‘other’ is defined and excluded. Calling Hollywood films ‘foreign’ instead of defining them as American or Hollywood is an attempt to define the ‘other’ and thereby exclude it. Thus, Egyptian cinema since 1952 has been torn between its ‘limits’ and its ‘sovereignty’, or between dehumanising the ‘other’ and following in the steps of the ‘other’. However, both aspects are in effect and work side by side within Egyptian society. For example, khawagas are mostly represented in Egyptian cinema as barmen, smugglers, and cozeners. Moreover, in many Egyptian movies, the naı¨ve, simple-minded character of the khawaga is used to enhance the comedic effects of a movie through broken Arabic and childish actions. And, in order to overcome national economic and social problems, Egyptian cinema has adopted certain Western social values presented in Hollywood movies: questioning the traditional model of women as home makers and child educators, representing women as active participants in social and economic changes, and promoting women’s right to employment and the liberating potential therein. Egyptian film makers in the twenty-first century are interested in touring the globe with their films, which have usually been met with approval by various film festival audiences. To do so, they make use of the latest Western technologies in their productions, and at the same time put emphasis on all forms of indigenousness. To emphasise indigenousness,

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Egyptian films revisit the country’s past to renew public memory, as evident in movies about Nasser and Sadat. John Bodnar, an American history professor, wrote that public memory is ‘a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past and present, and by implication its future’.20 Almost a decade later, a British scholar, Walter Armbrust, noted that the target behind such films ‘is no longer imperialism and Egyptian traitors but rather a present that has become detached from the moving spirit of a bygone era. If not a clarion call to restore that spirit, [it] is certainly a lens through which to reimage and reassess that which has been lost.’21 Recalling the past to revive a proud nationalistic spirit in the public marks current Egyptian cinema, which has so many historical events to choose from. What really characterises Egyptian cinema in the third millennium is its large budgets. This is evident, for example, in works produced by GoodNews4Film, a new Egyptian production company. Laylat El Baby Doll (The Baby Doll Night, 2008) was the company’s most recent movie. It had a budget of 40 million Egyptian pounds (about 7 million dollars), small by Hollywood standards but practically unheard of before in the history of Egyptian filmmaking. In the future, the company hopes to produce films in English to reach out to the English-speaking world. Adel Adeeb, director of Baby Doll Night and managing director of Good News4Film, acknowledged that, in order to work internationally, subject matter in Arabic movies has to change, from being tuned into local audiences to favouring a broader one; but he was convinced that cinema has the power to communicate over national borders: We [in Egypt] think and produce cinema in the same way as the Americans do . . . We’re trying to work internationally because we need to communicate. This is the glamour or the magic of cinema. We know the jeans or the hamburger, everything from the American movies, so I think people will know us . . . The company aims to broaden minds beyond images of gun-battles and belly dancing synonymous with the region.22 Taking the ‘other’ into consideration while producing movies about the ‘self’ is a post-9/11 feature of Egyptian cinema. Arab film makers have been sensing heightened worldwide attention, that the West is seeking knowledge about Arabs/Muslims and that Arab/Egyptian cinema could

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be a lens on Arab culture and society. Egyptian cinema was already on the cusp of change even before 9/11, but 9/11 events have given the industry a new and more urgent set of political concerns that have energised the content in significant ways.

Prescient 9/11 Arab Films Many politically prescient films emerged before 9/11; notable examples include Al-irhab wal-kabab (Terrorism and Kebab, 1993), El-Erhabi (The Terrorist, 1994), Teyour al-Dalam (Birds of Darkness, 1995), El-Akhar (The Other, 1999), and Al-Assifa (The Storm, 2000). In each of these movies we find fundamentalists in the making, born out of social and economic disorders. Egyptian film makers were already deeply concerned with terrorism as a topic, and they wanted to show its social and political context to challenge Egyptian society. These films offer a self-analysis aimed at Egyptians and Arabs, since they will not generally attract US audiences. Through these movies, Arab/Egyptian cinema was attempting to create an historical and documentary narrative about terrorism, its causes, and its cures. In these films, terrorists are shown on the margins, in inconspicuous, sterile, and small living spaces. In The Terrorist (1994, directed by Nader Galal), for example, we find Ali Abdul-Zaher living in a poorly furnished room with limited space that reflects the ‘limitedness’ of his mind as well as his existence. He is considered a ‘strange’ element in his society and portrayed as an ‘outsider’. More emphasis is put on the result (someone’s being/becoming a terrorist) rather than on the cause (the oppression and hard life in Egypt). In Birds of Darkness (1995), directed by Arafa, we see how corrupt politics and religious extremism lead to the destruction of society. The ‘broad’ reach of a ‘big’ politician is administered by the ‘finite’ reach of a ‘small’ lawyer. The relation between ‘dark’ and ‘light’ or between ‘known’ and ‘hidden’ reflects the cloudy political and social situation in Egyptian society. In The Other (1999), directed by Youssef Chahine, the US–Arab encounter is witnessed in ‘limited’ cyberspace, where characters fight by means of networked computers. The Other also discusses the meaning of terrorism, who is a terrorist, and who is a ‘real’ terrorist. Through the love story between an Egyptian-American who studies human rights and terrorism and an Egyptian female journalist whose own brother is a terrorist, the plot gives the viewer different layers of meanings

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about ‘terror’ and ‘power’ and how those in power are responsible for generating those who terrorise. The earliest of these films, Terrorism and Kebab (1993), directed by Sherif Arafa, explores how a terrorist is made out of an ordinary citizen. Ahmed, a father who would like to move his children to a school closer to his house, goes to al-Mugamma, a famous administrative building in Cairo. He gets shuffled around from one office to another until he attacks a bureaucrat who uses praying to slack off at work. When a policeman intervenes, Ahmed ends up with a gun and a set of hostages under his control. He gains the support of people at al-Mugamma: a soldier who hates police officers for their mistreatment of him, a prostitute who sees herself a victim of the moral corruption of her society, a husband who escapes his harshly materialistic wife, and a shoe-shiner who has fled an attempted revenge23 killing in Upper Egypt. The ‘unreal’ terrorists start by demanding nothing more than a good shish kebab of the highestgrade lamb, as meat is too expensive for most Egyptians. The symbolic meaning of the demand is analysed by the scriptwriter Wahid Hamed:24 ‘People don’t know what they want . . . They are crushed, their dreams are impossible, they can’t believe their demands can be fulfilled, so they ask for kebab.’25 The Egyptian Minister of the Interior intervenes to secure a peaceful end to the standoff and the safe release of the hostages, yet when he gets around to negotiating, he is shocked to find that the terrorists’ major demand is for kebabs. However, after a rich meal with his hostages, Ahmed’s demands become more political when he asks for the resignation of government leaders. The film ends with no terrorists to arrest but rather with conformists at risk because of what they face in their daily life. Ahmed asks the ‘hostages’ to get out of the building, as the Egyptian police forces are getting ready to swarm the building. He intends to wait behind to meet up with the police, assuming he will be killed. The hostages, however, insist that he leave with them. They all walk out of the building together while the Egyptian Special Forces fail to find or recognise any terrorists in the empty building. The film warns that terrorists can easily be manufactured through a corrupt society and the deaf ears of oppressors. Ahmed defines the terrorist in an answer to a question posed by a reporter, about what the terrorist looks like, by saying, ‘Like any one of us.’ In The Storm (2000), directed by Khaled Youssef, the Gulf War tragically enters the lives of an Egyptian family. By coincidence, two

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brothers find themselves in two opposite camps. This muddled political melodrama gives us an unusual perspective on the Gulf War, the bulk of the film portraying Arab conflicts and the everyday realities of a middleclass Egyptian family. Hoda is a schoolteacher whose husband, Hassan, abandoned her and their two sons due to a long-term psychological disorder. Hassan had fought in the Arab–Israeli war of 1973 and was shocked to discover the Israeli flag rising in Cairo. Hoda has refused to remarry to raise her two sons, Ali and Nagy, as the whole family believes that the father is still alive. Ali and Nagy, upon entering young adulthood, start facing the cruelty of social and economic problems in Egypt. Nagy falls in love with Hayat, a student and political activist who belongs to a rich family and whose father is against the idea of her marrying a poor man such as Nagy. For his part, Nagy keeps trying his best to become worthy of Hayat by working and studying at the same time to save money for marriage. Ali, who had graduated from the university, cannot find a job so he decides to go to Iraq to work in order to fund his brother’s marriage to Hayat. Ali joins the Iraqi Army, thinking that he will be a technician, but he is shocked to find himself on the battlefield. He is forced to participate in the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, but refuses to kill any Kuwaitis during battle. At the same time, his brother Nagy joins the Egyptian Army, aiming to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. To their horror, the two brothers discover that they are fighting in opposing armies and are terrified that they may injure or kill one another. The film leaves all

Figure 3.1

Burning the US and Israeli flags in Al-Assifa (The Storm).

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strands dangling with regard to the fate of the two brothers, while the final scene shows Hoda, along with Hayat, participating in Cairo student demonstrations, shouting slogans of hatred against the United States and Israel for pushing brothers (Arab vs Arab or Iraqi vs Kuwaiti) to fight against each other. The Arab demonstrators burned the US and Israeli flags to express their anger over the United States, which has been keeping a close eye on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which has lasted for decades, while launching a war against Iraq for occupying Kuwait.26 The film is structured around generational differences and historical changes. The older generations are divided into two categories. The first category is evident in the character of Hassan, soldier and father of Ali and Nagy, who still believes in Arabs’ power and who rejects conciliatory policies with Israel. But Hassan has disappeared, thus representing the fading of such older warriors from the scene. The second category is represented by those who would turn away from politics: a university professor, who urges students to focus on their studies rather than politics, and a businessman (Hayat’s father), who keeps trying to get his daughter away from politics and into marriage to a wealthy man. Hayat’s father represents Egyptian capitalists, most of whom come from modest middle classes and show no interest in politics, as long as it does not affect their business. Thus, some surviving members of the older generation do not endorse a military encounter between Arabs and Israel/the United States. The symbolic scenario of two brothers facing each other in the Gulf War as a warning of an impending political ‘storm’ suggests the emergence of a new generation that has never been witness to war. The brothers find themselves involved in a war, not against the ‘foreign’ body in the region, i.e. Israel, but against themselves. Hassan is a symbol of Arab victory in 1973, while his two sons refer to the failure of Arabs in everything, even in maintaining their ‘brotherhood’. The failure is not just military but also psychological. In a scene with Hayat and her father, the businessman assures his daughter that Arabs can do nothing but submit to American hegemony, and Hayat, a political activist, cannot do anything but surrender to her father’s claim. While Hassan’s generation has fought against Israel to restore their rights, the generation of Nagy and Ali cannot do anything but demonstrate and burn American and Israeli flags. Hassan, who never returns to his family, symbolises the absence of strong Arab regimes to more effectively confront Israel and America. The film makes it clear that a storm is brewing against the United States in the Arab world.

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Reel Bad Americans: The United States in Post-9/11 Arab Cinema In this section, the role of ‘images’ in determining how the US– Middle East encounter is perceived and how certain actions become (im)possible, (il)legitimate, and (un)necessary will be examined. The most common approach to analysing the relationship between cinema and society is to treat films as social documents, as pictures of social reality. In order to appreciate present conditions, Arab cinema collates them with those of the past: al-Quds, or Jerusalem, can be ‘freed’ by recalling Saladin,27 and the West can be overcome by remembering al-Andalus or Andalusia28 and the civilisation the Arabs/Muslims had built there. Escaping from the cruel present into the glorious past marks many nostalgic Egyptian films, such as Saladin by Yousef Chahine (1963) and Nasser 56 by Mohamed Fadel (1996). However, the Egyptian/Arab past in these films can be a burden as much as a time of glory. And sometimes the present is defined by problems for which the past has no solutions, such as the representation of the Arab/Israeli conflict in many Egyptian movies about the 1973 war. Despite the many evocations of past glory, there remains much inter-generational tension, pointing to the lack of past triumph and glory. An analysis of Arab film representations of the United States shows that Arab cinema articulates above all what film critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam term ‘allegories of impotence’ that probe social, political, and economic predicaments in the Arab world. Major Arab movies of this nature include 11’09’’01 – September 11 (2002), Alexandria . . . New York (2004), Laylat Soqut Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell, 2005), and Laylat El Baby Doll (The Baby Doll Night, 2008). These will be touched upon below, in discussions regarding their respective directors. I will also refer to another movie that deals with domestic issues that shed light on US interests in the Middle East, entitled Ayez Haqqi (I Demand My Rights, 2003).

Egyptian Film makers Youssef Chahine (1926– 2008): One of the most outstanding directors of Egyptian cinema, Chahine was able to make Egyptian local cinema cross national borders and reach people worldwide. He was born in the

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cosmopolitan city of Alexandria to a Lebanese father and a Greek mother, and went to secondary school at Victoria College, one of the most prestigious in Egypt. The nature of his background and education is reflected in his love and tolerance towards all ethnic and religious groups, a theme he brings unflinchingly to his works, evident in such films as Saladin, Alexandria . . . Why?, and many others. Chahine was a leading voice in Arab cinema for more than five decades, with his work carefully sketching out modern Arab history. His support of Arab nationalism can be seen his films Jamila Bouhired (Jamila, the Algerian, 1958), which relates the story of Algerian resistance fighter Djamila Bouhired; and Saladin (1963), which tells the story of the twelfthcentury sultan who liberated Jerusalem from Christian Crusaders. Saladin shows Chahine’s religious tolerance, which he inherited from his city of birth, Alexandria, and his first cultural incubator, Victoria College. In the autobiographical films that form his ‘Alexandria Trilogy’, Alexandria . . . Why? (1978), Alexandria Again and Forever (1989), and Alexandria . . . New York (2004), Chahine links the personal and the political, the local and the international, as well as the past and the present. The personal and national stories are intertwined to reflect on many issues, ranging from the image of the English in Egypt to the corruptibility of the Egyptian elites to Egypt’s coming into its own after the 1952 revolution. The trilogy gives us insight into Chahine’s artistic and personal life, his distinctive themes and cinematic technique, as well as his attempt to get his art recognised in the West. Mohamed Amin (1943– ): Three films by this author and director have proven that he has a cinematic viewpoint that differs from prevailing film trends in Egypt. The first, Film Thaqafi (Cultural Film, where ‘cultural’ means ‘pornographic’, 2000), deals with the problems of the sexually frustrated. The second, Laylat Soqut Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell, 2005), is a farce about an average Egyptian family enduring the disturbing regional conditions represented by the current situation in Iraq and other countries in the region suffering from American aggression. The protagonist, a school headmaster, searches for someone who could invent a military deterrent for Egypt to defend itself against what he imagines would be an imminent American invasion. Ameen’s third film that needs to be mentioned in this context is Bentain min Masr (Two Girls from Egypt, 2010), which deals with the problems of spinsterhood in Egypt. In Ameen’s films, sexuality functions as an

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important thematic tool for examination of current local or international social problems. It is one of the traditional taboos in the Egyptian cinema that Ameen attempts to break. Adel Adeeb (1966– ): Adeeb is the son of the famous Egyptian screenwriter, Abdel Hay Adeeb, who authored more than 100 screenplays for feature films. Adeeb’s recent films have been blockbusters. He is the producer of The Yacoubian Building (2006), based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswany; the film won the first Egyptian nomination for an Oscar. The Yacoubian Building is a highly artistic portrayal of diverse Egyptian lives and delves deep into many contemporary issues (e.g. homosexuality) with unprecedented frankness. Adeeb also directed Laylat El Baby Doll (The Baby Doll Night, 2008), which is the biggest Egyptian film production of all times. The film traces a difficult and bloody history, starting with the Holocaust, and then moving on to the Iraq War, the Arab– Israeli conflict, and finally 9/11. Adeeb is very interested in reaching out to audiences all over the world who want to know more about Arab societies, especially after 9/11. He asserts that there is a world out there that is starving for knowledge of our world and that our films should reflect the good and the bad.29 The films discussed below are intended for various audiences, as they are not pure genres, but rather a blend of genres. These films elicit both laughter and fear by exaggerating or playing with serious themes, language, action, relationships, and characters, all in order to captivate and entertain in a shared cathartic experience.

A Brief Overview of Select Films 11’09’’01 – September 11 (2002; Chahine’s episode). In this film 11 directors from around the world were invited to frame the worldwide reverberations of 9/11 attacks. Each director was allotted 11 minutes and 9 seconds to give his/her approach to the American tragedy. The film is a manifestation of multiculturalism as well as a witness to global readings of 9/11 events. Youssef Chahine is representative of the Arab perspective through his 11-minute episode. Chahine chooses to speak to the victims on both sides of the 9/11 divide rather than those who are still alive. In a fanciful way, he brings a US marine who was killed at the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and a Palestinian suicide bomber

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to observe 9/11 through their own individual tragedies. During his faceto-face dialogue with the US soldier, Chahine insists on reminding the audience of the millions of victims killed at the hands of Americans in Vietnam, Japan, Iraq, etc. He also refers to bin Laden and al-Qaeda as being essentially creations of US foreign policy and the CIA. Chahine’s episode starts with a film maker shooting scenes in New York while the police try to prevent him from doing so. The film maker is Chahine himself, in front and behind the camera, in order to deliver the message ‘I am what I make.’ It is a ‘postmodern’ doubling of oneself on screen; he is the author, the character, and the director. In the first scene, Chahine shows how the World Trade Center constitutes an important image in the eyes of many Arabs. He asks: ‘What are they going to say if I go home without having filmed the World Trade Center?’ But this Arab interest in filming America’s symbols is faced with a firm statement from the New York policeman: ‘If you don’t stop filming right now, I will shoot.’ Chahine shows his intense sadness over the 9/11 tragedy, as evident in the press conference he holds in Beirut on 12 September 2001, to talk about his new film. He wants to postpone the press conference because of the 9/11 catastrophe. His response to the tragic events is by ‘thinking’. And it is this ‘thinking’ that makes him recall a US marine who died years ago. The US marine starts his dialogue with the Egyptian film maker by asking him the following question: ‘What did you feel yesterday seeing the towers collapse?’ To explain the complexity of his feelings and the density of the US – Middle East encounter, Chahine takes the marine to a Palestinian house, to listen to the story of a suicide bomber, to learn about the different narratives/ readings of ‘who is the real victim’: suicide bombers are the result of Israeli tanks and missiles in the face of Palestinian rocks. By defending the idea that civilians are responsible for their government’s actions, Chahine suggests that the West has defined a ‘terrorist’ in a way that only suits Israeli interests, while ignoring Palestinians the right to defend their occupied lands. This is hardly to say that Chahine considers Americans and Israeli civilians as ‘fair targets’ for being the ones who elect the governments that the bombers feel justified in attacking. But he wants to deliver the message that we should look at our catastrophes in the larger context of world affairs. Chahine is able to confront Hollywood in many ways. The Australian author and film critic Christos Tsiolkas states, ‘Hollywood

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has trained us so well in cultural myopia that we take it for granted in blockbuster movies that cops in Moscow or Tel Aviv or Paris speak in broken English.’ According to Tsiolkas, Chahine is able to confront ‘us with an obviously fake restaging of the New York bombings in which the cops speak in Arabic. I don’t think this is a cheap effect, but rather a device by which we are being asked to contemplate the nature of “truth” and media.’30 Actually, Chahine’s episode confronts the West in general by proposing a point of view that needs to be contemplated by Westerners before embracing the rhetoric of the clash of civilisations and the war on terror. In Chahine’s piece lies an invitation to reread the tragedies of the past as well as those of the present with an eye on the concerns and fears of the ‘other’, with the notion that victimising the ‘self’ and terrorising the ‘other’, indulging in the Occidentalist vs Orientalist cliche´s, will not lead to a way out of the cycles of conflict. Chahine’s episode garnered many attacks from film critics in both the United States and Europe, who viewed it as a statement of support for terrorism and an ‘amateurish’ episode. For example, Sarah Coleman wrote: Given that ‘11’09’’01’ has positioned itself partly as a memorial to the events of Sept. 11, Chahine’s use of his segment as a critique of American imperialism could certainly be called tasteless. Actually, though, it doesn’t seem altogether inappropriate for an Arab filmmaker to address the rage and frustrations of the Arab street – it’s just a shame that he chose to wrap important issues in a veil of postmodern flim-flammery.31 Negative critiques such as the above then provoked their own criticisms in turn. Returning to Tsiolkas, we find: Youssef Chaine’s contribution is fucking great. I’m using the expletive to convey how strongly I feel about this episode, particularly because it has come under attack by many critics who detest its polemics and its intentions. Combining melodramatic excess with personal reflection, it is the story of a film director who cancels a press interview after hearing of the bombings in the USA,

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and then is confronted by the ghosts of two soldiers who demand of him that their individual stories be told.32 Tislokas thinks that Chahine, like many an Arab intellectual or artist, is torn between the undeniable nature of the 9/11 events and the irrefutable US political, economic, and military interference in the Arab world. Chahine shows sympathy not only towards Americans, but also towards Arabs who witness many crises born out of US policies in the Middle East and North Africa. Chahine’s piece looks beyond the disaster of 9/11, to unfold the many hidden layers of conflict between the United States and the West on the one side and Arabs/Muslims on the other. Alexandria . . . New York (2004) This is the third and final movie in Chahine’s Alexandria Trilogy (Alexandria Why: An Egyptian Story, Alexandria Again and Forever, and Alexandria . . . New York). The film is both nostalgic and angry; it shows the United States as defined by a level of violence and hostility that was not there in the mid-twentieth century. The country, which was supposed to stand for democracy and freedom, now has a distorted and racist image of Arabs: mainstream media depict Arabs as illiterates still living in tents and riding camels. This is a film that is about films, wherein Chahine tells the story of his disillusionment both through the life story of a man (the film maker/himself) and through the history of film, which moves from an idealised moment in the 1940s to the violent hostility of the 2000s. The American dream that Chahine believed in when he was young during his first journey to the United States in the 1960s is now only a memory. It is not just that the dream is less vivid; it is that it has been destroyed altogether. In Alexandria . . . New York, Chahine reconsiders his relationship with America, the country that he has admired most but whose policies he is now shocked to find going against the values that make it the land of dreams. The movie starts with a conversation between Yahia, the protagonist, and his closest friend, a Syrian intellectual named Adeeb. Yahia defends America because it had stopped the tripartite attack on Egypt by France, England, and Israel in 1956. Adeeb corrects Yahia’s information by telling him that it was the Russian warning that stopped the attack. At that time, Yahia (a stand-in for Chahine) was still under the influence of his foggy American dream. Then, Yahia is invited to attend a festival in New York to celebrate his films, but the 2000 Intifada makes him hesitate. Finally, he decides to go and talk to

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Americans face to face. At this time, Yahia starts to feel the discrepancy between the America he has valued and its policies in the Arab world. When he had first come to the United States as a student, Yahia encountered his first love, Ginger, an American girl from Virginia, also a student, in California. Yahia eventually went to Alexandria and, 25 years after his last meeting with Ginger, he has returned to America to discover that he had begotten a son with her. Yahia has lived a true love story with Ginger, his American dream manifested in the existence of Alexander. To his surprise, however, Yahia finds that this son rejects him because he is an Arab. Alexander represents Yahia’s indebtedness to the United States, where he received his initial training in cinema and the art of directing. Having achieved his dream, Yahia’s prestige has grown in the film industry back home, but he is still ignored and trivialised in the United States. Knowing that his father had not known about him and that his mother had once been a prostitute, Alexander visits Yahia at his hotel and shocks him by saying, ‘I was born in America for an American father, and I do not want to accept any ‘‘other’’ father.’ Yahia replies to Alexander’s words by saying, ‘Where did you get all this cruelty?! Neither I nor your mother is cruel! . . . For sure, it is America that taught you how to be cruel.’ The son continues to express his pride in being an American, and being part of the most powerful country in the world, while the father reminds him that the history of empires extols only philosophers, thinkers, poets, and artists rather than military men, armies, and architects of bloody wars. Yahia eventually dismisses Alexander, telling him, ‘Go away . . . it is me who refuses to have a son like you.’ The difference between Ginger and her son represents the difference between pre-9/11 and post-9/11 America, as Yahia tells his son: ‘simply the same difference between all the wonderful romantic dreamy 40’s Hollywood old movies and the cruel violent movies of today’. Chahine uses movies to historicise and show the difference between different eras. He lives through movies. Life to him is, in itself, no more than a big movie. Reality is cinematic and cinema is a dream. The image of America that Chahine foregrounds in this film – that America is no longer a dream and is losing its privilege as the land of freedom and democracy – constitutes a turning point not only in Chahine’s life but in the way the United States is perceived in the Arab world. Chahine’s work reveals his love for America – but currently he presents the love in a sad form. It is a love that is slowly

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dying, as America in his eyes no longer follows its claims to defend democracy and freedom. Instead, it is a country that provides nations such as Israel with weapons that kill innocent civilians. The ultimate dream of Yahia was to have a son, and in America he achieved this dream with Alexander. However, the young man rejects his father, even though he is one of the greatest film makers in the world. In turn, Yahia ends up rejecting this ‘arrogant’ American son, although he represents the dearest dream in Yahia’s life. In the end, Alexander’s anti-Arab attitude only works to reinforce Yahia’s belief in the death of the American dream. In Alexandria . . . New York, Chahine reinforces the notion of the Arab ‘other’ that is cultivated in popular society by US foreign policy. The cruelty that Yahia detects in his own son’s attitude towards him makes him believe that many Americans become harsh towards the ‘other’ because of their own country’s ruthless foreign policies. The movie ends with Yahia, full of anger, walking in the crowded streets of New York while a song plays in the background: ‘New York kills any nostalgia’. Laylat Soqut Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell, 2004), written and directed by Mohamed Ameen, is a political satire in Arab cinema, with scathing, dizzyingly well-crafted dialogue that simultaneously targets Americans and Egyptians. In an interview, Ameen said: ‘This is definitely an anti-American movie and it makes a point of illustrating Egyptian hatred for the US But I’m actually mocking us, Egyptians, not them.’33 He also points out that there is a clear ‘distinction [between the] American people and culture – which I respect – and devious, arrogant US policies’.34 The main character is Shaker, a simple Egyptian man and school principal who has been traumatised by the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, He begins to imagine the fate of Egypt if it were to face a US invasion. Soon after watching news of the fall of Baghdad, nightmares and horrible dreams start haunting him; the ghosts of US marines even come to him when he is awake. At his school, he envisages the Egyptian flag being replaced by an American one and fantasises that his students turn out to be American troops. Shaker tries to imagine how he might protect ‘home’ and decides he needs to pick a man of genius and finance his invention of a military deterrent to protect Egypt against future American attacks. At the same time, another character, Tariq, a former student of Shaker’s and an Egyptian with a degree in chemistry, is wholly obsessed with the spectre of unemployment. Tariq, the genius inventor,

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responds to the idea of his teacher and begins to research methods to counter potential US aggression. The film starts with Shaker and his family watching the American invasion of Iraq on the news. Shaker then goes to school and finds students demonstrating against US attacks on Iraq. When representatives from the Student Union ask him to make a protest sign and hang it at the school entrance in support of Iraq, he replies, ‘We made one for Afghanistan, so just add Iraq to the list’, suggesting that American wars in the region would continue, and that Afghanistan and Iraq were just the beginning. When the United States threatens both Iran and Syria, Shaker tells his students, ‘add Iran’ then ‘Syria’, and finally, he says, ‘Just leave spots on the list open as we don’t know who will be the next.’ Demonstrators burn US and Israeli flags and shout slogans to show their support for Iraqis. The protestors criticise the United States for its Middle East policy and double standards in tackling regional affairs, noting that it does not enforce UN resolutions when it comes to Israel. Shaker’s recurrent nightmares of America’s invasion of Cairo leave him with many psychological problems that culminate in sexual dysfunction. He visits a psychiatrist who advises him to lay aside his fanciful scenarios, as Egypt is different from Iraq and Afghanistan. Surprisingly, one of the men who frequents the same cafe´ Shaker does repeats his wish for the American invasion of Egypt: ‘to make us clean’. When Shaker asks him, ‘Do you think if they come here they will “clean” you?’ He replies, ‘I know that there will be like ten years of aggression, but soon we will be belonging to the ‘‘free nations’’.’ Shaker keeps thinking about the current situation in the world where there is no place for the weak. He believes that in order to feel safe one has to possess deterrent weapons. Shaker’s friends assure him that ‘Egypt does possess deterrent weapons’. He doubts this, and so they decide to visit one of their old friends, a veteran, to confirm. The old veteran asserts the importance of the weapons of ‘will’ and ‘faith’; he ends up telling them, ‘We have nothing but these ‘‘spiritual’’ weapons’. This refers to the frustration of Arabs with regard to their status in the international system that relies on military strength especially with the increasingly intense rivalry for regional influence between Israel and Iran. The films emphasise Arabs’ frustration over injustices in the region – both regional political issues such as the Israeli– Palestinian conflict, and domestic political issues. It shows Arabs aspiration to achieve regional

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leadership through military and economic superiority that will lead to the emergence of a new Arab foreign-policy orientation in the region, one that will stop the traditional policy of following America’s lead. Shaker remembers the stories of one of his students named Tariq who used to be a genius inventor. He decides to start looking for him. When he reaches his house and asks about him, Tariq’s mother tells him that her son ‘is working for the National Research Center’, which pleases Shaker who finds his anticipated inventor is on the right track. But Shaker is shocked to find Tariq at ‘The National Hookah Center’, smoking a hookah with no remaining interest in science and invention. Shaker is ready to sacrifice all he possesses to sponsor Tariq in order to get his help in inventing the deterrent weapon that Egypt needs. Tariq starts his job by staying at Shaker’s house. On the roof of his building Shaker draws an American flag as a kind of camouflage. Shaker hangs many pictures from Abu Ghraib on the walls of Tariq’s apartment to encourage him. Moreover, he gives him a tape that shows ‘moments of honour’ in Egyptian history from the war of 1973 to the present, which would presumably encourage Tariq when he gets frustrated. When Tariq views the tape he finds scenes of Egypt’s victories in soccer games, and he asserts that is the only way Egyptians win in reality. Moreover, in Tariq’s dreams, he wins the war against America, albeit in the bedroom and via sexual encounters. He dreams of Condoleezza Rice as one of his harem women belly dancing in front of him. He dreams of having sex with her, securing her total submission to him. If the ‘belly-dancer’ is one of the Orientalist stereotypes that Americans have of Arabs, Tariq reverses this stereotype in circumspect fashion by dreaming up a leading American politician as a ‘belly-dancer’ succumbing to his Arab masculine allure. ‘These aren’t sexual scenes’, explains Ameen, ‘they’re sexual meanings. It’s a universal language that everyone understands: The active partner, in this case Tariq, in a sexual act is always in the dominant, more powerful position. Tariq hates US officials so he defeats them in bed in a dream scene with Rice.’35 In a demonstration held in front of the American embassy in Cairo, Shaker’s daughter Salma shouts slogans against the United States and its policies in the region. She says, ‘If you managed to keep us backward by those traitors you have planted amongst us, now we are able to give a sober assessment of the situation.’ Selma marries Tariq, who ends up suffering from sexual dysfunction due to his invasion anxiety. The

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situation gets worst after hearing about the Abu Ghraib scandals. Shaker has nightmares about American marines breaking into his home, taking his whole family to a prison like Abu Ghraib, and raping his daughter Salma. This makes him more furious about the future of his family at the hands of ‘bad’ Americans. He brings his veteran friend to train him along with his family on the use of arms. They use portraits of American soldiers for target practice. Tariq manages to overcome his sexual dysfunction by imagining Salma as an American marine. Shaker and his friends use the same technique to overcome their sexual dysfunction. Salma complains about Tariq, who refuses to have children with her. When asked about the reason, Tariq says, ‘Whenever I look at news stories I find Arabs downtrodden, so do you want me to bring children into the world to be treated like this?!’ Shaker is convinced by Tariq’s viewpoint and asks his daughter to put motherhood on hold for one or two years to wait and see if Americans depart from the region. Salma says, ‘Then the Americans succeeded in making you frustrated about your future.’ But the spirit of defiance is evident in a scene when two CIA agents, who are following Shaker and Tariq’s plans to invent a new weapon, visit Shaker’s family at home to offer them millions of dollars, plus immigration to the United States, in return for access to Tariq’s research on the deterrent weapon. Shaker’s family, headed by Salma, dismisses the CIA agents after reprimanding them and rejecting their deal. The character of Shaker stands for an older generation that has witnessed the birth of a nationalist spirit at the hands of Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as its death following the Naksa, or the Setback of 6 June 1967.36 Tariq belongs to the post-1973 generation that grows up with a country deteriorating politically, socially, and economically. An intergenerational dialogue between Shaker and Tariq ensues, wherein Shaker criticises Tariq for his delay in inventing the deterrent weapon, and Tariq replies, ‘Where is your generation when the space between “us” and “them” gets wider and wider until it becomes as spacious as the cosmos itself . . . Now you want our generation to heal the broken world you left us!’ Meanwhile, Tariq succeeds in having his invention work theoretically, although he is in need of funding to put his theory into practice. He, along with Shaker, submit their proposal to deaf ears from officials and businessmen who would prefer to sponsor football players, singers, or inventors interested in making new tones for cell phones. Shaker gets frustrated and, as he bends over, tells all his friends that

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‘we are nations without any dignity and the only way we act in time of disasters is get on our knees, beseeching our enemies, “Please don’t fuck us”.’ Shaker says the last phrase in English and his friends follow him by doing the same and repeating his statement. This shows how Egyptians are frustrated with their government and policy makers. They believe that people in power in the Arab world are not interested in change or resisting American and Western hegemony. CIA agents visits Tariq offering to help him put his military deterrent into practice by testing their own invention to overcome his weapon. Tariq agrees, anxious about the success of his weapon against that of the Americans. Tariq’s weapon fails against the American one, and Shaker once again returns to being haunted by nightmares about the American occupation of Egypt. He imagines a destroyed Egypt following an American invasion. Tariq himself is haunted by the possibility of being raped by an American marine called Jack. Determined that such a blow to his ‘honour’ will not be tolerated, he becomes encouraged again to invent a successful and powerful deterrent weapon. Tariq works hard to make modifications in his deterrent weapon. The weapon becomes effective and proves the ability to protect Egypt’s skies against any attacks from the United States. The CIA agents come and threaten Shaker and Tariq with forced admission into a psychiatrist hospital. Salma tells her family not to worry as ‘Egypt still has some honest people who would support them.’ The following scene opens with Shaker and Tariq in a psychiatrist hospital where they spend many years until the American occupation of Egypt becomes a reality. The Egyptians use Tariq’s weapon to protect the country against the American invasion. Shaker’s friend, who longs for the arrival of Americans to ‘make us clean’, becomes the first to be killed by the American marines. It is customary to use sarcasm as the lingua franca of politics. The Night Baghdad Fell is testimony to that. With its darkly humorous dialogue, although highly critical of the United States and matching Orientalist cliche´s with Occidentalist ones, the film also pokes fun at the absurdity and ineptitude of Arab leaders. With everyone seeking a deterrent weapon, and with the fate of the Arab nation at stake, the ensemble cast of characters bumbles its way through Machiavellian political dealings across Arab countries and towards comic and absurd resolutions. In this search for a nation’s defence, the absence of the Egyptian state is striking. People are moving by themselves to find a way

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out of an anticipated American invasion. There is, the movie suggests, no other option. In this way, the film is a critique not only of America but of the Egyptian government as well, which presumably can no longer be trusted to defend its people. The film argues that the hegemonic image of the United States is also a reflection of Egyptian failures, or the failure of a government that allies itself with the United States. In that sense, the alien or troubling ‘other’ is not just America, it is (some) Egyptians themselves. A review by Amira Howeidy (2006) ended with this observation: ‘As the audience left a Heliopolis theatre after screening the film recently, a teenager was overheard telling his companion: ‘‘I really want to go and protest at the US embassy right now”.’37 Avez Haqqi (I Demand My Rights, 2003). With regard to the way Egyptian films link the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, I Demand My Rights is a noteworthy example. It tells the story of a simple Egyptian man who discovers by chance that he has a share in public property. Saber (an Arabic word that means ‘patient and marked by calm endurance of pain or difficulty’), the protagonist, gains the approval of more than 50 per cent of the Egyptian population to sell his share in the public properties. Upon Saber’s announcing this, many international powers show interest in ‘buying Egypt’. This throws light on money as a substitute for a weapon to be used in imperialist adventures. The film hints that the United States and Israel are two sides of the same coin. This is evident in the last scene in which there is an auction to sell all public properties in Egypt. This political satire has an approach to political comedy unlike anything that Egyptian cinema had attempted over the past 25 years. The film may be said to belong to what Fredric Jameson regards as ‘conspiracy film’ in which ‘it is the intent and the gesture that count’.38 This is evident in showing one of the bidders interested in buying the Egyptian public sector as ‘anonymous’: each bidder is supposed to show the flag of his/her country except for this anonymous bidder, who says, ‘I will show the flag later’. The movie relates the story of a down-to-earth struggling taxi driver unable to get married due to economic problems. Saber discovers, by sheer chance, that Egypt’s constitution grants him a share in the public property of his nation. But he cannot sell his own share by himself. He has to collect power-of-attorney authorisation from more than 50 per cent of Egypt’s population to sell the public sector of the

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country, in which case then he would be able to get married. The film is a social comedy that narrates the story of a disappointed young man who, by the end of the movie, refuses to sell his country to ‘outsiders’ even though this would solve his personal economic problems and allow him to marry. The film refers to the way globalisation instrumentalises the local to serve the ends of world superpowers. After getting approval of more than 50 per cent of Egypt’s population to sell out the country, Saber becomes aware of the fact that after selling out his ‘home’ he will not be able to find another one anywhere at any price. The last scene of the movie is a public auction to sell out Egypt. The highest price comes from someone without an ‘identifying national flag’, and when asked about his flag, he responds, ‘The flag is not important right now.’ When Saber starts warning Egyptians, who come from everywhere in the country to attend the auction and get their ‘share’, against selling the country to ‘foreigners’, one shouts back, ‘Give the bread dough to the baker even if he eats half of it.’ Saber responds by saying, ‘I will never sell out my country, and my rights in it will never be lost.’ Opposition parties in Egypt made use of the movie’s premise: some even naming their groups after the title of the movie. The film manages to deliver the message that the ‘other’ does not care about Egypt but only about his/her interest. Moreover, the film is arguing that any foreign interference in the region is serving only Israel’s ends, without paying attention to the mistreated people of the area. Laylat El Baby Doll (The Baby Doll Night, 2008) presents, for the first time in the Arabic and Islamic cinematic history, an elaborate account of the factors that continue to shape US–Arab/Muslim tensions, particularly in the post-9/11 context. The company aims to broaden minds beyond images of gunbattles and belly dancing synonymous with the region. ‘Night of the Baby Doll’ is a comedy which highlights misunderstandings between the Arab and Western worlds post-9/11 – it will be followed by an Arab take on the legend of Sinbad.39 A blend of genres, combining comedy and deeply serious drama, it is able to stir laughter and fear by exaggerating the situation, language, action, relationships, and characters, which captivate and entertain at the same time.

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The film revolves around the story of Hossam, an Egyptian-American tour guide, who is visiting Cairo for New Year’s Eve along with a group of Americans exploring business opportunities in Egypt. After a year’s separation from his wife to get treatment for impotence in the United States, Hossam aspires to a romantic night with his wife. His plans to conceive a child are thwarted by several events, some of which are comedic episodes, as he and his wife travel around Cairo looking for a room, and some are dramatic, as there is a terrorist plot to bomb the hotel where Hossam and the American tour group stay. The film is a call for both East and West to listen to each other and try to bridge the language and culture gap. The first scene in the movie, which comes before the title sequence, is a flashback to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. The stories that follow intertwine sex and politics to describe the impact of 9/11 on a broad range of people, Arab and American, and those who are both. The Baby Doll Night encompasses many historical events, especially the 9/11 attacks, a mix of many storylines spanning many places (New York, Cairo, Palestine, and Iraq). The main intent is to emphasise that 9/11 has not been the only turning point in the history of US –Arab/ Muslim encounters; however, it plays an important role in the culmination of current hostilities between the Arab/Muslim world and the United States. Andrew Hammond, a journalist familiar with the Middle East, has written that, after 9/11, The Arab world realizes as much as America does that their relationship has reached, if not its historical nadir, then at least a situation of raw, close-up anger. One might say that a bust-up that had been brewing for at least three decades has finally erupted and both parties have been forced to ask with brutal honesty what they want and what they expect to get from the other side.40 The Baby Doll Night sheds light on the complexities of the current situation in the Middle East. The movie’s overlapping narratives and elaborate events elucidate the impossibility of painting a totalising picture of any community, whether Arab or American. The film starts with a New Year’s celebration, shedding light on 9/11, which starts a new phase of encounters between America and the Arab world. The movie’s website opens with the question: ‘Can one night of pleasure mend sixty years of

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pain?’, which sums up the long history of misperceptions between Americans and Arabs. In this film, the United States is viewed as an imperialist power that employs its political, economic, and even military power to advance its own self-interests in the Arab and Muslim worlds, which have already been dis-empowered through their long history of European colonialism. One of the main characters in the film, an Egyptian activist and journalist named Awadheen Alasyouty, becomes a terrorist not because he has always hated America but as a result of what he faced at the hands of American marines in Abu Ghraib. At one time, Alasyouty craved peace in the Middle East. He is in love with Laila Corrie, a Jewish-American girl, who is against the Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands. She is killed by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to prevent Israeli forces from demolishing a Palestinian house. This parallels the real-life story of Rachel Corrie, the young American woman run over by an Israeli bulldozer on 16 March 2003. Awadheen is hurt deeply by this incident. What really destroys him, however, is what happens to him when he goes to Iraq to cover the war. After being captured, he faces brutal torture in Abu Ghraib prison, losing his virility when a US female soldier cuts his penis. The Egyptian journalist turns into a terrorist who wants nothing but to take revenge on the Americans who stole his manhood.

Figure 3.2 Awadheen being tortured in Abu Ghraib. Courtesy of The Baby Doll Night film website.

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Figure 3.3 Awadheen being tortured in Abu Ghraib. Courtesy of The Baby Doll Night film website.

The Americans in the movie are used to represent two different perspectives: Sarah Abraham, an American liberal activist for peace and democracy, is allied with the Arab point of view, while General Peter, an American conservative military officer at the Abu Ghraib prison and thus a symbol of American imperialism, is influenced by the ‘clash-ofcivilisations’ rhetoric and viewpoint. In one scene, Sarah, General Peter, and an Arab/Muslim living in the United States, Hossam, have a discussion about the oft-posed question: ‘Why do they hate us?’ Hossam explains that Arabs/Muslims hate US policies rather than Americans themselves. He adds that the United States has spent three trillion dollars on its war on Iraq, money that could have developed the region through health care, education, and other projects – actions which would have posed a far more effective threat to terrorism than weapons. At one point, General Peter has a conversation with Awadheen that highlights two different readings of one action. When Peter asserts that he has information that links Awadheen to terrorists, Awadheen refutes this claim by confirming that he has ‘many ties but with Iraqi resistance fighters’. General Peter thinks that those resistance fighters are terrorists since they are deliberately killing US troops. But Awadheen responds that resisting any occupation is recognised internationally, and that ‘this is not an excuse to arrest the Iraqi resistance fighters, throw them in Abu

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Ghraib, and torture them’. Awadheen reads the struggle in Iraq as ‘selfresistance’ while the general interprets it as ‘terrorism’. At the beginning of the movie, one of Awadheen’s friends, Shokri, defends him as someone who fights against oppression, but by the end of the movie Shokri finds that Awadheen has been blinded by his desire for revenge: ‘I am sorry but I will not be involved in your planned attack against civilians who did you no harm. I can understand your revenge against your oppressor but not against people living around you.’ Interpreting this as a violation of allegiance towards his ‘right’, Awadheen kills Shokri, who represents the mainstream Egyptians/ Arabs/Muslims who are against US policies in the region, but who, at the same time, are opposed to violence against civilians. At the end of the movie, Awadheen is shot by Egyptian police snipers while shouting that he is not a terrorist but someone who wants to have his rights. And so, Awadheen, who starts out as an average Egyptian/Arab/Muslim, ends up a terrorist. It now becomes useful to connect these cinematic representations of the United States to the real world. In his June 2009 Cairo speech, President Obama said: I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed [upon] one nation by any other.41 And in his Nobel Peace Prize remarks later that same year, President Obama stated: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms . . .We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest.42 Many Arabs/Muslims might think Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech a continuation of a discourse that had been attempting to legitimise US foreign policy in the Middle East. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was

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taken as a vivid example of US imperialism preceded by the Bush administration’s pro-war rhetoric of promoting democracy and freedom in Iraq which many Arabs/Muslims believed had been partly shaped by the unjustified and unconfirmed reports of Iraqi nuclear threats. In The Baby Doll Night, General Peter tells Sarah: ‘We came with our troops and children to liberate them from their rulers and their extremists’ terrorism. We sacrificed everything we have in order to heal them.’ But Sarah replies, ‘Nobody takes medicine against their will.’ In order to emphasise this, the film takes its audience to Iraq to see a nameless Iraqi who is talking about how Iraqis see Iraq before and after the invasion. This nameless Iraqi man expresses his frustration and anger at the American presence in Iraq, which in fact makes all Iraqis long for Saddam’s era. He tells Awahdeen, ‘Saddam ruled Iraq for thirty-five years. The number of those who died at his hands in that period is far less than those killed in one year at the hands of Americans and the armed militias.’ The movie shows how the rhetoric of liberation in the Middle East has been undermined by US policy in Iraq. Killing freedom of speech in Iraq is dramatised in a scene in which a correspondent is shot dead by a US soldier. Re-enactment of brutal scenes from Abu Ghraib prison serve to underline the difficulties America will face to dissociate and distance itself from that violent legacy. Real or cinematic, the images of American prison guards using sexual humiliation and snarling guard dogs to terrify naked Arab prisoners will have lasting repercussions for US – Middle East relations. Major Arab television networks such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya aired the images of torture, which elicited outrage from many Arabs. The word ‘scandal’ was splashed across the front page of Egypt’s Akhbar al-Yom above smiling US soldiers posing by naked, hooded prisoners piled in a human pyramid. The Kuwaiti newspaper AlWatan warned that this ‘barbaric’ treatment would provoke and rally Islamic fundamentalists.43 Although millions of Muslims worldwide denounced and condemned the 9/11 attacks, the Arab/Muslim image in the eyes of many Western policy makers has been greatly tarnished since 9/11. A 2006 poll conducted by ABC News/Washington Post showed that almost half of all Americans expressed an unfavourable opinion of Muslims and Arabs.44 A glimpse of this sentiment is caught in The Baby Doll Night’s portrayal of Hossam’s post-9/11 agony. In a scene shot in Harlem, New York,

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Hossam enters a bar to ask about an African-American friend. In the bar Hossam is introduced to his friend’s uncle, Philip, who tells Hossam that Egyptians are from Africa and that his ancestors are from Africa – so they are related. A white man suddenly attacks Hossam solely because he finds out that Hossam is an Arab/Muslim whose roots are African. Philip defends Hossam and warns the white man that Hossam is under his protection till he leaves the bar. This scene wants to show how Arabs are analogous to African-Americans in terms of negative profiling and prejudice by a hostile ‘other’. It is designed to make one cringe at the thought of being in situations like these, as countless Arabs have been, merely because of appearance and/or surname. The scene is also attempting to connect race and colonised status as sources of alliance: African-Americans, it is suggested, readily empathise with Egyptians, who are a former colonised people indigenous to the continent of Africa (even though most Egyptians identify themselves as ‘Egyptian’ rather than ‘African’). African-Americans especially are to be embraced by Egyptians, just as African-Americans should embrace Egyptians: they have a shared heritage. At the end of The Baby Doll Night the baby-doll nightgown arrives on a tank. The nightgown symbolises that which is American and Western and does not belong on the Arab body. Hossam’s wife does not get a chance to wear her baby-doll nightgown, suggesting that the Arab body rejects this ‘foreign’ production.

Conclusion We need to read cinema not as a simple index of what is represented on the screen, but in terms of a relationship to time made thinkable in the visual encounter. Egyptian cinema is increasingly attracting the attention of film critics, scholars, and Middle East-studies specialists. The industry has always been under the influence of Hollywood. Many Egyptian films import Western visual and narrative conventions to narrate Egyptian/Arab histories. But many if not most Arabs, while enamoured with American film making, are at odds with US foreign policy. Paul Maidment put it cleverly, when he compared the Arab viewpoint to that of Europeans who ‘love the idea of America, but they are not always so enamoured by the practice’.45 Since 9/11, Arab film makers have more boldly been reflecting this sentiment.

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The 9/11 attacks left much of the world – and above all, Arab and Muslim societies – with a new culture: a culture of fear reinforced by post-9/11 rhetoric: the global war on terrorism, ‘With Us or Against Us’, and the ‘Axis of Evil’. This culture insinuates itself into people’s lives, affecting their way of thinking about ‘self’ and ‘other’. A significant body of Egyptian films address this globalised culture of fear and, although many are unmistakably Occidentalist – in the sense of an equal and opposite reaction to Orientalism, with its essentialising, stereotyping, and crude cliche´s – these films at the same time are not without calls to stand up against stereotyping, ignorance and oppression, and to speak out for freedom, progress, and enlightenment. Post-9/11 Egyptian cinema aggressively takes on themes that contribute to an overwhelming desire on the part of the Arab world to broach the topics of an East –West encounter. It uses symbolism to give a wider range to the discussion, and to engage in battles with a view to breaking the siege of misunderstanding and ignorance between Arabs and Americans; in The Baby Doll Night, for example, sexual impotence, is a symbol of the impotence of the will. Memory plays an important role in Arab nationalism, which, in literature and films, comes to the forefront profoundly in times of ‘encounter’, whether military, political, or even cultural. Memory is also the reproduction, transformation, and transmission of these memories and narratives. In times of ‘encounter’, people instinctively bond to fight against an ‘other’ in the name of ‘self’. This trend also marks Egyptian films in the post-9/11 era, when Arabs find themselves accused of terrorism while they themselves are terrorised, like many others. In Arab cultural productions, Arabs want to resort to memory to gain a full sense of the current critical situation of the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ divide and the Orientalist vs Occidentalist responses. The 9/11 attacks, Arabs believe, cannot be extricated from 60 years of encounter and struggle. As a response to the American question, ‘Why do they hate us?’, films such as The Baby Doll Night emerge to provide an answer from an historical perspective: ‘We do not hate you, but we hate your policy in our region.’

CHAPTER 4 ARAB-AMERICANS' CULTURAL RESPONSE TO 9/11 AND ITS AFTERMATH

[If] the hyphen implies a well-formulated and/or single synthesis of the Arab and American identities, then nothing can be further from the complex cultural realities of the community where endless permutations are developed.1 This chapter provides an introduction to post-9/11 Arab-American literature, distinctive for its diversity of voices, topics, genres, and aims. Arab-American poets, such as Hayan Charara, Khaled Mattawa, Suheir Hammad, novelists such as Diana Abu-Jaber, Toufic el Rassi, Elmaz Abinader, Laila Halaby, and essayists such as Moustafa Bayoumi and Alia Malek, all detail in their writings how people who are perceived as Middle Eastern face the possibility of harassment after the 9/11 attacks. This chapter provides accounts of Arab-Americans’ cultural responses to 9/11 upon their shift from invisibility to visibility. Historically, negative images of Arabs and Muslims are produced whenever Middle East crises emerge. Arab-Americans, who already suffer from a double or hyphenated identity, face the double burden of sorrow for their country’s catastrophe and disproval of Arab stereotypes. This chapter focuses on how ArabAmerican writers react to being both Americans and Arabs. They are both Arab and American, and in fact their existence proves that these are not inherently contradictory categories. And while they may be seen as ‘other’ by some Americans, they might also be seen as ‘other’ by family

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and friends in the Arab world. Both parts are ‘self’, and so this idea of an internal war is how Arab-American writers talk about it – but it is between two aspects of a ‘self’, not an internal ‘self’ vs an internal ‘other’. In The Anarchy of Empire, Amy Kaplan2 argues that what is foreign and what is domestic are intertwined, as the one is used to reflect and construct the perception of the other. The threat of the foreign ‘other’ is projected on the domestic ‘other’. So, for example, the fear of annexing Puerto Rico as part of the United States (rather than as an unincorporated territory) manifests in the perception of the image of slaves incapable of self-governing but whose empowerment could pose a threat to the white mainstream. That is why we find in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers,3 for example, that the protagonist Sara’s quest for the American dream helps her assimilate into her new world. She escapes her old authoritarian Jewish tradition only to be captured by a new authority, that is the authority of the dream. Rebelling against her father, Yezierska’s protagonist surrenders helplessly to the authority of a whole society of strangers. Abandoning the ghetto does not necessarily entail an ability on Sara’s part to wash her hands of the influence that her father and native culture have left on her. She cannot escape that part of her life; she cannot separate her past from her present since both are there. Her new Americanised version is not able to wipe out her old one. This brings us closer to the picture of American society as a mixture of the old and the new, and makes us question the utility of having both of them melted in one pot. But to give the upper hand to one of them will result in a reciprocal attack from each one of the two identities against the other. This will not lead to the desired harmonious character of the American nation. Moreover, ‘the melting pot’ will never be able to change the solid nature of each identity to a ‘liquid state’, amenable to an easy process of assimilation. Joanna Kadi refers to Arab-Americans as ‘the Most Invisible of the Invisibles’, a phrase that ‘raises questions about who the other invisibles are, and whether Arabs are really the most invisible’.4 If the ArabAmerican community is viewed as an isolated enclave that separates itself from other ethnic groups and from the dominant, white mainstream centre, Arab-American literary and critical production reflects this fluid identification. Initially considered ‘not white’, then ‘not quite white’, then legally ‘white’, then ‘somewhere outside the limits of racial categories’, Arab-Americans have been confounded and befuddled with

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notions of ‘blackness’, ‘whiteness’, and ‘in-betweenness’ that has left them as the most ‘uncategorised group’. The Arab-American community attempts to make use of the American values of liberty and justice to negotiate and reconstruct the Arab-American identity within an American system characterised by a cultural and racial hierarchy. The loss of identity and the cultural indeterminacy are quite evident in the works of ArabAmericans, who collide with mainstream American culture. In this chapter I analyse two Arab-American literary texts for their repertoire of post-9/11 stereotypes and exile fantasies. The works are by Arab-American women writers, who have been marginalised and silenced, especially after 9/11, whether in the United States or in the Arab world. Arab-American women writers are pointing out the racism, oppression, and marginalisation they experience in the United States and are beginning to uncover the particularities of their own ethnic histories. It is evident that mainstream American culture seems to see them as powerless victims of their own religion/culture. Mohja Kahf’s emails from Scheherazad 5 thematises the hardships of Arab/Muslim minorities in the United States by creating a representational space from the legendary Thousand and One Nights. In Once in a Promised Land, Laila Halaby6 structures her novel in Arabian folklore and Western fairy tale, to follow the flow of important historical events and to emphasise the ways in which the past has informed the present, which culminates in a futureless world. Both Kahf and Halaby attempt to blur the distinction between being an Arab in America and being an Arab-American; two groups incorrectly referred to as the same.

Arab Immigrant Literature and Pre-9/11 Situation of Arab-Americans Arab-American literature started with the literature of Mahjar7 (place of immigration), which was centred on New York and led originally by Khalil Gibran (1883– 1931). Mahjar writers, who had fled to America to escape the social, political, and religious conservative constraints of the Arab world and to enjoy the American values of liberty and freedom of thought, challenged Arab cultural norms.8 Most of the writings are in Arabic, except for the English work of Ameen Rihani (1876– 1940), Khalil Gibran, and Mikha’il Na’ima (1889– 1988). In their writings, there is a desire for reform in the Arab world and an interest in bridging

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the gap between the East and the West. The early Arab-American Mahjar writers showed interest in promoting Western social and political values in the East while introducing the West to the spiritual values of the East, values that could help the West escape its mundane materialism. Their writings are similar in style to Arabic literature but without many religious and social conservative constraints. The similarity to Arabic literature makes it possible for Mahjar literature to be taught at Arab/ Egyptian schools as part of the Arabic literary curriculum, and despite its socially and morally liberal approach, Mahjar literature has found its way into al-Azhar schools, which are conservative Islamic schools. Michael Suleiman (1934–2010) wrote that it was only after World War I that ‘Arabs in the USA become truly an Arab-American community.’9 This is due to the fact that the war had made it difficult for them to go back to their homeland. They found it necessary to identify themselves as Arab-Americans and thus, as part of American society. In their attempts at quick assimilation, they were known to self-identify as American. As Evelyn Shakir (1938–2010) put it: The first generation of Arab American writers (as might be expected of immigrants of an age of rampant xenophobia) dressed carefully for their encounter with the American public, putting on the guise of prophet, preacher, or man of letters. They could not hide their foreignness, but they could make it respectable. Their American-born children – those who came of age in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s – costumed themselves as ‘regular Americans’ and hoped to pass, which may be why they produced so little literature.10 The second generation of Arab-Americans found itself on neutral ground, distancing themselves from their ‘Arab’ heritage, viewing it with confusion, denial, but sometimes honour. This is evident in the work of Eugene Paul Nassar (1935–), Vance Bourjaily (1922– 2010), and William Peter Blatty (1928– ), who used to identify themselves as mainstream writers rather than as Arab-Americans. The most identifiable beginning to a cohesive Arab-American community of writers only came in the 1980s, with the publication of two anthologies of Arab-American literature: a 20-page collection called Wrapping the Grape Leaves: A Sheaf of Contemporary Arab American Poets

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(1982), edited by Gregory Orfalea, followed by a larger and more comprehensive anthology, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (1988), edited by Orfalea and Sharif Elmusa. The presence of Grape Leaves in bookstores and on library shelves, Lisa Suhair Majaj states, ‘made it possible for general readers to discover Arab-American writers without first acquiring specialised knowledge. Moreover its publication established ‘Arab American Literature’ as a category on computer data-bases and in card catalogues.’11 In this way Arab-American writers began to explore what constitutes Arab-American literature. Articulating the ‘self’ necessitates a return to the past, in search of a deeper understanding of what it means to be an Arab in America. Two novels represent this articulation of the self, through a traditionally empowering return to the past. With Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon (1991) and Arabian Jazz (1993), Elmaz Abinader and Diana Abu-Jaber have, respectively, made a remarkable contribution to Arab-American literature through an exploration of Arab immigrant history in America. This theme recurs in works of many contemporary minority group writers who want to restore the past of their ancestors to show the distinctive nature of their ethnic communities. This escape from the present and return to the past emerges as a dominant element in the writings of many Arab-Americans because of the difficult situations they face in American society. In addition, the Arab– Israeli conflict only acts to widen the gap between Arab-Americans and Jewish-American community – as well as the US population in general. It is important to note that the writers of these two novels are ArabAmerican women who, in addition to suffering ethnic discrimination, have endured gender issues. In their attempts to articulate their ‘selves’ through the traditionally empowering return to the past, they have also traced the past of Arab women in an Arab masculine society. Abinader and Abu-Jaber meticulously pursue the connection between the past and the present in creating the Arab-American female identity: the past provides their characters with a means of invention, to be able to deal with the present. With Children of the Roojme, Abinader sets the scene of early ArabAmerican immigration, highlighting differences and similarities in the sources of ambivalence of the early Arab-American women, in comparison with their contemporary descendants. Abinader’s biogra-

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phical account of her ‘Family’s Journey from Lebanon’ goes back three generations, a feminist reconstruction of family history drawn from written and oral testimonies. In Arabian Jazz Abu-Jaber relates the experiences of two firstgeneration young Arab-American women, Jem and Melvina. The two young women are partially American and partially Arab: their father is an Arab from Jordan while their mother is American, of northern European origin. Jem and Melvina feel caught between two different cultures and try to establish their identity with the help of their father’s sister, Fatima. The girls return to their past, where they find only cruel incidents of racism against them. Jem remembers her school bus where she ‘learned how to close her mind, how to disappear in her seat’ in order to avoid the other children’s comments about her name and her skin. Abu-Jaber devises different coping strategies for her characters. Matussem, their father, indulges in his love of jazz and pounds his drums to tune everything out and to keep himself away from the world of strangers around him. Jem and Melvina find comfort in professional commitment and short-term affairs with local boys. It is their aunt Fatima who finds relief by keeping herself attached to her Arab roots and preserving her Arab values. Both Abinader and Abu-Jaber have their characters recall a gendered past that has been erased and that the two writers have incorporated into history, through fictional and real accounts of family stories. In Arabian Jazz and in another novel of hers, Crescent (2004), AbuJaber explores the dilemma of ‘not belonging’, that mires her first- and second-generation characters in a continuous clash with white hegemonic culture while assuming a semblance of ‘whiteness’. The Arab-Americans in Abu-Jaber’s novels, upon their failure to ‘achieve’ full ‘whiteness’, or assume a white identity, attempt to attach themselves to other ethnic minorities. In Arabian Jazz, the tense relationship between Arab-Americans, as well as other different ethnicities, and mainstream white communities is evident in the characters’ attempts to melt in the ‘melting pot’. A sense of displacement becomes articulated as the daughter rages at her father: ‘There’s only so much you can do to become American.’ The daughter is bound by contradictory cultural perceptions, at times viewed as ‘a wild American girl’ and at other times as ‘a boring Arab’. Finding themselves considered somewhat ‘white’ in a white community that is not fully convinced by their ‘whiteness’, the

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characters align themselves with other ethnic groups – AfricanAmericans and Latinos. In Crescent, Abu-Jaber contrives a mixture of characters from a wide range of Arab and other Middle Eastern backgrounds that negate unsophisticated representations of Arab identity. They try to overcome the American racist community through the introduction of an Arab community in a cafe´ that provides them with a venue to live their culture and to express their being a minority. Abu-Jaber tries to integrate the international Arab communities in these two novels, by introducing Arab culture to heal the gaps between Arab communities in the United States, indicating an Arab nationalist approach. Moreover, the struggle with mainstream American culture brings into existence alliances between different ethnic groups, which leave the reader with a sense of cultural indeterminacy from both Arabian Jazz and Crescent. It seems that Abu-Jaber could not escape the need to forge connections beyond the insular boundaries of group identity. Before 9/11, Arab-American writers examined their invisibility or marginality but, since that day, they have been faced with a sudden visibility and a demand to present their culture to mainstream Americans. Before 9/11, Arab-Americans tended to assimilate even while maintaining their Arab cultural features that helped them claim a sense of nationalism. It is notable that, by the 1990s, Arab-Americans were starting to celebrate their Arab culture intellectually and creatively to justify their position within American society, which has resulted in a heightened awareness of their hyphenated identity and a feeling of alienation from both the home and the host countries. This in-between status was well depicted by Gloria Anzaldu´a (1942– 2004): Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not acculturating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological conflict, a kind of dual identity – we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don’t totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness.12 Arab-Americans in their works of literature try to find a way of dealing with a potentially polarised identity by exploring the hybrid identity drawn from Arab culture and American society. It is clear why the Arab-American experience is not an isolated one, and that this

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concept of the hyphenated identity is one that resonates across many different hyphenated cultures. As well, the Chicana/Latina experience on the Mexican – Texan border, which Anzaldu´a writes about, has implications for many other migrant American communities.

Post-9/11 and the Renaissance of Arab-American Literature It is useless to search for the right words to express the inexpressible pain that has followed the horrible deaths of thousands in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. But there is another source of this pain: the severe blow that has been struck against the accomplishments made in recent years by Arab Americans toward correcting centuries-old stereotypes of both themselves and Arabs in the Middle East.13 The 9/11 attacks ended up strengthening the divide that separated Arab-American citizens from their fellow Americans, as well as maintaining and reinforcing the already existing negative stereotypes of Arabs as the mysterious, inferior, and violent ‘other’, constructed over the long period of Orientalist representation. 9/11 weakened the relationship between Arab-Americans and American society, and invited them to draw upon their past to regain their strength and recharge their belief in themselves as equal to their non-Arab-American counterparts. Gender, race, religious affiliation, social identity, and economic status of Arab-American immigrants are all in contrast to and interaction with their counterparts in America, which collectively give life and essence to American culture. Arab-Americans, just like other ethnic minorities in the United States, suffer while they lead the struggle along their way to assimilation in American society. The first generation comes with the native Arab cultural baggage that put them at the edge of belonging. Their new society does not accept their native cultures nor accept their being immersed in their new environment. In this way, the Arab immigrants abandon their native identity in search of one that will be accepted by the community in which they live and work. Nostalgia is often a symptom of the failure of the process of Americanisation. I think

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Arab-Americans’ performance of Americanness is analogous to the performance of gender. In Gender Trouble,14 Judith Butler refutes the perception of gender as a state of being, suggesting it is rather a performative manifestation. In other words, what makes us a specific gender is not being male or female but our performance of what is socially expected from a male or a female. Since even male/masculinity and female/femininity are no longer unambiguous and well-defined categories, the pursuit of gender definition in a patriarchal environment takes on an even greater form. If we accept that gender is performative, being a woman can be defined in relation to displays of femininity and sexuality. Marriage, therefore, not only stabilises gender categories, by creating the illusion of their certainty through the performance of sex, but also maintains the hierarchy and the connotation related to marriage and motherhood and creates the clarity through which the exclusion of the ‘other’ can take place. As is the case with the literature itself, Arab-American literary criticism responds to major trends in the wider field of literary criticism and to the social and political contexts in which it is produced. ArabAmerican literary criticism and theory has sought to explain and theorise the meaning of creative writing by Arab-Americans. While criticism is the evaluation and interpretation of literature, literary theory is a more philosophical discussion of the overall goals of literature. In ArabAmerican literary culture, the boundaries between creative, critical, and theoretical work are porous. It is impossible to speak of Arab-American literary criticism and theory without taking into consideration the contributions of Arab-American creative writers. In fact, some of the most important works of criticism emerge from the aesthetic productions of the artists themselves. Arab-American literary criticism assumes ‘race’ to be a fundamental category of analysis. The definition of race, however, is always under scrutiny. The major debates that emerge from this body of work most often centre on the relationship across aesthetics and politics and/or ideology. The first Arab-American novel in English was The Book of Khalid (1911),15 written by Ameen Rihani, who attempted to reconcile the notions of ‘East’ and ‘West’ by revealing common culture and values. He represented America as the world’s superpower that the Arab world

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should learn from by way of its political ideals, freedom of religion, and its embrace of science and progress. Current Arab-American writings are met with the scepticism of an intellectual community that questions the ‘Americanness’ of Arab Americans; consequently, since 9/11, Arab-American literature has borne the burden of having to plead the case of Arabs who are of diverse ancestral origins and identities. With the emergence of the post-9/11 narrative, Arab-American writing has become directly engaged in the struggle for Arab causes in order to combat the stereotypes and stilted representations of Arab cultures and peoples. Consequently, most criticism of Arab writing is centred on its veracity, its fidelity to representing the actual circumstances of Arab life. Also, because ArabAmerican writing has coexisted with racist caricatures of Arab/Muslim people in both popular and ‘high’ culture, critics have viewed it not only with an eye towards the intellectual capacity of Arab people but also in relation to its ability to counter negative images of the race. Unlike their non-Arab fellow authors, rarely were early Arab-American writers subjected to the kind of rigorous criticism that considered craft and form. This failure of the mainstream critical establishment and of Arab intellectuals themselves became a major concern of many Arab-American critics. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad explains: The community is still in the process of being formed and reformed as policies by the American government regulate the flow of immigrants from the Arab world. Legislation limiting immigration, as well as American foreign policy and the prevailing American prejudice against Arabs, Muslims, and Islam, has at times accelerated and at other times impeded the integration and assimilation of the community into American society.16 While we find writers such as Evelyn Shakir, who prefer to limit their Arab-American writings to works that focus on Arab-American topics, there are others, such as Mohja Kahf, who think that ethnic identity is the determining factor in recognising Arab-American literature. In this way, writings by Mona Simpson (Anywhere But Here (1987) and The Lost Father (1992)),17 for example, which do not focus on Arab-American themes, are to be included in the genre. It is interesting that the growing body of Arab-American literature has

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reached a critical mass, where it might be considered an ethnic literature in itself. It reveals thematic links and shares a set of attributes not only with Arab literature but with US ethnic literatures as well. Arab-American literature is not merely an extension of Arab literature; some Arab-American writers also act as unofficial representatives of the wealthy Arab culture. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, director of the Project of Translation from the Arabic (PROTA), which translates Arabic literature into English, insists, ‘We need to make our voice heard in America, not just as writers in English, but also as ambassadors of a great and rich culture.’18 In this way, the Arab immigrants’ stories will enlighten the mainstream American readers to the travails specific to the Arab world, and show the cultural affinities/ differences between the two cultures. However, there are other ArabAmerican writers who do not want to feel like sojourners and insist, as Khaled Mattawa states, ‘the more urgent task is to take stock of, and assert a claim to, the American context by enriching the dialogue among ArabAmericans’ diverse influences’.19 Mattawa wants Arab-American writers to get their experiences acknowledged as part and parcel of the dominant culture through being deeply attached to the ‘American context’. The post-9/11 era has witnessed an abundance of Arab-American writing, signalling an Arab-American literary renaissance. It shows a sense of responsibility on the part of many Arab-American writers ever since that moment of national crisis. They believe that metaphors are much more tenacious than facts, and that they need to correct the image of their own Arab identity by addressing Americans with Americans’ own language, in a way that could transcend any cultural differences. This Arab-American response marks a counter-narrative that is partly ‘self’ and partly ‘other’ and comes in different types of writing: novels, memoirs, poetry, as well as literary criticism and non-fiction prose pieces.20

Arab-American Hyphenated Cultural Responses to 9/11 and the Ongoing ‘War on Terror’ fire in the city air and i feared for my sister’s life in a way never before. and then, and now, i fear for the rest of us. first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot’s heart failed, the

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plane’s engine died. then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake me now. please god, after the second plane, please, don’t let it be anyone who looks like my brothers.21 Arab-American writers and artists use literary and cultural productions to respond to major historical and political events that have taken place in the Arab world and the United States. Throughout their existence in the United States and ending with the 9/11 attacks, Arab-American writers and artists have produced literary and cultural works that reveal their community’s sense of severe pressure under political upheavals. The contemporary development of Arab-American literature is a symptom of social changes in American society in the aftermath of 9/11. That date affected literature which, voicing the ferments and conflicts of the era, has become a compromise between old and new models. A sense of torn identity has given birth to a revolution in the critical and creative thought of Arab-American writers and artists. Upset by contradictions and revolutionary ideas, post-9/11 America has become the ideal ground for the development of an Arab-American literary renaissance. Resistance has marked most of the Arab-American literary works in post-9/11 America. This resistance constitutes a rebellion against Western negative stereotyping characterised by a heightened interest in revenge, emphasis on the ‘self’, departure from the ‘other’, and rebellion against established social and political values and conventions. Arab-Americans are attempting to produce art that can address humanity in general, represent the afflicted human spirit everywhere, and express the sterility of hatred in contrast with love. I think what T.S. Eliot says about the role of the poet in addressing the social problem of his time is applicable to the ArabAmerican literary ethic in the post 9/11 era: The poet is much more vitally concerned with the social ‘uses’ of poetry, and with his own place in society; and this problem is now perhaps more importunely pressed upon his conscious attention than at any previous time. The uses of poetry certainly vary as society alters, as the public to be addressed changes.22

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This is when the literary work is tied to, or located in, the time and place of the artist. It is also in this way that the literary work may be interpreted in different ways and bear different readings. This idea is well expressed in Terry Eagleton’s book, Literary Theory: [The] meaning of a literary work is never exhausted by the intentions of its author; as the work passes from one cultural or historical context to another, new meanings may be culled from it which were perhaps never anticipated by its author or contemporary audience.23 The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath characterise Arab-American literary production, but at the same time literary productions have not expelled the past from the scene. In order to appreciate the present conditions, Arab-American artists merge them with those of the past: the present is, after all, nothing but a growth from the past. The real significance of art is its task as an ambassador of social reality. This makes me recall Du Bois’ book The Souls of Black Folk, in which he tries to propose the sufferings of the blacks through the melodies of songs. Du Bois asserts the idea that art is a unifying force capable of going beyond the boundaries of race and gender. For Du Bois, ‘songs are indeed the siftings of centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words, and in it we can trace here and there signs of development’.24 Du Bois considers music a vessel of history wherein the ‘melting pot’ reflects black – white relations. In other words, in art the ‘melting pot’ can be observed more clearly than in the life of the society: ‘One might go further and find a fourth step in this development, where the songs of white America have been distinctively influenced by the slave songs or have incorporated whole phrases of Negro melody, as ‘Swanee River’ and ‘Old Black Joe’.’25 The way Du Bois refers to the effect of slave songs upon white music is an attempt on his part to prove the syncretic quality of art. He asserts the way blacks can prove themselves as capable of extending some kind of authority by the establishment of artistic hegemony over the nation. These ideas by Du Bois take us to a work of art written by an ArabAmerican woman to introduce her readers to the challenges facing Arab-American women and the way they resist.

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Mohja Kahf’s E-Mails from Scheherazad (2003) Mohja Kahf’s E-Mails from Scheherazadis a blend of the past, represented in the legendary Scheherazad of The Thousand and One Nights, and the present, as evident in the twenty-first-century New Jersey setting: Hi, babe. It’s Scheherazad. I’m back For the millennium and living in Hackensack, New Jersey. I tell stories for a living. You ask if there is a living in that. You must remember: Where I come from, Words are to die for. The original text in The Thousand and One Nights relates the story of Shahryar, a king who marries a new virgin every day, only to behead her the next morning. He does so out of his anger against his first wife, who had betrayed him. He kills 1,000 women in this way until he marries Scheherazad. Richard Burton, in his translation of The Thousand and One Nights, describes Scheherazad as the one who: had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of bygone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.26 On her first night with Shahryar, Scheherazad starts practising her storytelling talent. She relates her first story until dawn and, when Shahryar asks her to finish it, she responds that dawn was breaking. In this way the king is forced to spare her life for one more day to listen to the next part of the story. But when she finishes this story she begins another exciting one, which helps spare her life for one more day. She keeps following the same strategy for one thousand and one nights until she tells the king that she has no more stories. But the king has fallen in love with her and has three sons with her, so he spares her life and makes her Queen.

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In bringing Scheherazad to post-9/11 America, Kahf makes her Americanised and modern. In The Thousand and One Nights Scheherazad uses her storytelling talent to save her life and the lives of all girls who might be put to Shahryar’s sword. In Kahf’s poetry collection, Scheherazad is attempting to ‘save’ Arab/Muslim women in the United States from the many perceptions and stereotypes that have found their way into American society. In the original, the only thing that saves Scheherzad from being beheaded are words and her narrative skills, and Kahf is using words to fight against attacks against ‘visible’ Muslim/ Arab women in post-9/11 America. In her poem ‘Hijab Scene #7’,27 Kahf recounts many stereotypes about Muslim/Arab women: No, I’m not bald under the scarf No, I’m not from that country where women can’t drive cars No, I would not like to defect I’m already American But thank you for offering What else do you need to know relevant to my buying insurance, opening a bank account, reserving a seat on a flight? Yes, I speak English Yes, I carry explosives They’re called words And if you don’t get up Off your assumptions They’re going to blow you away The tone is angry and frustrated, in response to stereotypes that reduce Arab/Muslim women to the status of ignorant, victimised, less-American creatures, and that associate the hijab with ugliness. Kahf’s Scheherazad emphasises her complete ‘Americanness’, and that her most powerful weapons to face stereotyping are words that can blow away anyone with such ‘assumptions’ about Muslim/Arab women. Arab-American women writers face the dilemma of being both Arab and American. They suffer from the patriarchal nature of Arab as well as Western society. When they probe into the problems of the Arab world, they are accused of being

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‘Westernised’ and at odds with Arab culture.28 On the other side, Western societies still look at Muslim/Arab women with doubt in regard to both their national and ‘veiled’ identity. This affects the way they are received in the American community of readers. The history of East–West encounters cannot be ignored, politically or culturally, as Amal Amireh indicates: ‘political events cannot be seen as marginal to literary reception. Arab women novelists still carry the burden of this history, whose effects are too obvious to ignore. They can be seen in the way Arab women books are marketed and received in the West, in the way they are manipulated to meet the expectations and assumptions of Western readers.’29 In her collection of poems, Kahf attempts to transcend this gap between being Arab/Muslim and being American. She ignores the ‘hyphen’ and acts as an ‘unhyphenated’ American. She wants to speak for herself instead of being defined by others: Statements were issued on our behalf by Arab nationalists, Iranian dissidents, Western feminists30 The critic Amal Abdelrazek claims, ‘Whereas earlier Arab American writers tried to claim a space within white American culture using various strategies of assimilation, which often involved a breaking away from their traditions and homelands, the speakers in E-Mails resist assimilation.’31 However, Kahf’s approach is not resistance but refusal. What she attempts to propose in her book is not a resistance of assimilation but a no-need strategy towards it. Arab-Americans in her poem see themselves as ‘complete’ Americans, without any need to defend this point. They do not need to be melted in the pot as they are already dissolved in it. Scheherazad, who was able to face male violence with wit and words, is now reasserting her wit through the power of words, to face the ailing psyche of her Arab and Western interlocutors. Like Scheherazad, who helped the heart-sick king to rethink his violent approach towards women, the American Scheherazad attempts to help both Arabs and Americans to heal their distorted images of each other, while perceiving herself as ‘ArabAmerican’ without any space or a hyphen. Kahf refuses to submit to the way each party, whether Arab or American, rejects them because of their ‘incomplete self and other’. Kahf decides that, despite their cultural and blood ties with the East, Arab/Muslim-Americans are complete citizens. As Edward Said points

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out, ‘Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – are contrapuntal.’32 But this ‘undecided’ identity has left many Arab-Americans with a feeling of loss and a desire to determine their nationality. Lisa Suhair Majaj explains: ‘My childhood desire, often desperate, was not so much to be a particular nationality, to be American or Arab, but to be wholly one thing or another . . . I remained situated somewhere between Arab and American cultures – never quite rooted in either, always constrained by both.’33 Writing about cultural identity, it is evident that what Sepp L. Tiefenthaler states about Jewish-Americans applies to Arab-Americans as well. The ‘twoness’ of the immigrant’s identity constitutes his/her great dilemma, ‘the struggle to accommodate two selves and two cultural spaces into one integral identity’. To avoid being a foreigner in one’s land, most immigrants ‘have resolved this conflict through a gradual process of assimilation and acculturation to the dominant mainstream culture of the receiving country, thereby transforming themselves into something like a palimpsest with only a few traces of the original text remaining’.34 Assimilation, the process whereby a minority group gradually adopts the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture, is questioned by Kahf in her collection of poetry. Kahf shows how immigrants cannot escape one part of their life: they cannot separate their past from their present, since both together constitute their current identity. Her new Americanised version is not able to wipe out her old Syrian/Arab one. This brings us closer to the picture of American society as a mixture of the old and the new, and makes us question the utility of having both of them melted in one pot: to give the upper hand to one of them will result in a reciprocal attack from each of the two identities against the other. This will not lead to the desired harmonious character of the American nation. Moreover, the ‘melting pot’ will never be able to change the solid nature of each identity into a ‘liquid state’ amenable to an easy process of assimilation. There is a split in vision that cannot be healed by the ‘melting pot’: And where did I go? And what did I become? And in my new home did I eat cherries?

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And in my adopted family was I warm like Aleppan wool? What happens to a child who can no longer speak The language of its mother? What happens to a girl who wanted once to put her head On some pillow embroidered with her name?35 Thus, it is an experience of assimilation and nostalgia at one and the same time; to live the outward and keep the inward or to move between two identities personally while representing one national identity socially. This moment of reconciliation between one’s duality constitutes the national flag that embraces the two selves in one entity, i.e. America. In other words, one’s native identity dissolves in the battlefield of American life, leaving only one identity, i.e. the national one. Kahf points out how it is unavoidable for some Arab-Americans to resort to their native identity when they are alone while in front of their fellow Americans they are keen to be seen as Americans. Kahf delves deep into her memories to reclaim her lost past: This is the rim marked red With remembrance, horror, love, Her own blood filling This deep well36 The red colour signifies the family ties in her lost homeland whose memories are full of both ‘horror’ and ‘love’. The two words ‘horror’ and ‘love’ refer to her concern about her old homeland and, at the same time, her powerful caring feelings towards the place and its inhabitants. Nostalgia arises when a place or time in the past is missed. This part may be submerged; however, it is a part of rejuvenating one’s memories. While leading a comparative and selective attitude towards the national culture, the immigrant still feels this part – her own breathing – inside her. Changing herself inside and out to be one of them is beyond her power. During this process of donning the American flag the immigrant compares her old identity and her new one. This focus on cultural interaction and cultural loss is emphasised in Kahf’s poem ‘The Passing There’,37 where she probes the dilemma faced by second-generation immigrants in the United States. Her American identity has to face her old authoritarian identity and to escape the

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clutches of her parents. She points out the different experiences of USborn individuals and non-US-born immigrants. In the poem, Kahf describes the story of herself and her brother passing through an Indiana field, looking for raspberries and sensing the farmer’s suspicions about their religion and ethnic identity. This interface, where cultures touch, is embodied in Kahf’s poems. Kahf and her brother feel that they were born to be hemmed in, whether by the colour of their skin or by the blood in their veins. The double identity is evident in their Arab names, Yaman and Mohja, to make them thereafter separate from American society. What Gloria Anzaldu´a states about ‘borderlands’ is true of Mohja and her brother: The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.38 In E-Mails from Scheherazad, Kahf attempts to prove that it is a lack of knowledge rather than a clash of civilisations. In the poem ‘Lateefa’, Kahf starts with a type of ‘clash’ between the first and second generations of Arab immigrants. She shows how those who were born and raised in the United States do not feel the same enthusiasm towards their Arab homeland because of the fact that the only place they really know is America. Daddy, you can talk to me all you want about Palestine and I’ll be faithful to the end but I don’t know it, never smelled its rainwet streets, don’t know its stoops and backyards, and chicken coops I know New Jersey.39 This gap between the first generation and the second and third generations is due to a split in vision, evident in the relation between Arabs/Muslims and Americans, is attributed to a lack of knowledge about the other. Kahf demonstrates both parties as active participants in

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this battlefield of the ‘clash of ignorance’. Americans and Arabs need to know more about each other’s cultures to avoid misunderstandings and prejudices. In the poem ‘My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears’, Kahf provides a clear example of her thoughts on this clash of ignorance: her grandmother is performing ablution to get ready for prayers. In sensible lines, Kahf relates a story that appeals to Arabs’/Muslims’ and Americans’ sense of recognition: Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown As they notice what my grandmother is doing, An affront to American porcelain . . . They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see A clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom.40 This clash refers to the work of Samuel Huntington and his ‘clash of civilisations’ theory. Kahf succeeds in conducting a ‘silent’ dialogue between her grandmother, who considers ablutions to be part of her right to perform religious practices anytime and anywhere, and the Sears matrons, who fail to understand her act. This ‘silent’ dialogue exemplifies the scenario of East vs West and the clash of civilisations. Representing Arab-Americans as the connector at the border between two cultures, Kahf shows respect to both parties and sympathises with their lack of knowledge about each other: Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers, all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent . . . No one is fooled, but I hold the door open for everyone.41 The door here symbolises her ‘uncitizened’ status in the United States, or her ‘undetermined’ Americanness, due to her Arab/Muslim origins, while the mirror stands for her Arab identity. Whenever she looks at herself, and whenever others look at her, her Arab identity emerges at the surface. At the same time, her hybrid identity helps her to be acquainted with the two conflicting parts of her identity. She leaves the door open for both of them to run into her and to run towards each other. In the last few poems of her collection, Kahf attempts to bridge the gap between the two peoples, inviting both to believe in their ability to put an

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end to their mutual hostility. She denounces all forms of destruction, violence, and hatred. She denies the claim that one’s religion, race, or nation can constitute a barrier between one human being and another. In her poem ‘Disbeliever’, Kahf recalls atrocities committed against powerless Third World nations, in an effort to create bonds through empathy: By the limping of the people of Iraq By the sound of frantic running in Qana, in Kosovo, By the men and boys of Hama massacred By the swollen bodies in a river in Rwanda and Afghani women and the writers of Algiers I am a disbeliever in everything that refuses to kiss full on the lips the ones still living and receive them in the bosom of the self no matter the religion or the nation or the race.42 In this way Kahf delivers her hybrid message to both parties that religion, race, and nationality should not stop them from soaring beyond hatred and violence. They both need to transcend these superficial differences and stick to the human common ground they all share. In remembrance of the horrible attacks of 9/11, Kahf’s poem, ‘We Will Continue Like Twin Towers’, came to weave pain and hope on one loom. She invites ‘us’ and ‘them’ to remember that: what we will never forget again: That our lives have always been as fragile, as dependent on each other, and as beautiful as the flight of the woman and the man, twin towers in my sight, who jumped into the last air hand in hand43 Kahf acts as an agent to help both Arabs/Muslims and Americans break out of the jail of hatred and violence. In her collection of poetry, Kahf tries to present Arab/Muslim women as intelligent and talented human beings who are able to go beyond the ‘veil’ and to make themselves seen in a positive light, according to American/Western cultural standards. Kahf’s book manages to blend Arabic tradition,

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represented in the legendary Scheherazad of The Thousand and One Nights, into the experiences of contemporary Arab-American women, using the most recent means of communication, i.e. e-mail. Kahf adopts a humanistic approach in her poetry in an attempt to heal the wounds and break through the stereotyping wall that separates the two communities. It is notable the way she is able to merge pain, hope, and beauty in her poems. Starting with the plight of immigrants in general, then focusing on Arab-Americans, Kahf gives the merest edge of her attention to Arab women, showing their struggle and resistance in the United States and in the Arab world. The poetry collection ends in a beautiful dialogue, using passionate language to comment on recent political events, especially the 9/11 attacks. The book shows the poet’s ability to read the post-9/11 world with a critical eye that captures both the joy and tragedy of life. The book is a hybrid work that manages to link classical Arab characters with current-day events and characters. As Abdelrazek states, Like Scheherazad, Arab American women writers are telling their stories over and over again, using them to change the dominant configuration of their identities. In telling their own stories, contemporary Arab American writers take a stand against both the Orientalist and Islamic or Arab fundamentalist streams. Both of these perspectives obscure the complex web of gender, ethnic, and religious differences that separate rather than unite Arab and Arab American women.44 Mohja Kahf succeeds in taking both Arabs/Muslims and Americans into borderlands, assuring both parties of her independent and hybrid identity. At the same time, she stretches her hands to both Arabs and Americans to cross boundaries of ignorance about each other, to stop hatred and violence, and to make an initiative of love and understanding.

Once in a Promised Land: A Social Commentary on the Post-9/11 Arab-American Experience In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, a national rhetoric fuelled by misconstrued patriotism rushed to vilify and marginalize

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persons of an allegedly suspicious racial makeup. I will call this strategy moral racialization, and it is this strategy that informs . . . Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land.45 In The Rise of the Novel,46 Ian Watt indicates how the novel as a new genre proves to be unique and popular through its ability to imitate reality rather than create it. Unlike older genres of drama, epic, and narrative poetry, the novel’s perspective on truth is not universal. The novel appeals to its readers in an individualistic tone represented by its true-to-life characters, who allow readers to see into a place that most of us do not know about. The novel, therefore, is able to capture the human condition perfectly in the web of its complex plot and the familiarity of its characters. Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land relates the story of a couple who are the walking personification of the American dream but who, after 9/11, are branded as outcasts. As Halaby states in the preface, ‘Salwa and Jassim are both Arabs. Both Muslims, but of course they have nothing to do with what happened to the World Trade Center. Nothing and everything.’47 The couple, who live in Tucson, Arizona, far from New York City and Washington, DC, still have to confront personal tragedies in the midst of America’s rising anger and bigotry against all Arabs/Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The absence of communication between the couple, even before 9/11, is prominent in the novel. Salwa Haddad, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage, was born in the United States but grew up in Jordan. Laila Halaby keeps her characters within their Arab cultural and social boundaries to demonstrate that this results in their unacceptability in the American social system. This echoes Edward Said’s perception of the novel’s role in securing the readers’ perception by keeping the characters in the knowable cultural and social context. This helps to keep the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the context of the novel.48 Once in a Promised Land is peppered with Arabic terms, emphasising the characters’ cultural background. Laila Halaby’s text recalls works by Gloria Anzaldu´a, where a hybrid language is spoken by Chicanos and Latinos. Through the use of Arabic words and expressions Halaby attempts convey a post-9/11 atmosphere that witnesses an incredible emergence of ‘Americanised Arabic’. The novel’s opening words are in the traditional style of Arab tales, as used by Scheherazade in The One Thousand and One Nights: ‘Kan ya ma kan fi qadeem az-zaman’,49

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meaning ‘Once upon a time . . . in olden times.’ Such an introduction suggests that this is one among many similar stories. Halaby’s novel, that starts in the pre-9/11 era relating the story of a Jordanian-American couple, ends with a couple who stumble upon their marriage in the turbulent days following the 9/11 attacks. It seems that Halaby uses this traditional opening to Arab tales to stress from the beginning of her novel the death of the American Dream, especially for post-9/11 Arabs/ Muslims. They come from Jordan in search of the American Dream in Arizona. Jassim is a hydrologist, responsible for lives by harvesting water, while Salwa is a banker and real-estate agent who helps Americans with financial and housing issues. In other words, the couple deal with water and shelter, essential not only to Americans’ lives but to all forms of life. Both Jassim and Salwa possess the comforts of a well-ordered American life, evident in their beautiful home, Jassim’s Mercedes Benz, and Salwa’s large remittances to her family in Jordan. But behind this bright picture of success lies a marital life devoid of warmth and happiness, a routine life that has alienated them from each other. The events of 9/11 have expanded the distance within the Jordanian couple and has made their reunion impossible. The rupture is both an internal and external one. They feel themselves ‘outsiders’ from themselves and from the ‘other’. They end up confronting the superficiality of their material success in the United States, as well as the hollowness of their American dream. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha examines the concept of hybridity and the way it leaves minor pieces of identities built over time. This ‘part’ culture constitutes the bridge between the cultures as it is both and neither at the same time. It is an ‘in-between’ culture that, bafflingly, is both alike and different.50 Halaby’s characters are unsure of their identities, questioning their own belonging, nationality, and their sub-consciousness. Their hybridity is notably dismantled and its elements visibly recognised. Jassim and Salwa attempt to contemplate their undetermined identities. It might be this undetermined identity that results in a 12-year childless, colourless, unfulfilling marriage between them. Jassim silently accepts all occurrences of anti-Arab/-Muslim sentiment as if they are the unavoidable result of being a ‘hybrid’ person in America. He is unable to believe that a disbeliever in religion like himself is associated with Islamic fanaticism. When he knows about the worries of Salwa’s friend Randa about her kids and how they might get hurt because of their Arab heritage, Jassim says, ‘Why would anyone

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hurt Randa’s kids? People are not so ignorant as to take revenge on a Lebanese family for the act of a few extremist Saudis who destroyed these buildings?’51 At other times he seems to gloat over the national catastrophe. This happens when he remembers the man he meets at the gym who keeps talking about Salwa’s beauty: ‘As the first plane was flying into the World Trade Center building, Jack Franks was expounding on the beauty of Arab women and grilling me about my wife. There’s a meaning in that somewhere . . . ’52 Salwa does not like this passivity on Jassim’s part. Their societal alienation causes them to behave according to the social norms around them. Being treated as ‘suspected persons’ results in a sense of estrangement deeply embedded in them that affects their attitudes towards each other and leads each of them to lead a parallel life by him/herself. Jassim accidentally kills a teenage boy when he hits him with his car and his unsteady status leads him to hide his secret even from his wife Salwa. For her part, Salwa, who seeks tranquility in motherhood, becomes pregnant against Jassim’s wishes. Like Jassim she is self-involved and unable to communicate with him, so she keeps her pregnancy secret from her husband. Then, she has a miscarriage without telling Jassim. As the couple grows further apart, secrets, lies, and despair follow, to widen the distance between them. They end up finding an outlet in other people. Salwa seeks comfort from a younger American co-worker who shows her the interest and emotions she could not get from Jassim. Likewise, Jassim succumbs to the affections of Penny, a waitress who fills the emotional gap. Halaby is able to give a global meaning to the personal problems of these Jordanian characters living in the United States. They live their version of the American dream until they encounter racism and the harsh realities of being viewed as outsiders in the wake of 9/11. The way Halaby focuses on the couple’s failing marriage because of years of miscommunication might be a hint to the way Arab-Americans need to communicate with each other as well as with the American society around them. Jassim and Salwa have their personal flaws but, in the American promised land, their tragic downfall is heightened and comes to a head after the tragedy of 9/11. The 9/11 attacks brought on a national rage that swept into the lives of many Arab-Americans without political concerns. Salwa and Jassim thought that they had finally entered the American cultural mainstream, but the 9/11 attacks ended up leaving them with a

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sense of intimidation, disillusionment, and potential backlash. Steven Salaita, a controversial professor formerly at the University of Illinois, has stated that, ‘Before 9/11 scholars examined Arab-American invisibility or marginality – or whatever other term they employed to denote peripherality – but after 9/11 they were faced with a demand to transmit or translate their culture to mainstream Americans.’53 Halaby is able to profile her Arab-American characters who have to share the national tragedy and, at the same time, struggle to define themselves as normal citizens who should not face pervasive workplace discrimination and governmental surveillance, and cultural misunderstanding and insecurity. The complexities of the migrant experience, comprising the comprador, native informant, nationalist, and cosmopolitan positions, effectively emerged as hybrid representations. It is important to theorise the post-9/11 immigrant experience more fully, perhaps in relation to Saidian exile, Mufti’s concept of world minorities,54 or Dabashi’s work on post-Orientalism.55 Arab-Americans in Halaby’s novel are at odds with their American identities: We cannot live here anymore. All those years of schizophrenic reaction to American culture, disdain for the superficial, which she had buried with each new purchase and promotion, a spray of loathing she had denied in order to justify her current arrangement – it all burst forward as if she were seeing it for the first time, as though she had not spent the past nine years living this very life.56 The polarised realities of America as a promised land and its foreign policy have given and continue to give Arab-Americans a schizophrenic character: they love the idea of America, where all their dreams can come true but, at the same time, they hate its unbalanced foreign policy in the Middle East. Moreover, the 9/11 attacks came to provoke violent reaction against Arabs/Muslims in the United States, a negative societal reaction that has widened the gap between Arab-Americans and their promised land. US foreign policy constitutes an important element in the profile of Arab-Americans, regardless of their being Muslim or Christian, conservative or liberal, politically engaged or politically reticent.

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Halaby’s novel shows an unavoidable engagement with and an attention towards America’s role in the Middle East as an integral part of the identity of Arab-Americans. Salah Hassan explains: Although Arabs and other people from the Middle East are classified racially as white according to the US Census and most affirmative action forms, since the 1960s, the US government has unofficially constituted them as a distinct racial group by associating Arabs with terrorism and threats to national security. Unlike other racial constructs, such as blackness or Asianness, which are defined officially in opposition to whiteness, the contemporary racialization of Arabs appears to be linked to US foreign policy in the Middle East and its translation into the domestic context.57 For Halaby, the link between US foreign policy, world events, and the daily lives of her characters as Arab-Americans is clear. She devotes substantial space to the blindness of the American media’s treatment of the backlash to the 9/11 attacks. Edward Said asserts the role of Middle East politics in unifying ArabAmericans under one umbrella, regardless of their religion, class, or gender. His memoir Out of Place, for example, narrates his life within a political context. It opens with the following: I found myself telling the story of my life against the background of World War II, the loss of Palestine and the establishment of Israel, the end of the Egyptian monarchy, the Nasser years, the 1967 War, the emergence of the Palestinian movement, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo peace process. These are in my memoir only allusively, even though their fugitive presence can be seen here and there.58 There are many other examples where personal crises are joined by narratives of high politics that relate to either Palestine or US foreign policy: The remoteness of the Palestine I grew up in, my family’s silence over its role, and then its long disappearance from our lives, my mother’s open discomfort with the subject and later aggressive dislike of both

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Palestine and politics, my lack of contact with Palestinians during the eleven years of my American education: all this allowed me to live my life at a great distance from the Palestine of remote memory, unresolved sorrow, and uncomprehending anger.59 Halaby’s characters keep moving between the United States and the Arab world while making their personal confessions. The writer manages to connect their personal experiences with a critical attitude towards US foreign policy. A vivid example of how politics permeates Arab-Americans’ thoughts, mediates their relations with their fellow Americans, and even creeps into their dreams is when Salwa is asked by a customer at the bank, ‘Where are you from?’. Salwa replies, ‘I am Palestinian from Jordan.’ The customer asks, ‘What does this mean?’ Salwa throws the ‘bomb’ of her narrative and relates the history of the US– Middle East encounter since 1945: ‘It means that my parents are Palestinian but that I was born and raised in Jordan, because my parents were refugees. They were kicked out of their homes in 1948 when the state of Israel was established. Where are you from?’ By ending her statement with a question about the customer’s identity, Salwa makes clear that, if she is to be asked about her homeland, so should all Americans. The woman replies, ‘Here, born and raised. I’m a native Tucsonian, American-born and raised.’ The clash of identities escalates when the customer expresses that she would be more comfortable working with someone else she can understand better. Salwa introduces Palestine’s effect on her life and family through the identification of herself. But her fellow American is looking at the issue from a different angle and seeing things from a different perspective. She pays no attention to the tragedy of Salwa’s family, but focuses only on her being an Arab. Salwa, who was raised in Palestine and has lived in the USA for several years, still longs for her Palestinian roots. Said has this to say about the pull of one’s origins: It seems inexplicable to me now that having dominated our lives for generations, the problem of Palestine and its tragic loss, which affected virtually everyone we knew, deeply changing our world, should have been so relatively repressed, undiscussed, or even remarked on by my parents. Palestine was where they were born and grew up, even though their life in Egypt (and more frequently

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Lebanon) provided a new setting for them. As children, my sisters and I were cloistered away from ‘bad people’ as well as from anything that might disturb our ‘little heads,’ as my mother frequently put it.60 Exactly like Said, Halaby’s characters are struggling with their quest for identity and assimilation. They have a desire to assimilate to their American life but, at the same time, they feel homesick, as shown in Salwa’s yearning for her homeland. Halaby, with a Jordanian father and American mother, is able to reflect her hybrid identity in the crosscultural existence of her characters and to prove her talent in writing diasporic fiction. The way Salwa and Jassim move between their ethnicity, humanity, and hybridity is smooth, to the point where one does not even notice the fissures of their hybrid identity. This is what the American writer Gregory Orfalea refers to when he states, ‘I think that as long as the Arab-American novel addresses timeless, ethnicless themes – love, war, want – and does so boldly, it will continue to strengthen . . . Truly the self for an Arab-American author is a gathering of stained glass, fractured, yet full of light and colour, no one tile telling the whole story, no one emotion or belief telling all of it.’61 This is quite evident in the character of Jassim, who is represented as politically reticent; however, he, too, is fated to become an outcast in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. His passivity is evident in his conversation with the mother of the boy he hits with his car. She asked him, ‘Where are you from? India or something?’ Unlike Salwa’s strong responses, Jassim’s answer is straightforward and prepared: ‘I am from Jordan . . . Between Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.’ Jassim is just like many Arab-Americans who want to find their way in the American culture using ‘smooth’ or unthreatening or uncritical, language to avoid any clashes when, as Bhabha puts it, ‘disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’.62 Jassim looks at Americans as ‘pure, simple people, their culture governed by a few basic tenets, not complicated conspiracy theories’.63 The 9/11 events and their aftermath reveal repercussions in which the ‘good citizenship’ of Jassim is not recognised, but rather misrecognised as an Arab threat and target. He is asked to leave his job because he is an Arab. In ‘water’ Jassim, is able to forget about everything. Water is his area of specialty and his place of enjoyment. Jassim finds himself in water, the source of life for all human beings.

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As for Salwa, Halaby is keen on presenting a new image of ArabAmerican women such as Salwa, who is brave enough to maintain a presence in both American and Arab cultures. Salwa, unlike Jassim, struggles within American culture to define herself and to assert her Arab identity in clear and visible words. It is Salwa who makes the readers examine Arab culture and place so vividly. Salwa refuses to live in-between and insists on making the reader feel her displacement in America. It is interesting to see Salwa subjected to oppression not by an Arab man but by an American co-worker who lures her into adultery. She wants to go home to be herself and to be with her ‘culture, where things like this can’t happen’.64 Halaby manages to show an Arab woman as prey of an American white man, to offer a new alternative discourse. Penny, Jassim’s friend, looks at Arabs/Muslims as ‘those people over there, they oppress women and kill each other. They’re the ones who should be bombed.’65 This shows how mainstream American feminists are preoccupied with the dominant stereotypical discourse that, as Shakir stated, ‘had generally followed (and sometimes led) the crowd who believe that all Arab women are victims of genital mutilation and forced marriage, and that all Arab men are oil sheiks, terrorists, or religious fanatics’.66 In Once in a Promised Land, Halaby develops a counter-approach to these stereotypes, showing an Arab woman leading her distinct life of pain and resistance.

Conclusion Arab-Americans join their fellow citizens in pausing and reflecting upon the horrors of the 9/11 event and its aftermath. But while they join most Americans in seeking unity and solace with their fellow citizens, some Americans are sowing seeds of hatred and ignorance. Arab-American writers promote the idea of culture as a site of multiple interactions: it can promote misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and racism, on the one hand but, on the other, provides an avenue for cultural knowledge and connection and help and prevent misunderstanding and violence. In their writings, Arab-Americans stand as mediators between dominant US images and perspectives of alliance and solidarity with the Arab world. Mohja Kahf’s emails from Scheherazad is a blend of the past (represented in the legendary Scheherazad of The Thousand and One

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Nights) and the present (as evident in the twenty-first century New Jersey setting). The spiritual weakness of the age, caused by the flourishing of self-interest and scientific materialism, has prompted Kahf to look with reverence to classical works, as if they constitute a source for guidance and inspiration. Again, it is interesting to compare this approach by Arab-American writers with that of African-American theorists such as Du Bois, whose work, The Souls of Black Folk, has many classical references throughout. Laila Halaby is able, out of her intense and personal experiences, to express a general image of Arab-Americans in the United States. Halaby retains all the particularity of her experience to make of it a general symbol. Once in a Promised Land is suffused with its load of undefined terrors and anguish of spirit, and so this novel can be taken by Arabs in America as a rallying cry. Halaby is able to tease out all the themes of liberation, political and social reaction, the terrors of 9/11 attacks and after, and the impact of all these upon Arab-American characters. The novel contributes tremendously to cross-cultural understanding by making her characters waver between two lands to which none of them really belong. It is full of scenes related to displacement and nostalgia in which we can easily touch two currents of memoirs – Jordan and Palestine – running in the same ‘stream of consciousness’, especially in the character of Salwa. It is to be noted that many Arab-American narratives are, to a large extent, linguistically inclined towards Arabic. This may be an indication of the way they try to adapt themselves to the American way of life; however, ethnicity is always there. Mentally, they go back to the Arab world to feel their unique entity and to get their complete identity away from their American ethnic life. They believe that it is in the Arab world that their dignity exists. Here the words of Nancy Mirabal, a professor specialising in Afro-Latino diasporas summarise this feeling very well: ‘Nostalgia serves multiple functions. It keeps whole that which is fractured and in pain. It creates identity and purpose; it reminds and it renews. It is both fixed and fluid enough to hold memory and experience.’67 It is very important to trace the contrast between exilic and ethnic elements in Halaby’s story.

CONCLUSION

Arab response to 9/11 and to the global war on terrorism can hardly be completely covered within the limits of this study. I have therefore focused on selected Arab and Arab-American texts from different discourses – cinematic, fictional, poetic, and journalistic – about the United States/the West and attempted to show how these works speak to a larger Arab counter-discourse that has never been static. I have limited my study to the examination of the Occidentalist aspects of Arab texts and the ways in which they question and criticise the ideologically constructed binary opposition of the United States to Arabs/Islam. In many ways, these works deconstruct the East– West binary by pointing out contradictions and ambivalences that underlie the US –Arab ‘clash of ignorance’. The East – West binary divides the world into two antagonistic forces: the Arabs/Islam and the United States/West. Such polarisation reflects a distorted view of each party towards the other under the impact of a long history of stereotyping. With the development of modern electronic media, Arabs have started to look at the United States through the lenses of Al Jazeera and other media channels. Arabs’ use of modern media, exported by the United States, is evident in the April 6 movement in Egypt that started in the spring of 2008 through massive text-messaging, e-mail, and popular social networking platforms – Facebook, blogs, etc. Media progress in the Arab world in the post-9/11 era indicates how Arabs are able to make change through the use of Western tools rather than with the help of Western regimes. New post-9/11 Arab media refer to a new Arab discourse with Americans and with the West in general. Al Jazeera, for

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example, is able to criticise and undermine the rhetoric of not only Arab regimes but American and Western regimes as well. This understanding of the role of the post 9/11 media encounter gives a much broader understanding to any discussion of the Middle East–West encounter. With regard to the film industry, my analysis shows that Arab cinema articulates above all what film critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam1 term ‘allegories of impotence’ that probe the social, political, and economic predicaments of the Arab nations. In fact, the dominant perspective of Arab representations of the United States negatively depicts American policy makers as hostile and anti-Arab/Muslim. Today’s Arab imagemakers regularly link the conflicts in the Middle East with Israeli supremacy and Western ‘holy war’. The notion of a ‘holy war’ was undeniably present when George W. Bush used the word ‘Crusade’ to describe his war against a people he called ‘evildoers’. This study explores how Egyptian cinema in particular, as a powerful Arab institution that continues to shape and reflect the dominant thinking of Arab culture, largely perpetuates a counter-response ideology vis-a`-vis the United States/the West. If Hollywood deals with Arabs/Islam as a threat, Egyptian cinema scripts America as essentially colonialist. Arab film makers, it can be argued, identify America’s struggle for hegemony as the driving force behind any clash in the Middle East. By doing so, these films reveal not only the film industry’s complex relationship with US foreign policy in the region, but also the limits of liberalism when tackling outside vs inside issues or anti-colonial discourse vs antidictatorial commentary. In their writings, Arab writers resist the binary not only by defending Arabs/Muslims against the United States/the West and vice versa, but also by questioning ideological underpinnings of the binary. There is much coverage about Arabs/Muslims in American media but rarely do we see the other side. Covering Arabs and Islam by looking into their cultural productions is the core of my work. The very negative and ill-founded images attributed to Arabs/Muslims in mainstream US/Western media has left Arabs/Muslims with a need to promote alternative discourses that question and discredit the claims of a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a perception of ‘they hate our democracy’. Arab writings, thus, inscribe a double vision that aims to displace binaristic discourse and promote a search for new terms to articulate identity and difference. Their quest results in their construction of a coherent identity

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that uses the language of the ‘other’ to write the Arab autobiography and to provide a space for negotiation between Arab and American cultures. Engaging a contrapuntal perspective, to borrow a Saidian term, I have examined Arab cultural representations of the United States, as representative of Western modernity and Western foreign policy. My reading of Arab fiction argues that, while it puts forward a fictional counter-narrative and a more complex understanding of US– Arab encounters, it still tends towards a monolithic representation of the United States. For example, the Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany has emerged in the post-9/11 era as one of the most important Arab novelists. His first novel, The Yacoubian Building, comprises many dysfunctional components of Egyptian society and the ruling regime. Al-Aswany was able to portray Egyptian political corruption, sexual repression, and religious extremism by detailing the lives of his Egyptian characters. In his second novel, Chicago, he uses a series of vivid and interwoven episodes to detail the love affairs, ambitions, political views, and intricate lives of a group of Egyptian scholars at the University of Illinois medical school. Chicago is a novel written for an Arab audience about Egyptians in America and how they look at themselves and their country. In proposing this model for understanding US – Middle East relations, I have been influenced by many Islamic thinkers who have conceived alternatives to the models of conflict and misunderstanding, working from within Islamic thought. It is evident that, initially, Western modernity appealed to the hearts and minds of early Muslim reformists, who discerned many positive aspects in it. This is extremely clear in an oft-quoted comment by a well-known Egyptian scholar, Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905),2 that, whereas in the West he found Muslims without Islam, in the East he found Islam without Muslims.3 Abduh wanted to stress that, by their very conduct, people in the West manifested the ideals of Islam even though they were not Muslims, whereas in the Muslim world he was shocked to find people who selfidentified as Muslims but whose conduct belied their beliefs. The core of Abduh’s reform mission was the reconciliation of Islam and Western modernity through a balanced process that would allow Islam to become modernised while keeping the gist of its standards and values. It is this discourse that dominated the scene until the third quarter of the twentieth century. It was also the prevailing discourse in

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the Third World that observed Western modernity as a model. Abduh and his fellow scholars encouraged all possible means to grasp the pioneering aspects of Western modernity and to compete with it on its own terms. Another Arab Muslim scholar is Hassan Hanfi, who has been able to bridge the gap between Arab/Islamic culture and philosophy of life and those of the West. Showing cultural and philosophical competence, Hanfi has presented Islamic culture as being capable of absorbing the best in Western modernity. These efforts by Hanfi are evident in his 1991 seminal work, ‘Tradition and Renewal’,4 and his masterpiece, ‘Our Situation from Western Tradition: Introduction to Westernization’.5 It also includes an account of Arab-Americans’ cultural response to 9/11 and their forced move from invisibility to hyper-visibility. Historically, negative images of Arabs and Muslims are trotted out whenever Middle East crises emerge. Arab-Americans who already deal with their double identity face the additional burdens of sorrow for their country’s catastrophe and stereotypes about their Arab heritage. ArabAmerican cultural producers who detail how people in the United States who are construed as Middle Eastern faced the possibility of harassment immediately after 9/11. Finally, throughout this book, I have contextualised my findings within a new post-9/11 US –Middle East encounter. The many publications that followed 9/11 on the East and Islam have not delved into a deep scholarly investigation of Arabs/ Muslims, but instead are trapped in a new Western Orientalism era. However, recent scholarship in the field has challenged more traditional interpretations of the relationship between Western modernity and multiculturalism, political debates, and artistic movements. Simply put, few works have explored the representation of the United States in Arab/ Muslim culture. This book fills some of that niche because it is an attempt to understand the relationship specifically between the Obama era in the United States and the social/political change movements throughout the Arab Spring countries: Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Egypt’s Lotus Revolution, and other pro-democracy movements in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain. Tunisia’s uprising invigorated frustrated citizens around the region. Few works have begun to understand how cultural texts such as film, media, new media, and fiction will function in this process of Arab social and political change. This examination attempts to fill this gap by interrogating the social

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change in cultural theory, integrating cultural studies literature, and contributing to the prevailing theoretical trends in Orientalist – Occidental studies. It supplements current social and political theory on Orientalism–Occidentalism with a more comprehensive historical treatment of the roots of our contemporary accounts of the US– Middle East encounter and how it should be managed or confronted. Moreover, it makes a conceptual or theoretical contribution to the modern social sciences and the more traditional disciplines associated with Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Indeed, recent events in international politics have clearly driven both Americans and Arabs towards a rethinking of their approaches, methods, and intellectual priorities. In the United States, many scholars are addressing the most challenging element in the success or failure of US influence/US imperialism in the Middle East – the recognition of the ‘other’ and giving it the chance to be a ‘subject’ instead of always making it an ‘object’. On the other side, some Arab and Muslim scholars have turned to ijtihad (lit., ‘diligence’; here it means ‘personal or independent reasoning’), which is considered one of the sources of Islamic Sharia or law, to defend Islam against accusations of ‘backwardness’ and ‘fundamentalism’. They have provided the ultimate evidence to demonstrate that Islam does not inherently oppose modernity but actually welcomes it and is capable of incorporating it. This study is an attempt to unpack the counter-narratives of Arab-Muslim interaction with Western modernity as a very important formative factor in rethinking universal causes and virtues. Moreover, it asserts that many negative images and concerns about the United States were well in place even before 9/11, and that the fears of US expansionism were not created by the Iraq War, although certainly intensified by it.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 2. The trigger or catalyst for the Arab Spring is generally agreed to have occurred in December of 2010, when a Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire, in desperation over his situation. Protests began to build, gathering momentum by the spring of 2011, in one country after another. 3. The campaign led to an international campaign to eliminate al-Qaeda and other militant organisations. The United States and many other NATO and non-NATO nations participated in the campaign. The phrase ‘War on Terror’ was first used by U.S. President George W. Bush on 20 September 2001. 4. Throwing one’s shoe (or even just showing the soles) at someone is a sign of protest in many parts of the world. However, the act gained global notoriety in December 2008 when an Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, threw his shoes at President George W. Bush, during a press conference. 5. T.S. Eliot (1888– 1965) was an American-born English poet and critic, considered one of the most venturesome innovators of twentieth-century poetry and criticism 6. Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). 7. These range from Gregory Kilgore’s The Red Sword of Allah (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009) and Daniel Pipes’ Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003) to Brigitte Gabriel’s They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008) and Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Harper Perennial 2003). 8. See Edward S. Walker, ‘Gloomy mood in Egypt and Saudi Arabia’, Middle East Institute Perspective, 22 January 2003. Reprinted by Gulfwire E-Newsletters, 23 January 2003, p. 1.

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9. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, ‘100 years of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotyping’, The Prism 11 November 2005 (http://www.ibiblio.org/prism/jan98/anti_arab. html), accessed 19 September 2014. 10. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 39. 11. Margaret K. Nydell, Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Modern Times (Boston: Intercultural Press, 2005), p. 117. 12. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The clash of civilisations?’, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993), 22–49. Also, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). 13. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War between the major continental European states, marked the transformation of the international system into a system that would respect a states’ authority over its defined geographic area and freedom from outside interference in its domestic affairs. 14. Said: Covering Islam, pp. l– li. 15. Fawaz A. Gerges, ‘Is political Islam on the march?’, Christian Science Monitor (6 June 2006), p. 9 (http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0606/p09s02-coop.html), accessed 19 September 2014. Examples of such elections include Hezbollah in Lebanon winning 18 per cent of the votes in the May 2005 parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt winning 20 per cent of the votes in the November 2005 parliamentary elections, and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories winning 44 per cent (a majority) in the January 2006 parliamentary elections. 16. In his 2005 inaugural address, President George W. Bush traced out the logic of a new, post-9/11 US foreign policy: ‘For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny’, he declared, violence ‘will gather . . . and cross the most defended borders’ – that is, our own. Therefore he declared, ‘it is the policy of the USA to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.’ Quoted in James Traub, ‘Islamic Democrats?’, New York Times, 29 April 2007, p. 44. 17. This is evident in the Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll, conducted by Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland with the respected polling firm Zogby International. Most of these polls show the gap between American policies and Arab public perceptions of the United States. 18. According to James Zogby, anti-American sentiment is ‘due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel’. James Zogby, Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 173. 19. Examples of such scholarly assessment include: Robert Lerner, Standish Meacham, and Edward Burns, Western Civilizations: Their History and Their Culture, 13th ed. (New York: Norton, 1998) and Christopher Tyreman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 20. Pat Roberston, quoted in ‘Muslims “are worse than the Nazis”’, Rense.com, 15 November 2002 (http://www.rense.com/general31/nazis.htm), accessed March 2009.

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21. Quoted in Lawrence Pintak, Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam and the War of Ideas (London: Pluto Press, 2006), p. 101. 22. Quoted in Pintak: Reflections, p. 101. 23. Edward Said’s scholarly work has influenced such fields as literary studies, comparative literature, area studies (specifically the Middle East/ the Arab world/ Islamic world), anthropology, political science, comparative religion, and music. Said authored more than 20 books including, Culture and Imperialism, Orientalism, and Covering Islam. 24. Said: Orientalism, p. 343. 25. Amy Kaplan, ‘“Left alone with America”: The absence of empire in the study of American culture’, in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (eds.), Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 14. 26. Kaplan: ‘Left alone with America’, p. 16. 27. Amy Kaplan, ‘Manifest domesticity,’ American Literature 70.3 (1998), pp. 22–49. 28. Michael H. Hunt, The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 324. 29. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 2. 30. Little: American Orientalism, p. 3. 31. Ibid., p. 11. 32. Ibid., p. 42. 33. Ibid., p. 314. 34. Rashin Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 35. Mary L. Dudziak (ed.), September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 36. Denis Lacorne and Tony Judt, With US or Against US: Studies in Global AntiAmericanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 37. David Farber (ed.), What They Think of Us: International Perceptions of the United States since 9/11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 38. McAlister: Epic Encounters, p. 11 39. Brian Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Ussama Makdisi, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.– Arab Relations: 1820 – 2001 (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2010). 40. Said: Orientalism, pp. 20 – 1. 41. Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 167.

Chapter 1

The United States in Post-9/11 Arab Fiction

1. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Basic Books, 2003), p. 131. 2. Halim Barakat, ‘Arabic novels and social transformation’, in Robin Ostle (ed.), Studies in Modern Arabic Literature, (Warminster: Aris and Philips), pp. 126– 7.

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3. Barakat: ‘Arabic novels’, p. 137. 4. Mahfouz (1911 – 2006) won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1988. He has published more than 34 novels, over 350 short stories, written dozens of movie scripts as well as five plays over a 70-year career. His works provide a record of changing social concerns over many decades. 5. See, for example, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1994); Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). As pertains to Egypt, see Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers Between History and Fiction (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005); Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880– 1985 (London: Routledge, 2004); Muhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction (London: Routledge, 2007). 6. Noteworthy examples, particularly because of popularity and/or critical acclaim, include most of the works of Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004) and Chicago (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), Gamal al-Ghitani’s Zayni Barakat (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003), Ghada al-Samman’s The Departure of Old Ports (Beirut: Ghada alSamman Publications, 1973), Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (New York: Random House, 1987), Ibrahim al-Koni’s Gold Dust (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2008), and Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone London: Telegram, 2006). This list could easily be extended with many other novels that reveal the usually hidden aspects of a ‘sacred’ Arab reality. 7. The Cairo Trilogy comprises three titles (names of actual streets in Cairo): Bayn al-Qasrayn [Palace Walk ] (1956), Qasr el-Shoaq [Palace of Desire ] (1957), and El-Sukkariya [Sugar Street ] (1957). 8. Jurj Tara¨blshr, Uqdat Audib fi al-Riwaya al-’Arabiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Talr’a lil-Tibaˆ’a wa al-Nashr, 1982), p. 10. 9. Siddiq: Arab Culture and the Novel, p. xii. 10. Taha Hussein, Studies in American Literature (Cairo: no date of publication), p. 110. 11. Hussein: Studies in American Literature, p. 111. 12. Rasheed El-Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident: East – West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 2. 13. Quoted in Raja Al-Naqqash, Naguib Mahfouz: Safhat min Mudhakkiratihi wa Adwa Jadida Ala Adabihiwa Hayatihi [Naguib Mahfouz: Pages of His Diaries and New Light on His Literature and Life ] (Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Translation and Publishing), p. 64. 14. Edward Said: Orientalism, p. 12. 15. Karen Kostyal, ‘Alaa al-Aswany: Voice of reason’, National Geographic (http://ngm. nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0609/voices.html), accessed 20 August 2010.

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175

16. Publisher’s promotional description for The Yacoubian Building (http://www. aucpress.com/p-2792-the-yacoubian-building.aspx), accessed 3 November 2014. 17. Rachel Cooke, ‘The Interview’ [with Alaa al-Aswany], The Guardian (http:// www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/may/31/alaa-al-aswany-interview), accessed 20 August 2010. 18. Joanna Kadi, ‘Introduction’, in Joanna Kadi (ed.), Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab Canadian Feminists (Boston: South End Press, 1994), p. xix. 19. Abdeen Jabara, ‘Time for a change: Arabs in America’, in Audrey Shabbas and Ayad al-Qazzaz (eds.), Arab World Notebook Secondary School Level, Women Concerned about the Middle East (Berkeley: Najda, 1989). 20. Alaa al-Aswany, Chicago (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), p. 8. 21. Al-Aswany: Chicago, p. 30. 22. Ed King, ‘Review: Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany’, Telegraph News (http://www. telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3559820/Review-Chicago-byAlaa-Al-Aswany.html), accessed 16 August 2010. 23. David Pollock, quoted in Amal Saleeby Malek, Returning Home: A Postwar Lebanese Phenomenon (Beirut: Dar Al-Mourad, 2001), p. 107. 24. Amin Maalouf, On Identity, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Harvill, 2000), p. 3. 25. Maalouf: On Identity, p. 5. 26. Edward Said, ‘Reflections on exile,’ in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trink T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (New York: New York Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 357–66. 27. Roberta Rubenstein, Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1 – 2. 28. Rubenstein: Home Matters, p. 6. 29. Ibid. 30. Al-Aswany: Chicago, p. 23. 31. George, Rosemary Marangoly, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 2. 32. George: Politics of Home, p. 11. 33. Alaa Al-Aswany, [Chicago] (Cairo: Shorouk Press, 2007), p. 6 [Arabic edition]. 34. Al-Aswany: Chicago, p. 285. 35. Ibid., p. 208. 36. Ibid., p. 157. 37. Ibid., p. 36. 38. Amani Abul Fadl, Birds of the South (Beirut: Dar Al-Fikr, 2005). 39. Successors to the Prophet Muhammad as leader of the Muslims following Abu Bakr (632– 4), Umar (634– 44), and Uthman (644– 56). 40. Abul Fadl, Birds of the South, p. 65. 41. Stefan G. Meyer, The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 117.

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42. Those who follow the doctrines of al-Asha’ira, a ninth- to tenth-century theologian from Basrah, Iraq, who opposed the more speculative and freethinking theology of the group known as the Mu’tazilites. 43. Abul Fadl, Birds of the South, p. 117. 44. Ibid., p. 137. 45. Ibid., p. 128. 46. There is a saying by Prophet Muhammad that ‘those who came before you of the People of the Book split into seventy-two sects, and this ummah (‘nation’) will split into seventy-three: seventy-two in Hell and one in Paradise, and that is the jamaa’ah [main body of Muslims].’ This sect is always referred to as the Saved Group. 47. Abul Fadl, Birds of the South, p. 65 – 6. 48. Ibid., p. 70. 49. Ibid., p. 150. 50. Ibid., p. 208. 51. Ibid., p. 233. 52. Ibid., pp. 240– 1. 53. Allen Roger, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 65. 54. Fabio Caiani, Contemporary Arab Fiction: Innovation from Rama to Yalu (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 3. 55. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1967) and Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954).

Chapter 2 The United States in Contemporary Arab Media and Intellectual Life 1. Rasheed El-Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident: East/West Encounters in Arab Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 153. 2. This is evident in the writings of Bernard Lewis, such as ‘The revolt of Islam: When did the conflict with the West begin, and how could it end?’, The New Yorker 19 November 2001, pp. 50 – 60. The most obvious statement in this regard is Samuel Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72.3 (1993), pp. 22 –49 (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/11/19/therevolt-of-islam). 3. In a poll conducted by Al-Jazeera English about US motives in Iraq, about 3,500 respondents said the invasion of Iraq was to safeguard Israeli interests in the region (http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2003/09/200849134733816512. html), accessed 9 March 2003. 4. Ahmed Janabi, ‘New Iraq going “soft on Israel”: Iraqis angered by trade fair’s decision to remove clause boycotting Israel’, Al-Jazeera (http://english. aljazeera.net/focus/2009/10/2009102712157981279.html), accessed 9 November 2009.

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5. Amr Hamzawy, Marina Ottaway, Gamal al-Ghitany, Salah ad-Din al-Jourchi, Khaled al-Hroub, and Mustapha al-Khalfi, ‘President Obama and Middle East expectations’, Policy Outlook, Beirut: Carnegie Middle East Center January 2009 (http://carnegie-mec.org/2009/01/14/president-obama-and-middleeast-expectations/ay1z), accessed October 2010. 6. Abdel Monem Said, Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://today.almasryalyoum.com/pri nterfriendly.aspx?ArticleID¼75523), accessed 9 September 2007. 7. An English-language service was launched in 2006, although an Englishlanguage website was already functional in 2003. 8. Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Were American: U.S. Mass Media in Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 379. 9. Faisal Al-Qassim, ‘Al-Ittijah al-Mu’akis’ [‘The Opposite Direction’; author translation], Al-Jazeera, 10 July 2001 (http://aljazeera.net/channel/archive/ archive?ArchiveId¼ 89762), accessed 11 January 2010. 10. Fouad Ajami, ‘What the Muslim world is watching’, New York Times Magazine, 18 November 2001 (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/magazi ne/18ALJAZEERA.html). 11. Daniela V. Dimitrove and Colleen Connolly-Ahern, ‘A tale of two wars: Framing analysis of online news sites in coalition countries and the Arab world during the Iraq War,’ Howard Journal of Communications 18.2 (2007), pp. 153–68. 12. Dietram A. Scheufele, ‘Framing as a theory of mediaeffects’, Journal of Communication 49.1 (1999), p. 106. 13. Scheufele: ‘Framing as a theory’, p. 103. 14. Ibid., p. 105. 15. Ibid., p. 111. 16. Hammond, What the Arabs Think of America, p. 1. 17. ABC News, ‘Poll: Americans skeptical of Islam and Arabs’, 8 March 2006 (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id¼1700599), accessed 5 November 2007. 18. Julie Norman, ‘Creative activism: Youth media in Palestine’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2.2 (2009), p. 261. 19. Shirley Biagi, Media/Impact: An Introduction to Mass Media (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2006), p. 346. 20. The birth of mass media began in the early part of the 19th century with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon, who published in French the first two newspapers in the Arab world: La De´cade e´gyptienne and Le Courier de l’E´gypte. 21. Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); William A. Rugh, The Arab Press: News Media and Political Process in the Arab World (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987); Trevor Mostyn, Censorship in Islamic Societies ( London: Saqi Books, 2002); Nabil H. Dajani, ‘An analysis of the press in four Arab countries’, in The Vigilant Press: A Collection of Case Studies (Paris: UNESCO, 1989), pp. 75–88. 22. Dale F. Eickelman and John W. Anderson (eds.), New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 23.

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23. Riad Abdelkarim, ‘PR alone won’t win Arab, Muslim hearts and minds’, Arab News, 6 February 2002 (http://www.arabnews.com/node/218259), accessed 24 December 2009. 24. Ahmad al-Rubei, cited in Brent J. Talbot and Michael B. Meyer, ‘View from the East: Arab perceptions of United States presence and policy’, INSS Occasional Paper 48 (February 2003), p. 7 (http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/ GetTRDoc?AD¼ada435081), accessed 28 October 2014. 25. Josh Rushing, Mission Al-Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 26. Dawn Kawamoto, ‘War briefly draws traffic to news sites’, 24 April 2003 (http://news.cnet.com/War-briefly-draws-traffic-to-news-sites/2100 – 1032_ 3 – 998229.html?tag¼mncol), accessed 19 January 2010. 27. Fatma Muge Gocek (ed.), Political Cartoons in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 6. 28. CNN, ‘Iraqi shoe thrower: Bush’s ‘‘soulless smile’’ set me off’, 19 February 2009 (http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/02/19/iraq.shoe.thrower/ index.html), accessed 19 December 2009. 29. Associated Press, ‘Iraqi says he threw shoes at Bush to restore pride’, 20 February 2009 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/19/bush-shoethrower-i-wante_n_168144.html), accessed 19 December 2009. 30. Bob Reynolds, ‘Was Bush’s ‘‘mission accomplished’’?’, Al-Jazeera, 11 January 2009 (http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/theobamapresidency/2008/12/ 2008121619503329516.html), accessed 11 January 2009. 31. Al-Akhbar (www.al-akhbar.com/ar/taxonomy/term/15616?page¼8), accessed 27 December 2008. 32. Edward Said: Orientalism, p. xxviii. 33. BBC News, ‘Saddam’s rule “better” for gay Iraqis’, 6 July 2009 (http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8133639.stm), accessed 6 July 2009. 34. Al-Akhbar (www.al-akhbar.com/ar/taxonomy/term/15616?page¼8), accessed 1 January 2009. 35. Centre for Media Alternatives Quebec (CMAQ), ‘Montreal shoe action: US consulate Saturday at 1pm’, 17 December 2008 (http://www.cmaq.net/en/ node/31723), accessed 17 December 2009. 36. Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?Arti cleID¼191425&IssueID ¼ 1262), accessed 22 December 2009. 37. Medea Benjamin, ‘The Iraqi shoe-thrower should be pardoned’, The Huffington Post, 18 March 2009 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/medea-benjamin/theiraqi-shoe-thrower-sh_b_175621.html), accessed 30 December 2009. 38. Maktoob was launched in the year 2000 as the first Arabic web-based e-mail solution on the internet and now a leading Arab portal, with over 15 million visitors. 39. Maktoob.com, Hezaa Bush Elshaheer fe el-Kartoon ElAraby’ [‘Bush’s famous shoe in Arab Cartoon’; author translation] 18 December 2008 (http://majdah. maktoob.com/vb/majdah122235/), accessed 5 February 2009.

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40. Al Riyadh, 17 December 2008 (http://www.alriyadh.com/2008/12/17/arti cle395599.html), accessed 11 January 2009. 41. Maktoob.com, (http://majdah.maktoob.com/vb/majdah122235/), accessed 5 February 2009. 42. Lisa Lerer, ‘Laura: Shoe-throwing “was an assault”’, Politico News, 28 December 2008 (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16887.html), accessed 25 December 2009. 43. Program for International Public Attitudes (PIPA), University of Maryland, The Iraqi Public on the US Presence and the Future of Iraq – A WorldPublicOpinion. org Poll (PIPA, 27 September 2006) (http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pi pa/pdf/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf), accessed May 2010. 44. Mohamed Salmawy, Al-Masry Al-Youm, ‘Shoe of Massive Destruction’ (http:// www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID¼ 191075&IssueID ¼ 1259), accessed 22 December 2009. 45. Ramzy Baroud, ‘Hero revisited’, Al Ahram Weekly On-line, 2 – 8 April 2009 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/941/op6.htm), accessed 10 December 2009. 46. Baroud: ‘Hero revisited’. 47. Magdy El-Gallad, Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/arti cle2.aspx?ArticleID¼191094), accessed 22 December 2009. 48. Amin Howeidy, ‘Shoe of dignity’, Al-Ahram, 8 – 14 January 2009 (http:// weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/929/op8.htm), accessed 22 December 2009. 49. Muhammad bin Mukhtar El-Shanqiti, [‘Zaidi shoe – message of widows and orphans’; author translation], Al-Jazeera, 17 December 2009 (http://www. aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BCD72480 – 1AE5 – 4A68 – 810D-740477573263. htm), accessed 12 December 2009. 50. Amr Hamzawy, ‘A paper hero’, Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://www.almasryalyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID¼190990), accessed 22 December 2009. 51. Ibid. 52. As’ad AbuKhalid, Al-Akhbar, (http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/node/110233# comment-24931), accessed 30 December 2009. 53. Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh, Al Mustaqbal (http://www.almustaqbal.com/stories.as px?StoryID¼ 369933), accessed 1 January 2010. 54. Alaa El-Ghatrifi, [‘The shoe brought no dignity’; author translation], Al-Masry Al-Youm, (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID¼191232& IssueID ¼ 1260), accessed 22 December 2009. 55. PewResearch, ‘Global Attitudes Project’ (http://people-press.org/publications). 56. Fareed Zakaria, ‘The strategist’, Time, 30 January 2012 (fareedzakaria.com/ 2012/01/19/the-strategist). 57. Pew Research Centre (PRC) for the People and the Press, ‘Global opinion of Obama slips, international policies faulted’, PewResearch Global Attitudes Project, 13 June 2012 (www.pewglobal.org/files/2012/06/Pew-Global-Atti tudes-U.S.-Image-Report-FINAL-June-13 – 2 0123.pdf), p. 5. 58. Ali Younes, ‘Obama the Arabs Savior?’, Al Arabiya.net, 4 June 2009 (http:// www.alarabiya.net/views/2009/06/04/74817.html), accessed 6 February 2013.

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59. Hamzawy, Ottaway, al-Ghitany, ad-Din al-Jourchi, al-Hroub, and al-Khalfi, ‘President Obama and Middle East expectations’. 60. Anas Alqassas, personal interview, 16 June 2013. 61. Edward Said. ‘Memory, inequality, and power: Palestine and the universality of human rights’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 24 (2004), pp. 15 – 33. 62. Sjereen Abouelnaga, personal interview, 23 June 2013. 63. Pew Research Centre (PRC) for the People and the Press, ‘Egyptians remain optimistic, embrace democracy and religion in political life’, PewResearch Global Attitudes Project, 8 May 2012 (www.pewglobal.org/files/2012/05/ Pew-Global-Attitudes-Project-Egypt-Report-FINAL-May-8 – 2 012– 2 PMET.pdf), p. 20. 64. Ibid., ‘Confidence in Obama lifts U.S. image around the world’, PewResearch Global Attitudes Project, 23 July 2009 (http://www.pewglobal.org/files/ 2009/07/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Spring-2009-Report-1-July-23 – 1 1am.pdf), pp. 1 – 2. 65. PRC, ‘Confidence in Obama lifts U.S. image around the world’, p. 3 66. ShobikLobik.com (http://www.shobiklobik.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE ¼ true&TOPIC_ID ¼ 172011), accessed 12 February 2010. 67. Anayat Durrani and Amira Howeidi, ‘The perfect storm’, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 6 – 12 November 2008 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/921/fr1. htm), accessed 10 February 2010. 68. Nour had been sentenced in December 2005 to a five-year prison term on what his defenders said were fabricated charges. He was released in February 2009 for health reasons. 69. Ayman Nour, ‘Imprisoned Egyptian liberal oppositionist Ayman Nour writes open letter to Barack Obama’, 17 August 2008 (http://aymanoormasr.blogspot. ca/2008/08/imprisoned-egyptian-liberal.html), accessed 12 February 2010. 70. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/arti cle2.aspx?ArticleID¼238756), accessed 2 January 2010. 71. Samir Farid, ‘Swrh alamrykyyn ’end al’erb’ [‘Americans’ image in the Arab world is far worse than Arabs’ image in the USA’; author translation], Almasry Alyoum (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID¼214028), accessed 1 February 2010. 72. Al-Jazeera, ‘Obama’s Gaza silence condemned’, 31 December 2008 (http:// www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2008/12/2008123101532604810.html), accessed 10 February 2009. 73. al-Dakhakhni: ‘Egypt criticizes Obama for his calls to stop smuggling arms to Gaza’. 74. Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey [survey conducted October 2011 in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and UAE], University of Maryland (www. brookings.edu/, /media/Files/events/2011/1121_arab_public_opinion/ 20111121_arab_public_opinion.pdf), p. 27. Annual survey conducted with respondents from different countries each year. Home page: http://sadat.umd. edu/new%20surveys/surveys.htm.

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75. Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey, p. 25. 76. El-Sayed Amin Shalabi, ‘Awaiting Obama’, Al Ahram, 15 – 21 January 2009 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/930/op11.htm), accessed 2 February 2010. 77. Shalabi: ‘Awaiting Obama’. 78. Ibid. 79. Fahmy Howeidy, ‘Fy Entzar Obama’ [‘Awaiting Obama’], 24 January 2009 (http://fahmyhoweidy.blogspot.com/2009/01/blog-post_24.html), accessed 12 February 2010. 80. Ibid., ‘Obama el-montazer’ [‘The awaited-for Obama’], 2 June 2009 (http:// fahmyhoweidy.blogspot.com/2009/06/blog-post_02.html), accessed 6 February 2013. 81. The Syrian National Council (sometimes known as SNC, the Syrian National Transitional Council or the National Council of Syria) is a Syrian opposition coalition, based in Istanbul, formed in August 2011 during the Syrian civil uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad. 82. Burhan Ghalioun, ‘Obama: La Mahdy Montzr Wla A’ewr Dajal’ [‘Obama is not the awaited Mahdi nor the one-eyed daggal’; author translation], Al-Jazeera (http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/24B59928 – 6080 – 4315-A2D6 – 556E 0357A7AE.htm), accessed 13 February 2010. 83. Ghalioun: [‘Obama is not the awaited Mahdi nor the one-eyed daggal’]. 84. Annual Arab Public Opinion Survey [survey conducted June – July 2010 in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabic (KSA) and UAE], University of Maryland (http://www.brookings.edu/, /media/research/files/reports/2010/ 8/05%20arab%20opinion%20poll%20telhami/0805_arabic_opinion_poll_ telhami.pdf), p. 4. 85. Munir Shafiq, ‘Bayn Obama Wa Bush’ [‘Between Obama and Bush’; author translation], Al-Jazeera (http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B62C3B0F4FDA-4DF9 – 9CAC-432709435BEC.htm), accessed 12 February 2010. 86. Shafiq: [‘Between Obama and Bush’; author translation]. 87. Yousri Fouda, [‘Kidnapping Obama’; author translation], Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.aspx?ArticleID¼ 236526), accessed 13 December 2009. 88. Ibid., [‘Mama Obama’; author translation], Youm7, 12 February 2009 (http:// www.youm7.com/News.asp?NewsID¼70251) accessed 6 Feburary 2013. 89. Esam Shafie, personal interview, 18 June 2013. 90. El-Sayed Amin Shalabi, ‘Egypt, America and the future’, Al Ahram Weekly 14 – 2 0 July 2011 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1056/op9.htm), accessed 1 August 2011. 91. Shalabi: ‘Egypt, America and the future’. 92. Ibid. 93. Lewis: ‘The Revolt of Islam: A New Turn in a Long War with the West’, pp. 50 – 60; Huntington: ‘The clash of civilizations?’, pp. 22 – 49. 94. PRC, 13 June 2012 (www.pewglobal.org/files/2012/06/Pew-Global-Attitudes -U.S.-Image-Report-FINAL-June-13 – 2 0123.pdf), p. 59.

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95. PRC, ‘Global opinion of Obama slips, international policies faulted’, 13 June 2012 (www.pewglobal.org/files/2012/06/Pew-Global-Attitudes-U.S.-ImageReport-FINAL-June-13 – 2 0123.pdf), p. 20. 96. In June 2013, Sam LaHood was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison. After taking refuge in the US Embassy for four weeks he was eventually released after bail was paid (http://www.ibtimes.com/16-american-ngoworkers-including-son-us-transportation-secretary-ray-lahood-among-43-acti vists), accessed 26 August 2014. 97. El-Sayed Amin Shalabi, ‘Too much at stake’, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 8 – 14 March 2012 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2012/1088/op4.htm), accessed 9 February 2013. 98. Saad Eddin Ibrahim interview on Tahrir Channel, 24 October 2012 (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ oDwse1TtQ9I), accessed 9 February 2013. 99. Amir Taheri, ‘Obama’s first term may prove good for the middle east’, Asharq Al-Awsat, 3 February 2013 (http://www.aawsat.net/2013/02/article55 291334). 100. Munir Shafiq, Al Aqsa Voice (http://www.alaqsavoice.ps/arabic/?action¼ det_ ben&id¼ 106180), accessed 6 February 2013. 101. Abdel Moneim Said, Al-Ahram (http://www.ahram.org.eg/1067/2012/10/30/ 11/180061.aspx), accessed 4 February 2013. 102. Gulfnews.com, ‘Arabs react to Obama’s election victory’, 7 November 2012 (http://gulfnews.com/news/world/usa/arabs-react-to-obama-s-electionvictory-1.1100734), accessed 9 February 2013. 103. Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 15 November 2012 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ News/267/33/-Barack-Obama.aspx), accessed 9 February 2013 104. Fahmy Howeidy, ‘Ayakoon ‘aam el-mosalaha el-falstiniah’ [‘Would it be the year of Palestinian reconciliation’], Al-Jazeera, (http://www.aljazeera.net/ pointofview/pages/c7e90c4e-a05b-477f-8416-bd9f89995a88), accessed 6 Februrary 2013. 105. The April 6 Youth Movement is an Egyptian activist group established in Spring 2008 to support the workers in El-Mahalla El-Kubra, an industrial town, who were planning to strike on April 6. The movement was the catalyst of the political upheaval that brought about the downfall of Mubarak. 106. Farouk Goweida, ‘Fe wada’ Bush’ [‘In farewell to Bush’; author translation], Adab.com (http://www.adab.com/modules.php?name¼ Sh3er&doWhat¼ s hqas&qid¼ 81711&r¼&rc¼ 7), accessed 13 February 2010. 107. PRC, ‘Egyptians remain optimistic, embrace democracy and religion in political life’, p. 9. 108. Adel Iskander, ‘Egypt defies all’, The Huffington Post, 14 February 2011 (http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/adel-iskandar/egypt-defies-all_b_822336.html), accessed 11 August 2011. 109. Amr el-Shobaki, ‘Revolution brings out the best in Egypt’, Egypt Independent, 14 February 2011 (http://www.egyptindependent.com/opinion/revolution-bri ngs-out-best-egypt), accessed 11 August 2011.

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Chapter 3 The United States in Post-9/11 Arab Cinema 1. Michel Foucault, ‘My body, this paper, this fire’, Oxford Literary Review 4.1 (1979), p. 19. 2. Adel Adeeb, director of ‘Baby Doll Night’ and Managing Director of Good News4Film CNN, quoted in Neil Curry, ‘A new golden age for Egyptian cinema?’, CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/21/ egypt.cinema/), accessed 21 March 2008. 3. Ahmed Al-Muslimani, [‘Mollywood: Alliance of error and risk’; author translation], Al-Masry Al-Youm (http://www.almasry-alyoum.com/article2.as px?ArticleID¼ 252597), accessed 9 September 2009. 4. Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), p. 215. 5. Galal Amin, Whatever Happened to Egyptians: Changes in Egyptian Society from 1950 to the Present (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007), p. 137. 6. Amin: Whatever Happened to Egyptians, p. 139. 7. Oliver Leaman, Companion Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North African Film (Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001), pp. 23 – 4. 8. William Daniel, ‘Youssef Wahby: Cinema and history,’ Cine-Club Bulletin 6.10, p. 285ff. 9. Quoted in Ahmed al-Hadri, History of Cinema in Egypt (Cairo: Cinema Club Press, 1989), p. 219. 10. Leaman: Companion Encyclopedia, p. 24. 11. Ibid., p. 26. 12. Ibid., p. 28. 13. Hind Rassam Culhane, East/West, an Ambiguous State of Being: The Construction and Representation of Egyptian Cultural Identity in Egyptian Film (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 5. 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 7. 15. Anderson: Imagined Communities, p. 6. 16. Ibid., p. 7. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Jaap Kooijman, Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), p. 11. 20. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 15. 21. Walter Armbrust (ed.), Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 166. 22. Adeeb, quoted in Curry: ‘A new golden age for Egyptian cinema?’.

184

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23. Revenge in Upper Egypt, called ‘al-thaar’, usually erupts out of family feuds, and may continue for decades, resulting in massacres and ritual killings between warring families. 24. An Egyptian novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, and producer who has made his name by breaking taboos, tackling terrorism, corruption, and impotence. 25. Wahid Hamed, quoted in Nadia Abou El-Magd, ‘Wahid Hamed: Time and again’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 4 –10 January 2001 (http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2001/515/profile.htm), accessed 2 March 2011. 26. Nur Elmessiri, ‘The best of intentions’, Al-Ahram On-line, 15 –21 February 2001 (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/521/cu4.htm), accessed 20 July 2010. 27. Saladin (1137– 93), ‘Salah Ad-din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub, founded the Ayyubid dynasty of Egypt and Syria. He was also a renowned leader in the Crusades for his military prowess against the Crusaders and his honorable mercy to them. 28. Al-Andalus (now southern Spain) was governed by Arabs and Muslims, at various times between 711 and 1492. For large parts of its history, Al-Andalus was a beacon of learning, and the city of Co´rdoba became one of the leading cultural and economic centres in Europe, around the Mediterranean basin, and in the Arab/Islamic world. 29. Bhamati Viswanathan, ‘Upping the stakes in the Egyptian film industry – Adel Adeeb’, WIPO Magazine, June 2008 (http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazi ne/en/2008/03/article_0004.html), accessed 21 July 2010. 30. Christos Tsiolkas, ‘11’09’’01 – September 11: The rest is silence’, Senses of Cinema, January 2003 (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/24/ sept_11.html), accessed 11 February 2010. 31. Sarah Coleman, ‘The 9/11 movie Hollywood won’t let you see’, Salon, 25 November 2002 (www.salon.com/2002/11/25/11_09_01), accessed 11 February 2010. 32. Tsiolkas: ‘11’09’’01 – September 11: The rest is silence’. 33. Mohamed Ameen, interview with Amira Howeidy, ‘After Baghdad, is Cairo next?’, Al-Jazeera, 12 January 2006 (http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2006/ 01/200841016329556771.html), accessed 20 July 2010. 34. Ameen, in Howeidy: ‘After Baghdad, is Cairo next?’. 35. Ibid. 36. Also known as the Six-Day War or the Third Arab – Israeli War. The war ended with Israel occupying the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and the Syrian Golan Heights. 37. Howeidy: ‘After Baghdad, is Cairo next?’. 38. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 3. 39. Adeeb, quoted in Curry: ‘A new golden age for Egyptian cinema?’. 40. Andrew Hammond, What the Arabs Think of America (Oxford: Green World Publishing, 2007), p. 1.

NOTES

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185

41. ‘Remarks by the President at the acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize’ (http:// www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-CairoUniversity-6-04-09), accessed 8 September 2014. [Note: the on-line version ends: ‘. . . imposed by one another by any other.’] 42. ‘Remarks by the President at the acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize’ (http:// www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobelpeace-prize), accessed 8 September 2014. 43. Sherry Ricchiardi, ‘Missed signals: Why did it take so long for the news media to break the story of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib?’, American Journalism Review, August/September 2004 (http://www.ajrarchive.org/article.asp?i d¼ 3716), accessed 18 February 2011. 44. Jon Cohen, ‘Poll: Americans skeptical of Island and Arabs’, ABC News, 8 March 2006 (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id¼ 1700599), accessed 5 November 2007. 45. Paul Maidment, ‘Is Brand America in trouble?’, Forbes, 21 September 2005 (http://www.forbes.com/2005/09/21/us-branding-politics-cx_pm_0921 brandamerica.html), accessed February 2009.

Chapter 4 Arab-Americans’ Cultural Response to 9/11 and Its Aftermath 1. Mervat F. Hatem, ‘The invisible American half: Arab-American hybridity and feminist discourses in the 1990s,’ in Ella Shohat (ed.), Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 386, n.1. 2. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: First Harvard University Press, 2002). 3. Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, 3rd ed. (New York: Persea Books, 2003). 4. Joanna Kadi, Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and ArabCanadian Feminists (Boston: South End Press, 1994), p. xix. 5. Mohja Kahf, E-mails from Scheherazad (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). 6. Laila Halaby, Once in a Promised Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). 7. Mahjar (lit. ‘place of immigration’) refers to the diaspora specifically of Arabs, regardless of where they live. 8. M. M. Badawi, A Critical Introduction to Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 203. 9. Michael W. Suleiman ‘Arab-Americans and the political process’, in Ernest McCarus (ed.), The Development of Arab-American Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 43. 10. Evelyn Shakir, ‘Arab-American literature’, in Alpana Sharma Knippling (ed.), New Immigrant Literatures in the USA (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 6.

186

NOTES TO PAGES 139 –149

11. Lisa Suhair Majaj, ‘Two worlds emerging: Arab-American writing at the crossroads,’ Forkroads: A Journal of Ethnic American Literature 1.3 (1996), pp. 71 – 2. 12. Gloria Anzaldu´a, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books: 1999), p. 85. 13. Elie Chalala, ‘Arab Americans after September 11: Rethinking ideas not carved in stone’, Al Jadid 7.36 (2001) pp. 13 – 14. 14. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). 15. Ameen Rihani, The Book of Khalid (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1911). 16. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Not Quite American? The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the USA (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), p. 2. 17. Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); The Lost Father (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 18. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, quoted in Lisa Suheir Majaj, ‘Of stories and storytellers’, Saudi Aramco World 56.2 (2005), p. 31 (https://www. saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200502/of.stories.and.storytellers.htm), accessed 15 September 2014. 19. Quoted in Lisa Suheir Majaj: ‘Of stories and storytellers’, p. 31. 20. Some examples of each follow. Novels: Laila Halaby, Once in a Promised Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007); short stories: Mohja Kahf, ‘The spiced chicken queen of Mickaweaquah, Iowa’ and Samia Serageldin, ‘It’s not about that’ (both in Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa (eds.), Dinarzad’s Children (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004)), and Amani Elkassabani, ‘Hanaan’s House’ (in Carol Fadda-Conrey (ed.), Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2014)). Critical essays include Steven Salaita, ‘Ethnic identity and imperative patriotism: Arab American before and after 9/11’ (College Literature 23.2 (2005), pp. 146– 168) and Salah Hassan, ‘Arabs, race and the Post-September 11 National Security States’ (Middle East Report 224 (2002) (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer224/arabs-race-post-september11-national-security-state), accessed 15 September 2014. 21. James Zogby, Healing the nation: The Arab American experience after September 11 (Washington, D.C.: The Arab American Institute, 2002). 22. T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 150. 23. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 71. 24. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. (New York: Dover Publications, reprinted 1994), p. 157. 25. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk, p. 159. 26. Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (London: Burton Club, 1885), p. 14. 27. Kahf: ‘Hijab Scene #7’, E-mails from Scheherazad, p. 39.

NOTES

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150 –157

187

28. Lisa Suhair Majaj, ‘New directions: Arab American writing at century’s end,’ in Munir Akash and Khaled Mattawa (eds.), Post-Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 75. 29. Amal Amireh, ‘Publishing in the west: Problems and prospects for Arab women writers’, Al Jadid Magazine 2.10 (1996) (http://www.aljadid.com/ content/publishing-west-problems-and-prospects-arab-women-writers), accessed 17 September 2014. 30. Kahf: ‘Thawrah des Odalisques at the Matisse Retrospective’, E-mails from Scheherazad, p. 66. 31. Amal Talaat Abdelrazek, Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossing (New York: Cambria Press, 2007), p. 69. 32. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 55. 33. Lisa Suhair Majaj, ‘Boundaries: Arab/American’, in Joanna Kadi (ed.), Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab American and Arab-Canadian Feminists (Boston: South End Press, 1994), p. 79. 34. Sepp L. Tiefenthaler,’The search for cultural identity: Jewish-American immigrant autobiographies as agents of ethnicity,’ MELUS 12.4 (1985), p. 37 [thematic issue: European Perspectives ]. 35. Khaf, quoted in William Safran, ‘Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (1991), p. 84. 36. Ibid.: ‘The Dream of Return’, in E-mails from Scheherazad, pp. 15 – 17. 37. Ibid.: ‘The Passing There’, in E-mails from Scheherazad, pp. 18 – 20. 38. Gloria Anzaldu´a: Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 19. 39. Kahf: ‘Lateefa’, in E-mails from Scheherazad, p. 21 – 4. 40. Ibid.: ‘My Grandmother Washes Her feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears’, in E-mails from Scheherazad, pp. 26 –8. 41. Ibid.: ‘My Grandmother Washes Her Feet’, pp. 26 – 8. 42. Ibid.: ‘Disbeliever’, in E-mails from Scheherazad, pp. 75 – 6. 43. Ibid.: ‘We Will Continue Like Twin Towers’, in E-mails from Scheherazad, p. 83. 44. Amal Abdelrazek, ‘Scheherazad’s legacy: Arab-American women writers and the resisting, healing, and connecting power of their storytelling’, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (2005), p. 141 (http://www.iiav.nl/ezi nes/DivTs/MITelectronicJournal/2005/Spring.pdf). 45. Georgiana Banita, ‘Race, risk, and fiction in the war on terror: Laila Halaby, Gayle Brandeis, and Michael Cunningham’, Literature Interpretation Theory 21 (2010), p. 243. 46. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (California: University of California Press, 2001), p. 32. 47. Halaby: Once in a Promised Land, p. viii. 48. Edward Said, The World, the Text and, the Critic (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983). 49. Halaby: Once in a Promised Land, p. vii.

188 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

NOTES

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158 –169

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 53. Halaby: Once in a Promised Land, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 35 – 6. Steven Salaita, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It Comes from and What it Means for Politics Today (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), p. 74. Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008). Halaby: Once in a Promised Land, p. 54. Salah Hassan, ‘Arabs, race, and the post-September 11 national security state,’ Middle East Report 224 (2002), p. 18 (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer224/ arabs-race-post-september-11-national-security-state), accessed 16 September 2014. Said: Out of Place, p. xi. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 117. Gregory Orfalea. ‘The Arab American novel’, MELUS 31.4, Arab American Literature (2006), p. 127. [thematic issue: Arab American Literature ] Bhabha: The Location of Culture, p. 23. Halaby: Once in a Promised Land, p. 299. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 281. Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the U.S. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), p. 104. Nancy Raquel Mirabal, ‘“Ser de aquı´”: Beyond the Cuban exile model’, Latino Studies 1 (2003), p. 368.

Conclusion 1. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 271–8. 2. Sheikh Abdu was famous for his reason-based views when interpreting the Qur’an and the Sunnah. 3. Abdelwahab Elmessiri, ‘Features of new Islamic discourse’, Encounters 3 (1997), p. 50. 4. Hasan Hanafi, Al-Turath wa al-Tajdid: Mawqifuna min al-Turath al-Qadim [‘Tradition and Renewal’; author translation], 4th ed. (Cairo: Al-Muassa alJamiiyya, 1991). 5. Ibid., Muqaddima fi Ilm al-Istighrab [‘Our Situation from Western Tradition: Introduction to Westernization’; author translation], 2nd ed. (Cairo: Al-Muassasa al-Jamiiyya, 1992).

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Newspapers and Other Online Sources1 ABC News Al-Ahram Al-Ahram Weekly Al-Akhbar American Journalism Review Arab News Asharq Al-Awsat BBC News CNN News Al Dostor Forbes.com Al Ghad Al-Gomhoria Huffington Post Islamonline.net Al Jadid Magzine Al Jazeera Al-Khalij Mahjoob.com Maktoob.com Al-Masry Al-Youm New York Times Politico News Al Riyadh Senses of Cinema ShobikLobik.com Al-Watan World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) website

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Films 11’09’’01 – September 11 (2002) El-Akhar (The Other, 1999) Alexandria... Why? (1978) Alexandria Again and Forever (1989) Alexandria... New York (2004) Amrika Shika Bika (America Abracadabra, 1993) Al-Assifa (The Storm, 2000) Awlad Al Zawat (The Children of Privilege, first talking movie, 1932) Ayez Haqqi (I Demand My Rights, 2003) al-Azhar al-Mumita (Mortal Flowers, first silent film, 1918) Bentain min Masr (Two Girls from Egypt, 2010) Birds of Darkness (1995) The City (1999) El-Erhabi (The Terrorist, 1994) Film Thaqafi (Cultural Film, 2000) Hammam in Amsterdam (2001) Hello America (2000) Heya Fawda (Chaos, 2007) Al-irhab wal-kabab (Terrorism and Kebab, 1993) Jamila Bouhired (Jamila, the Algerian, 1958) Laylat Soqut Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell, 2005) Laylat El-Baby Doll (The Baby Doll Night, 2008). Leila (or Layla) (1927) The Other (1999) Saladin (1963) Teyour al-Dalam (Birds of Darkness, 1995) The Yacoubian Building (2006)

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———, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the U.S., Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Shalabi, El-Sayed Amin, ‘Awaiting Obama’, Al Ahram 15 – 21 January 2009 (http:// weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/930/op11.htm). ———, ‘Egypt, America and the future’, Al Ahram Weekly 14 – 20 July 2011 (http:// weekly.ahram.org.eg/2011/1056/op9.htm). ———, ‘Too much at stake’, Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 8 – 14 March 2012 (http:// weekly.ahram.org.eg/2012/1088/op4.htm). Al-Shaykh, Hanan, The Story of Zahra, trans. Peter Ford, New York: Anchor Books, 1995. El-Shobaki, Amr, ‘Revolution brings out the best in Egypt’, Egypt Independent, 14 February 2011 (http://www.egyptindependent.com/opinion/revolution-bringsout-best-egypt). ShobikLobik.com (http://www.shobiklobik.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE¼true &TOPIC_ID¼172011). Shohat, Ella (ed.), ‘Egypt: Cinema and revolution’, Critical Arts: A Journal for Media Studies 2.4 (1983), pp. 22 – 31. ———, Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. ——— and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the media, New York: Routledge, 1994. Siddiq, Muhammad, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction, London: Routledge, 2007. Simpson, Mona, Anywhere But Here; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ———, The Lost Father; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Sinha, Manisha, and Penny M. Von Eschen, Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Smith, Bryon Porter, Islam in English Literature, New York: Caravan Books, 1977. Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, New York: Grove Press, 1967. Suleiman, Michael W., ‘Arab-Americans and the political process’, in Ernest McCarus (ed.), The Development of Arab-American Identity, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Taheri, Amir, ‘Obama’s first term may prove good for the middle east’, Asharq Al-Awsat, 3 February 2013 (http://www.aawsat.net/2013/02/article55291334). Tara¨blshr, Jurj, Uqdat Audib fi al-Riwaya al-’Arabiyya, Beirut: Dar al-Talr’a lil-Tibaˆ’a wa al-Nashr, 1982. Thompson, John B., Ideology and Modern Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Tiefenthaler, Sepp L., ‘The search for cultural identity: Jewish– American immigrant autobiographies as agents of ethnicity’, MELUS 12.4 (1985), pp. 37– 51 [thematic issue: European Perspectives]. Traub, James, ‘Islamic democrats?’, New York Times, 29 April 2007, p. 44. Trotsky, Leon, Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics and Culture, New York: Pathfinder, 2001. Tsiolkas, Christos, ‘11’09’’01 – September 11: The rest is silence’, Senses of Cinema, January 2003 (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/24/sept_11.html). Tunstall, Jeremy, The Media Were American: U.S. Mass Media in Decline, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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INDEX

9/11. See also Once in a Promised Land and American attention to the Middle East, 56– 8, 73 Arab views of, 67, 132, 134 experience of, 12, 15, 117 in filmmaking, 100, 106, 116– 9 manipulation of, 22 poetry about, 155, 156 as watershed, 4, 11, 50, 100, 128, 142 11’09"01– September 11 [film], 116– 9 Abdelrazek, Amal, 150, 156 Abduh, Muhammad, 168– 9 Abinader, Elmaz, 139 Abu Ghraib prison, 4 –5, 56, 63, 67, 129– 31, 132. See also US foreign policy Abu Khalil, Asʾad, 74, 75 Abuelnaga, Shereen, 80 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 135, 139– 41 Adeeb, Adel, 109, 116 African-Americans, 132– 3, 147. See also race and racism Arab perception of Obama, 52 – 3, 58, 76, 77, 78 – 9, 80 – 1 theorists, 165 Al-Ahram [newspaper], 52, 53 – 4, 71, 82 – 3, 95, 104

El-Akhar (The Other) [film], 110 Al-Akhbar [newspaper], 63, 65, 74 Alexandria . . . New York [film], 114, 115, 119– 21 Ali, Mohamed (Cassius Clay), 52– 3 alienation. See also assimilation; ‘otherness’; race and racism; Western culture and values post-9/11 experience, 15, 140– 1, 157– 62 relationship with homeland, 27 – 8 as theme in Chicago, 35, 36, 47– 8 ‘allegories of impotence,’ 114, 167 Allen, Roger, 48 Alqassas, Anas, 79 American culture. See Obama, Barack; United States; Western culture and values American dream, 29, 83, 136, 157–60. See also freedom and democracy American media’s images of Arabs, 3, 5– 7, 24, 26, 50– 1, 63, 67, 161, 167 American Orientalism (Little), 9 – 10 Americanisation, 4, 6, 23 – 4, 107– 8, 142–3, 144. See also imperialism Amin, Galal, 102 Amin, Mohamed, 115–6 Amireh, Amal, 150

INDEX Amrika Shika Bika (America Abracadabra) [film], 103 The Anarchy of Empire (Kaplan), 136 Anderson, Benedict, 107 anti-American attitudes, 11, 73, 102– 3, 107, 121 anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment, 14, 50, 92, 158, 167. See also identity; stereotyping; terrorism Anzaldu´a, Gloria, 141– 2, 153, 157 Arab cartoonists, 60 – 1, 83. See also cartoons Arab cinema, 134, 167. See also Hollywood; specific films before and after 9/11, 3, 105–10 Arab/Muslim tensions in, 127– 33 filmmakers, 14 –5, 114– 6 growth of Egyptian cinema, 103– 5, 133– 4 prescient 9/11 Arab films, 110– 3 sociopolitical setting for, 100– 3 Arab culture, 1 – 2, 21, 100, 137, 141, 144– 5, 164 Arab desire for mutual understanding, 3, 18, 26, 46, 51, 78. See also dialogue, call for Arab immigrants, 24 – 6, 139 Arab intellectuals and American culture, 19 – 22 Arab media. See Arab cinema; Bush, George, Jr.; cartoons; Obama, Barack; Obamaism; shoe-throwing incident Arab media revolution, 56 – 61 Arab nationalism, 21, 107, 141. See also identity in film, 108, 115, 123– 5, 127 role of memory, 134 Arab reform efforts, 83– 5, 168– 9 Arab Representations of the Occident (el-Enany), 21, 50 Arab Spring, 1, 76, 77–8, 92, 93–4, 96, 169. See also Egyptian Revolution of 2011; Jasmine Revolution

205

Arab writers and societal change, 17 –8 Arab-American literature immigrant literature, 137– 42 literary criticism, 143– 4 overview of, 135– 7 post-9/11 literature, 142– 7 role in cultural mediation, 146, 164– 5, 167 Arab-American women, 15, 28 – 9, 139–40, 142 –3, 149, 150, 155–6, 164. See also gender roles Arabian Jazz (Abu-Jaber) [novel], 139, 140–1 Arabic literature, 18, 41, 138, 145. See also Arab-American literature Arab – Israeli conflict, 14, 51 – 2, 57, 82, 102, 111– 3, 167. See also Israel; US foreign policy Arab/Muslim women, 149– 50, 155– 6, 164 Arabs and their governments, 53, 79, 101, 125– 6 Arafa, Sherif, 110, 111 Armbrust, Walter, 109 art as unifying force, 146– 7 Asharq al-Awsat [newspaper], 53 – 4, 59 Al-Assifa (The Storm) [film], 110, 111–3 assimilation, 136, 137, 150, 155– 6. See also alienation; ‘melting pot;’ Western culture and values struggle towards, 119, 137, 142– 3, 162– 4 and ‘twoness,’ 151– 3, 154 al-Aswany, Alaa, 7 – 8, 13, 22 – 4, 26 – 8, 41, 48 –9, 168 Awlad Al Zawat (The Children of Privilege) [film], 104 Ayez Haqqi (I Demand My Rights) [film], 114, 126– 7 al-Azhar al-Mumita (Mortal Flowers) [film], 104 Al Badil [newspaper], 82 – 3 El Baradie, Mohamed, 97

206

ARAB OCCIDENTALISM

Barakat, Halim, 17 – 8 Baroud, Ramzy, 71 – 2 BBC (London), 59 Benghazi (Libya), 93 Bentain min Masr (Two Girls from Egypt) [film], 115– 6 Bhabha, Homi, 158, 163 Biagi, Shirley, 58 – 9 Bin Laden, Osama, 23, 54 –5, 117 bin Mukhtar El-Shanqiti, Muhammad, 73 Birds of the South (Fadl) [novel], 7 – 8, 13, 48, 49 overview, 39 – 40 plot, 40 – 1, 43 –7 setting and characters, 42 – 3 Bishara, Khairy, 103 Blatty, William Peter, 138 Bodnar, John, 109 Du Bois, W. E. B., 147, 165 The Book of Khalid (Rihani) [novel], 143– 4 Bourjaily, Vance, 138 Bread Givers (Yezierska) [novel], 137 Bush, George, Jr. (president), 51, 167. See also freedom and democracy; shoethrowing incident; United States contempt for, 68 –70, 72 freedom agenda of, 52, 77 – 8 war on terrorism, 7, 23, 59 Butler, Judith, 143 Caiani, Fabio, 48 – 9 Cairo Trilogy (Mahfouz) [novel], 19 cartoons, 2, 3, 53, 60 – 1, 67 – 70, 82 –4, 95. See also Arab cartoonists Chahine, Youssef, 106, 110, 114–5, 116– 9, 120– 1 Chicago (city), 28 Chicago (al-Aswany) [novel], 7 – 8, 13, 26 – 39, 49, 168 plot and characters, 28 – 31 political views in, 35 – 6, 37 – 9 setting, 26 – 7

themes, 23, 24 – 6, 31 – 5, 47 – 8 Children of the Roojme (Abinader) [novel], 139– 40 Cities of Salt (Munif) [novel], 41 The City [film], 103 clash of civilisations theory, 6, 23 challenge to, 11, 13, 14 – 5, 167 and misunderstandings or lack of knowledge, 51, 92, 118, 153– 4 The Clash of Civilizations (Huntington), 9 Coleman, Sarah, 118 colonialism, 5, 6, 11, 15, 19 – 21, 78, 107, 129, 167 Connolly-Athern, Colleen, 55 Contending Visions of the Middle East (Lockman), 10 – 1 ‘contrapuntal consciousness,’ 32, 168 Corrie, Rachel, 129 counter-Orientalism, 39, 75 – 6. See also shoe-throwing incident Covering Islam (Said), 5 Crescent (Abu-Jaber) [novel], 140, 141 crusade, use of term, 7, 59, 167 cultural ‘borderlands,’ 153, 154, 156 cultural misunderstandings, 9 – 10, 127, 134, 154, 160, 164, 168 cultural texts, 2 –4, 170 The Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan), 9 dialogue, call for, 8, 50 – 1, 96, 127– 33. See also Arab desire for mutual understanding Dimitrove, Daniela, 55 discrimination. See invisibility and discrimination Dudziak, Mary, 11 Eagleton, Terry, 17, 147 East– West binary. See also stereotyping deconstruction of, 1, 2, 13, 27, 96, 166 historicisation of, 11

INDEX Edwards, Brian, 12 Egypt. See also Egyptian; Mubarek regime centrality to Arab world, 2, 3 film industry of, 3, 101–2, 103 –10 social/political change, 76, 80, 83, 96 as source of media, 53 – 4 US views towards, 82, 98 – 9 Egypt Studio (Studio Masr), 104, 105 Egyptian Revolution of 2011, 1, 90 – 1, 93, 97, 98, 103, 169. See also Arab Spring; Jasmine Revolution Egyptian society, 13, 23, 102, 110, 168 Eliot, T.S., 4, 146 E-Mails from Scheherazad (Kahf) [poems], 15, 18, 137, 148 – 56, 164 – 5 and Arab-American women, 149– 50, 156 cultural ignorance, 153–4 identity and assimilation, 150– 3 original Scheherazad story, 15, 18, 148– 9, 156, 157 transcending differences, 154–5 el-Enany, Rasheed, 21 – 2, 50 Epic Encounters (McAlister), 11 – 2 El-Erhabi (The Terrorist) [film], 110 extremism, 22, 45 – 6, 110, 168 Fadel, Mohamed, 114 Fadl, Amani Abu, 7 – 8, 13, 22, 39– 40, 41 – 2, 46, 48 – 9 Faith Misplaced (Makdisi), 12 Farber, David, 11 Farid, Samir, 85 Film Thaqafi (Cultural Film) [film], 115 Foucault’s theory of discourse, 8 Fouda, Yousri, 89 – 90 frame analysis, 55 – 7, 66 freedom and democracy, 98. See also American Dream; Bush, George, Jr.; Western culture and values Arab views of, 6, 53, 82 – 5

207 in Birds of the South, 39 – 40 and shoe-throwing incident, 71, 72 United States as model, 20 US foreign policy, 75, 81, 90, 132

Galal, Nader, 103, 110 El-Gallad, Magdy, 72 gender roles, 9, 43, 83, 108, 139– 40, 142–3, 156. See also ArabAmerican women; identity Gender Trouble (Butler), 143 generational tensions, 24, 113, 114, 124, 153– 4 George, Rosemary Marangoly, 34 Ghalioun, Burhan, 88 El-Ghatrifi, Alaa, 75 Gibran, Khalil, 137– 8 Al-Gomhoria [newspaper], 83, 84 GoodNews4Film, 109 Goweida, Farouq, 98 Grape Leaves [poetry], 139 Guantanamo Bay detention camp, 4 – 5, 57, 85 Gulf War (1991), 41, 111– 3 Gulfnews.com, 94 Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, 144 al-Hakim, Tawfiq, 3 Halaby, Laila, 15, 136, 137, 156 – 64, 165 alienation, 160– 2 the American Dream, 156–60 hybrid identity, 163– 4 Hamed, Wahid, 111 Hamid, Said, 103 Hammam in Amsterdam [film], 103 Hammond, Andrew, 57, 128 Hamzawy, Amr, 73 – 4, 75 Hanfi, Hassan, 169 Harb, Talaat, 104 Hassan, Salah, 161 Hello America [film], 103 Heya Fawda (Chaos) [film], 106 historical frameworks, 10 – 1

208

ARAB OCCIDENTALISM

Hollywood. See also Arab cinema influence on Arab cinema, 101, 104, 108– 9, 133 perceptions from, 5, 6 –7, 26, 38, 50, 117– 8, 167 Home Matters (Rubenstein), 32 Howeidy, Amin, 72 Howeidy, Amira, 126 Howeidy, Fahmy, 87 –8, 95 – 6 Hunt, Michael, 9 Huntington, Samuel, 6, 9, 154 Hussein, Saddam, 41, 51, 65, 67, 71, 73, 132 Hussein, Taha, 3, 19 – 21 Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 85, 93 Ibrahim, Sonallah, 19 identity. See also anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment; Arab nationalism; gender roles; ‘otherness’; social exclusion and Americanisation, 107– 8 Arab-Americans’ double identity (‘twoness’), 13, 135– 7, 150– 2, 154, 158, 160, 169 cultural indeterminacy, 137, 141 new articulations of, 16, 167 past as key to, 31 portrayed in films, 103, 104 and social exclusion, 24 – 5 use of Arabic, 157, 165 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 107 immigrants alienation, 24 –8, 34, 36 conflict of identity, 151– 3 writers, 137– 8 imperialism, 4, 8 – 9, 40, 89 – 90, 97, 129– 33, 170. See also Americanisation; ‘otherness’ The Innocents Abroad (Twain), 10 invisibility and discrimination. See also race and racism post-9/11, 136, 141, 160, 169 social exclusion, 24 – 5, 39

Iraq, invasion and occupation. See also shoe-throwing incident; US foreign policy American response to, 57 –8 Arab response to, 4 –5, 11, 50, 51, 67, 70 – 3, 75 cultural texts, 3 media coverage of, 4 – 5, 56, 60, 65 as setting for films, 14, 121– 6, 130– 2 and weakening of United States, 70, 97 Al-irhab wal-kabab (Terrorism and Kebab) [film], 110, 111 Iskander, Adel, 98 – 9 Islam, 5, 12 – 3, 51, 58, 168– 9, 170 Israel, 5, 6, 10, 51 –2, 57, 71, 86 – 7. See also Arab-Israeli conflict; US foreign policy ‘Al-Ittijah al-Muʾakis’ (The Opposite Direction), 54 Jabara, Abdeen, 25 – 6 Jameson, Fredric, 126 Jamila Bouhired (Jamila, the Algerian) [film], 115 Janabi, Ahmed, 51 Jasmine Revolution (Tunisia), 1, 103, 169. See also Arab Spring; Egyptian Revolution of 2011 Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, 145 Al Jazeera [news agency], 50, 51, 62, 69, 73, 132, 166– 7 media revolution, 56 – 7, 58 – 60 Obama’s election, 86, 89 as source, 53, 54– 5 Judt, Tony, 11 Kadi, Joanna, 25, 136 Kahf, Mohja, 15, 137, 144, 148– 56, 164–5 Arab assimilation, 150– 3, 155– 6 immigrants and the past, 151– 2 stereotypes of women, 149– 50

INDEX Kaplan, Amy, 9, 136 Kawamoto, Dawn, 60 Keen, Sam, 14 – 5 Khalidi, Rashid, 11 khawagas (foreigners), 103, 108 Kooijman, Jaap, 107– 8 Lacorne, Denis, 11 Laylat El-Baby Doll (The Baby Doll Night) [film], 109, 114, 116, 127– 33 Laylat Soqut Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell) [film], 114, 115, 121–6 Leila [film], 104 Lewis, Bernard, 6 Literary Theory (Eagleton), 147 Little, Douglas, 9– 10 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 158 Lockman, Zachary, 10 – 1 Lotus Revolution. See Egyptian Revolution of 2011 Lumie`re brothers (filmmakers), 103 Maalouf, Amin, 31 Mahfouz, Naguib, 3, 18, 19, 21 Mahjar writers, 137–8 Maidment, Paul, 133 Majaj, Lisa Suhair, 139, 151 Makdisi, Ussama, 12 maktoob.com, 67, 69 ‘Manifest Domesticity’ (Kaplan), 9 Al-Masry Al-Youm (Egypt Independent) [newspaper], 51, 53 – 4, 71, 99 Mattawa, Khaled, 135, 145 al-Maˆzinıˆ, Ibrahim, 19 McAlister, Melani, 11 – 2 media, Arabs’ use of, 166– 7 media, sources and framing, 53 –5, 55 – 6. See also specific media Media/Impact (Biagi), 58 – 9 ‘melting pot,’ 136, 147, 151– 2. See also assimilation memory, home and exile, 33 – 5. See also nostalgia

209

Meyer, Stefan G., 41 Middle East Institute (Washington, DC), 5 Mirabal, Nancy, 165 Morocco Bound (Edwards), 12 Morsi, Mohamed (president), 97 Mubarak regime (Egypt), 79 – 80, 82– 3, 91, 96. See also Egypt; Egyptian muilticulturalism, 23, 36, 47, 116 Munif, Abdelrahman, 19, 41 Muslim Brotherhood, 96, 97 Al Mustaqbal [newspaper], 74 Nafʾa, Hassan, 94 Nassar, Eugene Paul, 138 Nasser, Gamal Abdel (president), 105–6, 107, 109, 124 Nasser 56 [film], 114 Nassrallah, Youssri, 103 Naʾima, Mikhaʾil, 137– 8 news reporting, 60, 62 – 3 New York Times on Al Jazeera, 55 Nobel Prize in Literature, 3 nostalgia, 32, 142– 3, 152, 165. See also memory, home and exile Nour, Ayman, 83 – 5 novels, genre, 18, 19, 157 Nydell, Margaret, 6 Obama, Barack (president). See also Obamaism; United States Arab views towards, 77 –9, 85, 86 –8 Cairo speech, 88, 90 – 2, 131 leadership of, 78, 92 – 7 Nobel Peace Prize remarks, 131 Obama, Barack, election of, 52 – 3 Arab coverage of, 93, 94, 98 as symbol, 56 Obamaism. See also Obama, Barack; United States Arab optimism, 76, 79 – 80, 82 – 5, 85 – 92 and Obama the man, 89 – 90

210

ARAB OCCIDENTALISM

the ‘objective correlative,’ 4 – 5 objectivity and social roles, 17 Occidentalism, 1. See also Orientalism; ‘otherness’ redefined, 3 – 7 texts studied, 2 – 3, 4, 7 – 8 Once in a Promised Land (Halaby) [novel], 15, 137, 156 – 64, 165. See also 9/11 assimilation and alienation, 162– 4 plot, 158– 9 US policy and alienation, 160– 2 Orfalea, Gregory, 163 Orientalism, 1, 3 – 7 Orientalism (Said), 1, 3, 12, 13 – 4, 21, 64 – 5. See also Occidentalism; stereotyping ‘orientalization,’ 3 – 4 Orient’s perception of the West, 21 ‘otherness,’ 2, 3 – 4, 14, 170. See also alienation; identity; imperialism; stereotyping Out of Place (Said), 161– 2 Palestinian crisis, 57, 78, 87, 95 – 6, 102 – 3, 117, 122, 129, 161 – 3 Pintak, Lawrence, 7 pluralism, 23, 36, 47, 116 political Islam, 6 The Politics of Home (George), 34 Pollock, David, 31 ‘post-Orientalism,’ 12, 160 powerlessness, 53, 68, 72, 79, 87 pro-democracy movements. See Arab Spring; Egyptian Revolution of 2011; Jasmine Revolution Prophet Muhammad depictions of, 7, 93 succession to, 40 al-Qaeda, 6, 10, 117 Al-Qassim, Faisal, 54 – 5 Qumsiyeh, Mazin B., 5

race and racism. See also AfricanAmericans; alienation; invisibility and discrimination; social exclusion and construct of Arabs, 11 – 2, 119, 143– 4, 161 in literary criticism, 143 perception of Obama, 56, 80 – 1 in the United States, 9, 33– 4, 56 victimisation, 38, 155 Radio Monte Carlo Middle East (Paris), 59 Reflections on a Bloodshot Lens (Pintak), 7 religious tolerance. See also Sunni and Shiʾite schism in Birds of the South, 39 – 40, 42, 45 in film, 115 Rihani, Ameen, 137– 8, 143– 4 The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 156– 7 al-Rubei, Ahmad, 59 – 60 Rubenstein, Roberta, 32 Rushing, Josh, 60 al-Sadat, Anwar, 105, 106, 109 Said, Abdel Moneim, 52 – 3, 94 Said, Edward ‘contrapuntal consciousness,’ 31 – 2, 168 Covering Islam, 5 criticism of Western perspectives, 6, 8 – 9, 12 – 3, 21 denial of rights, 80 on Once in a Promised Land, 157 Orientalism, 1, 3 – 4, 12, 13, 21, 64 –5 Out of Place, 161– 3 plurality of vision, 150– 1 scepticism regarding Obama, 86 Saladin [film], 114, 115 Salaita, Steven, 160 Saleh, Yassin Al-Hajj, 74 – 5 Salmawy, Mohamed, 71 Sawt al-Umma [newspaper], 82 – 3 Scheherazad. See E-Mails from Scheherazad Scheufele, Dietram, 55 –6

INDEX sectarianism, 40, 41, 42, 43 – 5, 46, 48 Shafie, Esam Abdel, 90 Shafik, Viola, 101 Shafiq, Munir, 89, 94 Shakir, Evelyn, 138, 144, 164 Shalabi, El-Sayed Amin, 86 – 7, 90 – 1, 93 el-Shobaki, Amir, 99 shoe-throwing incident, 14, 52, 53, 56, 61 – 76. See also Bush, George, Jr.; counter-Orientalism; Iraq American reaction to, 66 – 7 Arab media coverage of, 70 –6 highlighting stereotypes, 67 symbolism of, 61, 65, 66, 67 – 70, 72, 73 al-Zaidi as hero, 61 – 2, 63 – 4 Shohat, Ella, 114, 167 Siddiq, Muhammad, 19 Simpson, Mona, 144 social disease, 33 social exclusion, 14, 24 – 6, 39. See also alienation; identity; race and racism; stereotyping The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 147, 165 Stam, Robert, 114, 167 stereotyping. See also alienation; anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment; East– West binary; Orientalism; ‘otherness’; social exclusion Arab novelists’ exploration of, 13, 15, 18, 21 – 2, 38 of Arab/Muslim women, 149– 50, 156, 164 cultural, 2, 3 – 4, 5 – 7, 8, 10, 13 – 4, 166– 7 Occidentalist, 134 post-9/11, 137, 142, 144, 146, 169 representations of Arabs, 47, 63, 67 –8, 72, 123 resistance to, 144, 146, 166 social exclusion, 24 – 5

211

Stevens, Christopher (US ambassador to Libya), 93 Studies in American Literature (Hussein), 19– 20 Studio Masr, 104, 105 Suleiman, Michael, 138 Sunni and Shiʾite schism, 39 – 41, 42, 44– 6, 48 surveys and polls about America, 70, 76, 82 about Arabs/Muslims, 58, 132 regarding Obama, 78, 80, 86, 88 – 9 Taheri, Amir, 93 – 4 Tamarod, 97 terrorism, 23, 36, 106, 110– 3, 116–9, 129, 130–1. See also anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment; ‘War on Terror’ Teyour al-Dalam (Birds of Darkness) [film], 110 theories of culture and power, 8 – 13 The Thousand and One Nights. See E-Mails from Scheherazad Tiefenthaler, Sepp L., 151 Tsiolkas, Christos, 117– 9 Twain, Mark, 10 United States. See also Bush, George, Jr.; Obama, Barack; Obamaism; US foreign policy after Obama’s election, 82 – 5 Arab views towards, 7, 37 – 9, 75, 81 – 2, 92, 98, 119– 21 monolithic representation of, 168 US puzzlement over Arab response, 70, 71, 73, 130, 134 US foreign policy. See also Abu Ghraib prison; Arab – Israeli conflict; Bush, George, Jr.; Iraq; Israel; Obama, Barack; Obamaism; United States

212

ARAB OCCIDENTALISM

US foreign policy cont. Arab views towards, 53, 78, 86, 121– 6, 130 and Arab-American profile, 160–1 centrality of Arab –Israeli conflict, 51 –2, 57– 8 and cultural misunderstandings, 9 –10 expectations after Egyptian revolution, 90– 2 under Obama, 77, 79, 82, 89, 94, 96 US leadership, 92 – 7, 101 war as film subject, 111–3, 116– 7 ‘War on Terror,’ 7, 23, 59, 133–4, 145– 8. See also terrorism war system, 14 – 5 Al-Watan [newspaper], 69, 70 Watt, Ian, 156– 7 Western culture and values. See also alienation; assimilation; freedom and democracy Arab-Americans’ enrichment of, 144– 5 engagement with, 13, 19 – 22, 20 –2, 103 liberation from tradition, 107– 8

as model, 1, 2, 20 – 2 as opposed to US policies, 38 – 9, 76, 83 Orientalism as deviation from, 3 –7, 8–9 role in foreign relations, 9 – 13 struggle of assimilation, 119, 137, 142– 3 Western modernity, appeal and assimilation of, 2, 15, 168– 9 Westphalian international system, 6 What the Arabs Think of America (Hammond), 57 ‘Why do they hate us?,’ 70, 71, 73, 130, 134 Wrapping the Grape Leaves [poetry], 138–9 The Yacoubian Building (al-Aswany) [novel, film adaptation], 7 – 8, 22, 27, 29, 31, 32, 38, 47, 168 Yezierska, Anzia, 136 Younes, Ali, 79 Youssef, Khaled, 106, 111 al-Zaidi, Muntadhar, 52, 53, 61– 6, 68– 9, 71 – 5