Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World: Media, Public Space and Temporality 9781788311915, 9781788311922, 9781788316439, 9781786735423

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CULTURE, TIME AND PUBLICS IN THE ARAB WORLD

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CULTURE, TIME AND PUBLICS IN THE ARAB WORLD

Media, Public Space and Temporality

Edited by Tarik Sabry and Joe F. Khalil

Published in 2019 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2019 Tarik Sabry, Joe F. Khalil and Contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by the editors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Media and Journalism Studies 4 HB ISBN: 978-1-78831-191-5 PB ISBN: 978-1-78831-192-2 eISBN: 978-1-78672-542-4 ePDF: 978-1-78673-542-3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

CONTENTS List of Figures vii List of Contributors viii Acknowledgementsxi Introduction CULTURE, TIME AND PUBLICS IN A CHANGING ARAB CONTEXT Tarik Sabry and Joe F. Khalil

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Chapter 1 DIS-FORMATIONS OF PALESTINE Helga Tawil-Souri

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Chapter 2 ‘OUR CHILDREN ARE A THREAT’: PUBLICS AND THE POLICING OF CULTURAL TEMPORALITY IN EGYPT Ramy M.K. Aly

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Chapter 3 CULTURAL TIME AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE MIDDLE ATLAS MOUNTAIN VILLAGE OF AIT NUH Tarik Sabry

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Chapter 4 CONSUMING THE PAST IN CONTEMPORARY BEIRUT: THE CASE OF CAFÉ RAWDA DURING RAMADAN Helena Nassif

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Chapter 5 NEO-TAJDEED? RAP IN SAUDI ARABIA AND TUNISIA Joe F. Khalil

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Chapter 6 REFLECTIONS ON TIME IN ARABIC POETRY Atef Alshaer

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Contents

Chapter 7 KEYWORDS IN ARAB POLITICAL MEMORY: MAHDI AMIL’S VOCABULARY REVISITED IN 2017 Omar al-Ghazzi

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Chapter 8 RETHINKING ARAB PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE TIME OF REVOLUTION Abdelaziz Boumeshouli

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Index203

LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 3.1 3.2 3.3

Crowd gathering at the checkpoint Forced transformation into a queue Empty corridor On the ‘inside’ of the checkpoint Checkpoint landscape Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s tomb, Ait Nuh, 2016 Sacred tree beside the Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s shrine, Ait Nuh Mountain by the river nearly 2 kilometres from the village of Ait Nuh 4.1 Café Rawda on a Ramadan evening, before the scheduled 10 pm airing time of Bab al-Hara 4.2 Café Rawda on a Ramadan evening during the airing of Bab al-Hara in 2010 All images are in the public domain.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Omar al-Ghazzi is an assistant professor at the Department of Media and Communications, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Al-Ghazzi is interested in the role of media and communication in political conflict, activism and collective memory, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Before joining LSE, he was a lecturer (assistant professor) at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield. Al-Ghazzi’s research has appeared in journals such as Communication Theory and Media, Culture & Society and has been recognized by the International Communication Association. A former Fulbright scholar, al-Ghazzi comes from a journalism background. He has previously worked as a reporter for Al-Hayat Arabic daily and as a media analyst at BBC Monitoring. He completed his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Atef Alshaer is a lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He first came to London after completing his Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Birzeit in Palestine. He then went on to obtain a Master’s degree and a PhD from the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and taught there until 2014. Alshaer has written several research papers and monographs, including his book, Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World (2016) and an edited volume, Love and Poetry in the Middle East (2016). Ramy M.K. Aly is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity which was published in 2015 with Pluto Press as part of their celebrated Anthropology, Culture and Society Series. The book is the first ethnographic account of gender, race and class practices among British-born-and-raised Arabs in London and attempts to provide an account of the everyday experiences and expressions of Arabness in the British capital. Aly’s research engages and bridges the anthropology of ethnicity, migration and diaspora, media and cultural studies, and youth cultures, militarism and economic anthropology.

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Abdelaziz Boumeshouli is a Moroccan philosopher. He has written more than twenty books, all in the Arabic language, including Poetry and Interpretation (1998), The Philosophical Principles of the End of Ethics Theory (2001), Moroccan Philosophy, The Question of Being and the Future (2007), Being and Loss, Thinking about Contemporary Times (2007), On the Body’s Experience (2011) and Philosophy and the Arab Uprisings: New Philosophical Experiences in the Arab World. Joe F. Khalil is an associate professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is engaged in researching youth cultures, alternative media and media industries in the Arab world. He engaged in professional work and research in more than ten countries, including the United States, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Tunisia. Khalil teaches courses in global communication and media studies. He authored a policy monograph on Arab satellite entertainment television and public diplomacy and is also co-author of Arab Television Industries. His publications address a number of issues related to youth in a rapidly changing global media landscape. Helena Nassif is a social researcher of culture. She is currently the managing director of Culture Resource, an Arab regional organization working in arts and culture. She received her PhD in Media Studies from the University of Westminster in 2015. Her thesis, titled Home under Siege: Bab al-Hara, Televising Morality and Everyday Life in the Levant, ethnographically examines the construction and reception of televisual cultural, moral and spatial telos. She was a visiting fellow researcher at the University of Marburg and at the Orient Institute in Beirut. She is working on a book project that explores the role of digital memory and political emotions in oppositional cultures in the Arab East. Tarik Sabry is a reader in Media and Communication Theory at the University of Westminster, where he is also Director of the Arab Media Centre. Sabry is author of Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday (2010), editor of Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field (2012) and co-editor with Layal Ftouni of Arab Subcultures: Transformations in Theory and Practice (2017). He is also co-founder and co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Sabry’s research interests lie at intersections between media and philosophy, migration and diasporic studies, audiences, popular culture and intellectual Arab history.

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Helga Tawil-Souri is an associate professor in the departments of Media, Culture, and Communication and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, where she is also Director of the Kevorkian Centre for Near Eastern Studies. Tawil-Souri is a media scholar who works on questions of spatiality, technology and politics in the Middle East and especially Israel/Palestine. Broadly, her work critiques the notion that we live in an increasingly open and borderless world, by analysing how technologies and their infrastructures – such as cell phones and the internet – are explicitly territorial and political and often impose new forms of borders and controls. She is equally fascinated by how spaces and ‘things’ that are overtly territorial and political – borders, checkpoints and identification cards, for example – themselves function in cultural ways. She is the co-editor of Gaza as Metaphor (2016), and author of numerous academic publications. Inspired in part by the chapter she wrote for this volume, she is planning her next research project around a spatial history of turnstiles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book was made possible in part by the generous support of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (www.theacss.org) through its Working Groups Programme on ‘Producing the Public in Arab Societies’ (2013–15) with funding provided by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences or the IDRC. Translations and copy-editing for this book were financially supported by an Internal Scholarly Research Grant from Northwestern University in Qatar. We are indebted to the members of the media group, without whom this work would have been impossible, and to I.B.Tauris and the Arab Media Centre at the University of Westminster for their continuous and systematic support of the Arab Cultural Studies project.

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I N T R O DU C T IO N : C U LT U R E , T I M E A N D P U B L IC S I N A C HA N G I N G A R A B C O N T E X T Tarik Sabry and Joe F. Khalil

In a recent sociological study entitled ‘What are sociologists writing about in North Africa, 2000–2016?’, based on a survey of 3,614 social science books (2,142 in Arabic, 1,330 in French, 83 in English and 13 in other languages), Ait Mansour (2018) and his colleagues at Mohammed V University in Morocco showed how in the three countries of focus – Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – the sociology of culture headed the list of social science publications, followed by political science, methodology and the sociology of development. It is important to also note that the increase in publications on political science in the three countries has been exponential since the Arab uprisings of 2010. Taking this study’s findings into account, regardless of its small geographical sample, it is important to pose a qualitative question: why is it that the theme of ‘culture’ has emerged as a key category in social science publications in North Africa? Historiographies of knowledge production elsewhere show a strong dialectic between endogenous and exogenous variables. For example, the reasons why society presented itself as an urgent object of enquiry in post-Second World War German academia, and not long after that in American universities, are suggestive of a web of connections, including the emergences of fascism, communism, Hiroshima, not to mention mass migration from Europe to the United States (see Scannell 2007: 32–3). Similarly, the emergence of culture as an important category in 1970s and 1980s Britain was not accidental. It was merely the product of the interplay between endogenous and exogenous elements, including a shift from economies of scarcity to economies of abundance, with increase in leisure time being an important factor, the collapse of the British Empire, television and migration from the Commonwealth countries to Britain, added to which we need to emphasize the role of Marxist theory in the democratization of culture as a set of everyday practices. Articulations of culture in

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British academe, at the time, were dominated by two key readings: a culturalist paradigm that situated the question of culture in ordinary everyday experience, and a structuralist paradigm, according to which experience ‘could not presume itself as a self-validating category, since what determines it is elsewhere and otherwise than what it (experience) thinks it is’ (Scannell 2007: 201). The point of returning to these historiographies is to hint at the possibility, in the Arab context, of a re-reading of the category ‘culture’, considering recent historical events and the emergence of intellectual formations that are more mobile and feel more at home with interdisciplinarity than did previous generations. Arab states and their educational apparatuses have ceaselessly worked towards the stabilization of semantics around culture. That is what institutions generally do. Articulations of culture as a category in Arab universities have not been free from this process. The evidence for this lies in the hundreds of theses and dissertations on Arab culture that are either structuralist (not accounting for culture’s anthropological interpretations) or reactive to outside threat, cultural imperialism here being a key and dominant theme. Arab states have been complicit in stabilizing meanings of culture, first, by adopting and enforcing teleological readings of the category (that remain largely elitist and protectionist against the imperialist other), second, by the folklorization of culture in ways that make it subservient, on the one hand, to protectionist discourse and, on the other, to the neo-liberal global market, including tourism, where Arab cultures are treated as live museums of the orientalized other, and, third, through the co-option of popular culture artists as cogs in their propagandist machines (see Chapter 2). Three elements may precipitate a reconfiguration of ‘culture’ in the Arab context. First, the death of the intellectual as leader and legislator of truth, which prompted a reconfiguration of the relationship between intellectuals and the masses (see Chapter 8). Second, digital media have, besides their questionable political potential, opened space for an unprecedented creative energy, which is driven by a culture of sharing that has outmanoeuvred the state and its intelligentsias at the level of symbolic production (see Chapter 5). Third, and perhaps the most important factor, which is not unrelated to the previous two, is the emergence of the everyday and, with it, experience as prerequisites for self-reflexivity and creativity. All these changes, which we attribute partly to the Arab uprisings as ethical events, have opened new possibilities for the study of culture in the Arab region that we cannot ignore. As Badiou (2013: 13) put it, the ‘prevailing order fights tooth

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and nail on this point … to show that past events haven’t created any new possibility … Even supposing that the established order is master of the possibilities, it’s a matter of showing that these possibilities are, in our view, insufficient.’ In our grappling with the relationship between the Arab uprisings and the need to reconfigure interpretations of culture, we want to destabilize the state and its commissars’ monopoly over the possibility to think culture otherwise, to dislocate it from its metaphysics and subservience and to reconnect it to everyday, lived experiences (see Chapter 3). Emerging philosophers in the Arab region have been inspired and re-energized by peoples’ movements to rethink their take on fundamental categories, such as culture, experience, structure and history. Many of them have come out to explain that the new drivers of history are inherent, not to teleologies of becoming but to the everyday experience and the emancipation of the senses (see Chapter 8 and Sabry 2018).

Cultural time and publics Debates about Arab culture and media have resurfaced since the advent of modern mass media in the nineteenth century; their ramifications and implications have been discussed in political and social settings and researched in media studies, sociology, political science and anthropology. But since the societal position of media has changed, and because the societal position of culture is changing in the Arab context, temporality and publicness have come to assume a central position in this book. While we invite the reader to explore these terms throughout this book, we recognize that they have been one of the most complex subjects of anthropological and philosophical enquiry. The following discussion is therefore an initial foray into themes explored throughout the book. We advocate the use of ‘temporality’ because it refers to time insofar as it manifests itself in human life and experience. If temporality is the everyday subjectively lived time, as opposed to an objective time, then a plausible answer is that temporality comes from our ways of living, unlike time, which must come from the universe. The immediate problem with such a distinction is that temporality is in fact both highly complicated, anything but explicit, and by the same token entirely real. Understood as the act of ‘being’ in public and ‘doing’/constructing public, publicness, in this volume, is articulated as a double ontological strategy, since it has the potential to be both hegemonic, at the level of ideological construction, and emancipatory. By publicness, we mean

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the discursive/performative and intentional techniques that are used by hegemonic media to generate a sense of belonging to a common culture/public and a common time. Where Arab time continues to be studied, it is merely ‘cultural time’, without the concept of cultural temporalities being itself given much critical attention. Pre-Islamic Arab civilizations evince a high degree of culture-related specificity with its focus on poetry, while studies of ArabIslamic rules (e.g. the Abbasid Caliphate) focus on cultural achievements in the arts and sciences. The Arabs’ encounters with Western modernity were in turn superseded by the respective temporalities of colonial canons which in turn have been used to speak to and about an Arab cultural time. In fact, cultural time is focused on the time of colonialism and independence, time of revolutions and regimes, time of war and peace, time of royals and presidents, etc. Instead, this book is animated by the need to pay attention to Arab cultural temporalities as materialized in and through the prism of everyday life. Temporality underscores essentially all aspects of everyday cultural practices, as even the term ‘everyday’ shows. Why is it that the question of Arab cultural temporality is now imposing itself as an important category of analysis? And how is it, then, that the question of Arab publicness is, by default, an inextricable part of this same question? The 1967 Arab-Israeli War has, for the last fifty years, been the key historical moment to which Arab intellectuals from all teleological denominations have responded. Cultural and political analyses that responded directly to the Naksa (Arab defeat) of 1967 were framed within a dominant interpretation of time that drew its energy from structuralist analysis and the metaphysics of historical materialism (see Chapter 7). As such, the prevalent Arab intellectual discourse on temporality was largely motivated by a fixed structural analysis, where experience, as opposed to structure, never counted for much. We advance that a new Arab generation has emerged for whom the question of 1967 is no longer the main default position for thinking about the world. We want to argue that the Arab uprisings that started in Tunisia in 2010 have opened a swerve: a possibility for a new temporal configuration, or for a different understanding of the temporal question that has yet to be analysed systematically. The ethical and political demands made by the Tunisian public in 2010, and later in Egypt in 2011, and in other parts of the Arab region were, and are still, too complex to be submitted to a mere structural or teleological analysis of time. Furthermore, cultural time, as a category of analysis, can no longer be limited to questions around historical continuities or discontinuities,

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but also, and this is very important for us as scholars of media and cultural studies, at the level of discursivity and performativity. And so, another key question that drives the telos of this volume is: how does cultural time show up in different communicative forms (mediatized or non-mediatized) and what kind of publics does it produce? As this collection demonstrates, multiple temporalities persist or subsist as peripheral, subaltern or oppositional practices that are prone to reengage in several ways. These multiple temporalities, described and analysed in this book, appear to co-habit in our world and they are deployed depending on the pragmatic framework that is inhabited at a specific moment in time. The question of time and temporality has animated a long and old debate in philosophy. Philosophers maintained a strong interest in the origin of time: Heidegger maintained that time comes to us from the future, in contrast to Bourdieu who argues that it comes behind us through the past. For Nietzsche, time comes from the present, travelling perhaps in an eternal repetition. Instead of Husserl’s (1991: 11–12) claim that the present moment contained traces of what was the immediate past (‘retensions’), and of anticipations of what was immediately a future (‘protensions’), the chapters in this book reveal an Arab world in which countless temporalities (the pre, post and modern, the Islamic, the colonial and post-colonial, etc.) make up plural, hybrid experiences and whose analysis should resist the simplistic binaries that have dominated much of the research on Arab culture. It would be short-sighted and misleading to think of culture, with its economic, political and social dimensions, as operating only temporally. Multiple and interwoven cultural temporalities are interlocked with processes of publicness, which, more than anything else, made it possible to think about the practices of everyday public life. The unfolding chapters reveal how the processes of publicness are dialectic, dialogical and involve competing and often contradictory movements. By focusing on everyday culture and lived experience, this volume reveals how people in the Arab region engage in, reshape or negotiate new types of mediated and unmediated publicness. An engagement with Arab cultural temporality (and the transformations that have happened within it) is by default an enquiry into the relationship between cultural time and publicness. This volume advances that a significant change to the ways in which cultural time is lived and performed also presupposes change at the level of publicness. While we are unable to argue with certainty that change at the level of cultural time produces new publics and vice versa, we are confident, however, that an examination of the relationship between cultural time and publicness necessitates a

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multi-dimensional method. This wisdom speaks to and informs the key intellectual objective of this volume: that is, to reconfigure the relationship between cultural time and publicness through the lenses of anthropology, cultural and intellectual history, media and cultural studies, literature and philosophy. Traditionally, scholars of Arab media have concerned themselves with examining forms of ‘new’ media such as satellite television or the internet and ‘new’ content such as 24/7 news channels or reality television and have focused on observable behaviours such as those of pan-Arab audiences. Arab publics and audiences became synonymous and associated with three discourses: gomhor or gamaheer, the ‘Arab street’ or Ummah (Khalil 2013). Discourses on Arab publics polarized into images of gamaheer, a crowd unified by a leader’s speech such as that by Egyptian President Gamal Abul el Nasser. Also, gamaheer came to identify the mass audiences of popular culture icons in politics and entertainment. The image of a mass galvanized around hot button issues prompted Pollock’s (1993) reference to the ‘Arab Street’. From the Gulf War to the war in Iraq, news reporters and pundits alike use this evocative image of the Arab street to refer to Arab public opinion. A third discourse that often confuses Arabs with Muslims draws on the religious reference to the Ummah, the community of Muslim believers and their shared values and norms. It is a term often used to refer to a community that transcends ethnic and national identities and is often mobilized around specific crises such as the Danish cartoons controversy. What matters is how these technologies, forms and content develop an Arab public sphere with emphasis on de-spatialized and non-dialogical publics. By detaching people from their everyday life and encapsulating them within media-centric environments, this scholarship effectively isolated the study of the public sphere from publicness. However, even Habermas (1962/1995: 140) argues that publicity (or publicness) represents the defining principle of the public sphere. An over-emphasis on the public sphere and on the immediate explanation of ever-shifting processes throughout it when people try to make sense of critical events, such as the uprisings, can lead to drastically reduced consideration of publicness and of the overall context. This recognition remains a blind spot in contemporary debates on Arab culture. The attempt to redress these imbalances constitutes one of the main departure points for this book’s contributions. The core of this project is to understand publics in association with cultural time rather than simply through the public sphere.

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We look to publicness as a source to renew and expand our understanding of publics. We must consider the idea of publicness in a way that reflects its openness and reflexivity, and in a way that ensures it remains embedded in culture and wedded to temporality. By engaging with communities across the Arab region, we realize that they construct new types of publicness and reinterpret older forms of publicness. The chapters in this book echo but also redefine publicness as it increasingly embodies mediated and unmediated culture. This is not restricted to interactive forms such as the internet (with its multiple opportunities) but also inter-personal, indigenous, alternative and social forms of communication. Readers will discover that publicness does not refer to only one thing. It is formed by and imagined to encompass a number of contesting and often opposing political, social and cultural movements.

Reimagining Arab cultural time and Arab publics as a collective Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World came into being as a book project thanks to a research initiative by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), which was entitled ‘Producing the Public in Arab Societies: Space, Media, and Participation’. This sought to capture aspects of change in post-revolutionary Arab societies. As the initiative’s title suggests, this was a three-pronged project, focusing on three different themes: space, media and participation. Each research theme was led by a collective of expert Arab scholars, who came from the Arab region and the diaspora, allowing space for a unique interaction between scholars, activists and members of civil society groups. This book is the product of two years of dialogical interface, in different locales, between members of the media group which brought together Arab scholars specializing in anthropology, linguistics, poetry, art criticism, geography, media/cultural studies and philosophy, to think through and produce critical, innovative and publicly engaging research that examines the connections between media, time and publicness in both urban and rural settings, in different parts of the Arab world. A key objective of our group was to examine manifestations, meanings and transformations in the mediations of Arab publicness, and how these can be the products not only of locally produced temporal structures but also of the intersections between local time, national time and world time. Our engagement with publicness also underlines the ways in which publics in the Arab region mnemonically transgress media’s hegemonic discourses. Our multi-disciplinary approach provided space

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for Arab researchers from different disciplines in the humanities to engage dialogically and critically with the question of publicness and time within wider debates on art, media, philosophy, globalization, modernity and post-modernity. From the outset, and during the group’s first meeting in Marrakech in October 2013, the media group, then composed of seven scholars, enunciated a critical approach to understanding media that debunked the conventional interpretations of technological mediation, opting instead for interpretations that situate media within complex and wider conjectures. The inter-disciplinary composition of the group was part of an intentional effort to free our thinking on media from the facile discourses of presentism and technological determinism. We were, from the beginning, critical of media studies’ narrow interpretations of what the media are, and have, instead, considered a more phenomenological take on technology. Rather than limiting technology to satellite television, digitality, the internet or social media, we instead settled for a wider definition that situates technology at the heart of the human condition and makes it a mode for revelation that can bring to the fore connections between publicness and the temporal in digital sermons, the television melodrama, music and in other texts. For us, the checkpoint, the graffiti, the concert, the image of a charismatic leader, the human body and poems are all complex textual mediations that require un-concealment. Our debates and discussions around the category ‘publicness’ unlocked a more versatile definition that is driven by a discursive intentionality. We became more interested in unpicking publicness as techne, how it is done and performed, rather than how it is thought. During the group’s second meeting in Tunis in May 2014, the question of temporality imposed itself on us as a key category. Back then, as a group, we were deeply caught up in a complex relationship between thought and event. We were hanging on the cusp of a historical moment where events tended to create the conditions for new thought processes. Most of us had agreed that, regardless of the abject failures of the Arab uprisings, the significant shifts in structures of feeling and in processes of thinking were substantial enough to be suggestive of ‘transformation’. For us, the relationship between event and theory was moved not merely by the forms of knowledge and structures of feeling that it had created but also by the cultural temporality that these have brought to the fore as a strategy. The question of time thus became even more prominent for us in our following meetings in Beirut, in December 2014, where debate centred on abstract as well as anthropological interpretations of

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time. We especially became concerned with making a clear distinction between philosophical and anthropological experiences of time. For example, we wanted to know why it was that contemporary Arab art was experimenting with modernism, or why it was that recent Arab philosophical debate was engaged with quotidian questions, and what it would mean for us to live in different cultural temporalities. We also grappled with negotiated forms of time and publicness as agential forms of resistance against the dominant discourses of time and publicness as constructed by the state and its media. In our fourth group meeting, in Beirut in March 2015, we were in the process of drafting our empirical chapters. Back then, we had already discussed the philosophical project of Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, but in a more generic fashion. However, given the prominence of the temporal question to that point in our debates and in the empirical examination of different facets of Arab media and publics, whilst in Beirut, we decided to read and discuss al-Jabri’s (1991) work ‘Arab Cultural Time and the Problem of Development’, which appears as the second chapter of his seminal treatise The Construction of Arab Reason. In this work, al-Jabri makes a systematic argument, contending that the deficit in contemporary Arab culture was due to an unconscious and non-linear understanding of time. What was extremely interesting and formative for us, as a group, was al-Jabri’s philosophical engagement with the category of Arab cultural time. Using Piaget’s concept of ‘L’inconscient cognitif’, the philosopher makes a connection between cultural and unconscious time, arguing that: the unconscious has no history since it does not acknowledge natural time. It has its own time which is different from conscious time, the time of wakefulness and consciousness. Unconscious time resembles, to a degree, dream time, as it is unable to acknowledge temporal or spatial distances and orders, nor is it able to acknowledge the law of causality. The same can be said about cultural time and the time of a reason’s structure that belongs to a certain culture. Thus, cultural time is like unconscious time in that it overlaps and extends in a spiral way, making it possible for many cultural phases to coexist in the same thought (fikr) and thus in the same reason’s structure, just as repressed desires from different psychological and biological stages coexist in the gloominess of the unconscious. (al-Jabri 1991: 41)

Reading al-Jabri’s text, and his take on Arab cultural time, gave way to mixed readings. His structural, psychoanalytical and archaeological

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methods did not resound well with those in the group who practised ethnographic methods. The group also felt that non-linearity in cultural time, at the level of consciousness, was not merely suggestive of a Piagetian, unconscious cultural state, as al-Jabri argues. Some members of the group argued that, if looked at anthropologically, it is part of a complex temporal process, of intersectionality, appropriation and reappropriation. While the main disagreement was methodological, many of us felt that the question of cultural temporality can only come to the fore as un-concealment when, and if, it is studied within the context of everyday life and lived experience. We were more inclined, in this instance, and given our interest in trans-temporal mediations of time, to favour al-Khatibi’s (1980) strategic submission to the non-linear as a form of plural identity and Bergson’s (1913/2001) acquiescence to a multi-layered time-consciousness that manifests itself in intersections rather than in essence. Our engagement with alJabri and his philosophical take on the category of cultural time was extremely formative for us as a group. However, it also signalled a radical break with a second generation of Arab philosophers for whom Althusser, the pope of structuralism, remained a hero and for whom archaeologies of heritage took precedence over the material realities and lived experiences of the publics whom we were at pains to reimagine. In our final meeting as a group, which took place in London in November 2015, we exchanged empirical findings from our case studies (which were mostly ethnographic) and took a stab at evaluating the raison d’être of the collection. While some of us saw Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World as expounding different cartographies of Arab cultural times, others thought that the collection’s main contribution lay in its endeavour to give cultural time an anthropological interpretation, thus making a temporal break with a priori articulations of time in contemporary Arab thought that delimited this category to a merely non-experiential, teleological logic.

Navigating this book This book does not speak with a singular voice about the encounters of culture, publics and time, nor does it seek to produce a consensus about the mediations of events or cultural temporalities in the Arab region. In other words, the eight writers who have contributed original research to this volume do not all agree on the meanings of these events, particularly the Arab uprisings. Despite these differences, they

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all agree on the merits of conducting research that yields grounded theory. This research collection offers multiple pathways for thinking about the questions facing the Arab region today. It aims to expand our understanding and experience of media in everyday life. For too long, definitions of media have been restrictive and restricting. Too often, scholars of Arab media have tended to hide in silo understandings of media as political, social or economic instruments. This approach is useful for addressing specific questions about media structure and impact; however, it proves limited in explaining how the media become culture, and in showing that questions of interactionality between culture, temporality and publicness need to be central to intellectual debates on media. In developing the book, it was important for us to engage scholars whose work we deemed was in dialogue with the questions raised in the ACSS working group. It was a way for us to tie the fieldwork together with a longer legacy of scholarship. To that end, we invited scholars whose work added both contextual and historical dimensions to an understanding of Arab intellectual history. In the process, we asked a great deal of the contributors to this volume, and we are deeply grateful not only for what they delivered but also for their participation in our multiple meetings and their willingness to engage with one another over a period of two years. There may be no way to comprehensively or exhaustively map culture, time and publics in the Arab region. We certainly do not accomplish it here. However, the heterogeneity of the research is its highest virtue. We believe that every one of the chapters in this volume will serve as starting points for a new set of questions going forward. The chapters in this book cover multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to studying Arab contemporary cultures, and they are quite distinctive from one another in terms of their contexts, the subjects they study and their methods of analysis. Nonetheless, a number of shared themes can be traced throughout the book, and we wish to highlight four of these here. The first relates to an increased realization that Arab culture is complicated, complex and contested. As we shall see, this realization is motivated by the fact that temporality and publicness are experienced differently across the Arab region. A second theme reveals that a study of cultural production is organically linked to the study of intellectual and cultural thought. The latter, as we shall see, consists more of perpetual temporal nodes or junctures than of ruptures. The third cross-cutting theme relates to the importance of adopting a non-media-centric approach to the study of culture (see

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Morley 2007, 2009; Moores 2012). The importance of this approach is clearly evidenced through the multi-disciplinarity of the chapters and how these play out in different contexts. The use of mixed research approaches is a fourth theme present in this volume, with reflexivity emphasized in relation to ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis that is anchored in critical cultural approaches. In our efforts to assemble this book, weave multi-disciplinary queries, and find common threads in scholarship on Arab culture, time and publicness, we have crafted three sets of chapters. Each of these chapters can be read on its own, in any order. We encourage readers to go straight to a theme, community or location that interests them. However, we have organized the book into three major areas to assist readers looking for chapters that speak to particular issues or approaches, as well as helping instructors who are seeking to assign chapters in relation to a particular topic or theme. Chapters in the first set consider ethnographic approaches and show how various communities in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, Palestinian Territories or Egyptian cultural activists negotiate the meanings of time and exercise publicness through various cultural forms and practices. The second set is concerned with specific media forms: Chapter 4 focuses on Beirut’s cafe culture in a changing Levantine media consumption, while Chapter 5 discusses youth cultural politics as articulated in the works of Tunisian and Saudi rappers. The third set of three chapters revisits concepts of time in the work of older and more modern poets, the intellectual legacy of the 1967 Naksa, through the keywords of an intellectual activist, and, finally, the re-engagement of philosophers with everyday culture. One of the key questions that animated our discussions resides in the development of forms of publicness as different, separate or as not being part of the uprisings. In Chapter 1, Helga Tawil-Souri examines the issue of checkpoints. In the current global politics, checkpoints, like border crossings, are an issue of public policy and of basic human concern. Checkpoints are both material spaces and microcosms. Used as an anthropological object, the checkpoint reveals how public time, at the checkpoint, is experienced. Tawil-Souri’s ethnographic work around the Qalandia checkpoint, which separates the West Bank and Jerusalem, challenges linear conceptions of temporality and publicness. After a thorough description and analysis of the ‘checkpoint time’, Tawil-Souri reveals that ‘Palestinians are perceived – and perceive themselves – as being stuck in a system of settler colonialism that belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward.’ For Tawil-Souri, there can be no public, as there is no shared space or shared time.

Introduction: Culture, Time and Publics in a Changing Arab Context 13

Ramy M.K. Aly, in Chapter 2, complements Tawil-Souri’s argument by stressing the importance of historiography, particularly in recognizing moments of ‘passage from the micro-political realm of everyday “culture” to the macro-political realm of “politics”’. Aly starts by recognizing an ethnographic failure resulting from his attempt to conduct research in Egypt at a time when his interlocutors felt his involvement had become a liability. In investigating why certain activities (ranging from street performance to media development initiatives) represent an ‘existential threat’ to the state, Aly explores the development of a counterculture that was inspired by the 25th January Revolution and the resurrection of a Nasserite cultural machinery. Both are the result of historical moments and have to be understood in their ability to render politics as culture. To this end, he offers suggestions in the theoretical, methodological and ethical domains of scholarly practice on Arab culture. In Chapter 3, Tarik Sabry provides different entry points to some of the issues addressed by Tawil-Souri and Aly in their ethnographic approach to the study of Arab culture at this historical juncture. Sabry proposes three entry points to understanding temporality and publicness in the context of Ait Nuh, an Atlas Mountain Amazigh village. Departing from traditional realist ethnographies, first Sabry argues for ethnography as a dream, ‘a form of radical temporalizing’, that allows the researcher to break the bounds of modern versus traditional time. Second, he advocates for understanding time as archaeology, with researchers sifting through layers of time that are embedded in ‘earthliness’. It is only through this ‘digging’ that the dialectic between lived (a cumulative public and temporal experience) and preached (at the mosque and on satellite) Islam is understood. Third, Sabry articulates mnemonic time as a way to understand ‘how cultural time is negotiated, and often articulated, between memory (tradition) and imagination (agency)’. Helena Nassif, in Chapter 4, starts where Sabry ended, by taking up the encounters between tradition and imagination. She focuses on the circulation of a television melodrama, Bab al-Hara, and the embodiment of its Levantine themes in a cafe culture in Beirut. She focuses on the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, which is characterized by a change in media offerings and social practices. She advances ‘the neo-traditional as a descriptive category not only of a space but also of social practices that idealize the past and advance a conservative agenda but, nevertheless, is contested and negotiated’. By historicizing how the series may have influenced space and place,

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and, in the process, may have developed neo-traditions, Nassif reveals how clients construct and reconstruct the past while imagining the future. Joe F. Khalil, in Chapter 5, approaches the notion of tradition from a different angle that builds on Arab youth cultural production. He makes the comparison between the current effervescence in cultural production with that of the tajdeed (renewal) movement of the last century. He argues that rap should be conceptualized not as an outcome of the uprisings but as a contemporary episode with historical continuity – one which is anchored in the oral Arabic traditions. To this end, he advances arguments from fieldwork with Tunisian and Saudi rappers. For Khalil, hip-hop then becomes ‘a site for understanding how the identities of youth, as media makers and users, are shaped, constructed, and vigorously contested’. While much emphasis has been placed on the role of social media during the events that are known as the Arab Spring, the last three chapters shift the reader’s attention to cultural manifestations in the realms of poetry, political theory and philosophy. In Chapter 6, Atef Alshaer focuses on the poetics of time in different historical periods in Arab history. His study of the old (the pre-Islamic and Islamic) and the modern periods reveals the ability of poetic language to absorb time’s mystery and its ‘commanding effects on human beings in countless contexts’. One effect, in particular, relates to what Alshaer calls the ‘time of revolution’, when ‘all times are compressed into the present’. From street performances to YouTube videos and social media exchanges, the ubiquity of the poetics of time also reveals, in public, a culture that is still very attached to its oral tradition. By focusing on the work of an Arab intellectual who is engaged in both theory and praxis, Omar al-Ghazzi, in Chapter 7, reveals the importance of certain words as sites of cultural and political memory in Arab discourse. Using the work of Mahdi Amil (1936–87), alGhazzi makes a strong comparison between how understandings of certain terms (temporality, modernity and politics) that dominated 1967 Arab cultural production may illuminate our understanding of the 2010 Uprisings. Al-Ghazzi argues that the temporal linearity which characterized much of the 1967 post-Naksa cultural production should be disrupted in political historiography. Revealing a persistent continuity with the past, al-Ghazzi refers to ‘the self-Orientalizing and essentializing tropes and approaches that theorize an Arab self as moving through the ages and struggling to attain/catch up with Western modernity’.

Introduction: Culture, Time and Publics in a Changing Arab Context 15

Combining Alshaer’s attentiveness to the time of revolutions, and al-Ghazzi’s interest in intellectual praxis, in Chapter 8, Abdelaziz Boumeshouli turns his concern to a nascent philosophical experience. Anchored in the politics of the present, the everyday and the body, this experience represents a humanist thrust that rejects religious and political teleologies. Although energized by the revolutions, while not being defined by them, this new Arab philosophizing is engaged in the pursuit of a philosophical life that embraces and echoes the calls for human dignity. Befitting of a last chapter, Boumeshouli reminds us that philosophizing, just like grounded theory, is concerned with concepts that are ‘inspired by lived experience and the present as a temporality’. The themes, locations and communities that are covered in this volume are widely diverse – even eclectic. Additionally, the contributing scholars are native Arabic speakers and have spent substantial time working with and living in these communities. From the onset, we wanted to see scholars writing for audiences outside the narrow spectrum of their discipline. While there is no single method employed by the authors found in this volume, most chapters can be described as examples of ethnographies or textual analysis. The shared objective assumes that there is something to be discovered by carefully examining how culture operates over time and in public, thus providing a model for how young researchers can embark on their own adventure. What follows in this book is a set of innovative research that models how we might study culture, temporality and publicness. We believe that there is a crucial role for scholars in the arts, philosophy, anthropology, communication and media to use their respective expertise to conduct research and provide critical analyses of cultural conditions in the Arab region. We hope that, in seminars or workshops, readers will embark on their own research adventures, addressing questions in their own Arab communities, both in the region and beyond. We also hope that readers who are interested in a particular method, area or community will be able to extend their knowledge from the starting points that are offered in this book.

Bibliography Ait Mansour, Hicham (2018) ‘What are sociologists writing about in North Africa, 2006–2016?’ Beirut, Arab Council for the Social Sciences. Unpublished report. Augustine (1961) Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Badiou, Alain with Fabien Tarby (2013) Philosophy and the Event. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bergson, Henri (1913/2001) Time and Free Will. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Forgues, Eric Canal (1973) Arab Culture and Society in Change: A Partially Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, French, German and Italian. Beyrouth: Dar el-Machreq. Habermas, Jürgen (1962/1995) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Husserl, E. and J.B. Brough (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time: (1893–1917). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Interarab Centre of Cinema & Television (1965) Arab Cinema and Culture. Beirut: Arab Film and Television Centre. al-Jabri, Abed Mohammed (1991) Naqd al-ʾaql al-ʾArabi 1: The Construction of Arab Reason. Beirut: The Arab Cultural Centre. Khalil, Joe F. (2013) ‘“The Mass Wants this!”: How Politics, Religion, and Media Industries Shape Discourses about Audiences in the Arab World’, in Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone (eds), Meanings of Audiences: Comparative Discourses (pp. 123–34). Taylor & Francis. Available at: doi:10.4324/9780203380017. al-Khatibi, Abdelkabir (1980) Annaqd al-Mujdawij. Beirut: Dār al-ʾAwda. Lenczowski, George (1970) The Political Awakening in the Middle East. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Moores, Shaun (2012) Media, Place and Mobility. London: Palgrave. Morley, David (2007) Media, Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New. London: Routledge. Morley, David (2009) ‘Canons, Orthodoxies, Ghosts and Dead Statues’, in L.B. Lambert (ed.), Moment to Monument: The Making and Unmaking of Cultural Significance. Bielefeld: Transcript Verl. Pollock, D. (1993) The ‘Arab Street?’: Public Opinion in the Arab World. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Sabry, Tarik (2018) ‘People’s movements as event: Towards new affective regimes of critique’, Javnost 25 (4): 351–64. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1 080/13183222.2018.1463374. Scannell, P. (2007) Media and Communication. London: SAGE Publications.

Chapter 1 D I S - F O R M AT IO N S O F P A L E ST I N E Helga Tawil-Souri

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time Charles Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, 1930 Under siege, life is time Between remembering its beginning And forgetting its end The siege is waiting Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege, 2002

Prologue, back in time: Spring forward, fall back1 It was my one chance to meet Yasser Arafat when a friend who worked with Arafat called me out of the blue on a Friday morning in March 2003 and said to come by at 9 pm. It struck me as odd to be invited to the muqataʾa at night, but I figured that having been imprisoned in his compound for a year already, no doubt Arafat’s sense of time was different from that of those of us not locked up. I planned to arrive in Ramallah by 7 pm. Travelling from ar-Ram to Ramallah – a distance of 5 kilometres – I did not expect delay going ‘in’ through the Qalandia checkpoint. I also planned to spend the night at a friend’s given it was not uncommon, especially at night, for the checkpoint to be closed on the way ‘out’.2 I made my way up to the soldier. ‘Checkpoint closed,’ he grumbled without lifting his eyes. ‘Closed? Why?’ To have the whole checkpoint closed, and especially on the way ‘in’ to Ramallah, would have been likely if it were a Jewish holiday, if there were a European diplomat visiting the Israeli prime minister, if the

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United States were increasing its bombing campaign in Iraq, or some other far-off event that the Israeli regime used as a pretext to encumber Palestinians – none of which was the case that day. Seeing that I hadn’t moved, the soldier barked, ‘It’s seven o’clock.’ I was on my way to meet the president, so I had planned my travel time carefully. I looked at my watch. ‘It’s six,’ I said. ‘No. It’s seven.’ I looked at my watch again. As I looked back up at him, he grinned, ‘Daylight saving.’ Yes, that strange modern invention of setting the clock forward. ‘But daylight saving starts in two weeks,’ I responded. He quickly retorted, ‘It is already daylight saving in Israel. It is seven.’3 ‘But we’re in the West Bank,’ I said – the Green Line was a few kilometres well to our west. The corner of his lips took a slant upwards, almost smiling, he matter-of-factly declared, ‘Checkpoints are in Israel.’ I was standing in no man’s land where it was 7 pm, while some short distance beyond it was 6 pm. I wondered where the line was on which I could have half my body in one time zone and the other half in another. However, I did not bother asking. By his logic, which had the backing of the Israeli regime, checkpoints were islands functioning on Israeli time, no matter where they territorially existed. The same was true of settlements. That particular discrepancy of time only lasted a few weeks, until both Israel and the Palestinian Territories were back in the same time zone, but I walked away from the checkpoint that evening with a nagging thought: Israeli time had already ‘sprung forward’ yesterday, and the Palestinians were behind. It hinted at a larger metaphysical quandary: a complex imposition of ‘Israeli time’ onto Palestinian temporality.

A checkpoint world Checkpoints have been a significant part of daily life in the Palestinian Territories since the 1990s ‘peace process’, when they first emerged in full force. However, checkpoints, in material form and as emblematic of processes such as border crossings and im/mobility, have been a significant part of Palestinian life for the past seven decades, both within and outside the Palestinian Territories. This chapter considers checkpoints as actual material spaces that are made up of specific technologies engendering particular embodied territorial and phenomenological experiences and as microcosms. They are sites from which to understand Palestinian temporality.

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Given their centrality across Palestinian space and time, checkpoints have been the subject of scholarship from different fields. For the benefit of organization, I categorize these into three points of analysis, although some touch on all of these. First, there is scholarship that situates checkpoints specifically in the occupied Palestinian Territories, largely in the post-Oslo period, as part of a larger matrix of (mostly territorial) control. This scholarship analyses the checkpoint within the process of territorial fragmentation, alongside settlement expansion, by-pass roads, the creation of fences and walls, and other territorial configurations (Hanafi 2009; Tawil-Souri 2010; Weizman 2012). A second set of scholarship more implicitly touches on checkpoints as part of the bordering processes imposed on Palestinians, specific neither to the Palestinian Territories nor to the post-1990s’ time frame. The tensions of border crossings and territorial containment are experiences that have been shared by all Palestinians since the middle of the twentieth century – in diaspora, exile, statelessness or occupation (Said 1985; Khalidi 1997). Khalidi (1997: 1) states, for example: [t]he quintessential Palestinian experience, which illustrates some of the most basic issues raised by Palestinian identity, takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified […] For Palestinians […] such barriers generate shared sources of profound anxiety.

This is a trope that emerges in Palestinian films and literature as well, and thus emerges in scholarship in cinema and literary studies (Yaqub 2012; Fieni 2014; Mattar 2014). Finally, a third set of scholarship deals explicitly with the checkpoint itself. For example, some scholars deal specifically with ‘types’ of checkpoints and their political-geographic and economic implications for Palestinian society (Lagerquist 2002; Parizot 2009), while some critique them vis-à-vis their impact on Israeli hermeneutics (Naaman 2006; Kotef and Amir 2007). Others approach the checkpoint as an anthropological space from which to understand larger questions about Palestinian mobility, resistance and fragmentation (e.g. Bornstein 2002; Brown 2004; Hammami 2004, 2010; Handel 2009; Tawil-Souri 2009, 2011; Abourahme 2011). It is this last body of literature from which this chapter explicitly emerges – the checkpoint as an anthropologically meaningful site – while it is also in conversation with the second body of scholarship that is concerned with Palestinian experiences of space and time more broadly.

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This chapter considers checkpoints as temporal objects. First, in the sense that they are pervasive. As Handel (2009: 191) declares of the West Bank, ‘everything, both space and time, is measured in terms of before or after the checkpoint, and there are no assurances that another checkpoint will not pop up around the bend’. The ubiquity of checkpoints, both in actual presence and as a possibility, is approached in this chapter as a given. Second, checkpoints are actors that mark and define Palestinian temporality. In the words of Abourahme (2011: 453): The barrier – be it the checkpoint, ‘the wall’, the dug trench, the roving patrol […] modulates and defines Palestinian mobility and speed of movement, and in the process becomes constitutive of people’s experiences of space and time […] checkpoints can be thought of as a kind of built microcosm of wider reality: the physical-architectural mark of the lived political trauma. (Emphasis added)

Or, in the words of Fieni (2014: 8), ‘checkpoints […] demonstrate how the temporality of exception and the suspension of law operate as the internal clockwork of desecular sovereignty’. Both of these point to how checkpoints hold a particular power over time. This chapter takes it as its point of departure that a core Palestinian experience constitutes a struggle over territoriality, and that the ‘problem’ of the conflict and Palestinians, more generally, is largely approached as one of geopolitical space (Gregory 2004; Hanafi 2009; Weizman 2012). The point is that Palestinian geography is wrenched. Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, are ripped apart by mechanisms imposed by Israel that are nothing short of what Hanafi (2009) has termed ‘spaciocide’: annihilating the space of Palestine and its everyday (temporal) experiences. However, as much as Zionism is manifested as a violent territorial process, it is also a temporal process. Space is not separate from time. In other words, my aim here is to approach spatial and territorial mechanisms as fundamentally temporal ones; I ask, in a sense, what kind of temporality is engendered in the wrenched space of Palestine. Hence, this chapter is in conversation with scholarship on Israel–Palestine that deals with the temporal, some of which has emanated from comparative and literary theory (Fieni 2014; Mattar 2014), from sociology and political science (Jamal 2010a, b; McMahon 2016) and from critical geography (Abourahme 2011, 2016). Finally, checkpoints are emblematic because all Palestinians have in common a dislocation from a coherent sense of space and time. Palestinians inhabit different, discontiguous, disconnected, fragmented

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spaces – no matter where they might be – and this collectively defines Palestinian temporality (see Said 1985). The Palestinian experience of time and the power relations that determine their experiences of time are shackled and tortuous. Checkpoints define and reveal this distressed temporality.

Towards a public: Time and communication The question addressed in this book is: what is happening to public time at this particular moment in the Arab world? This chapter analyses this question with an experiential understanding of time – embodied, lived, phenomenological, territorial. Similarly to the other contributions, this chapter argues against conceptions of time that distance the anthropological object. Here, that anthropological object is the material construct of a checkpoint. The question, then, is whether wrenched time and space – which a checkpoint exemplifies – makes a public possible. The answer is, simply, ‘no’; because without a shared space there is no shared time; and without both of these, there can be no public. This chapter elaborates on this equation. A brief detour is necessary first. The notions of time and temporality used here are drawn primarily from Heidegger (1962) and Bergson (2001) – philosophers who deal with a phenomenological understanding and a theorization of time, insisting that time is a lived experience. Bourdieu (2000) also analyses time’s relationship to being, while considering it as part of a power dynamic. Time is a form of power. Hardt (1997: 65), drawing on both Agamben and Foucault, suggests that ‘[t]ime is the measure of power, and once a sovereign power has our time it is loath to let it go’. In other words, biopolitics is a question of temporality, as control over time leaves individuals more vulnerable to control (see Mbembe 2008; on Palestine, see Gordon 2008; Ophir and Azoulay 2009). Scholars theorizing temporal inequalities and speed – Virilio (1986) being chief among them – argue that geopolitics (a politics based in space) has been supplanted by chronopolitics (a politics based in time). Virilio’s work demonstrates that speed privileges certain populations and restrains others. In other words, the experience of time is relative, and the sharing of space does not guarantee the sharing of time. A relevant example is how checkpoints subject different populations to distinct time regimes. In analysing the time it takes to travel through a checkpoint, Handel (2009) argues that space–time relationships and the

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practices between Palestinians and Israelis are radically asymmetric: Palestinians face difficulty, slowness and unpredictability, while Israelis are faced with a predictable, fluid and ultimately ‘modern’ experience of time and space.4 Parizot (2009) complicates this by recognizing that there are different speeds depending on who is attempting to cross a checkpoint: an Arab-Israeli, a Palestinian Jerusalemite, a Jewish Israeli, a West Banker, etc. The speed of one person versus another can be very different (slow versus fast) and variable (whether it is always the same), and, in some instances, mutually exclusive (one can pass only if another is stopped). Checkpoints demonstrate how different temporal structures disavow Palestinians: they are part of the political power dynamic of Israel–Palestine. As Bourdieu (2000: 225) suggests: When powers are unequally distributed, the economic and social world presents itself not as a universe of possibles equally accessible to every possible subject […] but rather as a signposted universe, full of injunctions and prohibitions, signs of appropriation and exclusion, obligatory routes or impassable barriers, and, in a word, profoundly differentiated.

The work of Handel, Parizot and Collins helps to situate Palestinian’s position in a larger economy of temporal worth; but Palestinian and Israeli time are not altogether separated. First, multiple temporalities can be inter-dependent, relational, entangled (or also separate). Second, the structures that make time’s passing different for one or another group demonstrate the presence and diffused violence of the Israeli regime everywhere across Israel and Palestine. In other words, ‘Israeli time’ determines the relationship wherein experiences of time are relative to one another. Time is a site of material struggle, creating social differences and inequalities; temporality is the experience of that time structured in specific political and economic contexts. To sum up, time is lived. Time is power. Time is relative. Time is a material struggle. Finally, time is not simply a measure or a vector, but is a constituent of culture. Time contributes to culture because it is one of the most important means of communication. Media and communication theorists have analysed the role of time and temporality, contending with questions of synchronicity, simultaneity and feedback, for example, by positing what kind of temporal and geographic distances or proximities are made possible by different technologies of mediation, that is, the extent to which media technologies are often attempts to ‘shrink’ distances between people in search of ‘true’ or profound communication,

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or what constitutes ‘liveness’ in a media-saturated environment (deSola Pool 1983; Thompson 1995; Peters 2012). An analysis of this work falls beyond my purview. The crucial point, however, is summarized best by Fabian (1983: 30–31): ‘for human communication to occur, coevalness has to be created. Communication is, ultimately, about creating shared Time’.5 The sharing of time is a condition for communication. Fabian’s concept of coevalness highlights the importance of a togetherness that is synchronous and simultaneous (occurring at the same physical time) as well as contemporary (as in co-occurrent). Coevalness is a common, active, sharing of time. Coevalness is necessary for communication, and communication is necessary for collectivity – whether the formation of a public, such as one based on class,6 a national identity, or otherwise. Time is at the core of Anderson’s (1983) discussion of nationalism; for example, the modern perception of time as a chronological continuum has facilitated the development of the national idea. Thanks to technological, economic and cultural changes – such as the newspaper – the nation can imagine itself as operating simultaneously and moving in unison on the same time axis. In other words, a chronological time sequence is necessary for meaning-making, comprehensibility, and the formation and recognition of collective identity. To put it in Heideggerian terms, in the absence of a stable continuum, the possibility of ordering the present as a passing moment between past and future is condemned to ongoing failure. Human beings generally take for granted that time has a direction from the past into the present and towards the future. According to Heidegger (1962), there are three ecstases of temporality: the past (‘having been’), the future (‘being-ahead-of-oneself ’ or ‘coming-towarditself ’) and the present (‘waiting-toward’) (see Scott 2006). Drawing from Heidegger (1962) and Bergson (2001), I approach perspective, duration, simultaneity, direction and other characteristics of time as consequences of the situatedness of the observer (or experiencer) of the event. Time is thus not an existing thing but is the being of a process that temporalizes itself – Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-time’. Time is lived through temporally, inseparable from its being endured. Bergson calls this ‘real time’: perceived in the continuousness of its being lived. It endures, it is never at a standstill, it ‘escapes the interval’ (in Scott 2006: 186). ‘Real time’ contrasts with what Bergson calls ‘measurable time’: a sequence of ‘nows’ in which time remains spatially external to what determines it. Time becomes measurable only when it is made divisible, and it is divisible because it is space. To put it differently,

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time becomes measurable ‘because it surreptitiously relegates duration to spatial instants’ (Scott 2006: 186; emphasis added). Time that is reduced to the measurable phenomenon will always fail to fully grasp the temporality of time, the ‘lived time’ (Scott 2006: 187).7 Measurable time discombobulates the chronology of past–present–future, and thus encumbers ontological and phenomenological realities. Palestinians were arguably the first in the region to experience, and to continue to live, through the shock and calamity of the shake-up of things as they were, and to be confronted by the disruption of their lived time. The reverberations of the Palestinians’ tragedy in the middle of the twentieth century are still being felt and continue to shape political and cultural developments across the region. Palestinians are now longstanding experts in dealing with, representing and enduring refugeehood, exile and diaspora; persevering under regimes of violence and war; conducting street politics and uprisings, and living with the failure of these in overthrowing their systems of domination – experiences currently, and sadly, present throughout the Arab world. The longevity and continued experience of the ‘Palestinian problem’ offers a window into the effects and affectations of the temporal transformations and ruptures that occur during these times of crises. The Palestinian predicament further highlights the foreclosure of a possible future, because of the experience of a perpetually suspended and divided present. The checkpoint, which I turn to in the next section, evocative of Bergson’s ‘measurable time’ (slices of space parcelled off into sequences of disconnected ‘nows’) disrupts the temporality of time and, in so doing, prevents the possibility of Palestinian coevalness.

Checkpoint time The material formations of checkpoints have changed over the decades, although their logic has not. There is no such thing as generic checkpoints, even if they share a particular architecture. From the perspective of the Palestinian attempting to get through, the checkpoint is generally structured as follows: first, one knows one is approaching the checkpoint because the taxi service or the bus line abruptly ends, because of the enormous and chaotic traffic jams, because of the sudden presence of hundreds of people making their way towards a particular place. Second, one encounters a large waiting area – sometimes covered with a corrugated roof – lined with metal barricades, surveillance cameras, signs. People continuously flood in at a frenzied pace into this

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waiting area. A set of turnstiles is the first contrivance through which a person must pass, making their way from crammed chaos into a funnel. These first turnstiles – operated by remote control by an unseen Israeli soldier – lead towards a narrow corridor that is lined by metal barricades. Above the turnstile are surveillance cameras, razor-barbed wire and sharp metal arrows. People press onto each other, squashing those ‘ahead’ up against the metal barricades and the turnstiles (see Figure 1.1). There is no routinized tempo: the speed at which the turnstile unlocks and keeps rotating – with only enough space for one person – is determined by the unseen soldier. By virtue of the narrowness of the corridor (about 10 metres long by 60 centimetres wide), people are forced to squeeze into a somewhat (dis)orderly queue. At the other end of this corridor is another remote-controlled turnstile, most often unlocked at a slower tempo than the first; the corridor fills

Figure 1.1  Crowd gathering at the checkpoint.

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up at a faster speed than it is emptied (see Figures 1.2 and 1.3). At 55 centimetres wide, the turnstiles are extremely narrow (compared with, for example, the 75 to 90 centimetre-wide turnstiles used at Israeli bus stations). Only one person can fit at a time; heavier-set people, people holding infants, pregnant women, let alone those in wheelchairs, cannot. When the second turnstile is remotely unlocked, a person enters what can be thought of as the main security hall, where bright fluorescent lights give the space a vapid, sinister feel. Directly in front is an X-ray conveyer belt on which to place bags, to the right is a thick bullet-proof Plexiglas window, behind which sit Israeli soldiers. At the bottom of the window is a tiny horizontal slit for identification cards, permits and paperwork. Unlike the position of a bank teller, there are no perforations in the Plexiglas to allow for a direct auditory experience: the soldier speaks through a loudspeaker, the Palestinian

Figure 1.2  Forced transformation into a queue.

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Figure 1.3  Empty corridor.

speaks into thin air (teeming with microphones and video surveillance cameras). The Plexiglas is opaque, as if lined with a pasty film, making it difficult to see more than a few centimetres inside; one is more likely to see one’s own reflection. After a person drops off their bag, empties their pockets of any stuff, displays or gives their paperwork to the soldier, they must wait to explicitly be told that they can move on. Then, one is permitted to pass through a full body scanner and pick up one’s belongings from the X-ray conveyer belt, where another soldier (or two or three) may conduct a more thorough search, ask the person to step aside for a pat-down, ask them to step inside the office for interrogation, send them back, or ignore them altogether. The wall to the right is lined with opaquer Plexiglas, behind which are more soldiers. All along the left side are barricades. Once through all of these spaces, there is one last remote-controlled turnstile to pass through before being let out altogether (see Figure 1.4).

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Figure 1.4  On the ‘inside’ of the checkpoint.

The architecture imposes a particular disposition: people press into each other to form a line, funnel into the turnstile, compress into the barricaded corridor, wedge into the next turnstile. At each of these passages, one waits for an unknown period of time. One becomes trained to listen for the ‘click’ of the turnstiles and to accept that one’s fate and time is not under one’s control. This process is unpredictable and contingent: one never knows whether one will become shut in one of the turnstiles (which happens often), nor for how long; whether one will be stuck in the barricaded corridor, with how many other people, and whether this ‘togetherness’ will last minutes or hours. One never knows, if one does make it through the turnstile, corridor and next turnstile, that one will not be turned away; or that if one makes it through the checkpoint, that one will make it through the next one, or this same one, on one’s way back home later in the day, or tomorrow or the day

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after. The unpredictability denies one any reasonable anticipation; evoking Bourdieu’s (2000: 228) explanation of absolute power as the power to place other people ‘in total uncertainty by offering no scope to their capacity to predict […] The all-powerful is he who does not wait but who makes others wait.’ From entering the first turnstile through exiting the second, there is no way out: one is stuck inside. It can take a minute to get through this part of the process, it can take hours, constrained in a space that is oppressive and dehumanizing: harsh, colourless, made of concrete and metal, with soldiers booming incomprehensible commands over loudspeakers, bone-chillingly cold in the winter, unbearably sweltering in the summer. This disjunctive temporality produces deep ontological insecurity: there is no continuity, stability, routine, no ability to plan ahead, no ordered sequence, no continuous narrative, no cause and effect. Solitude is the fundamental experience at the checkpoint: one is concerned only with the present task of waiting to maybe pass through, and, it bears repeating, waiting without knowing how long the wait will be. One’s present time is occupied with itself and is over-determined with the moment and its immediate consequences. Existence, here, does not plot itself on a chronological timeline, but collapses in on itself. Time becomes measurable, fragmented into a series of nows, relegated into spatial instants, dislodged from its own endurance. There is a range of technologies and technics that make this possible: clocks, timetables, soldiers’ work shifts, maps, databases, X-ray machines, turnstiles, barricades, scanners, and so on (the checkpoint is one apparatus in a larger regime which separates, classifies, surveils and controls; see Zureik 2010). These help to organize power into forms of spatial and temporal surveillance whereby each Palestinian is measured, classified and separated. These frozen ‘nows’ – frozen inside the turnstile, in the corridor, the next turnstile, in front of a mirrored window – block the multiplicity of the future that lies in the past and renders the future into the suspension of all possibilities. The checkpoint imposes the abstract ‘now’ over temporal possibility, freezing the moment on the edge of the tragedy. According to Heidegger, time is essentially and primarily time for doing something, and that action is directed towards the future (the German term is revealing: Zukunft, literally ‘to-coming’ or ‘coming towards)’. In other words, events come to us out of the future. But the future here is the click of the turnstile, the next turnstile, the next checkpoint. Inside the checkpoint, the present remains motionless. Each person is physically alone, but further classified and separated as being alone

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by the soldier, or the entire apparatus that renders the person a unit that can be separated from others who are also attempting to get through the checkpoint. Whether a person arrives at the checkpoint with their children in hand, their whole family, their co-workers, or with an emergency medical team, they can only pass through each mechanism by themselves, at whatever tempo it happens to be. Each person is atomized. This kind of disintegration of a person and of their experience of time goes further. Passing through the checkpoint is where and when ‘identity’ is assigned to a Palestinian, and this illustrates the highly asymmetric socio-political exchanges between Palestinians and the Israeli regime. These ‘exchanges’ have become increasingly mediated, technologized, abstract, distanciated; over the years, interaction and communication take place through remote-controls, loudspeakers, Plexiglas windows, one-way mirrors, surveillance cameras, biometric strip readers, binoculars peeping out of watch-towers, and so on. It is a process that empties one’s individuality, since it renders ‘identity’ a bureaucratic measure and abstracts the subject from the object determining the identification (be it a soldier, or, increasingly, what seems to be an invisible force). A Palestinian, for the most part, does not deal with their ‘oppressor’ directly, nor even with a regime per se, but with the architecture pressing down on them, squeezing them between various metal and concrete formations. The consequence of indirect interaction with soldiers is that people increasingly take out their frustrations on each other (whether about running late, the checkpoint’s presence, the occupation’s abstraction, colonialism’s expansion, or whatever). Solitude is experienced by being spatially and temporally segregated, but it is also more profound, for it is an aloneness that renders impossible a collective response or resistance. Merchants, who have been ‘working’ at the checkpoint for more than a decade, now arguably have a broader view of these changes. Ayman has been running a coffee/food stand at Qalandia since 2002, and whenever I am at the checkpoint, especially early in the morning, Ayman and I share a coffee and cigarette. On one such cold rainy morning in the winter of 2015, we were listening to news of impending snow. It brought back a shared memory: ‘You remember during that snowstorm we had snowball fights with the soldiers! Now there is no soldier to throw a snowball at. We neither see them nor even know if they’re coming or going,’ he said. That morning, like almost every other weekday, Ayman and I watched as hordes of men with work permits inside Israel made their way to the checkpoint – some of whom would buy a coffee from Ayman.

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The crowd around 5 am is a haunting scene. Although all are collectively facing the same conditions (exploited labourers in Israel, forced to pass through the checkpoint, sharing a politically unstable future) they jostle and push each other to get ahead in the queue, trying to beat the clock, although the clock here is the click of the remotecontrolled turnstile. They have no control over their time: they do not know if they will get to work on time (if at all), and they must wait for their turn to come through the first turnstile, into the corridor, and through the next turnstiles. This kind of instituted order is suggestive of what Bourdieu (2000: 229) refers to as absolute power, which ‘has no rules, or rather its rule is to have no rules – or, worse, to change the rules after each move, or whenever it pleases’. In the meantime, there is no sense of togetherness: these atomized beings are really a mass that will inevitably become further fragmented by the turnstiles. There is palpable corporeal frustration, especially during high-traffic times, that did not exist in previous years, before turnstiles, before tight corridors, before soldiers were hidden behind opaque windows and walls. ‘There’s a brawl every morning! People fight each other even though they’re all in the same situation,’ Ayman confirms. As we continue the conversation, he expounds, ‘There is a perfectly logical way of explaining what is going on. People are taking their frustration out on each other because there is no other room for them to do so. Neither can they fight against the occupation forces, nor can they fight against the [Palestinian Authority].’ Notwithstanding the critique against the Palestinian Authority, Ayman was alluding to the shrinking possibilities of where, when and how ‘resistance’, or even simply frustration, can be expressed. What he was also suggesting is how connection is structured through the regime of the checkpoint itself: disconnecting people, putting one into competition with the other, suspending the possibility for resistance, emptying one’s existence in a phenomenological sense by atomizing individuals and a larger collective from one another. Fabian’s coevalness is not even a distant possibility here, it just simply is not. Neither communication, nor community nor the formation of a public – and thus any political change – is possible. It bears mentioning here that even communication by the use of technology, such as through mobile phones, is not possible, for Israeli policies mean that there are no cellular signals available at checkpoints (Tawil-Souri 2015). That pervasive sense of frustration and anger foretells the resignation that means that this is what one must go through now. As I stand with Ayman, contemplating his explanation, I am reminded of what a taxi driver mentioned years ago, in 2003. Staring at a queue of cars stretching

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for more than a kilometre in a rural area in the northern West Bank, he was exasperated. ‘Wow!’ he whistled, staring at the long and immobile line, ‘our national struggle is shrinking. It used to be fighting against the occupation. Now we feel victorious if all we do is get through the checkpoint!’ If, thirty years ago, the dream was to overthrow the entire occupation, fifteen years ago it was to be able to get from one part of the country to another without checkpoints. By the 2000s, it had contracted to simply getting through the checkpoint, if at all. Today, most Palestinians do not even attempt to get through a checkpoint. A man born in Jaffa, who was living in Ramallah, explained to me in November 2014, ‘I am old now, I am allowed to get a permit to visit Jaffa [Israel more easily provides permits for people aged over 65 years]. I always imagined that I would fly at the first chance. But I haven’t been, because I can’t bear having to go through Qalandia [checkpoint].’ The sense of imprisonment is figurative as well: fighting against the system of Israeli occupation and colonialism seems increasingly impossible. The most poignant remark remains a statement made by a young woman in 2003: I get there [the checkpoint]. I see them [the soldiers], I see the gun, I forget everything I had just told myself [about wanting to resist the soldiers] … I see the huge line [of people waiting] and my thoughts, my strength evaporate. Nothing. I feel beaten before my turn has even come.

Considering how the checkpoint – let alone the larger political situation – has become so much more intractable, over a decade later, the young woman’s incapacitation makes for a bleak prognosis. However, her words echo across the taxi driver’s statement of shrinking possibilities and the old man’s resignation. The significance is tremendous, and is best stated in a recent joke: ‘The Arab Spring was on its way to Palestine, but got held up at a checkpoint’ (Abourahme 2016: 129).

The regime of the moment The checkpoint enforces a particular experience of time that is separated and alone, driven by political forces that divide, dislocate, discombobulate. Palestinians remain hanging as ‘temporary subjects’ of the occupation, where the past has been pulled from under their feet, where time is disintegrated from its being endured, where the

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future is a dead-end. Mbembe (2008) calls ‘emergent time’ the feeling of absence in which both past and future horizons are fading, but the checkpoint demonstrates how these have already faded. It is a more pessimistic reading, to be sure, especially if read alongside the temporal displacement or dispossession under which both internally and externally displaced Palestinians have been excluded from past and future times (Mattar 2014: 109). This is the regime of the moment. It is not simply a state of in-betweenness towards an anticipated future, because what lies ahead is not a probable outcome but a certainty: of being inside the turnstile, inside the checkpoint, of doing this again tomorrow – the only element of surprise is not whether it will happen, but when, and at what speed. As such, a checkpoint makes Palestinian temporality stand still: people must wait, landscapes (see Figure 1.5) are obliterated, connections between one place and another are severed,

Figure 1.5  Checkpoint landscape.

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the continuity between one time and another is amputated, political concerns zoom in on trying to get through the checkpoint, or to survive within its confines, rather than contending with the more macroscopic affairs of an entire territory or nation. The logic of simultaneously ingathering and segregating Palestinians, displacing anger and aggression towards each other, and suspending them as such for an unknown period of time and without any assurance that the whole process is not going to occur all over again, down the street or later that afternoon, and having one’s time held in suspense is the Palestinian predicament par excellence. Since 1948, ‘all Palestinians share an experience of suspended time that lacks normal continuity. All Palestinian communities everywhere confront the same temporality crisis: a festering sense of temporariness, the suspension and emptying of time, of waiting’ (Jamal 2010a: 19– 20). Waiting is a permanent companion, and, equally, permanent temporariness is the dimension that characterizes Palestinian life. However, it is not simply for those chopped up by checkpoints, nor only those under curfew, whom Darwish’s poem evokes, nor only for the refugees for whom waiting has become permanent, but for all Palestinians. Drawing on Palestinian cinema and literature, Yaqub (2012) declares that Palestinians are always on the road, a road that leads to nowhere (in her explanation the condition of having one’s identity shaped by aspirations for a homeland, rather than by the founding of a state, is metaphorically rendered as an ongoing journey in process). Palestinians are collectively in-waiting, and, as Darwish hints, they are in-waiting for the waiting to end. For Palestinians, waiting is more than waiting – it is prolonged, it is unending, it often takes one back in time, leaving one in that sensation of being left behind in history, of chasing outdated dreams. At the same time, waiting is less than waiting: akin to remission, quiescence, discharge, exemption. This kind of waiting is evocative of ‘prison time’. As Hardt (1997: 64) suggests, prison time is an ‘obvious form of punishment in our world’, and is a temporal nothingness that exists purely as a sentence, a punishment. Of course, there is no crime that the Palestinians have committed, nor is there an elaborate calculus for how much time their ‘crime’ equals (even if these are arbitrarily decided, there are generally matrices: theft equals six months, murder equals ten years, etc.) Palestinians’ temporal experience is not simply arbitrary (albeit it is driven by a colonial logic), but is also temporarily perpetual. There is a useful lesson in comparing prison time, and that is the phenomenological experience. ‘Inmates live prison as an exile from

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life, from the time of living,’ Hardt (1997: 65) suggests; they are forced, he continues, ‘to grapple with one of the most intense metaphysical problematics and they suffer a properly ontological malady. They are constrained to an existence separate from being – this is their exile from living’ (Hardt 1997: 66). Without the ability to ‘own’ their temporality, they cannot be. If prison time is one comparison, unemployed time is another. Bourdieu’s (2000: 223) analysis of the unemployed’s time posits how uncertainty about the future is an uncertainty about one’s social being, and, how the ‘[t]he extreme dispossession of the sub-proletarian […] brings to light the self-evidence of the relationship between time and power’. The unemployed ‘can only experience the free time that is left them as dead time, purposeless and meaningless’ (Bourdieu 2000: 222). If time – per Heidegger – is time to do something that, for the unemployed, there is no possibility of doing. The person becomes dispossessed of the power to give sense, in both senses, to their life, to state the meaning and direction of their existence, they are condemned to live in a time orientated by others, an ‘alienated time’. At the checkpoint, it is the soldier, the apparatus, the entire Israeli regime, in that click of the turnstile that dispossesses the Palestinian. For Bourdieu (2000: 237) too, the significance is profound: What truly is the stake in this game, is not the question of raison d’être […], but of a particular, singular existence, which finds itself called into question in its social being […]. It is the question of the legitimacy of an existence, and individual’s right to feel justified in existing as he or she exists. (Original emphases)

The unemployed person – as the imprisoned – is a person without a future, ‘living at the mercy of what each day brings and condemned to oscillate between fantasy and surrender, between flight into the imaginary and fatalistic surrender’ (Bourdieu 2000: 221). Whether unemployed or imprisoned, the experience of time is suspended under the control of a dominant force. So too for Palestinians. ‘Palestinians cannot foresee the duration or the outcome of waiting. Time has stopped, robbing them of their individuality as subjects’ (Jamal 2010a: 15). Here, the checkpoint is evocative of so much more than itself, stripping life of everything but the time of waiting, waiting for that waiting’s end, which is isolated, cut off, estranged from one another in a present that is at a halt. This is a trauma: it has become mundane, material, quotidian, repeated

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and eminently repeatable – one simply has to think of the series of Gaza ‘wars’, the series of peace talks and negotiations, the series of land expropriations for settlement growth, the generations of citizenshipless refugees, the checkpoints.

Palestine at the checkpoint The checkpoint is significant because the form of temporality it engenders speaks to the larger Palestinian predicament, and how the control/loss over time has been an integral component, both of the conflict and of Palestinian life, since at least 1948. Palestinians, as a whole, are defined according to a disputed, and disrupted, timeline, externally forced upon them, first by the Zionist movement, then by the State of Israel. In fact, ‘Palestinian-Israeli politics, or more specifically the Zionist colonization of Palestine which defines these politics, is about nothing if not time’ (McMahon 2016: 5). As a national modern movement, Zionism nullified Palestinian time by declaring it to be empty of meaning, thereby suspending Palestinian time and replacing it with Jewish time.8 Palestinians experience a disrupted time because of a temporality and a history that are the consequences of a colonial yoke. The colonial predicament has historical roots, but it is ongoing. Policies instituted in the early days of the Israeli state have enduring impacts on Palestinians inside Israel, in the Palestinian Territories, as well as outside (particularly on refugees and exiles). In the immediate aftermath of 1948, Palestinians were categorized by the new Israeli state according to their location in space and time: laws about citizenship and land ownership were passed, not simply about who was or was not there, but when and for how long they were there (see Pappé 2006). Legal policies transformed time, making it measurable, making it into a thread separating different types of people, each moving along different chronological timelines (Jamal 2010a). Palestinians were fragmented into ‘sub-sectors, differentiated by a timerelated key’ (Jamal 2010a: 10): some were permitted Israeli citizenship upon proving that they were living in ‘Israel’ (i.e. in their own homes since before the state appeared) continuously between 1949 and 1952; some, whose land was expropriated, were rendered ‘present absentees’ (an oxymoron that is both spatial and temporal); and refugees exiled from their homeland were considered to live outside of Israeli time and outside of historical time – and they still do. While, certainly, law,

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territory and demography defined Israeli colonialism, the exacerbation of these structural inequalities were imposed and experienced at the level of time. Time is central to the practice of colonialism. When, in the course of colonial expansion, a Western body politic came to: occupy, literally, the space of an autochthonous body, several alternatives were conceived to deal with that violation of the rule. The simplest one, if we think of North America and Australia, was, of course, to move or remove the other body. Another one is to pretend that space is being divided and allocated to separate bodies […] Most often, the preferred strategy has been simply to manipulate the other variable – Time. With the help of various devices for sequencing and distancing one assigns to the conquered populations a different Time. (Fabian 1983: 29–30; original emphasis)

The control over Palestinian time continues to be critical to Israel’s colonial project. Following Wolfe (2001), if settler colonialism and invasions are structures, and not events, their very longevity defines the political life of their subjects (see also Scott 2004, 2013). In the meantime, new systems put in place since the 1967 occupation and, more recently, in the 1990s increase the layers of ways in which Palestinian temporality is determined. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are concomitantly the ‘eternal Jewish homeland’, and yet they are ‘temporarily occupied’. However, temporariness requires stages of progress towards an anticipated (better) future, whereas ‘temporariness’ here is experienced by generation after generation of Palestinians. Refugee camps were erected to be temporary, just as settlements were initially declared temporary – the growth and perpetuation of both, since the late 1940s and the 1960s, respectively, contravenes any claims to temporariness. Likewise, closure has been imposed as a temporary measure since 1991. Ophir and Azoulay (LinkManagerBM_REF_ONdn6V882009) draw this rhetoric to its logical end: because the occupation is temporary, Palestinians are governed as temporary human beings. The end of the conflict becomes displaced, but the end of Palestinians’ displacement, both spatially and temporally, is also displaced. While this critique seems to be targeted at the Israeli regime, the search for solutions on the part of the Palestinian officials and parties has become temporary too, permeating their own outlooks and actions and resulting in a foreclosure of the possibilities (Jamal 2010a, b; Abourahme 2016).

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‘Temporary’ has become part of the very logic of colonial governmentality. The concreteness and continuous material fortification of walls, by-pass roads, and, of course, checkpoints, bear Israeli colonialism’s permanency, hiding in plain sight. All of these presumably temporary schemes (refugee camps, closure, etc.) have morphed into longevity: they are structures of colonialism. In fact, it is the Israeli military’s terminology for checkpoints since 2005 that best demonstrates this structure, and specifically checkpoints’ spatial and temporal intractability: they are now called ‘terminals’. Palestinians are perceived – and perceive themselves – as being stuck in a system of settler colonialism that belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward. It is as though Palestinians have unfairly been left behind in the wake of history, which has granted others territorial sovereignty. This can translate into a sense of amazement, fury and hopelessness that settler colonialism is still happening, but if colonialism belongs to the dustbin of history, so too does the Palestinians’ chase of an outdated mode of liberation. Palestinians are also well aware – given the example of Israel – that territorial nationalism, even if the norm in world affairs, is rife with violence and exclusionary practices. Thus, Palestinians exist in a tragic situation that doubly belongs to the past, a countertimeliness that makes their situation seem especially perplexing.9 However, the central Palestinian predicament is of a disordered space–time, marked by, as Said (1985: 20) posited decades ago, ‘the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time’. Palestinians live within a disruption of the chronological continuum of past–present–future, and this temporal dis-formation undermines both the individual’s and society’s very sense of being. Palestinians’ temporality was yanked away, first, by the brutal slap of colonialism, followed by more layers of power: ongoing dispossession, exile, military rule, occupation, shrinking territory, ‘peace’ processes, curfews, bombing campaigns, checkpoints. Checkpoints, or rather, terminals, engender a radical disruption of time and space. Without a shared time and space, there is no communication, no community, no public. Palestine is stuck inside the checkpoint.

Notes 1 ‘Spring forward, fall back’ is a well-known North American mnemonic with which to remember which way clocks are to be set during Spring and Fall changes to and from daylight saving time (DST), respectively.

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2 I am using ‘in’ (towards Ramallah) and ‘out’ (of Ramallah) in the everyday manner in which it is employed; although the directionality of going in and out is problematic, since the checkpoint sits inside the West Bank. 3 Both Israel and the Palestinian Territories observed DST when this happened in Spring 2003. Israel switched on the same day as the European Union, and the Palestinian Territories not until two weeks later, with the rest of the Arab countries observing DST. Across the world, it is not uncommon for the switch to/from DST to take place at different times or on different days. Moreover, Israel has not been consistent in when it changes the clocks, and during some years it has skipped the change altogether. In fact, the issue is also related to temporality, bringing about a conflict between Judaic notions of time and the more secular Israeli-state ideas (Kellerman 1989: 94). 4 The politics of movement and waiting are also class matters, as they relate to economic conditions of possibility. Time is money, after all. This is seen in Bourdieu’s example of unemployed time discussed later. 5 Fabian’s critique is targeted at anthropology and the production of knowledge of the other. But in touching on how time is used for the purposes of distancing and othering, his intervention is extremely useful. 6 Consider Marx’s argument that class consciousness would arise not simply because of its conditions of exploitation (an ideological concern), and not simply because it could now gather in the factory floor (a spatial concern), but because it would do so at the same time and in a particular moment in historical time. 7 The spectre of Marx is here. In capitalism, time is an alienating principle that subordinates human beings under its law. As a result of modern industry, Marx argues, man becomes abstracted from all of his faculties, abilities and potentials, and becomes the embodiment of empty mechanical time. 8 Time was argued to be lost to the Jews because of historical events outside of their control. With the creation of a nation state time would be ‘returned’ to them (Herzl 1959), which becomes a core myth in Zionist political thought. In later Zionist narrative, the figure of the pioneer/ national hero would resurrect Jews from history to lead them on to their modern journey (see Zerubavel 1995). 9 There are important critiques to be waged here about nationalism, territoriality and globalization, the idea of progressive temporality that sections off that which belongs to the present and future from that which ought to be relegated to the dustbin of the past. Benjamin (1968/2003: 257), writing about fascism, explained that ‘the amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible […] is not philosophical [… ] it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable’.

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Scott, David (2013) Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sheller, Mimi (2015) ‘Historical temporality and generational identity: Of standoffs and stalled time’, Small Axe 46: 169–77. Tawil-Souri, Helga (2009) ‘New Palestinian centers: An ethnography of the “checkpoint economy”’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (3): 217–35. Tawil-Souri, Helga (2010) ‘Qalandia Checkpoint: The historical geography of a non-place’, Jerusalem Quarterly 42: 26–48. Tawil-Souri, Helga (2011) ‘Colored identity: The politics and materiality of ID cards in Palestine/Israel’, Social Text 29 (2): 67–97. Tawil-Souri, Helga (2015) ‘Cellular im/mobilities: Dis/connecting telephone calls in Israel-Palestine’, in Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, John B. (1995) Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Virilio, Paul (1986) Speed and Politics. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Weizman, Eyal (2012) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso Books. Wolfe, Patrick (2001) ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Yaqub, Nadia (2012) ‘Utopia and dystopia in Palestinian circular journeys from Ghassan Kanafani to contemporary film’, Middle Eastern Literatures: Incorporating Edebiyat 15 (3): 305–18. Zerubavel, Yael (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zureik, Elia, David Lyon and Yasmine Abu-Laban (eds) (2010) Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 2 ‘O U R C H I L D R E N A R E A T H R E AT ’ : P U B L IC S A N D T H E P O L IC I N G O F C U LT U R A L TEMPORALIT Y IN EGYPT Ramy M.K. Aly

If we documented the shit we have to go through every day it would make you stay in bed, but this is our reality now and … we are going to deal with it. I personally have no intention of closing today, or tomorrow, or to stop working … I believe I am doing the right thing … my only fears really are losing the language to be in the same space as other people. But legally, ‘khalas’ (that’s it), if they decide … this time [November 2014, crackdown] and it was really harsh on us, the only reason that I, I will not stop and there is nothing I can do … I’m going to cry now. If I am doing everything that I can, if my paperwork is ‘in order’ and they still want to stop me … fine … they will do it, but I will not do it myself. I will not stop myself from working. This is the conviction that makes me come to work every day, and you have to always ask yourself, am I doing my best? Yes! We are living in an absurd situation, but don’t let what is happening to you on the inside stop you! (Mariam, performance art activist) We thought we were going to get raided all the time, there was this constant question of whether … Is this worth it? And we weren’t even frontline, it’s highly unlikely that it was going to happen, but we still needed to take precautions, to be prepared to know the number of lawyers, to make sure we were ready for it. What was constant during this period was insomnia, not being able to eat, being angry with your child. Is the unhappiness worth it? Is rotting in jail worth it? (Fatin, campaigner on alternative histories)

These voices reflect the fear and precariousness that the Egyptian state has sought to instil among those people who are associated with what I describe as the January Counterculture. While successive crackdowns on civil society and dissident voices have been an intrinsic part of the

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Egyptian government strategy for decades, I focus on efforts to stifle and silence dissent since the popular coup of July 2013. The accounts above relate to a particularly concerted crackdown that took place in November 2014, when the government announced that a revised ‘Associations Law’ was coming into effect. The period between the fall of the Mubarak regime in February 2011 and the July 2013 popular military coup was an interregnum when many young people took the ideas and energy that animated the 25th January Revolution1 and transformed them into tangible interventions, projects and initiatives that were designed to bring about the socio-cultural and political change that they sought. A flood of protest movements, political coalitions, advocacy groups, culture and arts collectives, citizen journalists and other forms of activism flourished. I argue that, together, these constitute a countercultural assemblage, albeit one that is loose and diverse. The existence and activities of some of these groups may predate the 25th January Revolution but, nonetheless, they were active in it, or were inspired and emboldened by it and, importantly, they have come to be seen as being analogous with it. In the months that followed the fall of the Mubarak regime, advocacy groups, culture and arts collectives, citizen journalists and other kinds of cultural activists were quickly approached by European and American philanthropic and development agencies, who offered a seemingly endless supply of ‘Arab Spring’ funding opportunities. The ensuing professionalization, institutionalization and financialization rapidly led an important part of this counterculture away from the possibilities of grass roots and DIY to dependency on foreign donors for the survival of their projects. Bayat (LinkManagerBM_REF_ dF3aHTOS2013) has argued that this overall approach to political and cultural change is better described as a ‘refolution’, rather than as a ‘revolution’. Here, I offer a complementary reading whereby the January Counterculture was transformed into a nascent ‘third sector’2 (see Sakr 2006). Although this nascent third sector contributed richly to forging new visions, forms of expression and participation; the connections between the January Counterculture and foreign philanthropic, cultural diplomacy and the development agencies became a significant legal and cultural liability. The Egyptian government and the military have for decades been the largest recipients of foreign aid; nonetheless, these very same benefactors have effectively criminalized relationships between international donors and Egyptian civil society. A time-honoured and intricately layered repertoire of foreign agendas, treason and espionage

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turned those working in the nascent counterculture/third sector into reliable and recognizable ‘folk devils’ (Cohen 1972). The January Counterculture and the Muslim Brotherhood became equivalent, despite their inherently divergent visions and praxis, to form a seditious ‘fifth column’. What both the Muslim Brotherhood and the January Counterculture were seen to share was a desire to demilitarize Egyptian politics, economics and public life. As the security state and its adherents saw it, the 30 June (2013) ‘revolution’ was a popular movement that reflected mass opposition to the ‘destruction of the Egypt military, which is seen as being synonymous with the Egyptian state’ (see Aly 2012). The November 2014 crackdown on civil society, spurred by the Associations Law coming into force, had come almost one year to the day after the interim president, Adly Mansour, had ratified a new ‘Protest Law’ which effectively re-criminalized public assembly. The right to association and the right to public assembly, both central gains of the 25th January Revolution, had thus been undercut by counterrevolutionary ‘lawfare’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006) and a campaign for law and order. The Association Law and Protest Law were part of the consolidation of power by ‘the 30th June Alliance’ (tahaluf thalatheen yunyu), and with them the authorities would liquidate the Muslim Brotherhood’s presence on the streets and then paralyse their institutional network of charities, associations, schools and businesses. However, it was quickly made clear that these laws equally sought for the containment and control of a constituency that had played an active role in the overthrow of both the Mubarak and Muslim Brotherhood regimes, namely, the January Counterculture. The revised Associations Law sought to control what civil society organizations could do and how they could be funded, and they introduced heavier prison sentences and fines. Some within the nascent third sector reacted to this by shutting up shop, others suspended their activities or abandoned their offices, others still adopted a kind of radio silence, suspending email and telephone communications while waiting to see what would happen, but far more continued to work within a spectrum of obdurate resolve, others, meanwhile, suffering from anxiety, insomnia and panic attacks. Asad (LinkManagerBM_REF_TdRJooKz2012) has argued that young revolutionaries in Egypt may appear to have radical demands while sharing a core set of assumptions about the desirability of a liberal, democratic state with an establishment culture, not least because they are a product of it. It has long been recognized that the rise of

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countercultures represents the splitting of the bourgeoisies (see Roszak 1970; Martinez 2003). However, we must take pains to understand the actual points of confluence and divergence in the relationship between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘counterculture’. I do not share Asad’s views that Egypt’s establishment culture desires a liberal democracy, an assertion that I will try to demonstrate in this chapter. In order to elaborate further on the points of confluence and divergence, I explore why activities like street performance, alternative histories, academic research and media development initiatives (to name just a few) should constitute such an existential threat to the Egyptian state. In order to do so, I will bring together two sets of material; the first explores the experiences and narratives of people whose work is associated with the politics and modes of expression of the January Counterculture; I compare and contrast these with the narratives and discourses that emerge from a number of congresses held by the incumbent president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and key elite syndicated constituencies in the early days of his presidential election campaign in May 2014, namely ‘the artists’, ‘the literati’ (almuthaqafin) and ‘the broadcasters’ (al-Eʾlamiyin). In so doing, I attempt to demonstrate that what I term the January Counterculture, on the one hand, and the establishment culture, on the other, share fundamentally divergent temporal visions in relation to the state and culture. This divergence, I will argue, means that the modes of publicness, expression and organization of the January Counterculture constitute a pressing and fundamental threat to Egypt’s 64-year-old military republic. The subject of this chapter was not one of choice. It came about as a result of the cultural politics that I now seek to elaborate. I had set out to conduct ethnographic research on a provincial media collective that I consider to be part of the January Counterculture. True to form, they established themselves in 2011 in the wake of the revolution, and a year later they had started publishing weekly tabloid newspapers in a number of villages, towns and non-metropolitan cities across the country, capturing the talk of the town through local journalists and for a local readership. However, as I prepared for fieldwork in late 2013 a culture of fear and suspicion of all things ‘January’ had descended upon Egypt. Fearing for their safety and my own, my interlocutors saw me as a liability and they ultimately refused to host me. My ethnographic fieldwork did not take place and I experienced what I now understand to be a form of ‘ethnographic failure’, and so it is to that failure that I must first turn.

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Ethnographic failure The 25th January Revolution brought with it a recognition on the part of Egypt’s mainstream media and cultural industry that the centralized Cairo-based structures of printing, television and music had to do more to reach the millions of people in Egypt’s governorates (see Aly 2012). Most of the attempts to engage these regions by commercial and stateowned media were very short lived; in contrast, the small-scale media development initiatives had the perseverance to address that imbalance. I was drawn to one such media collective. Although it was based in Cairo, the collective itself was quickly devolving the management of local papers and was innovating with new journalistic practices. The whole endeavour reflected the continuity and change in the relationship between the governorates and the national centre in Cairo. Each weekly edition of the tabloid papers had to be emailed to Cairo, where stateowned newspapers still maintain a monopoly on newspaper printing. Fresh off the press in Cairo, the papers would be bundled up and sent in taxis, coaches and microbuses to the villages and towns from whence they came, to be distributed to their local readers. So it was to a town in Upper Egypt that I intended to travel and conduct fieldwork. I felt that the best way to capture all of this was through ethnographic film. The collective itself welcomed my interest and we discussed how the filming could be collaborative and could contribute to their wider aims. I aimed for the summer of 2013; however, national politics soon imposed its own imperatives. The Morsi presidency was effectively ended in three days of mass demonstrations that were underwritten by the Egyptian armed forces and intelligence agencies. Almost immediately after the 3 July Putsch what it was possible to say and do in public became dramatically constrained.3 Egypt’s commercially owned private media had played a crucial role in turning public opinion against the Muslim Brotherhood and now led a chorus of nationalist jingoism that idealized both the military and the police as the saviours of the nation. The airwaves were awash with footage of the Egyptian armed forces in combat exercises, commandos abseiling down burning buildings, F-16s flying in formation, helicopters and battleships firing missiles, troops crossing the Suez Canal in 1973, all set to a chorus of patriotic music produced by Om Kalthoum, Abdel Halim, and an endless stream of contemporary ‘patriotic’ pop songs. Journalists from the provincial newspaper collective documented the injuries they sustained, together with the destruction of cameras and equipment, as they were chased, and often assaulted, by members

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of the public and the security services in equal measure. As Rasha Abdalla, Professor of Journalism at the American University in Cairo (AUC), put it to me ‘… the problem today is that if you are carrying a camera on the street it’s not just the state that will go after you, it’s the people, “al-muwatineen al-shurafaa” (honourable citizens)’. I delayed fieldwork a full six months, but as the date approached I was advised by my contact at the media collective that filming was still ‘not a good idea at the moment’. I concluded that this was no time to be wandering around with a camera putting myself and those hosting me in unnecessary danger. The longer I waited for things to settle, the more Egypt’s deeply entrenched militarism defined public discourse and silenced any form of dissent. By the spring of 2014, thousands of people who were believed to be members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the state now labelled as a terrorist organization, were under politically motivated detention. Scores of young activists had been jailed for defying the new Protest Law. Student demonstrations at university campuses around the country were first labelled as the work of the Muslim Brotherhood and were then violently suppressed.4 The 6th April Movement, which had played a central role in the 25th January Revolution, had been banned after a court ruled that it too was a terrorist organization.5 Journalists, both local and international, had been arrested in unprecedented numbers, many without any formal charges.6 Even the football ‘Ultras’, who had animated protests against both the Mubarak and Morsi regimes, were to be labelled as terrorist groups and banned.7 The announcement of the new Associations Law that was to come into effect in November 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of my fieldwork. As Mariam and Fatin related at the outset of this chapter, panic ensued across the nascent third sector of charities, advocacy groups and initiatives. The camera, now effectively criminalized, meant that the ethnographic film had to be abandoned. I hoped that I could go back to basics; all I needed was the hospitality of the media collective and a notebook, which I would only take out in the safety of my lodgings in the town. I asked the head of the newspaper collective, ‘Could I spend a month or so at the [Anon] office?’ ‘As you are aware, times are tense and, at best, unclear. The idea of embedding someone in our offices who is clearly not from the community, for as much as three to four weeks, is not something that sounds right at this time … at most you could have limited access (a day or two) at one of the papers in one of the larger towns, but not in the rural areas.’ I was disturbed by the notion that fieldwork was understood to be a form

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of embedding, an insidious term borrowed from war reporting. ‘Could I interview some of your readers or subscribers?’ ‘That wouldn’t be a good idea, perhaps if you gave us the questions you were interested in we could interview them on your behalf ’ came the answer. As I explored the remaining options that might make this research possible and fruitful, I realized in no uncertain terms that the level of access that the collective was prepared to give me would be bereft of the ethnographic and the day-to-day. My visibility and presence, in any form, seemed to be a liability. Even basic questions that are a normal part of early fieldwork relations suddenly seemed to be problematic and capable of casting suspicion both upon me and on the media collective hosting me. I would have to lie about the grant I had received for the research, since ‘transparency’ in that matter would be tantamount to an admission of espionage. I would have to avoid saying that I worked at the AUC, as pro-regime media had singled out the university for strong criticism, even claiming that the university’s faculty received foreign research funding to ‘spy on Egypt’, and ‘train’ Muslim Brotherhood youth to ‘demolish the state’, schooling its students in ‘unpatriotic ideas’.8 All considerations of research ethics in the field would have to be sacrificed, as would any critical questions about media ownership and models, a fundamental aspect of research on community-based media. I was an anglophile academic in receipt of ‘foreign research funds’, trying to research a group that was, in one way or another, implicated by funding relationships that had been criminalized and that were the subject of periodic moral panics. To put it mildly, my research would have to be surreptitious, my own sense of being honest and open about myself with others would have to be sacrificed for half-truths, and probably for bare-faced lies. I felt that I would not be able to maintain the artifice required, and if I did I would, in a sense, confirm all the suspicions that many Egyptians harbour towards opponents, researchers and foreigners. My mind flashed back to a four-part series of public service announcements (PSA) produced by the military’s ‘Morale Affairs Administration’ and that was aired on Egyptian television channels in 2012.9 In the first PSA, a young man enters a shisha cafe, his nationality is unclear, he could be Egyptian, but, for an Egyptian audience, his fair features code him as being foreign. (Voiceover) From the outset, he knows why he is here and has identified his target … he will find his way into your heart, as if you have known him for a long time … He is able to obtain lots of sensitive information for free.

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‘The spy’ approaches a table where three young people sit (two females and a male). They are welcoming and friendly and invite the spy to join them. One of the females has a kuffieh wrapped around her neck, which identifies her as an activist or protestor. ‘When I was on the metro I heard them conspiring against the army!’ says one of the young females. ‘We have a [cooking] gas crisis,’ says the other. ‘We have a huge traffic problem, and prices are sky high!’ the young male offers. ‘Really!’ says the spy, in English and with an exaggerated look of glee on his face. (Voiceover) Who are you complaining to? And why expose ‘the heart of the country’ to him … you can’t confide in just anyone when you don’t know who he is and who is behind him.

The camera switches to the spy, who is shown sending a text message as he holds his smart phone, which is just out of sight under the table. (Voiceover) Watch what you say, every word has a price, every word could rescue the nation.

The three-part PSA series10 had clear and rather crude messages – the dissemination of information that is deemed ‘false’ or ‘inflammatory’ by the authorities is a fundamental threat to the nation state. The advertisements depicted young people as being either careless and naive or vicious and unpatriotic by inflating the figures of demonstrators, fraternizing with foreigners (read: spies) both in person and online, and hanging out the country’s dirty washing for all to see, while in the process ‘undermining the state’ and committing a crime.11 The PSAs were roundly ridiculed as ‘eʾlanat al-gawasees’ (the spy adverts) and they were pulled from the air after two weeks. By 2014, it seemed that the public mood was more accepting of the messages underpinning the campaign. I, along with countless others, now represented that suspicious figure whose politics, interests, ideas and connections outside Egypt constituted a threat to the nation itself (see Sholkamy 1999; Owens 2003; Borneman 2009). As an anthropologist, I was overtaken by a sense of hopelessness. The politics of the field was usually about representation and reflexivity. In this case, the politics of the field seemed far more visceral. My craft is based on the ability to develop relationships with people, yet now my interlocutors felt that I was a liability, even before I had arrived. The general atmosphere in the country, and the fears of the media collective, made me feel that the townspeople would look at me with suspicion and

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with a tinge of xenophobia for my ‘not Egyptian enough’ presentation. ‘The field’, which had been so accessible and full of promise just months earlier, was now inaccessible and hostile – I had just experienced ‘ethnographic failure’ (see Shaffir and Stebbins 1991; Ahmed 2000; Phipps 2005). In his overview of anthropology in Egypt between 1900 and 1967, Hopkins (2015: 137) recalls that: after 1967 there were problems getting research permission, as security issues loomed ever larger. These problems affected foreign and local researchers, though doubtless differently. Foreigners were not allowed to travel freely in the countryside. In 1970 on a visit to Luxor I was not allowed to leave the city limits, and it was the carriage driver who enforced the rule … Egyptian researchers often did their research in areas where they were personally known, such as their home village. The result was a period during which little research was done, especially in the countryside.

Between October and December 2014, a spate of incidents involving ‘honourable citizens’ took place that coincided with the crackdown on non-governmental organizations. Journalists, tourists and people voicing what were seen as opinions that undermined the narrative that what Egypt had experienced was a corrective revolution (on 30 June 2013) were being subject to citizen arrests or being delivered to the police as spies.12 In a return to the practices of the mukhabarat state (‘surveillance state’) ‘al-muwatineen al-shurafa’ driven by nationalist zeal had once again become instruments of state surveillance and regulation (see Aswany 2012; Fadl 2015). I could not escape Hopkins’ reference to 1967. As in 1967, the 25th January Revolution (2011) heralded a crisis for a particular political vision, style of leadership and mode of governance. As Hopkins seemed to foretell, I was forced to turn my ethnographic attentions closer to home.

Art for art’s sake and the cultured citizen-soldier Mariam and Dina run a performance art group from a suburb of Cairo. Their project aims to break the elitism and Cairo-centric nature of the Egyptian art scene by providing local artists from across the country with opportunities to perform in public spaces in the areas in which they live. Their project came into being in 2011, and their first

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performance in a public space took place in early 2012. Both agreed that their experience was very positive and that audiences in public spaces were, for the most part, welcoming. Mariam believed that a large part of their success related to the fact that their performances were ‘simple stories’, and ‘our statement is to have no statement … from the start, we have emphasized that we are not doing anything political’. Between 2012 and late 2013, they were able to organize performances in public spaces without seeking security clearance or permission from the authorities. By 2014, they were no longer willing to take that risk. Mariam and Dina did not feel that seeking permission to perform was in itself an infringement; indeed, they had successfully applied on a number of occasions. For Mariam, the matter was not simply a case of securitization, it was, in her words, ‘the lack of references’. What they had encountered quite regularly was the incomprehension of local authorities and the police towards the kind of art and performances that they were organizing. Mariam: When we applied for permissions, they would ask, ‘What will you be saying?’ ‘Are there any lyrics, can we read them?’ ‘Is it a play, can we read it?’ … They were not really interested in the idea of protecting us on the street; they were more interested in what we might be saying. Even when we were given permission, the authorities were puzzled, they don’t understand what we mean when we say that there will be giant puppets, and a percussion band, or that we were not selling tickets and that the performance moves in the streets … They don’t understand why we want to do this in a public place. Why aren’t we doing this in one of the ‘Qusoor al-Thaqafah’? [literally: ‘cultural palaces’, venues run by the Ministry of Culture]. Why do we want to do this in a poor neighbourhood, or in a public park or square? We try to explain to them that people never attend anything at the ‘cultural palaces’ … But, for them, the ‘cultural palaces’ are safe, because they are government owned and no performance there will involve anything the authorities don’t agree with. We always have to make sure they understand that we are not doing anything political. Dina: Most of what people associate with what happens in public spaces is political, you know … related to activism or a political message, and there is always a feeling that people have that art has a message, so people ask, ‘What is your message?’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ ‘Surely there must be a political message?’ The question about art having a political message comes up a lot! … When we

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were doing a workshop in [Anon] people were asking about what kind of message we wanted to put out, while we were saying ‘we just want people to perform different kinds of art, nothing more.’ But they would come back and say, ‘Well, what do you want people to be educated with?’ Mariam: This has something to do with history, with the arts scene in different governorates, people think of the ‘haraket al-thaqafah aljamahiriyah’ [the movement for popular culture] that was started in the 1960s by Nasser. This was clearly a state initiative, but also with the clear intention of educating people, in the sense that the state is teaching you how to be a cultured person, a person with taste, it always has this message ‘I am educating you’ … and that is what has existed, and it is the venue that many local artists want to perform in. They don’t see the cultural palaces as we do, as these mediocre places that we want nothing to do with. For the local and young artists these are places that they have to perform in to get recognized. Even young artists feel that way because, at a certain point [in history] those state-sponsored places, like the cultural palaces and cultural clubs, did a really good job, especially in the governorates, and they really did help to produce talent. There is also this issue of recognition, so the young artist starts in one of these cultural clubs, or by performing at the cultural palace, and then eventually makes his/her way to the Opera House in Cairo.

For Mariam and Dina, the Nasser-era cultural apparatus had become increasingly irrelevant and represented a bygone mode of cultural production and state patronage. Their vision of public art and culture promotes a non-hierarchical ‘art for art’s sake’ that seeks to break free of the constraints and formalism of state-sponsored art and its developmental modernism. Their work frames art and public performance in terms of the carnivalesque, a genre that is reliant on the right to public spaces. It was no coincidence that the carnivalesque flourished in Egypt between 2011 and 2013. However, with the changing political environment, the unquestioned ‘right to the city’ which the 25th January Revolution heralded, was quickly fading away (see Abaza 2015). Although this had created certain challenges for their work, they persevered. As Dina put it, they were not trying to conquer public spaces: ‘we are trying to share them and we try to understand.’ They were promoting a form of public performance that was, on the whole, new, and they constantly changed the way they worked to accommodate the sensibilities of the audiences

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and the obsequious demands of state officials who were obsessed with cultural and political ‘security’. Dina and Mariam’s inoculating claim that what they were doing was ‘not political’ had a familiar and troubling undertone. Arab mukhabarat states have historically created an aversion to all matters political among their subjects, leading to various phrasings of the statement ‘Ma lahu bʾilsiyasa’ (‘He/she has no interest in politics’) as a standard social anodyne (Aly 2015: 134). There was a certain futility in their inoculating claim. Their most formidable challenge seemed to be the necessary politics of art in Egypt. Perhaps what they meant to say was that their work had nothing to do with the ‘politics’ of the 25th January Revolution. Whether or not they intended it, Mariam and Dina’s understanding of aesthetics and politics diverged significantly from that held by the cultural establishment. In May 2014, the incumbent president, el-Sisi, held a congress with ‘the artists’ in which they expressed their vision of the role of art in public life after what they saw as the ‘30th June Revolution’. Adel Imam, one of Egypt’s most celebrated comedians, offered the following: Your Excellency Field Marshall el-Sisi, in the days of the late President Nasser, we used to have something given to us by Dr Safwat Okasha, one of Egypt’s great intellectuals and a military officer. He created something called the ‘cultural palaces’ [applause]. These palaces produced a huge number of artists, authors, poets, people of letters and thinkers … these palaces have been ruined, we must return to these palaces, there must be a place for talented people to express themselves … there must be artistic education at school and opportunities for young people to express themselves … I have seen many crises in Egypt, but never anything as we have experienced in the last three years, when I saw the country in a complete state of implosion, were it not for the fact that we are an authentic nation and the army truly loves the people and is the pillar of this society [applause]. From the days of the Pharaohs to Muhammed Ali, all the cultural prodigies came from the army, the most important advocates of enlightenment have come from the military …13

The cultural and political establishments see the key to national redemption, after 2013, in the resurrection of the Nasserist cultural machinery and in extolling the qualities of militarized culture. At the same congress, the late Nour el-Sherif, another celebrated icon, laid bare the avowed role of Egypt’s artists in public life.

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I want to say something about the role of the arts … When I was a student at the Institute [of Dramatic Arts], Mr Galal al-Sharqawi produced a play called ‘inta iliqatalt alwahsh’ (You Have Slain the Monster), written by Ali Salem. It’s a play about the Naksa [setback, calamity] of the (19)67 [war] told within a Pharaonic setting. The ruler was muddled (after the national defeat) so he called the people to congregate in order to consult them, so that each person could voice their opinion. Muhammad Nouh was playing the part of ‘the artist’. He said, ‘May I speak?’ ‘Speak … ’ (replied the ruler) ‘Are you Senefru the artist?’ ‘No’ came the answer, ‘I’m an Osta (master craftsman) in the workshop that produces human beings’ [applause]. So when I give artists freedom, serious artists, artists who have a position on life, have a position on justice, who love the poor, it is certain that they will build an army; and to complete the words of ‘the artist’ in the play, ‘I will produce a people that you can go to war with’ in order to overcome the Naksa [applause].

For el-Sherif, the congresses held by the Pharaonic ruler in Ali Salem’s play after a catastrophic national defeat is identical to that held by el-Sisi in 2014. Both Imam and el-Sherif make an implicit analogy between the 1967 Naksa and the 25th January Revolution. Furthermore, according to both celebrities, what the arts should seek to produce is not just a ‘cultured citizen’ but a ‘battle-ready cultured citizen-soldier’. Dina and Mariam saw the same period very differently. I have described the period between 2011 and 2013 as being an interregnum, that break in the time of the state and its norms of governmentality that provided many young people with an opportunity to promote and practise a new kind of public art and to nurture a new type of audience. When I asked Dina and Mariam whether they would start their project again today, in 2015, they felt that it would not be possible. As a significant body of literature suggests, unregulated public spaces can become sites of public engagement and deliberation between strangers (Lefebvre 1995; Bayat 1997, 2003; St John 2003; Harvey 2013). It is no coincidence that the period in which Dina and Mariam were free to experiment with audiences in public spaces corresponds to the disappearance of the police force from Egyptian streets, that is, between 28 January 2011 and late 2013. The Egyptian cultural and political establishment sees the 2011 revolution as the cathartic culmination of four decades during which al-mashrouʾ al-watani al-misri (the Egyptian national project) and al-aql al-misri (‘the Egyptian mind’) have been conspired against and

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eroded by unidentified enemies, both from within and without. This was well illustrated by el-Sisi during the same congress: Nation-states have a lifespan, we had a Nahda [renaissance] project until 1967, that project was attacked in 1967 with the express intent that we end up in the situation we are in today … That is the reality, a nation that used to have very promising (development) indicators, and at a time when the ‘five-year plan’ of 1962 was an example to others, like the Koreans. There was a (conspiratorial) desire amongst some that success should not continue – regardless of the policies that were adopted subsequently. I want to say that the ‘awareness’ that has been formed (al-waʾiy aladhi tashakal) in the last twenty-five to thirty years is not a ‘true awareness’ and, as a result, people perceive their reality in a way that does not fit with their reality.14

The writer and poet Fatima Naoot echoed el-Sisi’s narrative, during the conference between the incumbent president and the ‘al-Muthaqafeen’ (literally ‘the cultured’) in May 2014. For Naoot, the post-July 2013 project is ‘about how to revive the Egyptian mind’. She argues that ‘The Egyptian mind, which until … the generation of the 1960s was … a mind we could be proud of … minds that created all the great thinkers of the whole Arab region … that mind is today under threat, actually it has been intentionally dissolved’.15 For the former Minister of Culture, the playwright Jabir Asfour, who took part in the same congress, ‘Culture is the mind itself.’ The question for the incumbent president, el-Sisi, as he reasons it, was: How can you transform the minds of Egyptians so that they become soldiers who are capable of producing Egypt’s future? That is your challenge; and, by the way, this is not just the job of the Ministry of Education alone, or of the media alone, it is an entire system of institutions you must have in mind, the creation of a comprehensive cultural system.16

There is no sense of ‘art for art’s sake’ in these narratives of the cultural and intellectual establishments. For the establishment, art, culture and knowledge are elements of ‘national security’ and must thus be regulated and orchestrated with the aim of a mode of public mobilization, or hashd. The cultural politics of the Nasser era were part of a broader orientation towards authoritarian, nationalist and post-colonial developmentalism. As Crabbs (1975) and Reid (1990) demonstrate, for

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the Free Officers, development was understood as a kind of ‘technocratic utopia’ that was produced by military men and expert technicians. Art and culture were central to that project, but for Nasser, ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘knowledge for its own sake’ were the province of ‘civil humanists’, whom he characterized as a ‘politically irresponsible’ liberal elite (Reid 1990: 194). It was under Nasser that statist culture reached its peak with the establishment of the one party state (in 1953), the nationalization of the print media (in 1954, 1960), and the establishment of the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance (in 1958) (see also Gordon 2002). The result was the establishment of ‘eaʾlam al-hashd’ (the media of public mobilization), ‘Fann al-hashd’ (the art of public mobilization) and ‘thaqafat al-hashd’ (the culture of public mobilization) or, in the words of the former Minister of Culture, cited earlier, ‘a comprehensive cultural system’. To my mind, the repeated references to 1967 in the discourses of the cultural establishment should not be brushed aside lightly. These discourses constitute more than mere nostalgia, they represent a collective melancholia that is centred on a Nasserist ‘golden age’, a cultural time to which they seek to return (Aly 2015: 166–94). Art that is critical, dissident, satirical or even ‘apolitical’, as Dina and Mariam describe their work, is a hindrance to the national project of redemption in the eyes of el-Sisi and his devoted elite. It is in this sense that their work, and that of many others who form the January Counterculture, is necessarily political and is sometimes threatening. The management of this cultural and temporal orientation has the force of ‘lawfare’ in Ali Salem’s play behind it. Since the 1950s, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Culture have extended the powers of arrest to its officials in order to regulate cultural production, performance, screening and exhibition.17 In September 2015, the powers of search and arrest were extended to the Artists Syndicate18 and the Syndicate of Musicians.19 In November 2015, the Ministry of Culture’s agency for ‘Oversight on Audio and Audio-Visual Material’ (al-musanafat al-faniyah), the Tax Authority, the National Security Agency and the Ministry of Manpower raided the Contemporary Image Collective (a non-profit art organization that was founded in 2004) and Zero Productions (an independent production company that supports independent filmmakers).20 The following month, the Townhouse Gallery, the Rawabet Theatre and the independent publisher Merit were raided and shut down. In January 2016, Studio Emad El-Din, which offers rehearsal spaces for performing arts, was raided by the same government agencies, while its founder was briefly arrested for licence irregularities, but the studio did not suffer the same fate as others.21

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Since then, countless others have been prevented from performing and producing in the name of the regulation of art and culture for the sake of maintaining the cultural hegemony of the military state. The Nasserism of the el-Sisi regime, and the elites from which it draws its strength, has often been reduced to disputes about the accuracy, or actual historical correspondence, of the two figures, in terms of their character, ideology, economic policy, or their attitudes towards party politics or media freedoms. In these respects, there are similarities as well as significant differences. More interesting is the way that a form of cultural neo-Nasserism has come to represent a kind of transcendental moral politics that, in turn, reflects a statist temporal orientation which is shared by a cultural, literary and media establishment. Al-Jabri (2011) argues that there are two forms of motion in cultural time, that of motionless ‘dependence’ (al-iʾtimad), on the one hand, and the motion of ‘transference’, or ‘al-naqlah’, on the other. For al-Jabri (2011: 41), the motion of ‘dependence’ is based on al-turathia (heritage) and sukun (motionlessness), while the motion of ‘al-naqlah’ is that of transference ‘from one place to another, from one stage to another’. Following al-Jabri, I read these two forms of motion as representing modes of contesting cultural temporalities, although I doubt that he intended such a reading. Al-Jabri asserts that there is a relationship between the substructure of an uncontested episteme and ‘time’ and, in the process, he elaborates what he believes to be the ‘problems’ of Arab cultural time. Accordingly, the ‘zaman’ (time) of a culture reflects an epistemic structure that is so deeply embedded and uncontested that it ‘does not necessarily correlate with chronological time or sociopolitical time’, rather, it is ‘the time of unconsciousness’, ‘the time of dreams’ (al-Jabri 2011: 37). Al-Jabri’s formulations of culture and cultural time represent an abstracted metaphysics of culture. From an anthropological perspective, he fails to account for cultural time as a lived experience by obfuscating the everyday, the institutional and the social contexts that animate, cite, graft and assert particular kinds of cultural temporality. The cultural politics that I have described suggests that certain modes of expression and orientations towards culture can represent different and contesting modes of cultural temporality.

Knowledge for its own sake: The perils of disruptive histories If al-Jabri’s formulation of ‘motions’ in cultural time are to help make sense of the contestation in the cultural present, as I have described thus far in

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this chapter, then they need to be liberated from the intellectualist and antimaterialist framing that he imposes upon them. The motions of al-iʾtimad (dependence) and al-naqlah (transference) must be relational, everyday, carefully periodized and understood in reference to the multivalent operations of power in the social body. Gross (1985: 67) argues that ‘statist temporality’ seeks to organize collective memories and determines which ‘threads of continuity still linking the past to the present are to be maintained and which cut out’. In a similar vein to the way in which the Egyptian state deploys ‘lawfare’ to silence artists who were associated with the January Counterculture, the state has been equally concerned to regulate the knowledge produced about Egypt, not least about how the revolution is to be historicized. As Hall (LinkManagerBM_REF_ KYp5tlWh1997) argues, the desire to fix representational possibilities is the work of power and, in the case of Egypt, a militarized history remains that is jealously guarded by the state and by a loyal intelligentsia. Fatin’s passion is alternative and popular histories. In 2012, she started working on a project to engage young people from different backgrounds around the country in the creation of popular histories of the 25th January Revolution that could be retold as stories and plays. Fatin began her project by training her interlocutor’s senses so that they would look at ‘historical narratives critically … read between the lines … [and] locate silences in the narratives of event you think you know everything about’. Fatin’s experiences with alternative histories had shown her how peoples’ narratives of critical events in contemporary Egypt often challenged stratocratic historiography, in which the military and the police are depicted as both central and benevolent actors. During the conference between the incumbent president and ‘the cultured’, one of Egypt’s arch ‘intellocrats’ (Mehrez 2008: 61), the feted war reporter cum novelist, the late Gamal el-Gheitani, offered the following: The relationship between the army and the Egyptian state and the Egyptian people is an interactive relationship, if the army is in the ascendance, then Egypt ascends with it; and if it (the army) weakens, Egypt weakens with it … The demise of the Egyptian nation state means the demise of the entire Middle East and the demise of the entire Arab world. Our fate, and the fate of Egypt, and your fate (Abdel-Fatah el-Sisi) is that you are a bulwark, you … saved Egypt, you have saved the Arab world and the Islamic world.22

All historiography is partial, but what is unique about stratocratic history are the social, juridical and corporeal penalties of challenging

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it. Versions of history that question the benevolence of the military, its conduct, its place in the story of modern Egypt, are seen as being the fabrications of duplicitous Egyptians and foreign conspirators who either fundamentally ‘misunderstand Egypt’ or who seek to undermine the very foundations of the state itself. Indeed, nothing has shaken and outraged the Egyptian establishment more than the prominence of antimilitarism in the political culture of the January Counterculture, which has consistently called for the end of militarized politics, economics and culture, and continues to campaign for an end to military trials of civilians, and accountability for civilian deaths at the hands of the military police since 2011. Fatin’s project sought to question and complicate the way that the 25th January Revolution had been narrated by the Egyptian establishment as a case of a benevolent military institution that intervened to defend the will of the people. She also sought to challenge the idea that the 25th January Revolution was bloodless and was centred on Cairo. She aimed to do this by giving voice to the experiences and narratives of young people from around the country. Fatin was well aware that historiographical challenges to the state, its rhetoric and its narratives were, as she puts it, ‘too political’ in the current climate. It was not just the subversive nature of contesting the state’s narratives that was threatening; the economic and intellectual connections with the outside world that made her endeavour possible were regarded with equal suspicion. The fact that her endeavour was funded by foreign grant money created a complicated set of considerations for her engagement with young people. As Fatin puts it, ‘they have to know what we are doing, who is funding us, and their parents have to know what they are doing’. However, when both your politics and your mode of operation are construed as being suspicious, threatening, or even criminal, it is difficult to maintain the legitimacy that is needed to work in public. As Fatin went on to suggest, many people whose work is associated with the January Counterculture often have to conjure up ‘banal labels’ for what they are doing, and for why they are doing it, so as to make it more palatable to the public. Alternative histories have had to become ‘storytelling’, donors have to be described as ‘partners’, grants and funds are ‘service contracts’, and the not-for-profit projects have to be set up as limited liability companies. Revisionist or popular histories that break with the state’s own version are seen as being malevolent and conspiratorial. Indeed, academic research, particularly that which is informed by critical theory, is considered to be a suspicious activity. This is best put in the words of the

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incumbent president, who offered the following during his conference with the ‘al-muthaqafin’ (the literati) when one of those in attendance raised the issue of the large number of young people who were being detained or serving prison sentences following the 2013 coup. How can we prevent, how can I stop, my children from going inside [prison] and being arrested? I am prepared to accept that they express themselves, even if their opinions at that moment are mistaken, but I want them to be able to express themselves without taking the whole country into collapse with them. If we are to complete the picture, if someone is targeting Egypt, how will they target [Egypt]? Using research and studies that have been taking place over many years […] they have reached the very core of our society, they have entered into its nooks and crannies, […] they have identified its weaknesses and its strengths and they have started to work on how to exploit the weak points and to sideline the strengths in this society.23

El-Sisi constructs himself as being the tolerant patriarch who has been forced to imprison his ‘children’ in order to secure a greater good: the preservation of the Egyptian state. The expressive impulses of young people are ‘mistaken’ and an existential threat to the state. For el-Sisi, ‘research’ is a targeted form of ‘fourth generation’ psychological warfare, a notion that he has repeatedly relied upon.24 For el-Sisi, research on Egyptian society is designed to bring about the collapse of the Egyptian state and society from within, by exploiting the weaknesses of Egypt’s misguided youth. In other meetings, el-Sisi has gone further. During the congress between the incumbent president and ‘the broadcasters’, or ‘alEʾlamiyin’, one broadcaster questioned the incumbent president on the way in which many of Egypt’s youth had withdrawn from public life as a result of the media campaign that had ‘tarnished their image, accused them of being spies and of receiving foreign funding’.25 To this question the incumbent president had a lengthy and detailed answer, in which the ideas and modes of expression of the January Counterculture were synonymous with foreign espionage and the collapse of the state. When I used to sit with the representatives of the European Union and the United States and they would speak about civil society and the issue of foreign funding – I didn’t accuse anyone, but the very act of creating an awareness which does not correspond with Egypt’s ‘reality’ means that I am damaging that consciousness. I used to

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Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World say to them: you are coming to teach our children, and I am with you on that point … I mean democratic practice and change, and all that. Great, but teach them also that if the state collapses, there will be neither this nor that. Secondly, I would say to them: ‘you feel sorry for us, right?’ Ok, I wonder if it is in our interest (Egypt’s) that if we have problems, Egypt’s young people react to that problem (constructively) rather than just wanting to demonstrate on the streets.26

Here, el-Sisi equates basic political freedoms with the collapse of the state. As in previous statements, he cannot countenance that the ideas that animate the January Counterculture are their own. For him, they are the result of the indoctrination of naive and idealistic young people by foreign governments; ultimately, they are a form of false consciousness. Furthermore, he reduces the January Counterculture and all its ideas, modes and initiatives to the category of ‘disruptive protestors’. Fatin’s project did not involve demonstrations, and nor did mine, and yet we were both tarnished with the same brush and were considered to constitute an existential threat to the nation. Initially, she intended to run the workshops in Cairo. However, by 2014, she felt that ‘it would be really difficult to do anything in Cairo without attracting attention’. One of the strategies she adopted was to change the location of the workshops. While her work posed a risk both to herself and her interlocutors, Fatin was not deterred. All of this made me feel that I don’t want to make any compromises about the project; [it] was this opportunity to have some breathing space to ask questions that aren’t being asked enough, to really counter everything that we are going through … I didn’t want us to be indoors all the time, I did want us to feel unnatural about our presence, I didn’t want to have to think about that … I wanted it to be comfortable … if you are going to help a group of young people to think this way, surely you can’t do it in this place [Cairo], where there is the most control, where you can’t say things.

As with other initiatives and research agendas, the move outside Cairo made sense as a form of decentring. It was also a pragmatic move that was designed to side-step Cairo, the heartland of state control and regulation. Fatin’s workshops eventually ran in a location where the participants were free to walk around, talk openly and, importantly, interact with the local townspeople and discuss their histories and

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experiences. Fatin also adopted another strategy, namely, underpublicizing the workshops and the project. As she put it: We didn’t put up any posters. We didn’t publicize in any other way … in the end, that was good, because we got to talk openly and safely, and we could discuss our experiences of the revolution, this feeling of defeat and helplessness, and the political changes.

Ever decreasing but meaningful publics Fatin’s point struck a chord with what I had heard from Mariam, Dina and others. In 2014, Mariam and Dina also took the decision that they ‘shouldn’t do any publicity’ about their project because ‘eventually, people would ask who is funding the project and so we decided not to say anything, so no press releases and so on’. As Dina put it, in both cases they focused on being ‘very visible locally, that is the goal … but then, in terms of media, sometimes it’s beneficial, sometimes it’s not’. Initiatives like these rely on a form of publicness and openness. In other settings, projects are encouraged to have a strong media profile both for the recruitment of participants and to satisfy donors’ concerns over ‘impact’ and ‘legacy’. However, within the context in which they were working, a different approach to publicness was required. For Fatin, leaving Cairo and not seeking media attention was not solely about eluding state authority or public censure, nor was it simply a coping strategy for the project. On a very personal level for Fatin, it was a way of maintaining purpose, and of creating and sustaining relationships with people under difficult circumstances and, importantly, a sense of continuity with the January Counterculture. I felt there was a general sentiment that was created in 2011 that was persisting, perhaps not in Cairo, so I wanted to capitalize on that in the pockets that are not drenched by this paranoia … With time, I became able to think that maybe this is not about confrontation, maybe we are just not talking to the right people. I mean, those people I had the workshop with, they are a public, aren’t they? A public of [Anon city], of [Anon city] where they have created their own initiatives and spaces that are places where they can continue to talk with the same excitement about the revolution, I mean these are publics, aren’t they?

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Fatin echoed a theme that had been raised by others whom I interviewed. Although limited in number and scope, the strength and solidarity of the relationships that were nurtured through initiative, activism and research were the basis on which people maintained their countercultural politics. Mariam had explained that while she was sometimes affected by the generalized precariousness of life in Egypt’s third sector, her main fear was not of confrontation with the state or of forced closure. Rather, maintaining ‘a common language’ with audiences in public spaces was the main concern. That ‘common language’ sustained her intellectually and emotionally; anything that impinged on that ‘common language’, like cameras, which some members of the public looked upon with suspicion, had to be forfeited or strictly controlled. Fatin, Mariam and Dina sought to maintain what countercultural publicness remained available to them. They were acutely aware of the defining features of what Tilly would call their available ‘repertoire of contention’ (see Tilly 2004, 2008; Tilly and Tarrow 2006). They helped me to better understand the reluctance that was expressed by the media collective towards my presence among them. They had turned me away because of the significance of the local relationships that they had worked so hard to nurture, and that had to be continued at all costs. In other words, the January Counterculture continues to survive, but only by curtailing and redefining its sense of publicness under duress.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have described two constituencies that relate to cultural time in quite divergent ways. There are many ways in which these contestations may be understood: they are inflected by generation, memory and politics. In contrast to Asad’s (2012) assertion of a shared set of core assumptions about the desirability of a liberal, democratic state among what he terms the young revolutionaries and the establishment, I would argue that the voices, orientations, experiences and strategies in this chapter suggest a fundamental divergence in relation to cultural temporality. Rather than accepting that the substructure of Arab reason is unconscious and uncontested, as al-Jabri (2011) does, I postulate that the establishment remains captivated by the motion of ‘al-iʾtimad’ while the January Counterculture remains determined to experience the motion of ‘al-naqlah’. Here, I turn to Marchart (2003: 90), who draws us back to hegemony and the ‘passage from the micro-political to the macro-political … when subcultures

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turn into politicized countercultures’. Following Hall et al. (1978), the January Counterculture represents a crisis of hegemony and marks the exhaustion of consent among an extremely important group of people. In turn, the apparatus of coercion has been deployed. Following Laclau and Mouffe (1985), the best evidence that youthfulness in Egypt is no longer simply a position of ‘sedimented’ or ‘latent’ antagonization is the scale and scope of arbitrary arrests, harassment, the closure of art and cultural spaces, travel bans, long prison sentences for protestors and journalists, online satirists and researchers, who have been charged with everything from ‘plotting to overthrow the regime’ to ‘spreading false news’ and ‘receiving foreign funds’ as payment for sedition and espionage. The 25th January Revolution was arguably that moment of reactivation marking the passage from the micro-political realm of everyday ‘culture’ to the macro-political realm of ‘politics’. Youthfulness in Egypt is no longer characterized by ‘relations of subordination’ but, more forcefully, by ‘relations of oppression’. Yet, despite these painful and repressive forces, ‘cultural time’ is, in a sense, on the side of the January Counterculture, for what is inevitable is that, in due course, they will become the establishment.

Notes 1 The 25th January Revolution takes its name from the outbreak of demonstrations against police brutality on the day that the Egyptian state celebrates National Police Day. The demonstrations were met with a ruthless crackdown by the authorities that, in turn, led to more widespread demonstrations with broader demands, such as ‘bread, freedom and social justice’. Demonstrations and sit-ins took place in public squares across Egypt, calling for the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule and rejecting the very public plans for his son, Gamal Mubarak, to succeed him as president. Public resistance to police brutality eventually led to the collapse of the police and central security forces, but not before an estimated 4,000 people had lost their lives. After eighteen days of protest around the country, Hosni Mubarak agreed to step down and handed over the responsibility for running the country to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Although power remained in the hands of the military, as it had done since 1952, the events were seen as a revolution because of the way in which they were informed by the values of anti-authoritarianism, democracy and equality. This period also saw an explosion in protest, art, writing, music and political activity on a scale that Egypt had never previously experienced, and a questioning of

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the values that underpin social and political power in Egypt. Young people played a prominent and decisive role throughout. There is debate about whether the revolution ended on 11 February 2011 or whether it is still ongoing. I take the position that the 25th January Revolution remains the most important and decisive political event since the 1952 Free Officer Revolt, and that its effects are still being felt today.   2 As Corry (2014) notes, the third sector has long evaded definition, with Kendall and Knapp (LinkManagerBM_REF_Rg1g18jv1995) famously describing it as a ‘loose and baggy monster’. Terms such as ‘social economy, third sector, solidarity economy or alternative economy, nonlucrative sector, non-profit sector, not-for-profit sector, voluntary sector, idealist sector, etc., are increasingly used as synonyms’ (Moulaert and Ailenei 2005: 2042).   3 M. Shawke (2014) ‘Khanq al-majal al-ʿam: ‘an horeiyet al-taʾbir fimisr’ (Suffocating the Public Sphere: Freedom of Expression in Egypt) Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression. Available at: http:// afteegypt.org/wp-content/uploads/-‫ التقرير‬2-2014-‫السنوي‬.pdf.   4 Ibid.   5 Anon, ‘Court bans April 6 Activities’, Mada Masr, 28 April 2014. Available at: www.madamasr.com/news/court-bans-april-6-activities (accessed 17 July 2018).   6 Anon, ‘Egypt’s imprisonment of journalists is at an all-time high.’ Committee to Protect Journalists, 25 June 2015. Available at: https://cpj. org/reports/2015/06/egypt-imprisonment-of-journalists-is-at-an-all-timehigh.php (accessed 17 July 2018).   7 ‘Court bans Ultras and labels them terrorists’, Mada Masr, 16 May 2015. Available at: www.madamasr.com/en/2015/05/16/news/u/court-bansultras (accessed 17 July 2018).   8 Anon, ‘bil-fidyou: Ahmad Moussa ʿaljameʾah alamrikiyah tataamar ʿala misr’, al-Youm al-Sabea, 2 December 2014. Available at: www.videoyoum7. com/2014/12/02/%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%8A% D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%88-%D8%A3%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC% D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9 %85%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A9/ (accessed 17 July 2018).   9 Anon, ‘al-kalima tanqidh watan’ campaign. Available at www.youtube. com/watch?v=EZNTvNBN4KM (accessed 31 July 2015). 10 PSA2: ‘al-ishaʾat’– al-kalima tanqidh watan’ Available at: https://youtu. be/zL8H3QlK3vo. PSA 3: ‘“idkhil albayanat” – al-kalima tanqidh watan’ Available at: https://youtu.be/Uksbdi34Krg (accessed 31 January 2019). 11 While there was no direct reference to the penal code in the advertisements, the Egyptian Penal Code (Law No. 58 01 of the year 1937 and its amendments: 1946, 1953 and 2006) criminalizes the type of information and opinion-sharing that the PSA was targeting under

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the following articles: ‘Article 102: Stirring-up sedition by raising of the voice, by speaking loudly or singing. Disturbing public security, casting horror among the people, or causing harm and damage to public interest by deliberately diffusing news, information/data, or false or tendentious rumours, or propagates exciting publicity.’ ‘Article 188: Disturbing the peace, creating fright among the people, or causing harm and damage to public interest by publishing with ill intent, false news, data, or rumours, or fabricated or forged papers, or falsely attributed to a third party.’ 12 Anon, ‘Three Arrested in Egypt for Speaking English’, Egyptian Streets, 15 December 2014. Available at: http://egyptianstreets.com/2014/12/15/ three-arrested-in-egypt-for-speaking-english/ (accessed 17 July 2018). Anon, ‘American Arrested for Talking about Egypt’s January 25 Revolution in English’, Egyptian Streets, 24 January 2016. Available at: http://egyptianstreets.com/2016/01/24/american-arrested-for-talkingabout-egypts-january-25-revolution-in-english/ (accessed 17 July 2018). Alain Gresh, ‘I was arrested for chatting in a Cairo café’, Al-Jazeera.com. 14 November 2014. Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ opinion/2014/11/i-was-arrested-chatting-cairo-20141114175012955778. html (accessed 17 July 2018). Patrick Kingsley, ‘Egyptian student arrested carrying copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four’, The Guardian, 10 November 2014. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/10/egyptianstudent-arrested-1984-orwell (accessed 17 July 2018). Belal Fadl, ‘Egypt: The nation of snitches makes a comeback’, Mada Masr, 9 November 2014. Available at: www.madamasr.com/opinion/politics/egypt-nation-snitchesmakes-comebackhttp://www.madamasr.com/opinion/politics/egyptnation-snitches-makes-comeback (accessed 17 July 2018). 13 Anon, ‘Liqaa al-mushir al-Sisi ma’ ‘al-fananeen’, https://youtu.be/ PPiiwT0UAhE. 14 Ibid. 15 Anon, ‘Liqaa al-mushir al-Sisi ma’ ‘al-udaba’ wa ‘al-muthaqafeen’. Available at: https://youtu.be/kR2XX6-Zvzc (accessed 31 January 2019). 16 Ibid. 17 Law 50 of 1950; see Anon, ‘Taliq Qanuni ala manh al-dabtiyah al-qadaiyah liaʾdaʾ majlis niqabit almihan altamtheliyah’, Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression, 17 September 2015. Available at: http://afteegypt. org/freedom_creativity/2015/09/17/10904-afteegypt.html (accessed 17 July 2018). 18 Anon, ‘Actors Syndicate Heads Granted the Power of Arrest’, Mada Masr, 15 September. Available at: www.madamasr.com/news/culture/actorssyndicate-heads-granted-power-arrest (accessed 17 July 2018). 19 Charles Akl (translated by Assmaa Naguib), ‘The Power of Arrest and the Future of Music in Egypt’, Mada Masr, 24 November 2015. Available at: www.madamasr.com/sections/culture/power-arrest-and-future-musicegypt (accessed 17 July 2018).

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20 Ahmed Morsy, ‘The culture raids: intellectuals and cultural organizations decry raids on the Townhouse Gallery and Merit Publishing House’, AlAhram Weekly, 7 January 2016. Available at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/ News/15132/23/The-culture-raids.aspx (accessed 17 July 2018). Anon, ‘Townhouse Gallery, Rawabet Theater Closed after Interagency Raid’, Mada Masr, 29 December 2015. Available at: www.madamasr. com/news/culture/townhouse-gallery-rawabet-theater-closed-afterinteragency-raid (accessed 17 July 2018). 21 Anon, ‘Studio Emad Eddin Inspected by Authorities, Operations Continue as Normal’, Mada Masr, 14 January 2016. Available at: www.madamasr. com/news/studio-emad-eddin-inspected-authorities-operations-continuenormal (accessed 17 July 2018). Anon, ‘Khanq al-majal al-ʿam: ʿan horeiyet al-taʾbir fi-misr’ (Suffocating the Public Sphere: Freedom of Expression in Egypt) Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression, 3 March 2014. Available at: http://afteegypt.org/media_freedom-2/2014/05/03/7556afteegypt.html?lang=en (accessed 17 July 2018). 22 Anon, ‘Liqaa al-musheer al-Sisi maʾ al-udabaʾ wa al-muthaqafeen’ (Congress between Marshal el-Sisi and the literati and inculturati). 4 May 2014. Available at: https://youtu.be/kR2XX6-Zvzc (accessed 31 January 2019). 23 Ibid. 24 Samar Abdallah, Mohammed Ramadan, ‘Ma hiyah “hurub al-jil al-rabea” al-mutakararah fi ghitabat al-Sisi?’ (What are the ‘4th Generation Wars’ that have been repeatedly cited in the speeches of al-Sisi?) Al-Watan, 4 July 2015. Available at: www.elwatannews.com/news/details/763836 (accessed 17 July 2018). 25 Anon, ‘Liqaa al-musheer al-Sisi maʾ al-Ealamiyeen’ (Congress between Marshal al-Sisi and the broadcasters) 4 May 2015. Available at: https:// youtu.be/XFdWGrGgNqM (accessed 31 January 2019). 26 Ibid.

Bibliography Abaza, M. (2015) ‘Egypt: Scattered thoughts on a counter-revolutionary moment’. Available at: www.opendemocracy.net/mona-abaza/egyptscattered-thoughts-on-counterrevolutionary-moment (accessed 27 February 2016). Abdalla, A. (1985) The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt, 1923–1973. London: Al Saqi Books. Abdalla, A. (2000) ‘The Egyptian Generation of 1967: Reaction of the Young to National Defeat’, in R. Meijer (ed.), Alienation or Integration of Arab Youth: Between Family, State and Street. Richmond: Routledge. Aboim, Sofia and Pedro Vasconcelos (2013) ‘From political to social generations: A critical reappraisal of Mannheim’s classical approach’, European Journal of Social Theory 17 (2): 165–83.

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Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Taylor & Francis. Aly, R. (2011) ‘Rebuilding Egyptian media for a democratic future: Mediating “the Nation”: from State to public service broadcasting, critically engaging Egypt as a complex society’, Arab Media & Society 14. Available at: www. arabmediasociety.com/rebuilding-egyptian-media-for-a-democratic-future (accessed 3 September 2018). Aly, R. (2012) ‘Producing Men, the Nation and Commodities: The Cultural Political-Economy of Militarism in Egypt’, in J. Selby and A. Stavrianakis (eds), Contemporary Militarism: Towards a New Research Agenda for International Relations. London: Routledge. Aly, R. (2015) Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity. London: Pluto Press. Asad, T. (2012) ‘Fear and the ruptured state: Reflections on Egypt after Mubarak’, Social Research: An International Quarterly 79 (2): 271–98. Aswany, A. Al (2012) Egypt’s ‘honorable citizens’. Available at: www. worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/alaa-al-aswany/egypts-honorable-citizens (accessed 27 February 2016). Bayat, A. (1997) Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press. Bayat, A. (2003) ‘The “street” and the politics of dissent in the Arab world’, Middle East Report 226: 10. Available at: doi:10.2307/1559277. Bayat, A. (2012) ‘Reclaiming Youthfulness’, in S. Khalaf and R.S. Khalaf (eds), Arab Youth: Social Mobilization in Times of Risk. London: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution. Bayat, A. (2013) ‘Revolution in bad times’, New Left Review 80. Available at: https://newleftreview.org/II/80/asef-bayat-revolution-in-bad-times (accessed 3 September 2018). Borneman, J. (2009) ‘Fieldwork Experience, Collaboration, and Interlocution: The “Metaphysics of Presence” in Encounters with the Syrian Mukhabarat’, in A. Hammoudi and J. Borneman (eds), Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Browers, M. (2007) ‘The Egyptian movement for change: Intellectual antecedents and generational conflicts’, Contemporary Islam 1 (1): 69–88. Available at: doi:10.1007/s11562-007-0006-y. Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Sociology and the Modern). London: HarperCollins Distribution Services. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J. (2006) An Excursion into the Criminal Anthropology of the Brave Neo South Africa. Berlin: Lit. Corry, O. (2014) ‘Third Sector Research’, in R. Taylor (ed.), Third Sector Research. Baltimore, MD: Published in cooperation with the International Society for Third Sector Research.

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Crabbs, J. (1975) ‘Politics, history, and culture in Nasser’s Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (4): 386–420. Available at: doi:10.1017/s0020743800025356. Fadl, B. (2015) ‘Egypt: The nation of snitches makes a comeback’. Available at: www.madamasr.com/opinion/politics/egypt-nation-snitches-makescomeback (accessed 27 February 2016). Fahmy, Z. (2011) Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. France, A. and S. Roberts (2014) ‘The problem of social generations: A critique of the new emerging orthodoxy in youth studies’, Journal of Youth Studies 18 (2): 215–30. Available at: doi:10.1080/13676261.2014.944122. Gordon, J. (2002) Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, Middle East Documentation Center. Gross, D. (1985) ‘Temporality and the modern state’, Theory and Society 14 (1): 53–82. Hafiz, S. (2001) ‘Jamaliyyat al-riwayah al-jadidah: Al-qatiʾah al-maʾrafiyah wa-al-nazʾah al- Mudaddah lil-ghinaʿiyah’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 21: 184. Available at: doi: 10.2307/1350042. Hall, S. (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage in Association with the Open University. Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke, and B. Roberts (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrington, B. (2003) ‘The social psychology of access in ethnographic research’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32 (5): 592–625. Available at: doi:10.1177/0891241603255677. Harvey, D. (2013) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso Books. Hopkins, N.S. (2015) Anthropology in Egypt, 1967: Culture, Function, and Reform. Cairo Papers 33: 2. Egypt: The American University in Cairo Press. al-Jabri, Mohammed Abed (2011) The Formation of Arab Reason: Text, Tradition and the Construction of Modernity in the Arab World. London: I.B.Tauris. Jemielniak, D. and M. Kostera (2010) ‘Narratives of irony and failure in ethnographic work’, Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences/Revue Canadienne des Sciences de l’Administration 27 (4): 335–47. Available at: doi:10.1002/cjas.177. Johnson, N.R., E. Goode, and N. Ben-Yehuda (1997) ‘Moral panics: I social construction of deviance’, Social Forces 75 (4): 1514. Available at: doi:10.2307/2580710. Kendall, J. and M. Knapp (1995) Voluntary Means, Social Ends. Canterbury: Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent at Canterbury. Laclau, E. and C. Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.

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Laclau, E., C. Mouffe, W. Moore, and P. Cammack (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 3rd Edition. London: Verso Books. Lefebvre, H. (1995) ‘The Right to the City’, in E. Kofman and E.L. Bas (eds), Writings on Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Marchart, O. (2003) ‘Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap: Is There Such a Thing as a Post-Subcultural Politics?’, in D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds), The Post-Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg. Martinez, M.L. (2003) Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mehrez, S. (2008) Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice. London: Routledge. Moulaert, F. and O. Ailenei (2005) ‘Social economy, third sector and solidarity relations: A conceptual synthesis from history to present’, Urban Studies 42 (11): 2037–53. Available at: doi:10.1080/00420980500279794. Owens, Geoffrey (2003) ‘What! Me a Spy? Intrigue and Reflexivity in Zanzibar’, Ethnography 4 (1): 122–44. Paechter, C. (2012) ‘Researching sensitive issues online: implications of a hybrid insider/outsider position in a retrospective ethnographic study’, Qualitative Research 13 (1): 71–86. Available at: doi: 10.1177/1468794112446107. Phipps, P. (2005) ‘Michel Leiris: Master of Ethnographic Failure’, in U. Rao (ed.), Celebrating Transgression: Method and Politics in Anthropological Studies of Culture: A Book in Honour of Klaus Peter Köpping. New York: Berghahn Books. Ramadan, Y. (2012) ‘The emergence of the sixties generation in Egypt and the anxiety over Categorization 1’, Journal of Arabic Literature 43 (2–3): 409–30. Available at: doi:10.1163/1570064x-12341242. Reeves, C.L. (2010) ‘A difficult negotiation: Fieldwork relations with gatekeepers’, Qualitative Research 10 (3): 315–31. Available at: doi:10.1177/1468794109360150. Reid, D.M.M., E. Burke, M.C. Hudson, W. Kazziha and R. Khalidi (1990) Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, K. (2015) ‘Youth mobilisations and political generations: Young activists in political change movements during and since the twentieth century’, Journal of Youth Studies 18 (8): 950–66. Available at: doi:10.1080/1 3676261.2015.1020937. Rohloff, A. and S. Wright (2010) ‘Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the Heuristic’, Current Sociology 58 (3): 403–19. Available at: doi:10.1177/0011392110364039. Roszak, T. (1970) The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. London: Faber & Faber. Sakr, N. (2006) ‘Foreign support for media freedom advocacy in the Arab Mediterranean: Globalization from above or below?’ Mediterranean Politics 11 (1): 1–20.

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Shaffir, W.B. and R.A. Stebbins (1991) Experiencing Fieldwork: An Inside View of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Sholkamy, H. (1999) ‘Why is Anthropology So Hard in Egypt?’, in S. Shami and L. Herrera (eds), Between Field and Text: Emerging Voices in Egyptian Social Science. Cairo: Cairo Papers in Social Science. St John, G. (2003) ‘Post-Rave Technotribalism and the Carnival of Protest’, in D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds), The Post-Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg. Temple, E.C. and P.R. Gill (2014) ‘Walking the fine line between fieldwork success and failure: Advice for new Ethnographers’, Journal of Research Practice 10 (1): 2. Tilly, C. (2004) Social Movements, 1768–2004. Boulder, CO: Routledge. Tilly, C. (2008) Contentious Performances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, C. and S. Tarrow (2006) Contentious Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 3 C U LT U R A L T I M E A N D E V E RY DAY L I F E I N T H E M I D D L E A T L A S M O U N TA I N V I L L AG E O F A I T N U H Tarik Sabry

Time is the mountain. (A 45-year-old Ait Nuhian man) May God bless whoever created the mobile phone – may they, with God’s power enter paradise. (A 75-year-old Ait Nuhian woman) The real must not only be determined in its historical objectivity, but also from interior intensions, from the secrecy that interrupts the continuity of the historical time. (Levinas, Totality and Infinity in Gaston 2006: 5) When I was 10 years old, my grandmother, the Zayania (from the Amazigh Middle Atlas Mountain region of Zayan), took me on what then appeared to me to be a night out with her half-sister, Mahama. All I knew then, and from what I can recall, was that we were visiting an important saint, a seyed. The two half-sisters were well prepared: taking food, a small mobile cooker and some blankets. After what felt like an eternity of a walk on the same mountain, we came upon a very modest, small white room with an ancient-looking little greenish door. A 2-metre box lay at its centre, which, in turn, was surrounded by used candles. A green satin sheet covered the box. Unaccustomed to marabout shrines and what happened in them, I thought it might have been a strange misplaced or oddly centred high sofa, too high to sit on. My grandmother, also called shtou, and her sister lit candles, made Moroccan tea, ate msseman,1 prayed together and talked incessantly, occasionally they carefully placed their right hands on the green box, rubbing them gently against the green satin material, muttering words in Tamazight I did not understand. I ran around the green high sofa as if it were a miniature Kaaʾba, and wondered what the fuss was about. I had no idea I was in the middle of a cemetery and the green sofa had the

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remains of a holy man, who had died more than a thousand years ago, in it (see Figure 3.1). His name is Sidi Eissa wʾNuh (a descendant of Moulay Idriss II,2 a ninth-century ad political refugee who built the city of Fez). My grandmother, God bless her soul, who was not well versed in child psychology, then told me the green sofa was a coffin and inside it was a dead man. She told me all this in preparation and anticipation of their ‘dreaming’ (or encounter with the oracle – she and her sister) which had to occur before, and not after, the dawn prayers. Dreams occurring after dawn are shunned as Satan’s work. Dreams before dawn are saintly and bring a lot of Baraka3 and good tidings with them. I was surrounded by dead people who were very likely to come and get me whilst my grandmother and aunt braced themselves for a vision, the oracle, a transcendental communication with a holy, healing dead man, Prophet Mohammed’s descendant. No Hitchcockian movie could have captured a 10-year-old’s helplessness as night unfolded. My grandmother and aunt slept either side of me on the floor, with no mattress but a handmade straw carpet. I was put between two emotionally and spiritually charged women. It was a hot summer (summers are always hot there) and I trembled with fear. My grandmother and aunt went straight to sleep. There was nothing before my eyes but a blinding darkness. Electricity had not yet been introduced to Ait Nuh4 village. A few tortured minutes later, I swear I could hear movement inside the coffin. Then came a faint noise from it, and another slightly louder noise, and then I heard the whole coffin shake violently. At this point, I

Figure 3.1  Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s tomb, Ait Nuh, 2016.

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was totally unnerved and opened my mouth, letting out the loudest, most amplified scream that the poor saint, the other dead and the two sisters had ever heard. The scream coincided with the time just before dawn (perfect for a blessed vision), my grandmother and her sister screamed too and I, hearing them, was certain we three were in real trouble, and I let out an even bigger scream. I tried to warn them in a high-pitched voice: ‘The saint is getting up … the saint is getting up!’ It turned out that Mahama, God bless her soul, had her not-too-small a nose resting on the edge of the wooden coffin as she slept. She was a stereosonic snorer. I had spoiled it all: the ritual, the expectation, and the missed chance of a saintly vision, an epiphany, a divine communication. My grandmother and her sister, both Amazigh Muslims, were, consciously or unconsciously, practising an old pagan practice: the cult of the dead (also called incubation), one of the distinguishing characteristics of Amazighs in antiquity (Brett and Fentress 1997: 35). For Pomponius Mela (a Roman geographer, ad 43), Amazighs considered their ancestors’ spirits to be gods, and swore by them, consulting them as oracles, and, having made their requests, ‘treat the dreams of those who sleep in their tombs as responses’ (quoted by Brett and Fentress 1997: 35). This Amazigh ritual is still practised, but more secretly than before, since the advent of tele-evangelical Islam and its local traditionalizers, who proclaim such practices to be bedaʾ (innovations)5 and thus forbidden in Islam. This chapter engages with ethnographic research conducted in Ait Nuh (in 2015), which examined how Ait Nuhian people negotiate the meanings of time in the contexts of their everyday lives. Ethnographic research was conducted in Ait Nuh with three different generations from five different families. The research asks one key question: how do the Moroccan Middle Atlas villagers of Ait Nuh construct notions of ‘time’ in the context of everyday life?

Salafism as a singular cultural time Here, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a dialectical relationship between Ait Nuhians’ appropriation of Moroccan Sufi Islam and a slowly creeping pseudo-rationalist cultural Salafism. A paradox lies at the heart of the dialectics I describe here. My usage of ‘pseudo’ before rationalism is tactical for two reasons: (1) if I had, in this instance, opted for cultural Salafism as rationalism, the result might well be a cry from the social scientist who adheres to the notion, or the epistemic positioning, which sees religion as a pre-scientific, and

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therefore as an ahistorical, category. In this notion, no type of religious or cultural Salafism can be objectively associated with rationalism, not even pseudo-rationalism. (2) I have also intentionally avoided the title ‘Islamification of everyday life as pseudo-rationalism’, since the use of the word ‘Islamification’, in this context, is problematic on many levels. I have instead settled for ‘cultural Salafism’, which describes a precise, exclusivist form of puritanism that is channelled through a web of global media content and through local agents, including the Moroccan makhzen’s imams. The interviews I conducted in the village of Ait Nuh produced complex reactions to lived and preached Islam. The desegregation of the sexes, the public playing of music, singing and dancing, in the Zayan area, of which Ait Nuh village is part, have for centuries, and until very recently, been ordinary, everyday sociocultural practices. The villagers I interviewed now believe most of these practices to be haram (illegal under Islamic law). Our parents say that Sidi Eissa (the marabout) is the grandfather of Nuhians, they say also, because of his existence here and his Baraka, we are living in safety. I have visited his shrine too and passed the night there with my mother. (Moussaoui, 45 years old) I was visiting Sidi Eissa because I was possessed by jinn, and because of his Baraka I feel well now; but I am no longer visiting him, because we now recognized that these kinds of visits are forbidden in Islam. (Khadouj, 60 years old) We visited the shrine of Sidi Eissa in the past because there were no hospitals and we didn’t have money to go to the doctor, shrines were the hospitals of poor people. Women who hang their underwear on the tree next to the shrine think they are leaving their illnesses on the tree. Women also comb their hair and leave plucked hair on the same tree. People who spend the night in that shrine always ask each other in the morning what they’d dreamt. (Eto, 75 years old) People used to go to the shrine of Sidi Eissa with cocks and goats to slaughter hoping to be cured from psychological and spiritual illnesses. I stopped visiting the shrine because preachers told us not to visit it. (Zeineb, 85 years old) We have stopped visiting the shrine of Sidi Eissa because the preachers told us going there is like worshipping the dead. (Ben Omar, 75 years old)

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These testimonies about visits to Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s shrine, whom I could, without any historical certainty, trace to Eissa, one of the sons (or descendants) of Moulay Idriss II,6 show evidence of a shift in meanings relating to the saint and his socio-cultural relevance for the villagers. The visits to the saint and the dreaming, as a transcendental communicative ritual, are only examples among many other preIslamic religious rituals that were practised by Amazighs before the introduction of Christianity and Islam (see Bel 1938). In its complexity, the Amazigh religion, Alfred Bel observed, is ‘charged with numerous pagan magico-religious practices’ that have survived the test of time (in El Ayadi et al. 2013: 23). Amazigh pagan beliefs, including the oracle, demons (jinns), sacred trees (see Figure 3.2), stones, caves (see Basset 1920) and water sources, are still part of Ait Nuhians’ present cultural tense. They have been incorporated mnemonically into a popular everyday Islam through a process of métissage, creating a métis of cultural temporality that does not radically break with the past and past beliefs, but that appropriates new cultural times using a language of temporal mounting. Among the many reasons villagers still spend the night in Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s shrine is to dispel jinns (demonic possession). Another example of how one cultural time mounts/penetrates another is the recent visits to the marabout by girls from the city of Khunifra (9 kilometres away from the village) who want to stop smoking. My interlocutors told me stories of young girls bringing a pack of cigarettes to the marabout. The story has it that those who find the pack of cigarettes on their way back home

Figure 3.2  Sacred tree beside the Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s shrine, Ait Nuh.

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are not granted the saint’s Baraka, whereas those whose cigarettes are not returned are guaranteed the saint’s Baraka and will be able to quit smoking. What I find interesting here is how, in the age of the internet, the abundance of self-help books, television and radio programmes, etc., a younger generation of Amazighs is choosing to travel up the mountain on foot to seek a remedy from a transcendental power: Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s Baraka. What the statements about the visits to the marabout also seem to show is evidence of a métisized cultural temporality; a magico-rationality, an interplay between formal and popular everyday Islam that both subverts and reappropriates old hybridized pagan traditions. Regardless of the systematic attempts at undermining ‘popular everyday Sufi Islam’ by mediated cultural Salafism and its proponents in the village, which sees visiting marabouts as an innovation and therefore its cultural practice as blasphemous – pilgrims still make the journey almost daily. But they do this at the risk of being ostracized by other villagers (mainly neighbours). Cultural Salafism operates through the mediatic (television, radio, mobile phones) and the social (the role of group leaders/ostracizing) to transform a richly varied cultural temporality (which it describes as impure/incoherent) with a more puritanical singular cultural time. It wants to rid Amazigh cultural time of its multiple cultural temporalities. Cultural Salafism and its preachers act by homogenizing cultural and religious experience – their ultimate motif is masked by a pseudorationalism, the main aim of which is to de-métisize cultural experience. What the villagers have done, perhaps for centuries, is to re-appropriate Islamic teaching through negotiation. The oracle is no longer a pagan God; he is the spirit of a Muslim saint and a descandent of Prophet Mohammed. The saint is a mediator between the villagers and God. If a miracle is performed (e.g. if a long illness is cured after the visit, or if a young woman stops smoking), it is because the saint asked God, who then grants the villagers’ wishes through the saint’s mediation. The saint is also, by my interlocutors’ admissions, a public service provider. His shrine is a meeting point for the dispossessed, the repressed, the sick and others seeking help in the absence of effective public state institutions. Although Islam was introduced to the Amazighs of the Middle Atlas from the eighth century ad, I learned from the interviews that people in Ait Nuh, except for a very small minority of educated people, have only learnt to pray in Arabic in the last three decades. It was the children who first went to school who taught their parents what to say when praying. The older generation (in their 50s to 80s) are almost all illiterate, could not read the Koran, and so hardly prayed.

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We were not praying at all because we didn’t know how to pray and what to say while praying. We did not start to pray until Mohammed (our son) left school. My husband was an illiterate person and so am I. There was no one to show us how to pray. (Eto, 75 years old) My parents did not know how to pray ’til I grew up and showed them how to do so. (Hafiz, 33 years old)

A more puritan interpretation of Islam is now finding its way to the villagers through Islamic satellite media and the Salafist imams who act as anchors for their singular cultural timing. Religious media and its content anchor the role of the local imam, making it more potent. During Friday prayers in Ait Nuh, the imam addresses the villagers in both Arabic and Tamazight, but most of the sermon is delivered in Zayani Tamazight. I have attended a Friday sermon where the local imam warned of the big bedʾa (innovation), that is, belief in magic and visiting marabouts. ‘Visiting marabouts [a centuries-old Moroccan Amazigh and Sufi tradition] is like worshipping the dead, which is a kind of shirk [worshipping a deity other than God].’ This type of puritanism may sound like an attempt to rationalize and purify religious discourse, removing it from its centuries-old hybridized, magico-mythical temporality, but it is also an attempt to formalize and standardize religious, and therefore cultural, experience. I call this a pseudo-rational religious discourse because it also seeps into other areas of cultural life, forbidding music, dance and the desegregation of men and women. What lies beneath this pseudo-religious rational discourse of formal Islam is a form of puritanism, a cultural Salafist ideology. The imams and religious TV programmes are now saying that visiting marabouts is shirk, that dance and music are the work of Satan and ought to be avoided. We have always had a culture of ahaidus [Zayani folkloric dance], where men and women sing and dance together. Now weddings are changing, instead of ahaidus and music, many are having Koran recitals as a more Islamic way of celebrating weddings. Also, men and women now are segregated at many weddings. We never had this before. (Samira, 23 years old)

Almost all the villagers interviewed have access to television and satellite. During the interviews, I asked several questions, hoping to discover whether television consumption had played a role in re-temporalizing or standardizing time for the villagers. My interlocutors from the older

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generation explained how, twenty-five years ago, before electricity and the media came to the village, people did not know much about countries or people outside their immediate surroundings. Television has brought the world to the village. Their sense of Moroccanness has also only been formed since the coming of radio and television. It was the coming of radio in the 1970s, and of national television in the 1990s, that has consolidated Ait Nuhians’ Moroccan national consciousness. Ethnographic material showed that while television has, to a certain extent, led to the re-temporalizing of everyday village routine, religious time, prayer-time, is still the prime form of temporality around which everyday routinization is organized. Ait Nuhians still make appointments according to the prayers of the day. However, for the Douar’s women a new mediated form of temporal organization is taking hold. Asmaa, a 30-year-old woman from Ait Nuh, is an example; she states: I wake up for fajr prayer, I make breakfast then sweep the house. I like watching news and Turkish films. After lunch, my time is really dedicated to many soaps and programmes I follow. I watch ‘Salwa film’ on MBC4 channel at 4.00 pm ‘Bani film’ in Zee Alwan channel at 7.00 pm … Some women here in Ait Nuh manage their time according to [the] films they watch.

Towards an ontology of cultural time In his philosophical treatise A Critique of the Structure of Arab Reason, the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri (1996) strongly and systematically argues that the deficit in the contemporary ArabIslamic cultural repertoire is partly due to an unconscious and nonlinear understanding of cultural time. In this thesis, al-Jabri also plants the seeds for a serious intellectual engagement with the question of Arab temporality, which, I would like to add, drives the telos of this collection. Al-Jabri grapples with notoriously difficult questions in his treatise, such as ‘what does it mean for culture to have a time and for time to have a culture?’ I am at once mindful and aware of the considerable differences that exist, both in method and approach, between epistemological, philosophical work and ethnography, but I am also aware that ethnographic writing, or the writing of culture, as a practice, is often driven and inspired by philosophy. As Geertz eloquently put it, ‘all ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession’

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(in Michaelsen and Johnson 2008). Al-Jabri, like other philosophers who have grappled with the notion of time or cultural temporality in the Arab context, has, because of their approach and method, mostly done so through an epistemic archaeological method, and, let me also add, through a dehumanized objectivism. Although one can see how non-linearity in cultural (epistemic) time may pose a problem for an epistemologist dealing with thought structures, engaging with everyday human experience throws up different concerns. Non-linearity in cultural time, at the level of consciousness, is not merely suggestive of a Piagetian unconscious cultural state, as al-Jabri argues. It is, if looked at anthropologically, part of a complex process of temporal mounting, of intersectionality, of forgetting, of remembering, of appropriation/ reappropriation, of resisting and of being mnemonically temporal in the world. In this chapter, I would like to argue for the necessity of an ontological approach to engaging with the question of cultural time, which takes its cue from experience and everyday life. As I will later show, using evidence from ethnographic research, different cultural times compete, in a Bergesonian multi-layered time-consciousness, for a place in Amazigh cultural time: Pagan time, Jewish time, Christian time, Roman time, Arab time, French time, state time, Hollywood time, tele-evangelical time and Turkish drama time, the mountain, the river, the saint are all competing cultural times. Cultural time, like a dream, is only graspable through intersectional, experientialtemporal tracedness, through the mnemonic imagination and through opening epistemologically to an engagement with presence, as a nonhermeneutic field.

Time as archaeology I have found no sayings or references to time in the villagers’ popular sayings, songs, poems and folk tales, none that my interlocutors could recall anyway. Time for them is embedded in earthliness. The mountains, the river, the tree, the marabout are the real markers of time, rather than any abstract concept or meaning thereof. Time is fought for when irrigation rotates from one farmer to another – time, here, means water for the plants – and cannot be disassociated from earthliness. No one in the village remembers exactly who the saint, Eissa wʾNuh, was, or when he lived or died, but everyone I spoke to had visited his shrine. The time of the saint is his shrine. The time of the saint is his Baraka, and this is obtained through the ritual at the shrine or near it, through

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the hanging of clothes, hair and other items on a holy tree next to the shrine; here, time is (symbolically) spatial. The only time when Ait Nuhians really respect time is during irrigation. There are seventy-two farms here; each farm gets two hours of irrigation time, which means twelve farms are irrigated in a day. This system works day and night … There is old rotation and new rotation, old rotation refers to those people who have been included in the rotation of irrigation from the very beginning, and the new rotation refers to those new members in the system who have just moved out of their family home and built their own. (Mohamed from Ait Nuh, 43 years old)

The villagers I interviewed who had lived through French colonialism described the French colonial time as the worst they had ever lived through. The French made alliances with feudal families in the Zayan area (the family of Imahzan being the most mentioned during interviews) to strengthen and legitimate their colonial campaign in the region. The family of Imahzan, according to Ait Nuhian villagers, used their relationship with the French to exercise a savage type of feudalism on the inhabitants of the Zayan region, forcibly taking land from farmers and exploiting a labour force without any wage, all under the watchful eye of the so-called French protectorate. Colonial time was a time of starvation – the colonizer used Ait Nuhians as free labour to build things, and refusal to comply meant death – we dug so many roads and dams of water around 1948 without any payment. The makhzen regime was the same, they only sent for us when they needed something built or done, and they never paid us either. The Imahzan were feudalists who conspired with colonialism and treated us as badly, if not worse, than the French. (Ben Omar, 75 years old) We have far more commodities now than we did when I was young. We only used to have one gown or dress each and had to wash it, dry it and put it back on. Wheat was a luxury. We used to spend hours in the mountains fetching wood – we would go all day and come back around 4 pm. We only had meat on Sundays, and only had two meals a day: bread and tea in the morning – in the evening we’d have couscous or soup. This has now changed, and new technologies are making our lives much easier. (Khadouj, 60 years old) In the past, if someone died we did not care about his/her family. Now, if someone dies, we stand by his/her family in order to reduce

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their pain and sometimes people stay with the family of a deceased person for fifteen days. … yes, there were no watches at all, and we didn’t use the hours, we were like animals, knowing day from night only through darkness … In the past, in Ramadan, we fasted the whole month without knowing when Eid came, until we heard it from the people of Khunifra when they came to visit us, sometimes we fasted more than a month … we were illiterate and no one knew how to count days. (Eto, 75 years old)

Mnemonic time The Ait Nuhian villagers’ encounters with modernity and its different cultural times (national, European (colonial), American, Turkish, religious, etc.) through the media and their everyday experiences, create an intersectional temporal consciousness, which is reflexively navigated through the workings of a mnemonic time. The latter concept and its workings are inspired by Keightley and Pickering’s (2012: 13) ‘mnemonic imagination’ where the focus steers away from sociologically and psychologically deterministic interpretations of memory to advocate an emphasis on the relations between personal and popular memory and the interplay between situated and mediated experience. The ‘mnemonic time’, in this instance, facilitates ‘the transactional movement needed for co-existence’ (Keightley and Pickering 2012: 9). Here, the redrafting of memories of our past experiences is not a fixed process. Experience, in this case, ceaselessly traverses a temporalized space between the remembering subject and the changing intervening sociocultural forces with which it enters a dialectical relationship. In the case of Ait Nuh, the ‘traversing of temporalized space’ unveils a perpetual performance of selfhood, oscillating between an ‘unlived’ spatiotemporality, enacted through local, national and trans-local televisual media texts, which, in turn, enter into dialogue with the villagers’ ‘lived’ experiences, folklore, memory and tradition, to form a trans/ cross-temporal imagination.7 Avoiding modernist and deterministic interpretations of ‘experience’, Keightley and Pickering (2012: 19) define experience as ‘never exclusively personal or public, interiorised or outwardly facing, self-directed or the blind product of social forces’, but as always in flux and spanning ‘these mutually, informing categories’. The traversal movement of experience is predicated on a dual temporal structure, ‘characterised by its continual unfolding in time while also acting back on the continuing development across time’ (Keightley and

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Pickering 2012: 24).8 This dual structure allows the subject to creatively reflect ‘narratively’ about the self across time. For the Ait Nuhians to whom I talked, accumulated experience is crystallized in a mnemonic, third discursive and performative space. In other words, while the accumulated ‘experience’ of (the lived and unlived) may shape their identities, it is through their mnemonic oscillation between memory (folklore, tradition, religion) and imagination (agency) that their cultural time is negotiated. To make sense of Ait Nuhians’ understanding of their cultural time, it was important to recall not only their memories of the past and of everyday experiences in the present but also of the relationships between these and their mnemonic imagination.

Aletheia Almost every ethnographic work comes with a special moment – an event that takes us by surprise. It may be a brief statement, a neglected graffito on a wall, a gesture, a wry smile or a moment of silence. It is a sort of unexpected aletheia: an un-concealedness (see Heidegger 1975/2001: 49). I had two such moments in the fieldwork, which I think shaped the main argument of this work. Moment number one came when I was probing a 45-year-old Ait Nuhian about the meaning of time. His answer, after brief pondering, was short and devastating: ‘time is the mountain’ (see Figure 3.3). I say ‘devastating’ because I belong to a meaning-making culture that had instilled in me a Cartesian kind of thinking, which could only articulate the notion of time, or, for that matter, any phenomenon, through abstract conceptualization. This statement was not only revealing; it has given my fieldwork an intellectual purpose: is there an alternative way to engaging with, or making sense of, the notion of temporality, especially cultural temporality outside Cartesian hermeneutics? The answer reveals a non-hermeneutic, substantialist language that breaks away from the conventional discourse in the humanities, as I was taught it. That time is the mountain is more of a phenomenological answer to the question. What the Ait Nuhian man was telling me was: the mountain has been here since I opened my eyes, it is still here, it was here before I was born and it will be here long after I have died, the mountain, as earthliness, is the manifestation of timeliness itself. The mountain is both a witness to time and its embodiment. Time, unlike us, does not change; it is we who change and die. The mountain is timelessness.

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Figure 3.3  Mountain by the river nearly 2 kilometres from the village of Ait Nuh.

Chraïbi’s (1982) novel La Mère du Printemps (The Spring River) is about a river, which, not incidentally, runs across the Moroccan Middle Atlas Mountains; an Amazigh tribe anticipates the Arabs’ coming several years before the arrival of Uqba Ibn Nafi’9 and his message of Islam. Aït Yafelman, a fictional Amazigh tribe, prepare for the coming of a new time, a new cultural time: the Arab cultural time. They wait for this new time by the river, for the river was to be a carrier of a new cultural time for the Amazighs of the Middle Atlas Mountains. In the novel, the charismatic leader of Aït Yafelman reassures his people: Ils sont (Les Arabes) a la recherche de se qu’ils n’ont pas dans leur territoire: L’eau. Et je vous ai déjà dit que là ou il y a de l’eau, il y a du temps … Nos ancêtres ont eu à affronter les Roums et bien d’autres envahisseurs qui n’ont fait que passer un siècle ou deux sur notre sol … qui ne ont pillés sans doute, asservis sans doute, mais sans atteindre notre âme. Ils ne nous ont pas détruits puisque nous voici encore sur notre terre. Ils se sont détruits eux même. Ils ne connaissent pas la valeur du temps. (Chraïbi 1982: 134)10

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The river is not a mere earthly phenomenon; it is time (time runs through it/penetrates it). Time, as a worldly phenomenon, is brought to the fore through the river. It is the river that brought the Arabs to North Africa. Arab cultural time, a new time for the Amazigh, had come via the river. Here we have evidence, although through literature, that the relationships between earthliness, space and time are not the result of some sort of incoherent indigenous interpretation; they are, on the contrary, a historical interpretation, which connects the river and time to a historical event, one that brought with it a new cultural time. The Ait Nuhian man’s four-worded answer has made it possible for me to think that worldly phenomena, such as time, can, if allowed, also be understood in what Gumbrecht (2004: 15) calls ‘the non-hermeneutic field’. This should by no means be read as an anti-hermeneutic stance. Instead, what I advocate here is that our starting point, our default position for thinking about the world and the things in it, should be the world itself, rather than an abstraction thereof. Moment number two came when I asked a 75-year-old Ait Nuhian woman whether she still visited the shrine of Saint Sidi Eissa wʾNuh. She first answered negatively, since she assumed that I, an educated person, would find such a practice to be part of a long gone, mythicomagical world (see Bourdieu 1979). She was too embarrassed to answer positively. ‘Now we are learning the real Islam,’ she answered, ‘from imams, from radio and television programmes.’ Her answer was mnemonically appropriated for me as a university lecturer and researcher, whom she assumed would, like the new imams, shun the visiting of the saint as being a blasphemous or at least an irrational act. However, no sooner had I played down my position as researcher, recounting the story of my encounter in the marabout shrine as a 10-year-old child, than she conjured up a different type of answer, which she delivered with a wry smile: ‘Well, to be honest, I still go from time to time.’ This kind of mnemonic manoeuvring suggests that a third language, an agential voice, a mnemonic cultural time, transcends the dictatorship of the ‘they’, of cultural Salafism and tele-evangelical Islam. It also suggests that cultural time is, in the first place, a negotiated time. Choosing the anecdote of the ‘dream’ to begin this chapter is part of a reflexive exercise, and an attempt to expose the fuzzy relationship between meaning and being, the extensive and the intensive, the experiential and the failures of academic language to create meaningful meaning. However, this non-normal, impracticable dreaminess must not, as Jacques Derrida warns, be seen as paralysis, but always as ‘une démarche’ (see Gaston 2006: 14). To Augé’s (1995:  40) three

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figures of supermodernity’s excesses, (a) the overabundance of events, (b) the spatial over-abundance of space and (c) individuality; excesses of which have exposed problems of meaning-making by and through anthropology, we may want to add another: (d) temporal intersectionality. The other not only lives in and through different cultural temporalities; they do so agentially, through a mnemonic imagination that helps them move in and out of different cultural temporalities, resisting violent ideologies and teleological discourses of becoming. The past was not spoken about nostalgically; it was a dreadful, colonial-feudal time, a time of starvation and lawlessness. However, modernity’s ‘long revolution’, its material goods – electricity, television, the mobile phone, the fridge, the cooker and education – are all appreciated by the villagers and have all transformed their lives for the better. Modernity’s critique, as the ethnographic evidence shows, can no longer be sustained merely through its hermeneutics of suspicion or its inherited Cartesian ‘meaning-making cultures’.11 Room must be made in our analysis of modernity, by way of a default position, for presence as a non-hermeneutic field. Moroccans living in isolated areas of the Middle Atlas Mountains are still on the margins, with no access to social or unemployment benefits, their children must travel miles on foot to go to school, jobs are hard to get, the state is totally incompetent in engaging with this part of isolated Morocco. However, the narrative that I encountered again and again, regardless of these disadvantages, is one of hope. Ait Nuhians’ understanding of time is far from aporetic: time, it is spatial. It is about presence. Time comes to the fore through earthliness. Time only makes sense when it is thought of intersectionally with earthliness: water, mountains, rivers and shrines. Time is the time of earth, and how can it be anything else? Time is, after all, the time of earth and our being on it. Unconscious cultural time still mounts/penetrates conscious cultural times through different ritual practices. Communicating with the dead – the oracle – may no longer be seen as an old pagan cultural practice; yet it is, nonetheless, practised through the appropriation of a new, mnemonic time. Ait Nuhians do not worship the dead; they seek Allah’s favours through the dead’s Baraka. It is by adding this new layer, appropriated from the invading Arab’s culture, that a pagan culture, thousands of years old, survives as a cultural practice. The appropriation of new discursive and mnemonic languages, the mounting of cultural times, are driven by the Amazigh’s desire for freedom: to be in their land, to be subsistent, to govern their affairs, to dance ahaidus, to sing in the mountain – no matter what the new Salafist imam says or preaches – the mountain, a witness to

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reverberations and echoes of women’s loud and beautiful love songs, is also a witness to a yearning for freedom to be. ‘Ethnography as dream’ is a form of radical temporalizing, for dreams are not constrained by the aporia of time or space, dreams have no beginning or end. It is a dream where time only exists as far as it mounts/penetrates its many intersectional constituents and where the river, the tree, the mountain and electricity are time itself. Cultural time has a way of organizing itself through the act of mounting. Time mounts other times, traces of other times. It rides in them and they ride and mount each other. Time comes into and through other times, a constant morphing into a polytemporality where to think about time is at any given moment, and always, a mnemonic temporal act. However, the mnemonic act – being our own editors of our own cultural times – can only occur through us, Dasein (Being-in-the-World), for whom the world, and our time in it, are a matter of concern. Time, like all ontological phenomena, can only exist through us. As such, our method has to take into consideration not only what goes on in our heads but also how we experience the things of the world as presence. Since ‘cultural time’ only generates meaning through a kind of ‘mnemonic negotiation’, a kind of filtering, appropriation and reordering, which requires a new language, a new time is created that is neither local, national or global: the ‘they’ time and ‘my’ mnemonic time combine to create an agential new (my) time. I do not use ‘they’ in its Heideggerian sense, which we ‘can simplify here to mean Mass Society’ (see Scannell 2014). In such a context, the ‘they’ is a way to prescribe the essence of the being of everydayness. For Heidegger, watching television is the kind of activity where one’s own Dasein vanishes into the ‘dictatorship’ of the ‘they’ (see Scannell 2014: 28). By ‘they’ I mean the ‘they’ as a mounting ‘qualitative multiplicity’ (Bergson 1913/2001: 224) that troubles the border between the extensive and the intensive, but which, through the mnemonic, creates a new language of self. Mnemonic time is, therefore, always a new time.

Notes 1 A Moroccan bread type, round and thin, made with flour and butter. 2 The Idrisid dynasty ruled Morocco in ad 788–974. 3 Ait Nuh is the name of a small village in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. It is some 9 kilometres away from the city of Khunifra. Its inhabitants are mostly of Amazigh origin. They refer to themselves as Zayanis, attributed to the Amazigh region of Zayan, and as Nuhis, an attribution to the Idrissid Saint Sidi Eissa wʾNuh.

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  4 For an analysis and definition of the concept of Baraka, see Westermarck’s Ritual and Belief in Morocco (1926/1968). According to Westermarck’s study, Baraka can be attributed to things like trees, plants, objects, days of the week and people, starting with the Prophet, his descendants (Chorfa), the Sultan, the saints. It is also attributed to old people, strangers, idiots, etc. (Westermarck 1926/1968; El Ayadi et al. 2013: 26–7). See also Jamous (1981) in which he critiques Gellner for focusing on the functionalism of the concept of Baraka, and ignoring its ideological tropes (see El Ayadi et al. 2013: 34).   5 According to the Hadith, ‘every innovation is misguidance and all misguidance is in the Hellfire’. Reported by Abu Daawood at-Tirmidhee.   6 Tracing Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s origins was very difficult. Oral history has it that the real name of the saint is Sidi Eissa Boulouh as he went around teaching the Koran to people of the Douar on wooden plaques (Louh), but Barrahou, a known Amazigh broadcaster, responsible for the development of Amazigh radio in the Zayan area, confirmed that scholars from Fez have traced Sidi Eissa wʾNuh’s origins to the Idrisid dynasty, and to Idriss II specifically. I spent days in Fez trying to find a historical document to prove this, but with little success. So, as far as historical evidence goes, I have, for now, nothing other than what was recounted to me by interlocutors during fieldwork.   7 See Heidegger’s (1992b: 80) Zukünftigsein, the state of readying oneself to ‘receive the right impetus from the past in order to open it up’.   8 Please also see my review of Keightley and Pickering’s book (in Sabry 2014).   9 An Arab general (622–83) who led the Umayyad campaign, culminating in the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb. 10 ‘They [Arabs] search for that thing which they lack in their territory: water. And I have always told you that where there’s water, there is time. Our ancestors had to confront the Romans and other invaders who spent no more than a century or two on our soil. That they have looted and exploited us is true, but they could never reach our soul. They have not been able to destroy us, for here we are, still in our land. They have destroyed themselves instead. They do not understand the value of time’ (author’s translation). 11 See Gumbrecht’s (2004) distinction between ‘presence cultures’ and ‘meaning cultures’ in his book The Production of Presence.

Bibliography Adam, Barbara (1990) Time and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Adam, Barbara (1994) Timewatch: A Social Analysis of Time. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Alweiss, Lilian (2002) ‘Heidegger and “the concept of time”’, History of the Human Sciences 15 (3): 117–32. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Ayadi, M. El, H. Rachik and M. Tozy (2013) L’Islam Au Quotidien: Enquête sur les Valeurs et les Pratiques Religieuses au Maroc. Casablanca: Edition La Croisée des Chemins. Basset, Henri (1920) Le Culte des Grottes au Maroc. Alger: Carbonnel. Bel, Alfred (1938) La Religion Musilmane en Berberie, Equisse d’Histoire et de Sociologie Religieuses. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner. Bergson, Henri (1971) The Creative Mind. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bergson, Henri (1913/2001) Time and Free Will. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Berque, Jacques (1962) French North Africa: The Maghrib between Two World Wars. London: Faber & Faber. Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) Algeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brett, Michael and Elizabeth Fentress (1997) The Berbers. London: Wiley Blackwell. Chevalier, Jacques (1928) Henri Bergson. New York: Books for Library Press. Chraïbi, Driss (1982) La Mère du Printemps. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Derrida, Jacques (1993) Aporias. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. Fortes, Meyer (1970) Time and Social Anthropology. New York: Humanities Press. Gaston, Sean (2006) Derrida and Disinterest. London: Continuum. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gell, Alfred (1992) The Anthropology of Time. Oxford: Berg. Gumbrecht, Ulrich Hans (2004) The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Supermodernity. London: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin (1992a) The Concept of Time. Trans W. McNeill. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin (1992b) The Concept of Time: The First Draft of Being and Time. London: Bloomsbury. Heidegger, Martin (1975/2001) Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Hope, Wayne (2006) ‘Global capitalism and the critique of real time’, Time and Society 15 (2/3): 275–302. al-Jabri, Abed Mohammed (1996) Naqd al-ʾaql al-ʾArabi 2: The Structure of Arab Reason. Casablanca: The Arab Cultural Centre. Jamous, Raymond (1981) Honneur et Baraka: Les Structures Sociales et Traditionnelles dans le Rif. Paris: Édition de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

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Keightley, Emily and Michael Pickering (2012) The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. London: Palgrave. Khatibi, Abdelkabir (1980) Annaqd al-Mujdawij. Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwdah. Marder, Elissa (2013) ‘Real Dreams’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 51, Supplement S1, 196 (John Wiley & Sons). Michaelsen, Scott and Johnson E. David (2008) Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture. New York: Fordham Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1993) The Birth of Presence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rabinow, Paul (1995) ‘On the Archeology of Late Modernity’, in Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden (eds), NowHere: Space Time and Modernity. London: University of California Press. Reading, Anna (2012) ‘Globital Time: Time in the Digital Globalised Age’, in Emily Keightley (ed.), Time, Media, and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ricoeur, Paul (1985) Time and Narrative. London: University of Chicago Press. Sabry, Tarik (2004) ‘Young Amazighs, Migration, and Pamela Anderson as the Embodiment of Modernity’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 1 (1): 38–52. Sabry, Tarik (2010) Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday. London: I.B.Tauris. Sabry, Tarik (2014) ‘A review of The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice by Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering’, Media, Culture and Society 36 (6): 888–95. Scannell, Paddy (2006) ‘Broadcasting and Time’. PhD Thesis: University of Westminster. Scannell, Paddy (2014) Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation. Cambridge: Polity. Smart, J.J.C. (ed.) (1973) Problems of Space and Time. London: Macmillan. Westermarck, Edward (1926/1968) Ritual and Belief in Morocco. New York: University Books. Wilk, Richard (2002) ‘Television, Time and the National Imaginary in Belize’, in Faye Ginsberg, Laila Abulughod and Brian Larkin (eds), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. London: University of California Press. Williams, Raymond (1961) The Long Revolution. London: Penguin.

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Chapter 4 C O N SUM I N G T H E P A ST I N C O N T E M P O R A RY B E I RU T : T H E C A SE O F C A F É R AW DA DU R I N G R A M A DA N Helena Nassif Introduction It is a cold February evening in Beirut, 2017. I decide to visit Café Rawda after a long absence. I go with a friend, who insists on using the right-side entrance so as not to miss the new decor. Walking through the corridor, I can’t help but be surprised: the over-80-year-old Beiruti seaside cafe (established 1935) is taking on a different style. The first middle space, once occupied with tables between the plants, has become a lounge space made up of wide brown couches. The second middle space is refurbished using a red concrete material to cover the fountain. The feel and mood reminds me of artificial ‘Damascene milieu’ aesthetics.1 I may be prompted by the television drama series, Bab al-Hara, which I followed over thirty Ramadan nights in this cafe in 2010. Or, maybe, because the trends I spotted seven years ago are now more clearly manifested. I reach the seating space by the sea, completely sealed during winter by glass doors and windows from all directions. We open the window a little so as to allow fresh air to circulate into the argileh (hookah) smoke-stuffed space. The smell of tobacco is strong, even when only four busy tables fill the area, which has more than thirty empty ones. I recognize three people. The first is the manager, Muhammad Shatila, sitting with a few people who seem to be his family members. The second is the well-known actor and playwright Rafiq Ali Ahmad, who is playing Tawleh (backgammon) among a group of six men. The third is the head maître, who is the only one I knew among a group of seemingly new waiters who are working that shift. I send my friend abroad a text message stating, ‘when you come back, you will hardly recognise Rawda.’

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This seaside cafe, which is by the Mediterranean Sea in Beirut, symbolizes the transformations towards a socially conservative and economically consumerist society. Yet it also represents a continuity with a past Beirut, and with a time that was diverse, inclusive and hopeful, one that seems to be lost. Since 2008, the significance of Rawda as a ‘place of memory’ (Nora 1989) has been contested, as I shall argue later in the chapter. What are these changes and contestations, and what do they tell us about cafe leisure and Beirut? In order to explore these questions, I focus on the cafe during the month of Ramadan, Islam’s month of fasting from dawn to sunset, when evenings take on a different mood in the presence of television drama screenings. Studying the cafe during the month of Ramadan exposes the shifts in both the materiality of the place and the way it is being experienced. It allows us to trace the ordinariness within the everyday life of a month and what is exceptional in comparison to the rest of the year. Ramadan at Rawda thus permits an exploration of place and time, as well as the religious and the mundane that are conjoined. This work is based on media ethnography, meaning immersion in the daily media and social practices of people, which I conducted in Café Rawda during the month of Ramadan 1431 (the ninth month in the Hijri calendar), which corresponds to 10 August to 9 September 2010. I used two methods: participant observation and unstructured interviews. Participant observation took place during the thirty evenings of Ramadan between 8 pm and 12 am at Rawda, before, during and after the screening of the Ramadan drama series, Bab al-Hara, at 10 pm (see Figure 4.1). In addition, I conducted unstructured interviews with regular, occasional and former clients both during and after Ramadan. I base this chapter on the material that resulted from the fieldwork during Ramadan, 2010, and on observations that I gathered, as a native of Beirut, both before and after 2010. In the first section, I locate Café Rawda within Beirut’s pre-war cafe culture. I describe how the geographical location, its services and clients influence a cafe’s categorization. I look into how cafe identities are constituted, and the past and present changes that they reflect. In the second section, I explore the shifts at the level of what Rawda offers. I focus on a change in services, mainly the self-imposed beer ban and the introduction of the screen during Ramadan, which started in 2008. Ramadan time matters, because it allows for observation of the commercial and religious trends within the cafe. In the last section, I introduce some of the discussions generated within the cafe between two of the young clients who frequented Rawda during Ramadan.

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Figure 4.1  Café Rawda on a Ramadan evening, before the scheduled 10 pm airing time of Bab al-Hara.

I focus on how they negotiated the same issues: the alcohol ban and the introduction of the screen, which raised questions about how to negotiate the religious and social morals and what issues are at stake. I take the temporal dimension into account by tracing how they used and constructed the past and the ideas of the future that dominated in the past, thus participating in the contestation in/over the present. The chapter concludes by drawing links between the cafe space and the idealizing of the past.

Beirut’s cafe landscape Beirut’s cafe landscape underwent many changes during the war period. It is possible to delineate two distinct eras: the pre-war and the post-war cafe landscapes. The changes are observable at the levels of cafe practices, geographical location and spatial classification. In this context, Café Rawda constitutes a valuable case study because it is one of those rare cafes that allow us to trace the continuities between the pre-war and the post-car cafe culture. A place that used to serve alcohol until 2008, Rawda allows for an exploration of two shifts. The first is the shift from pre-war shaʿbi cafes to post-war spaces of neo-tradition, and

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the second shift is from shaʿbi seaside cafes to ‘leisure’s moral spaces’ of consumption. To be able to identify the specificity of Rawda, it is thus important to historically situate the seaside cafe within this complex and shifting context of a vivid cafe culture in Beirut. In the following section, I first provide a glimpse into the pre-war cafe landscape, its classification, and the seaside cafe as a special type. I then propose a new classification based on the post-war changes. The presence of cafe spaces in Beirut goes back to the sixteenth century, when coffee was introduced from Yemen to the Near East (Hattox 1985). Derived from the word ‘coffee’, al-maqha (cafe) and al-qahwa (coffee) are used interchangeably in colloquial Arabic to mean cafe. The first is the classical Arabic term meaning cafe, while the second literally means coffee. In colloquial Arabic, adding the defining prefix al (the) designates a coffee-drinking venue, instead of coffee as a beverage. Accounts of coffee houses in twentieth-century Beirut are rich in gender, class and sectarian inclusion and exclusion. Pre-war cafes played social, political, professional and syndicalist roles, and they performed as spaces for assembly, celebration, entertainment and public visibility (Itani and Fakhoury 1997; Douaihy 2005; Sawalha 2010). The pre-war maqha shaʿbi (traditional cafe, as used by Sawalha 2010)2 is defined based on three characteristics: playing card games, smoking argileh (hookah) and hosting male-only clients, except for the seaside cafes, which host families with children (Douaihy 2005: 13). There are multiple approaches to cafe classification: according to location, the identity of the clientele, the leisure activities available, and the cafe’s relationship to its surroundings (Douaihy 2005). Douaihy (2005: 10) further classifies the maqha shaʿbi into four different types that are based on location: the first two types are situated in Beirut’s city centre (front and back streets), the third type is found in residential neighbourhoods across the city, and the fourth type is the seaside cafe. Itani and Fakhoury (1997) mention the male-only port area cafes, which are different from family seaside cafes, thus introducing a fifth type. Sawalha (2010) compares the shaʿbi cafes studied by Douaihy (2005) to the French-style cafes that opened in the 1950s and 1960s on Hamra Street in the Ras Beirut area. Ras Beirut, in the 1960s, was a hub for an Arab intelligentsia due to multiple factors, among which is the presence of a number of universities, the best known of which is the American University of Beirut, which attracted students and academics from the region to Ras Beirut (Nagel 2002). Beirut was also the centre for a free press and an active publishing industry, which invited writers and journalists who challenged the status quo of Ras Beirut’s cafe scene.

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In the pre-war cafe context, seaside cafes constituted a special type. They met the first two of the three characteristics of the shaʿbi cafes: playing card games and smoking argileh (hookah). In contrast to the shaʿbi cafes, which hosted male-only clients, these cafes traditionally attracted, and continue to attract, families, intellectuals, artists, politicians and journalists across genders and generations. They also serve food and provide play areas for children (Douaihy 2005: 118–19). A city by the sea, Beirut in the twentieth century is said to have had nine seaside cafes, of which only two survived the war era (1975–90) (Douaihy 2005). The following six cafes no longer exist: al-Bahri, al-Bahrayn, Hage Daoud, al-Amercan, al-Hamra and alGhalayini. Seaside cafes not only attracted notables and intellectuals but also clients from non-littoral cities or towns. For example, the contemporaneous famous author and poet Amin Nakhle (1901–76) and the renowned painter Mostafa Faroukh (1901–57) patronized Hage Daoud’s cafe, which was a ‘popular Friday destination for families from Damascus’ (Abu Fakhir in Barclay 2007: 34). Most seaside cafes in Beirut today do serve argileh, allow card games and include television screens. The civil war in Lebanon, and the consequent destruction of Beirut’s historical centre, changed the cafe landscape. The pre-war male-only shaʿbi cafes of the city centre and the port no longer exist in today’s Beirut. Only a few residential neighbourhood cafes have survived, in addition to two seaside cafes, one of which is Café Rawda. The end of the male-only shaʿbi cafe, however, has not threatened some of the leisure activities that were available at the shaʿbi cafes, mainly argileh and card games. I propose a distinct classification to distinguish between the two prominent cafe categories in Beirut today: those that serve argileh and allow card games, and those that do not. There is no common parlance to differentiate between these two classifications. For the objectives of this chapter, which does not focus on the cafes where card games and argileh are not available, and, for the lack of an appropriate term, I chose not to label these cafes. Using the term ‘modern cafes’, which was used by Sawalha (2010) to juxtapose the French-style cafes with the shaʿbi ones, is no longer relevant, because shaʿbi cafes are no longer the dominant cafe category for comparison; and this can be misleading, since both cafe categories that are available today are modern. Cafes that do not serve argileh extend across many city neighbourhoods and constitute a diversity of styles that include, in addition to the French café trottoire, a myriad of genres, ranging from the lounge to the American chain coffee shops.

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I use the concept of neo-tradition to classify the contemporary mixedgender cafes that serve argileh and allow card games, rather than in contrast to the modern, the neo-traditional here, following Asad (2003: 222), has the ‘present’ always at its centre. What differentiates spaces of neo-tradition is thus the fact that they maintain certain elements from the local traditional cafes, like playing card games and smoking argileh, but they refuse others, like gender exclusion. The neo-traditional, thus, is an overarching element in which local cultural elements from the past exist within the context of mass communications and digital culture. These cafes offer ingredients from the past (playing card games, smoking argileh, and certain menu items), which are embedded in a modern media setting of digital connectedness, through television screens, the internet and mobile phone connectivity. The majority of the cafes I categorize under the neo-traditional do not constitute a simple continuation of the pre-war shaʿbi cafes, which, for example, have changed when accessed by women in cities like Damascus and Cairo, nor do they represent a reinvented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Instead, the neo-traditional is the adaptation of old ways (playing card games and smoking argileh) under new conditions (gender mixing and media culture), but for the same old purposes of assembly, socialization and entertainment. The presence of the television screen is an important component of the neo-traditional, as a trend. It is beyond the scope of this chapter, but to develop the concept of neo-tradition further, it is essential to analyse the different uses of the television screen in a cafe space. Before I introduce Café Rawda, one important leisure element to add to the cafe landscape is alcohol consumption. In Beirut, alcohol was allowed to be served in seaside cafes from 1925 (Itani and Fakhoury 1997). The decision to permit alcohol, similarly to its prohibition, reflected social changes and negotiations. Critcher (2011) explains how alcohol consumption in Britain was sometimes perceived as being a problem, and how processes of moral regulation were shaped by public debate. While ‘moral reformers’ in Britain tried to influence the state, as the final regulator, in the case of Lebanon, new trends to restricting alcohol use in cafe spaces do not seek state legislation, and they are mainly associated with the rise of pious entertainment within the Islamic sphere (Harb 2006). Basing their analysis on the cafes that are widespread in Beirut’s southern suburb, Deeb and Harb (2013: 208) identify cafes that are located in majority Shia suburbs to be ‘leisure’s moral spaces’. They classify these alcohol-free cafes and restaurants into various styles: heritage, nature-garden, formal dining, contemporary

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and eclectic. Excluding the formal dining style, which is not the object of this chapter, all of the cafe styles they introduce offer argileh and allow card games. These can thus be grouped under what I identify as neotraditional spaces. Alcohol availability provides an additional layer of comparison and classification. An alcohol licence defines the cafe space in terms of its location and the identity of their clienteles, and less in terms of their interior design. I now move on to introduce Café Rawda and to describe how alcohol and television viewing were contested by Rawda’s clients.

Contestations over Café Rawda Qahwat al-Rawda3 (garden cafe), Rawda (garden) and Shatila4 are used interchangeably to name one of the rare garden cafes by the Mediterranean Sea in the Ras Beirut area of the Lebanese capital. The grandfather, Ahmad Shatila, opened the cafe in 1935, and after his death left its management to his wife, who died in 1996. After her, the children took over the management in turns. The founder’s children and grandchildren retain the rights to the cafe, but not to the land. According to Muhammad Shatila, a grandchild and the current manager of Café Rawda, the rights to the land are shared among a larger number of heirs, ‘whose names fill seven pages’. The cafe is situated by the shore; it is an open-air space with two paved and parallel walkway entrances separating middle seating areas between plants and trees. The left walkway leads to a children’s play area, while the right walkway leads to a northern sea-view terrace that overlooks the Military Beach and is famous for hosting artists and intellectuals. To the western side, two additional terraces overlook the rocky coast, the first is a roofed ground floor, and the second a roofless first-floor seating area. In the centre of the western terrace, a flight of stairs leads down to the seashore, where fishermen used to stand on their typical barrel-shaped spots.5 Multiple factors differentiate Rawda from other cafes in the city in general, newer seaside cafes, and its neighbouring cafe ʿArus al-Bahr, specifically.6 It is a garden-like space by the sea in a city with few public gardens and a privatized coastline. It provides a calm atmosphere away from the busy streets, accessible to both men and women from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Rawda’s unpretentious ambience is open to co-existing extended families, lovers, friends, political activists, artists and intellectuals, across gender, age, class, region, sect and political identifications. Its main distinction, in comparison to ʿArus al-Bahr,

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lies in the symbolic capital that Beirut’s intellectuals historically brought to Rawda. In 2008, one of the decisions of Café Rawda’s new management was to stop serving beer. In fact, it was the decision to ban alcohol that drew the attention of Rawda’s clients to a change in the management turn among the founder’s children. One of the brothers, Abed al-Fattah Shatila, took charge of Rawda, and his son Muhammad became the executive manager. The regular clients understood that the change in turns led the more conservative brother to take hold of Rawda. As a result, different groups of clients, who were not happy with the alcohol ban, initiated a boycott campaign on social media, in the hope of pressuring the owners to reverse their decision. The beer ban was also coupled with other changes that Rawda underwent during the month of Ramadan of that year, mainly the screening of Ramadan television drama series. In the following sections, I describe how the alcohol ban and the Ramadan changes influenced Rawda as one of the few surviving shaʿbi seaside cafes. I begin by introducing one regular Rawda client, the famous music composer, singer and actor, Ahmad Qaabour.7 In the 1990s, Qaabour contributed to the construction of a televised image of the typical Beiruti (i.e. Beirut dweller) based on his father’s stories. In his rendition, the mark was the tarbush or the fez, popular in Lebanon and Syria as the official head-gear under Ottoman rule and until the midtwentieth century. In the excerpt below, he speaks of this past Beirut, which is both subjective and collective. Qaabour juxtaposes the city to its seaside cafe, a context in which Rawda still holds what Beirut has lost. He then criticizes two main visible breaks with the past which had taken place: the alcohol ban and the introduction of the giant screen(s):8 Why do we come to Rawda? Because this place gives us the impression of a lost [political] stability, especially as it is in front of the sea. It is still standing by the shore. The sound of the sea is still witnessing us. That is why we come to Rawda, especially for me, the Beiruti. I have been coming here for more than forty-five years, since the early days of Rawda. Yes, it has undergone change, a wall repainted, a tree was cut or grew taller, the cloths covering the tables changed, but the place remains for what it symbolizes: stability, quietness, repose and steadiness in a time of rapid change. Rawda also looks like the country, with all the diversity it holds. Knowing that the decision to ban alcohol has disappointed me, I would have liked its Beiruti Muslim owners and patrons not to be bothered with beer because Christians, seculars, and tourists have

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the right to drink alcohol … The place has not changed, except during Ramadan and the World Cup and the screen that is turned on all the time. I feel it is a violation of what Rawda represents to me, a chance to meet, engage in dialogue and reflect, and not to be present in a consumerist society that drains my attention and increases my anxiety by what is shown on screens. I don’t want to watch Bab al-Hara. (Qaabour 2010)9

Qaabour’s description of Rawda stresses two shifts: the prohibition of alcohol and the introduction of television screens (even if seasonally). I start with the alcohol ban, which contributed to shifting Rawda from a shaʿbi seaside cafe to a ‘moral space’ of leisure (Deeb and Harb 2013), resulting in a slow shift in the social composition of the clientele. According to a circulating rumour, the ban was one consequence of Abed al-Fattah Shatila returning from pilgrimage to Mecca. The total alcohol ban in 2008, however, followed a partial alcohol ban during the month of Ramadan of the preceding years. Ramadan, a holy lunar month in the Muslim calendar, is the month of fasting, that is, abstaining from any food and drink between sunrise and sunset. This is usually coupled by alcohol abstinence by Muslims who do not necessarily strictly uphold the no alcohol rule during the rest of the year. Muhammad Shatila, Rawda’s executive manager, asserted that his father performed pilgrimage, but explained that the decision to ban alcohol was both religious and commercial. By commercial, he emphasized his desire to reach out to a new clientele in a city with a growing number of people who are uncomfortable with frequenting a place that serves alcohol. He claimed that former clients were only allowing the cafe to break even, and finding a new clientele for a new Rawda required looking for both the ‘conservative’ crowd and the ‘younger generation’. It is difficult to fact-check Muhammad’s assertion that the decision to ban alcohol indefinitely brought an increase in sales between 2008 and 2010.10 Irrespective of whether the decision was driven by religious or commercial reasons, or both, the boycott calls by Rawda’s regular clients following the beer prohibition failed to jeopardize the profitability of the cafe. In 2010, a number of Rawda’s ex-boycotters re-frequented the cafe on the premise that the ban is a ‘personal right’ of the owner of a ‘private cafe’. Rawda’s regulars, similar to Qaabour, although they had expressed a clear position against the ban and remarked that there is a visible change in Rawda’s clients who seemed to be more religious, continued to perceive Rawda, in 2010, as a place of security and tranquillity amidst a ‘chaotic present’.

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The alcohol ban thus contributed to a slow shift in the clientele, but did not threaten the symbolic meaning of Rawda as a place that connects contemporary Beirut to a past with a more horizontal culture. The introduction of the television screen, however, redefined Rawda; it changed it from being a shaʿbi cafe that represents stability into a neo-traditional space that represents consumption. This shift in experiencing Rawda is only seasonally dependent on the introduction of television screens during Ramadan, or during the World Cup.11 To understand the peculiarities of introducing the screen to Rawda during Ramadan, I approach Ramadan beyond piety as a frame of analysis. That is, I understand Ramadan not only as a sacred month of fasting, discipline and modesty but also as a ritualistic month, a festive month for families and friends getting together, going out and consuming. Beirut, like other cities in the Arab region, acquires a daily rhythm during Ramadan that is distinct from the rest of the year. Fasting from daybreak until sunset, even if not practised by some Muslims, is followed by post-iftar (post-breaking-the-fast) encounters around food with friends and family. Those who fast in Ramadan, as well as many of those who do not fast, thus experience the day according to imsakiyya Ramadan (Ramadan schedule). Fasting time is experienced as an individual time, with spiritual meanings and embodied practices that encourage practitioners not to conform to work routines. Post-fasting time tends to allow for social engagement in which people join together to share food and to associate in different leisure activities. This is not to suggest rigid boundaries between fasting and post-fasting; spiritual practices take place throughout the day. Most informants, however, mentioned that the rate of family meetings, both by being invited and by accepting invitations to indoor and outdoor gatherings, tends to increase during Ramadan, and with it, their expenses.12 Consumption and expenses thus rise in association with socialization among family and friends. These social practices, when they occur in cafes as public leisure spaces, infuse space with Ramadan’s unique temporality. Spirituality notwithstanding, we can observe at Rawda, starting from 2008, what Armbrust (2002) termed the ‘Christmasization’ of Ramadan, namely, the association of Ramadan with materialism, a process that effectively turns it into a mass consumption ritual. Rawda first introduced a screen and put on a ‘Ramadan mood’ in September 2008. That summer, I joined friends for post-iftar evenings of playing cards and smoking argileh. Rawda was screening season three of Bab al-Hara, which was already a popular television drama series known for emptying the streets of Arab towns during its airing. In 2008,

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nevertheless, the television was kept at a low volume and the cafe space remained without ornaments. On the first two nights of Ramadan, 2010, I met the same friends, playing card games at Rawda. During Ramadan, they play for fun, while during the rest of the year they do it to gamble. After the first two evenings, they stopped frequenting Rawda, because they did not want to watch Ramadan television drama series and found the loud sound of Bab al-Hara very obtrusive. To create the Ramadan mood in 2010, Muhammad Shatila went beyond substituting alcohol as a leisure activity with television screening. Based on Bab al-Hara’s reported yearly number of viewers and its ability to attract more clients to Rawda during 2008 and 2009, he installed two large screens instead of one and raised the television volume as if in an open-air cinema.13 He considered Bab al-Hara as the main event around which the evening centred, and continued to screen a number of drama series before and after Bab al-Hara’s screening time (see Figure 4.2). Muhammad Shatila also introduced new menu items and decorated the cafe with plastic silver Ramadan lanterns (fanus/fawanis), neon lights in the shapes of palm trees, crescents and stars, and a congratulatory Ramadan expression ‘Ramadan Kareem’ (‘generous Ramadan’). The new mood resembled the ‘Ramadan tents’ that were popular during the 1990s.14 Although the general phenomenon of Ramadan evenings in leisure spaces was not new, Rawda’s Ramadan shift into the neo-traditional was.

Figure 4.2  Café Rawda on a Ramadan evening during the airing of Bab al-Hara in 2010.

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As with the alcohol ban, the presence of the television screens in Rawda slightly changed, but did not alter, the place. Rawda remained inclusive of people from different sectarian, class and ideological backgrounds. It is not only the spatial that is socially constructed but also the social that is spatially constituted within spatial forms and relative social locations (Massey 1992: 80). Rawda’s history as a shaʿbi seaside cafe hindered its shift to an enclosure for ‘conservative’ clients that were identified by Muhammad Shatila. The continued presence, or return, of some of the ‘non-conservative’ crowd, although they were annoyed by the alcohol ban, guaranteed that Rawda remained a meeting point, whose meaning is neither fixed nor static, but open to contestation. This contestation over place reflects a contestation over values that can also be traced in the debate among Rawda’s clients attending viewings of Bab al-Hara. In the next section, I introduce two of them and question whether neo-tradition as a descriptive category, used to describe the cafe, can provide an analytical framework to examine the representations of the past observed in a place.

Negotiated public I met Adam and Shaker (both born in 1990) in Café Rawda. They were sitting in a group to play card games requiring a minimum of four players. Adam and Shaker were very good friends, studying at the same private university. Adam worked for his family business, a food processing industry, while studying for his bachelor’s degree in business administration. Shaker worked full-time at a bank in parallel to studying for his bachelor’s degree in finance. Both young men took their work engagement seriously as they woke up at 6 am during the week to be at work before going to their classes in the afternoon. Adam’s leisure lifestyle, however, differed from that of his friend Shaker, who partied more frequently and occasionally spent time with his parents. Adam, on the other hand, hardly went out clubbing and spent most of his free time with his family. The young men described their position in relation to regional politics and global economics. They repeatedly spoke about their need to secure themselves and to be able to start a family, and, more generally, the impossibility of making a decent living in Lebanon. While they agreed about economics, a conflict arose about politics. Shaker was critical of an Arab nationalist rhetoric, abided more closely to a liberal worldview, and reiterated the political cynicism he

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described his father to have had, while Adam supported Arab nationalist sentiments and used quotes by Jamal Abdel Nasser. The differences in values and attitudes between the two friends reveals the complexity of Rawda’s public, which is termed ‘conservative’. In one encounter, Shaker revealed sensitive details about his first romantic relationship, which was beginning to become serious. Nine months into the relationship, the ex-girlfriend confided to Shaker that, before she met him, she had had an extra-marital sexual experience and that she was not a virgin. Shaker expressed that he ‘could not help feeling furious’ and broke off the relationship.15 Months later, he evaluated his behaviour retrospectively and considered himself to have been ‘childish’ and ‘patriarchal’. He said that he questioned himself for a long time before he was able to entertain the possibility of his future wife not being chaste. He asked himself why he accepted men, and not women, being sexually active. Although he had reconsidered his position, he nevertheless advised his colleague at the bank to remain a virgin until she got married, and he defended his ex-girlfriend’s ‘loss of virginity’ from within the construct of the chaste woman. He contended that she was ‘tricked into sexual activity’ by an ‘older guy’ who was ‘exploiting’ her for his ‘sexual pleasures’. Shaker’s attitude on the subject revealed the contradictions that are embedded in the conflicting expectations around women’s sexuality (Schielke 2009). Adam, on the contrary, expressed a clear refusal of the value system that celebrates sexual liberty. He recounted his grandparents’ story in order to denounce the materialistic values that govern human relationships in the present. His maternal grandfather, a paediatrician from Damascus, got married when he was 16 years old, to his grandmother, who was 14 years old. After the couple’s first baby, Adam’s grandfather travelled to Britain to continue his medical education as a paediatrician, while his wife stayed in Damascus for more than a year before following him. Adam’s mother, a dentist, was born in Damascus, while her sister, Rabih’s mother, who is a fashion designer, was born in England. I met the grandmother, along with Adam’s mother, both veiled, while watching Bab al-Hara at Rawda. Adam considered his grandparents’ epoch to have enjoyed fewer temptations and to have exhibited higher moral values in comparison to today. He believed that, in the past, men were confident to travel alone, without fear of their wives cheating on them, while women today ‘cannot be left alone’, as his married friends were facing problems caused by long-distance marriages. Both stories about love, however, reveal that young people are negotiating what they see as inherited and dominant values. For

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while both Shaker and Adam valued chastity as a means to control women’s sexual liberty, both were also aware that sexual liberty is being practised by themselves, or their friends. The negotiations over values exposed the contradictions in the ways that the young people are using the past and positioning themselves vis-à-vis the present and future. In the tale about Adam’s grandparents, just narrated, similarly to the conversation between Adam and Shaker, to be narrated, the portrayal of the past was not a personal longing for a lost home, but an idealized representation of a past that was just and pure and that was being used to criticize the present. Adam: In the past, if someone wanted to get married, they would help him find a wife, not ask him to have a car and an apartment and a substantial salary before being able to propose to a girl. Shaker: It is no longer as easy as it used to be. Adam: Everything has become materialistic. Shaker: Yes, now life has become so materialistic. Now the person needs to be financially at ease (kamil mukammal) to be able to start a family. Before, they used to help him to build himself and to build a family, now no one helps one another. Adam: Now, even the brother doesn’t care about his brother while, in the past, the whole neighbourhood was as if it were one family.

The past, to these young men, was morally superior to the present, economically more just, and contained the blueprint for a better social and economic life. Adam recurrently complained that all of the problems started during their time: ‘Life was simple. Our parents did not have as many worries as we have now.’ The young men agreed on the superiority of the past, but did not agree on their self-defined social religiosity. Adam considered his family to be ‘conservative’, and not ‘fundamentalist’. He offered his sisters’ lifestyle as an example of his family conservatism. His sisters, one veiled and one not, enjoyed the right to freedom of movement, but when one sister met a serious potential partner, the couple were not expected to go out unaccompanied before their formal engagement or katb kitab.16 They interacted privately and freely online, and his sister might have met her fiancé without Adam knowing about it, but he trusts that she did not. The difference between Adam and Shaker’s relationship to family

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and religion, and to negotiating the ‘multiple moral rubrics’ (Deeb and Harb 2013), is reflective of a contestation that is taking place at the levels of cultural norms and identity construction. Adam’s cousin Rabih, whom I met in Damascus, called Adam ‘religious’. While Shaker thought that he used to be ‘reserved’ and had become ‘open-minded’ at university. Shaker wanted Adam to become more ‘open-minded’, while he was discovering religion anew. That year was the first time he had attended post-iftar Ramadan prayers (taraweeh) at the mosque. However, once Ramadan was over, he went back to frequenting pubs and drinking alcohol. Although the alcohol ban introduced a demarcation between the conservative and non-conservative Rawda clients, identifying the conservative public was not straightforward. The young conservatives I interviewed exemplified how the category is open to constant negotiations. ‘Conservative’, in their case, did not correspond to one clear set of values or practices, either religious or social. The question of who the conservative is was not only a matter of positioning the individual vis-à-vis the category but also a matter of tracing shifts in time; shifts that had implications for the ways in which the young perceived themselves and were perceived by their peers. Gender mixing, in this case, was not a sufficient indicator of a progressive attitude towards gender. The neo-traditional, in their case, was not only about blending entertainment styles from the past with those from the present but also a choice of idealizing the past and its values, a past that was used to legitimately criticize the present and to champion conservative moral values. In this context, I identify another conservative trend, one that is not linked to religious or moral conservatism, but that additionally gives value to the past. In the case of Rawda, Qaabour, for example, similarly to other clients who refrequented the cafe after the ban, requested the conservation of the place as a place from the past, harbouring stability and security in the face of a fast-changing Beirut.

Conclusion In this chapter, I used Café Rawda as a case study in order to trace the social and cultural changes influencing the spaces and publics of entertainment in Beirut. Rawda, a seaside cafe that holds the characteristics of Beirut’s pre-war shaʿbi cafes, lived (in 2008) through two breaks with its past. The first was an alcohol ban that was meant

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to attract a more conservative clientele to the cafe. The second was the seasonal introduction of television screens, which influenced the entertainment practices taking place at the cafe. Based on a media ethnographic research conducted mainly during Ramadan, the chapter focused on the specificity of seaside cafes to study what was being negotiated during a sacred month in the Muslim calendar. While the changes introduced in 2008 challenged the symbolic meaning of Rawda and introduced changes in the leisure practices available in the space, the place succeeded in maintaining its significant characteristics as a meeting point for a mixed public at the level of class, sect, age, gender and status. Café Rawda provided a unique case study of continuity, rather than a break with a pre-war Beirut. This was a continuity that allowed the exploration of two conservative trends. The first was an idiosyncratic and ambivalent social and religious conservatism, which was expressed by the young men. The second conservative trend was shared across age groups and perceived the past to be an idealized time. Rawda’s public were generally unhappy with the present, and they looked to the past for answers. Qaabour was hoping to conserve a Rawda he knew, and he rejected the consumerist society that the screen advertisements brought to his leisure space. The young men, however, criticized materialism but not the screen or consumerism. They were the clients Muhammad Shatila wanted to attract to a Rawda that was less a seaside cafe and more a neo-traditional space. The neo-traditional is a descriptive category not only of a space but also of social practices that idealize the past and advance a conservative agenda but, nevertheless, is contested and negotiated. It is important here to mention that the contestation over the space of Rawda is anything but over. The struggle inside the Shatila family on who should manage Rawda, and how, and what leisure practices are permissible in the cafe was not resolved, and a legal case was raised. The focus of this chapter was on the negotiations among individuals, owners, managers, clients, and even the internal struggle within the individual, while the state was always absent. I finish this chapter with the news that a judicial guard was appointed by the court to oversee the management of Rawda until the court judgement is issued. Among the owners, one group wanted to divide Rawda into two, but the initial court decision was to conserve the unity of Rawda and the concrete barriers constructed around the lounge-style area, in addition to its sofas, were removed. Café Rawda continues to be a place for consuming the past, a past that is not critically examined but that is idealized and contested.

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Notes   1 For more information on ‘Damascene milieu’, please see al-Ghazzi (2013).   2 Shaʿbi comes from the word shaʿb or people/folk, but the translation of the rich meaning of the word shaʿbi is not straightforward. When linked to culture it is usually translated as ‘popular’, but when linked to dance or medicine, it is translated as ‘folk’. Sawalha (2010) chooses the traditional cafe to designate the shaʿbi cafe. However, none of these terms reflect the complex connotations of shaʿbi involving a number of elements that include class (low culture versus high culture), popularity (reaching out to many people), ordinariness (unsophisticated) and others.   3 Contrary to Sawalha (2010), I do not use Qahwa to name the popular coffeehouse, and cafe to name the Western style ones. In this chapter, I use Qahwa and cafe interchangeably, and I consider cafe to be the English translation of the Arabic Qahwa (which literally means coffee in English).   4 Shatila is the name of a well-known family in Beirut that owns the rights to the land where Rawda and its adjacent cafe, ʿArus al-Bahr (meaning mermaid), are located. As a result, both cafes are referred to as Shatila, in attribution to the Shatila family. Similarly, one of Beirut’s Palestinian refugee camps is also named Shatila after the Shatila family, which owns the land on which the refugee camp is built.   5 This space has been completely sealed and it was forbidden to reach the shore from Café Rawda in 2017.   6 Rawda is bordered by two privatized beaches; to the right there is the Military Beach, and, to the left, the Long Beach. To the east it is adjacent to Beirut’s only amusement park, the ʿArus al-Bahr Café (owned by another part of the Shatila family), the Ghalayini Café (a shaʿbi cafe) and the al-Nijma football stadium.   7 Qaabour is an ex-communist who was accused, after the Lebanese civil war, of joining the neo-liberal economic project of the post-war Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, by joining the Hariri-owned television station, Future Television.   8 The screen in the middle area is composed of white Plexiglas over a wooden stand. The screen size is approximately 3 metres wide and 3.3 metres long. The total height of the screen is 4 metres.   9 Ahmad Qaabour, interview with the author, Beirut, 16 September 2010. Irrespective of the characteristics of the clients that the Ramadan drama series and the World Cup competition attract, both events tend to fluctuate in the numbers of their audience, depending on who is playing or which drama is being screened. 10 Muhammad Shatila, interview with the author, Beirut, 25 August 2010. 11 This chapter does not draw comparisons with cafe football viewing, which requires participant observation during the World Cup. It is, however, important to mention that, in contrast to cafe football viewing,

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Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World which attracts a predominantly male crowd that exhibits a high level of competitiveness in supporting their preferred teams, Ramadan television watching, mostly of drama series, creates a more relaxed and inclusive storytelling atmosphere. Conservative Muslim discourse problematizes consumption by ‘good’ Muslims during the holy month, and calls for ‘modesty’. Rawda complicates the distinction between modest and opulent Ramadan practices for two reasons: it is regarded as an unpretentious space, and it is relatively affordable (for a wide range of middle-class clients). Rawda is considered to be an affordable cafe, on average. A middle-income family is expected to be able to afford visiting Rawda more than once during Ramadan. The volume was not lowered during advertisements, a common practice in homes. The first Ramadan tent in Beirut was established in 1995. It was a modified imitation of an Egyptian custom that was popular in the Hussein district of Fatimid Cairo. The tent spread used in Egypt, a famous colourful cloth, was also borrowed for tents in Lebanon so as to decorate outdoor spaces, or the indoor halls of restaurants and hotels. These tents organized evening shows that hosted singers, monologists and storytellers. Television stations seldom covered these daily Ramadan entertainment shows. This custom has lost momentum since 2005, with the assassination of Rafiq Hariri and the deterioration of the security situation in Lebanon. For more information, see Mallah (2005) and Rihan (2008). Shaker, interview with the author, Beirut, 30 August 2010. Katb kitab: this literally means the writing of the book, or the legal signing of the marriage contract. Even when it is an official marriage, it is socially considered to be a formal engagement and usually the marriage is only consummated after the wedding party and the bride’s move to the groom’s house.

Bibliography Armbrust, Walter (2002) ‘The Riddle of Ramadan: Medial, Consumer Culture, and the “Christmasization” of a Muslim Holiday’, in D.L. Bowen and E.A. Early (eds), Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barclay, Nadia (2007) ‘Cafe Culture in Beirut: A Center for Civil Society (16th Century–Present)’. Master’s Thesis: Bryn Mawr College. al-Barghouti, Tamim (2004) ‘The vital illusion: The war of Basous and why we tell tales’. The Daily Star, 21 February. Available at: www.dailystar.com.

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lb/Culture/Art/2004/Feb-21/95485-the-vital-illusion-the-war-of-basousand-why-we-tell-tales.ashx (accessed 24 May 2017). Critcher, Charles (2011) ‘Double Measures: The Moral Regulation of Alcohol Consumption, Past and Present’, in P. Bramham and S. Wagg (eds), The New Politics of Leisure and Pleasure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Deeb, L. and M. Harb (2013) Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shiʾite South Beirut. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Douaihy, Shawqi (2005) Maqahi Beirut al-Shaʾbiyya 1950–1990 (Beirut Popular Cafés 1950–1990). Beirut: Dar Annahar. al-Ghazzi, Omar (2013) ‘Nation as neighbourhood: How Bab al-Hara dramatized Syrian identity’, Media, Culture and Society 35 (5): 586–601. Harb, Mona (2006) ‘Pious Entertainment: Al-Saha Traditional Village’, ISIM Review 17: 10–11. Hattox, Ralph, S. (1985) Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Washington: University of Washington Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. London: Cambridge University Press. Itani, Mukhtar and Fakhoury Abed al-Latif (1997) Beirutuna [Our Beirut]. Beirut: Dar al-Anis. Joubin, Rebecca (2013) The Politics of Love: Sexuality, Gender, and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama. Plymouth: Lexington Books. Mallah, Imad (2005) al-Umsiyat al-Ramadaniyya fi Khiyam Beirut [Ramadan Evenings in Beirut’s Tents]. Al-Ittihad, 17 October. Available at: www. alittihad.ae/details.php?id=33933&y=2005 (accessed 8 May 2017). Massey, Doreen (1992) ‘Politics and space/time’, New Left Review I/196 (November–December). Nagel, Caroline R. (2002) ‘Reconstructing space, re-creating Memory: Sectarian politics and urban redevelopment in post-war Beirut’, Political Geography 21: 717–25. Nora, Pierre (1989) ‘Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoire’, Representations 26 Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, 7–24. Qaabour, Ahmad (2010) Interview with the author, Beirut 16 September 2010. Rihan, Fadi (2008) ‘Khiyam Ramadan Manazel al-Bayrutiyyin wa Shashatihim mundhu 14 Shbat al-Mashʾum [Ramadan Tents are Beirut’s Houses and Screens since 14 February]’, Almustaqbal Newspaper, 12 September, Edition 3075. Sawalha, Aseel (2010) Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City. Austin: University of Texas Press. Schielke, Samuli (2009) ‘Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation, and the Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (Islam, Politics, Anthropology), S24–S40.

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Chapter 5 N E O - T AJ DE E D ? R A P I N S AU D I A R A B IA A N D T U N I SIA Joe F. Khalil

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Arab world seems to be convulsed by revolutions and counter-revolutions. Around and behind these events, however, one type of actor, mostly young people, was at work articulating visions of culture and polity. This chapter is about youth, media and their complex relations in contemporary times. It focuses on Arab rap as public performances revealing cultural politics, and on rappers as interpreters of cultural change and continuity. I am taking a fairly wide definition of hip-hop, referring it to a broad range of cultural practices, ‘including MCing (rappin’), DJing (spinnin’), writing (graffiti art), breakdancing (and other forms of street dance), and cultural domains such as fashion, language, style, knowledge, and politics’ (Alim et al. 2009: 2). There is significant debate over just when and where Arab hip-hop began. Many scholars of Arab hip-hop assume that it first appeared in Palestine during the late 1990s (Stein and Swedenburg 2005; Maira 2013), whereas others argue that such engagements go back to the experiences of Arab Americans, if the focus were to be on the cultural practices associated with an ethnic group (Youmans 2007; Yenni 2011). More recent articulations point to the rise of dissent in 2010, or the constellation of factors – the economic, political, social and cultural disenfranchisement of young people – that led to the so-called Arab Spring as the moment at which the cultural practices of hip-hop gained public and media acknowledgement (Gana 2012; Gosa and Nielson 2015). For this chapter, I take 2005 as a pivotal date in the emergence of a sharing and collaborative culture among hip-hop artists, which was facilitated by Web 2.0’s possibilities. This allowed rappers to collaborate both temporally and spatially across the Arab world, the diaspora, and globally, and ushered in a decade of Arab hip-hop as a trans-local cultural movement.

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Against this backdrop, I advance some ethnographic material and contextualization within the current inter-disciplinary scholarship on hip-hop to explore what I call neo-tajdeed (new renewal), features that are associated with the re-emergence of youth agency as a category in public life. The An-Nahda (awakening) that marked the social and political history of the Arab-speaking world in the late nineteenth century was associated with a cultural, particularly literary, effervescence that is often depicted as tajdeed (renewal). As discussed later, it was a period that was characterized by the interplay between politics (particularly Arab nationalism), economic entrepreneurship (especially in the publishing field) and creative experimentation with literary genres and tastes. If seen through the prism of An-Nahda and its tajdeed movement, Arab hip-hop has not sprung fully formed from nothing: it is an expression of youth cultural politics. Used as a case study for analysing the current mutations of youth cultural politics, rap should be conceptualized as being a contemporary episode with historical continuity. Unstable historical interactions among youth, socioeconomic and political forces, and other emerging cultural forms are the essence of this continuity. As I shall explore, Arab rap represents a cultural form responding to a historical crisis – surfacing especially during the Arab Spring. In poetry, fiction, film and other creative fields, young people have attempted to offer politicized artefacts that reflect and respond to a political climate that was fomenting long before the Arab uprisings of 2010. On this basis, a variety of personal, political, economic, technological, social and religious forces shape the emergence of rap, for example, as a lingua franca in a process of neo-tajdeed. The testing of this line of argument is in whether it makes sense of evidence, whether it comprehends historical truths. Most of this chapter assesses evidence in the course of telling the particular journeys of two rappers in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. I have selected these two countries for four reasons. A first, and obvious, reason is that I have been conducting research in Saudi Arabia for a decade, and I have had significant access to rappers in Tunisia for at least two years. Second, researching in both countries can yield theoretical and practical revelations about the state of youth cultural politics. Third, research is conducted in what is perceived to be one of the most liberal Arab countries, Tunisia, and the most conservative one, Saudi Arabia. Lastly, Tunisia spearheaded the Arab uprisings for which (according to popular consensus) rappers formed the ‘anthem’, while Saudi Arabia has remained relatively immune to these movements.

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Of course, this is not enough material from which to generalize, but my aim is to frame the lines of questions about hip-hop as part of a neo-tajdeed process in the twenty-first-century Arab world. As such, the chapter simultaneously engages with youth-generated media (Khalil 2010), a framework that integrates alternative and youth media definitions in understanding contemporary youth and communicative activities. To clarify, the term ‘generated’ accounts for the intensity and passion that often motivates young people to develop and circulate specific artefacts. Broadly defined, youth-generated media include, but are not restricted to, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, graffiti, videos, songs and other forms of communication that are developed and circulated by young people, with or without the support of adults. In practice, the purpose of selecting these two rappers is not to compare or contrast them but to evaluate specific youth-generated media in specific historical instances and in specific localities. My central questions address the ways in which Arab hip-hop’s form and content establish linkages with young people’s socio-political history and culture. I contend that these linkages are best understood as Abdurhaman’s ‘connective creativity’, where cultural analyses of media need not be ‘detached from argumentations and debates inherent to Arab thought and its problems’ (Sabry 2010: 28). In order to recognize connections, I start by locating the central emphases in Arab intellectual thought through continuities and ruptures, and then reaching behind them to grasp the contours of neo-tajdeed.

An-Nahda and tajdeed: Continuities and ruptures A long and interesting history surrounds the emergence of the Arab modernity project (Kassab 2010; Patel 2013). For the purposes of this chapter, the key element of this history is the emergence of An-Nahda, which first came into being in the late nineteenth century, as the Arab citizens of the Ottoman Empire sought to find alternatives to their everyday cultural, political and social decline. Many of the activities associated with this movement were referred to as An-Nahda, and they have since been distinguished from their accompanying cultural revival, which is known as tajdeed. This period resulted in vibrant intellectual thought about ‘the challenges posed and opportunities offered by Western modernity, particularly in the socio-political, constitutional, and economic realms’ (al-Rahim 2011: 8). The following is a discussion of ruptures, linkages and continuities within the An-Nahda movement during the twentieth century.

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Between 1850 and 1914 was seen as a period of the re-conversion of European Renaissance and modernist projects. Laroui (1977: vii) believes that, beginning in Syria and developing in Egypt, ‘the nahdah sought, through translation and vulgarization, to assimilate the great achievements of modern European civilization, while reviving the classical Arab culture that antedates the centuries of decadence of foreign domination’. During the inter-war period (1919–38), this inspiring social and nationalist movement continued as the AnNahda project. Cultural and intellectual activities intensified through the widespread publishing of poetry and short stories in specialized magazines. In parallel, this movement resulted in ‘the formation of intellectual salons and political secret societies, and the development of proto-nationalist and proto-feminist movements’ (Patel 2013: 19). With the independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the unionist ideologies of pan-Arabism dominated Arab intellectual thought. To put it another way, the cultural movement tajdeed tried to maintain its own momentum, standards and procedures, and to grant itself a certain independence from strong state control (Abu-Rabiʿ 2004). This seemingly linear trajectory that emerges between the late nineteenth- and mid-twentieth-century Arab intellectual thought, however, takes an important new direction through the moral and political crisis after 1967. The defeat of Arab armies and the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem prompted the emergence of a critical intellectual movement. In what Laroui (1977) called the ‘second Nahda’, Arab poets, playwrights, filmmakers and other intellectuals sought refuge in the few remaining pockets of freedom in the Arab world. Under the cultural anguish of a generation that had been shocked by the 1967 defeat, themes from the first Nahda re-entered public discourse. Eschewing strict state controls, they developed trans-locally and are best expressed in the old adage, ‘Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.’ The common failure of both the nationalist project and its critics to develop meaningful alternatives was overcome by the communication revolution of the 1980s and 1990s (Alterman 1998). Starting with a robust pan-Arab press, based in Europe, in the 1970s, this information and entertainment revolution was later magnified by the introduction of pan-Arab satellites in the 1990s. The era of pan-Arab media ushered in new hopes for the revival of an Arab political and cultural project (Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research 1998). At the heart of the conceptualization of the information and entertainment revolution as a platform for Arab intellectual thought in the 1980s and

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1990s there lies a paradox: it is premised on the assumption that media institutions, and mediated texts, matter and that they have an impact on how Arab lives are made, both individually and collectively, and on how Arabs make sense of the world. This is well evidenced, but so are the structural limitations on media ownership, access, censorship and representation (Kraidy and Khalil 2009; Sakr et al. 2015). The importance of tajdeed does not lie in the intensity, ingenuity or constancy of its cultural practices, nor in the abundance, pervasiveness or longevity of its contributions; the importance of the movement rests on its place in Arab intellectual thought and the currency of its propositions. Several implications are seen to flow from the preceding discussion if we are to examine the cultural effervescence around the Arab uprising – rap being one of its manifestations. These cultural practices, such as hip-hop, rearticulate practices by connecting and reconnecting histories, tempos and publics. First, any attempt to assess such phenomena requires one to locate ‘continuities’ and ‘ruptures’ between past and present cultural movements. Second, the resulting media need to be the focus of study inter-actionally, rather than cognitively, in order to document how meanings are constructed. Third, focusing on the contours of a tajdeed allows for categorizations that are constantly changing. The next section discusses Arab hip-hop precisely as a cultural practice, and uses youth-generated media as an analytical framework within which to reveal the contours of neo-tajdeed.

Youth-generated media and Arab hip-hop This analysis answers the call for comparative and cross-cultural research that is located within historical analyses (Hill 1999) and that aims to explain the ‘translocalities’ (Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997) of hip-hop cultures. It demonstrates how ‘rap music and hip-hop culture have in many cases become a vehicle of various forms of youth culture’ that has been formed at particular historical, cultural, economic and political conjunctures (Mitchell 2001: 10). Hence, this chapter is specific about the local loci and their multiple connections. Arab hip-hop or Arab rap are often treated, misleadingly, as being unitary in academic, public and policy discourses. Existing research has tended to place the field on a spectrum, with one body of scholarly writing and documentary filmmaking that anchors Arab hip-hop in globalization or global youth culture (Swedenburg 2001; Hammond 2007; el-Hamamsy and Soliman 2013) and that tends to be celebratory in nature (Khalaf and Khalaf

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2011). At the other end of the spectrum there is a set of critical academic writing and filmmaking that focuses on Islamic and diasporic identities (Arab-American, North African-European) or national hip-hop scenes, especially Palestinian (Yenni 2011; Maira 2013). Alongside these perspectives, there have also been insightful discussions about the role of rap in politics as a ‘resistance to colonial, neocolonial, and late capitalist entrenchments in the Arab world’ (Nouri 2012: 26). Instead of contextualizing Palestinian rap in the familiar environment of alienated and oppressed youth experiences, Massad (2008) suggests linking it to the traditions of revolutionary and alternative Arab political songs that date back to the 1950s – an attempt to re-establish a continuity of cultural thought and practice. In lieu of a connection with the cultural politics of African-Americans, rap becomes indigenous to Palestinian culture ‘not epiphenomenal or subservient to the political, but […] generative of political sentiment’ (Massad 2005: 177). Since the Arab uprisings, many commentators have heralded Arab hip-hop as being the voice of the revolution and as an underground force for social change (Peisner 2011; Hagmann 2015). Focusing on the organization and economic value of Tunisian rap, Shannahan and Hussain (2011: 55) describe rappers as artists practising a form of resistance, with no expectation of ‘financial or even public rewards’. Nevertheless, they see rappers as incapable of transitioning from performing resistance to effecting political change (Shannahan and Hussain 2011: 56). In contrast, Khiari (2011) sees rap as ‘direct democracy’, enabling people to transcend religious, economic and historical constraints so as to transform their societies by minirevolutions (Fatah 2011). Building on these explanations, the following section positions youth-generated media as a framework for analysing how Arab rap might be understood in the lineage of tajdeed. The designation youthgenerated media reflects a commitment to developing an analytical framework within which to examine young people’s engagement with, and development of, media artefacts that escape the neat categories offered in media that are produced for youth (Khalil 2010). As a framework, youth-generated media orient our analyses to four characteristics (Khalil 2014). The first relates to creativity, whereby the end result is a unique by-product of young people’s experiences. With youth-generated media, creative rewards are irrelevant, to the extent that young people do not follow the market logic presented in mainstream media. The second characteristic concerns young people’s

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ability to render this creativity in a physical shape, an artefact. The latter is self-expressive of individual or collective experiences. Even simple acts can attract attention, despite media and collective-action blackouts. The third characteristic suggests the origination of forms of energy, since young people are self-invested in their artefacts. The fourth characteristic accounts for the ripple effect of youth-generated media which are, in many cases, part of a sequence of activities. The artefact is usually one element in a chain of events or actions that combine media with other forms of youth cultural politics and practices. My use of youth-generated media is informed by extensive fieldwork, during which I became cognizant of the complexity of active rhizomes among young Arabs across different age, national, cultural, political, geographic and economic markers. It calls for a rethinking of the ‘local’ and the ‘regional’, advocating instead a trans-local and rhizomatic approach that acknowledges the multiple ways in which ideas, practices, symbols and artefacts are developed, appropriated and circulated (Bailey et al. 2008). Such an understanding breaks the obsession with the local and the fetish of the regional, paving the way for a negotiated understanding of how young people, both across the Arab world and globally, are empowered by ideas and practices. In addition, youthgenerated media provide a flexible mechanism with which to analyse the multiple interactions of material, structural and discursive forces, focused on traditional media practice. What do youth-generated media imply for our study of Arab hiphop and its linkage to tajdeed? They suggest that this hip-hop and its artefacts (performances, music videos, songs, graffiti, etc.) can no longer be analysed simply as texts, subcultures or glocal cultures. Arab hip-hop becomes a site within which to understand how the identities of youth, as media makers and users, are shaped, constructed and vigorously contested. With a growing, worldwide network of individuals and collectives, and the increased use of online tools, rap (as hip-hop’s musical artefact) has eroded some of the obstacles of geography and made it easier to appear like a rhizome and in trans-local collaborations. In what follows, I examine the characteristics of youth-generated media in the works of two rappers who come from Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. I have two aims: the first is to contribute to an expanding body of literature that argues that Arab rap is linked more to socio-political and cultural movements and less to a generically hybrid cultural musical mashup that is void of cultural politics. My second goal is to recast the relationship between music and activism. I propose we consider rap as a lingua franca in a process of neo-tajdeed, a movement

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of disengagement from the cultural politics of the immediate past and a reinscription of specific cultural and political values that are anchored in Arab-Islamic heritage. I shall consider some findings from my indepth interviews to develop the contours of neo-tajdeed that may inform both the theory and the research on youth-generated media. The purpose is not to compare the experiences of the Tunisian rapper, Balti, and the Saudi rapper, Black Drama, but rather to engage rappers as ‘cultural agents’ and ‘critical interpreters’ of a movement, which is ‘a way of life’, a ‘lifestyle’ or a ‘worldview’ (Spady et al. 2006: 28; Alim et al. 2009: 2).

Balti and Black Drama The history of Arab hip-hop, in all its aspects and modalities, is yet to be written. I can only present a brief sketch of two rappers, who form part of a wider phenomenon that has been increasingly visible and vocal among the Arab region’s younger generation. Facebook groups, music forums, YouTube videos and performances held in both private and public venues suggest the strong public presence of rappers. Based on my fieldwork in Jeddah and Tunis, the Saudi hip-hop movement is estimated to include some sixty rappers, who are spread across the kingdom, but who are primarily concentrated in the more urban and liberal centres on the east and west coasts. Similarly, the Tunisian hiphop scene includes some fifty rappers who are spread across the country but who have a strong presence in the capital. Balti, whose real name is Mohamed Saleh, was born in 1980, in the Medina (Kasbah) in Tunis, and spent his childhood in an urban neighbourhood of Sidi Hsine. He says his choices were limited to becoming a criminal, a musician or a sportsman. He chose the last two.1 After a brief career as a basketball player, he turned to rap music, influenced by his brother’s interest in breakdancing. Starting his career as part of the rap band Wled Bled (kids of the town or the countrymen) in the 1990s, Balti’s career as a solo performer took off in 2000. As such, he established himself as a bridge between the 1990s and the current generation of Tunisian rappers, earning him both praise and criticism. Balti’s original popularity was built around socio-political critiques of young people’s everyday lives; he tried to navigate around the strict governmental control of music production and performances by constructing lyrics about love, personal struggles and family values. Despite these attempts, he was jailed for an anti-regime song that he

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did not produce, yet he was still invited to perform at governmentsanctioned venues. Born in 1981, Hani Zein, also known as Black Drama, grew up in the western coastal town of Jeddah, perhaps the most liberal Saudi city. At the age of 11 years, he started dabbling with pirated music-composing software, learning English by listening to songs and watching subtitled movies. By 1999, he had started Dark2Men, a two-member band. Between 2001 and 2008, the band made extensive use of the internet to build its popularity, promoting, sharing, and compiling a list of 25,000 email addresses. In 2008, Black Drama achieved regional fame as the Saudi finalist on MTV Arabia’s hip-hop competition show, Hip-Hop Na. Despite the fame, Black Drama was unable to generate a steady income from his music, and he decided to follow his other passion and become a chef and restaurant entrepreneur. He remains active as part of a rap collective called J-FAM, which brings together various generations of rappers in Jeddah. Next, using youth-generated media as a framework, I will discuss themes that have emerged from in-depth interviews with Balti and Black Drama. The purpose is to identify the contours of neo-tajdeed as evidenced in rap. The first section treats creativity and energy as two critical characteristics that reveal the roots and sustainability of hip-hop culture, while the second section shows the by-products and outcomes associated with rap’s artefacts (particularly songs and videos) and events. Creativity and energy Balti and Black Drama provide powerful accounts of the multiple and contradictory roots of rap in the Arab world. While they recognize connections with African-American rap, both artists see Arab rap as also having indigenous roots in their respective communities. Pointing at his skin, Balti proclaimed, ‘Rap is the music of “k-halesh” ’, a term used to refer to people with dark colouring – an acknowledgement of the diverse ethnic and racial identities. Moving beyond racial roots, Black Drama stresses links between hip-hop and the pre-Islamic poetry competitions that took place in Souk Okaz. Even today, sung poetry has a strong influence across Saudi Arabia, with poets’ duels taking place during festivals accompanied by ‘song and dance rituals involving lines of dancing chorus singers who repeat the line of each poet, giving his challenger time to respond’ (Campbell 2003: 228). In both accounts, there are discernible performative acts that become

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symbolic of seeking linkages with a sub-Saharan African (itself drawing on African-American) ethnic dimension of rap, while simultaneously demonstrating strong roots in Arab local practices. A clear reminder of tajdeed’s twin process of joining Western modernity and reviving Islamic and pre-Islamic culture. Not surprisingly, the connection with the African-American rap of the 1990s is a running theme in most studies of global rap (Murray and Neal 2012; Aidi 2014). However, both Black Drama and Balti distinguish their work from the mainstream global hip-hop scene. This position may be viewed as a strategy for developing a creative and cultural identity that separates their artefacts from the commercially dominated world of rap. This is achieved through clear distancing from the set of discursive images that are associated with mainstream rap. Echoing what both believe is a distorted image of rappers, Black Drama recalls a period in his life when he was working as a hospital technician and was trying to get married: I didn’t introduce myself to her [his fiancée] as a hip-hop artist. Do you understand what I’m saying? I can’t say that to anyone. When any girl knew about it, she would say that I wouldn’t succeed. Do you understand what I’m saying? People still don’t accept the hip-hop artist ’til now. For them, I’m like the hip-hop artist they see on TV. No need to explain because you know how they look on TV. The hip-hop artist should be one of the most intellectual persons. Had he not been intellectual he would not have been able to express himself.2

While Black Drama did not elaborate on these widespread perceptions of rappers, there is a clear attempt to separate hip-hop into ‘looks’ and ‘intellect’. The former is associated with a mainstream version of rap, while the latter is a marker of an alternative vision. The visual perception of rap artists is further emphasized when Balti traces the circulation of these images through multiple platforms and scenes. He also introduces a specific mission for local rappers: The conspiracy that we are witnessing through American music videos is that they make you live an illusion, they get you to see 50 Cent in [a] Lamborghini and Maserati and wearing ‘bling bling’ worth billions, and naked girls […] well this is not rap. Rap, at the base, is rhythm and poetry [says it in English], it’s rhythm and poetry with which the blacks and Hispanics were fighting racism and marginalization in America, the Arab and African immigrants

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used it in France, also in Tunisia, the youth have also used it. To each their own. I will give you an example. In Algeria, Loutfi Double Canon has a religious speech in his rap, which is positive. It’s his political reflection, so, you see, rappers who have a certain culture talking to people, you know what I mean? It means that rap is not drugs and drinks and foul language, and so on; for me, rappers are philosophers, whether French or American, not 50 Cent, not Dr Dre, not Snoop Dogg.

As in the quotation above, Balti and Black Drama invoke two dimensions of their work in comparison to that of others. The first has to do with their focus on content, which is characterized by rhythm and poetry, a reflection, or a philosophy that is contrasted with a focus on visual performativity illustrated through the production of music videos displaying wealth. The second is a political dimension that gives these rap artists a clear task on which to reflect, to fight and to offer positive pathways for their society’s future. For Balti, this is not just a conspiracy but an ongoing battle for rappers like him. Throughout my interviews, one common denominator was the passion with which these rappers distinguished themselves from the mediatized images of rappers, particularly Western ones. These rappers have redefined their creativity by equating it with an intellectual act: philosophy. Echoing Balti, Black Drama puts it succinctly: [Rapping] is a philosophy. This is my philosophy. It is the concept that you put in this song, to what extent it will be useful to people or not, you get them to see their world with all its complexities.3

To these artists, rapping is equated with an ability to understand current mutations in the everyday world, to formulate useful interpretations of young people’s politics, and to put ‘local’ culture at the centre of the debate. Take, for example, Balti’s 2011 hit Jey mel rif lel assima (Coming from the rural areas to the capital) about young people’s aspirations and deceptions after internal economic migration. The key point here is that rappers have a role to play in their societies. Their creativity is engaged in a process of praxis to craft messages that are accessible to these communities. The second important argument concerns the Westernization of local culture. Not only are rappers engaged in presenting viewpoints on and attitudes to the world, they are also focused on constructing them for a specific audience. Here, language is brought to the forefront as a way to root these rappers in local cultures. Balti sums it up like this:

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Western cultures have the good and the bad. Why do we need to impose something that is not ours? You see, instead of saying ‘peace be upon you’ [in Arabic] we say, ‘Yo, what’s up, Man?’ We do not need to shed our skin. You know what I mean.

As Alim et al. (2009: 7) have noted, ‘language, the omnipresent medium through which hip-hop cultural practices, performance, and productions are both expressed and constituted, is perhaps one of the least analyzed aspects of hip-hop culture’. While some of his colleagues at the university were excited about the music, Black Drama’s friends often commented that ‘rap is in English, sing in English, there’s no problem, but in Arabic, that’s stupid’.4 The problem is not of language use but, rather, of a perceived perplexity of the English language with Western modernity and of Arabic with Muslim traditions. For purveyors of traditions, languages, just like cultures, are not supposed to mix or even to juxtapose – Western music and Arabic lyrics, or a non-traditional mixture of English and Arabic lyrics within a song or even a single verse or phrase. However, for Black Drama, the mix is not just a reflection of everyday life but also an opportunity to experience various forms of delivery and creativity: We are Arabs and speak Arabic and English […] When I’m able to deliver what I want to say, then there is nothing so-called language. I have a picture I need to clarify in sixteen lines; I have something to say in sixteen lines.5

Perhaps one of the most significant accomplishments of Arab rappers, in general, is to emphasize classical Arabic and local dialects. This is an important spatial dimension to Arabic language. In Saudi Arabia, there is a typological division between sedentary (hadari) and Bedouin (badawi) dialects. The former is associated with cosmopolitan cities, like Jeddah, while the latter reflects tribal affiliations. In Tunisia, even within the sedentary dialect, there is a clear distinction between urban Darija (spoken Arabic) and the various Berber, French-infused dialects. This is further fragmented due to expansion of the urban areas, the emergence of upper- and middle-class zones and of various houma (neighbourhoods). The result is rap’s reliance on both classical or literary Arabic and the development of local vernaculars that reflect a growing concern with the emergence of Arabic urban vernacular as ‘mixed’ or ‘corrupt’ forms of speech. Interestingly, Arabic language used in rap is often in its classical form, which had largely disappeared from

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young people’s everyday use, but which has been reinvigorated through rap. For Balti, the issue is not just the complexity of language (whether Arabic, English or French), but the extent to which rap uses the spoken language (Darija) and reflects the interests of a particular community. At first, our texts were hard to understand. But then we simplified them to get closer to people. We simplified our language. We began to speak the Tunisians’ language [Darija]. We spoke about their problems. People started to hear their problems through our songs. The music was basically their mirror. It’s like you pulled a mirror in front of these people. They found their identity in these songs. When you speak to someone about illegal immigration, maybe they have experienced it. When you speak to him about the traditional neighbourhood, he is living in it. When you speak to him about his mother, he feels it. When you speak to him about jail, he is living in it.

For the youth who are growing up in an increasingly globalized world, the issue of Arabic urban vernacular is often associated with a range of cultural practices that are deemed to be alien to an essentialist Arab culture. In the background looms the question of authenticity: what makes a particular musical genre authentically Arab, Western or not? Rap is the closest way to express oneself. I mean, with rap one is not trapped in inherited opinions and structures, as in the case of Tarab [classical Arabic music]; with rap, I talk as I please.6

The creative possibilities that are associated with liberating forms of expression transcend language only to face the significant challenge of narrowly defined (and limiting) notions of culture. Similarly, Black Drama’s declaration seems to coincide with Balti’s sentiments that point towards the economic and political structural limitations on the acceptance and promotion of rap as a genuinely local form of expression. We’re, like, non-official because we get support from no one, the government wants to promote traditional music, the record companies do not believe in our popularity and do not know how to treat us. For them, they are used to producing Mezwed [traditional Tunisian music] and even radio stations prefer to play foreign rappers, but not us.

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Language plays an important role in revealing cultural politics, not just in the choice of fundamental language (Arabic, English, French or other) but also with regard to young people’s understanding of time in relation to the dynamics of creativity. The ability to write and perform in multiple languages is a historical product of increased interconnectedness, of hybrid cultures, colonialism and post-colonialism, soft power, and a range of socio-political, economic and cultural vectors that overlap in young people’s time. In their accounts, there are discernible performative acts that reveal the energy and creativity that are necessary to popularize a form of music and make it an accessible, vernacular form of media. In its creative pursuits and the vigour of its message, the emerging hip-hop culture reveals forms of expression that are developing in public, with rappers acting as facilitators. Artefacts and sequences of activities This section combines two inter-linked characteristics of youthgenerated media: the development of self-expressive artefacts, which, in turn, trigger a sequence of related activities or artefacts. Rather than confuse their audiences with the contradictory presence of multiple political affinities or manifestations, these rappers incorporate multiple temporal and public lineages that have developed over the years. These recurrences of young people’s cultural politics have found in rap, as with other forms of youth-generated media, a modicum of exposure. As Scott (1990) and Bayat (2013) point out, these practices represent a type of ‘everyday street politics’ or a ‘hidden transcript’ of the oppressed. Speaking about his relationship with the government, Balti provides a powerful account of the multiple and contradictory meanings of politics: They were social topics, unemployment, the neighbourhood, illegal immigration […] Rappers did not speak politics like they do now. And the first political rap song that came out was pinned on me. I was arrested for it, even though it was not mine. It belonged to one of our friends, and his voice is very similar to mine. So they arrested me sometime in 2005–06

In another illustration of this period, Balti recalls the song Flash (2008), which again brought him face to face with the authorities: When I released the [opening lyrics] ‘Go to the street, you get lost’ song, I was subject to an investigation, and I was called several times

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to the police station and the Ministry of the Interior to explain why I released it. I was not doing politics. I was just criticizing the society.

This quotation seems to coincide with sentiments that are expressed in other interviews that I have conducted, which point towards a discursive practice of first; narrowly defining politics, and then distancing oneself from them. By labelling his acts as criticism or parody, Balti moves from ‘politics’ to the ‘politics of the everyday’. His explanation of the 2014 hit PaPam is characteristic of this: PaPam is not politics. It was after a joke. It’s a parody. It’s about the constitutional council. When you talk about the increasing cost of living, or the lack of security, people say to you, ‘What do we have to do with Panama?’ Let’s talk about the daily challenges people face with the high cost of tomatoes, onions and meat.

In the very few studies of Arab rap (Stein and Swedenburg 2005; TawilSouri 2011; Gana 2012), scholars have produced important evidence about the centrality of ‘Arab’ and ‘local’ politics in the emergence and development of Arab rap scenes. In this work the focus on Palestine as ‘the most vexing and defining question of Arab contemporaneity’ (Gana 2012: 31), the politics of occupation, and Arab (dis)unity have also been significant. Similarly, the definition of politics has continually expanded to include economic, cultural and social themes that are related to social justice, citizenship and basic freedoms. However, two specific interpretive perspectives can be identified. The first is that any precise situatedness of rap in the flow of youth-generated media has to be attacked temporally with macro-analytical historicizing tools. As this section will show, manifestations of youth cultural politics, rap included, are historically situated and linked. The second interpretive perspective is that the rap scene increasingly reveals trans-local political articulations as rappers reach beyond their immediate communities or their corresponding diaspora. Manifested through a sequence of activities, collaborations, performances and networks, this hip-hop culture is branching outwards through multiple media platforms and public engagements. Recent rap commentaries have managed to bind the Prophets of Da City in apartheid-era South Africa, to Ana Tijoux in Chile, to DAM in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to El General in Tunisia, in providing the soundtrack for ‘revolutions’. In my interviews, I found that what binds Black Drama and Balti is a political awareness that

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links the present to the past. As Massad (2008) claimed, Nakba, the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948, was not a simple historical event but was a ‘history of the present’. Just as Black Drama recalls his early awareness of hip-hop, he blends together Palestinian and AfricanAmerican histories that are linked by a concept, a meta-narrative of defence against aggression, regardless of its shape, form or instigator. Let’s say I got to know hip-hop at the beginning of 1997. When I was in sixth grade, I got to know about the 1948 Arabs [a term used for Arab-Israelis] and their world was not much different than Tupac’s. It is all about the concept and how are they going to sing the Arabic hip-hop. I understood from the concept that Tupac was talking about that he was defending his people, environment and society. Regardless of his formulation of that subject, the concept was there and those Arabs were also doing it.7

In a single statement, Black Drama identifies himself with the politics of an African-American and an Arab-Israeli. Separated by geographies, they share a set of practices, rap and an assertion of political identities. The use of the term ‘concept’, Black Drama emphasizes, is different from a message, because it reveals a way of being which is anchored in multiple localities and temporalities. These trans-local cultural politics often mix ethno-religious identifiers of which the rappers, as individuals, do not claim full knowledge, yet on which they nevertheless form a clear opinion. In what follows, Balti demonstrates a specific awareness of everyday political life in post-uprising Tunisia. The regional dimension, Palestine, is juxtaposed with a local social divide, and secular ideas, such as Arab nationalism, are meshed with religious explanations, such as Fitna (strife). Since key political or religious ideas have become part of the repertoire of their everyday life, rappers draw on them in the formulation of their own political identity and rap. It’s part of Arab nationalism; after all, they [Palestinians] are Arabs and Muslims [the majority is], they are part of your religion, your people, your cause. I don’t know how people who believe in the cause and understand what it is – especially the Salafis and the New Salafis – if they truly raise the banner of Islam, they should fight outside, in Palestine. You don’t fight your own people. For me, this is a false Jihad, what is happening in the Arab world today is Fitna [strife] do you understand me? […] We are fighting each other. I say, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God,’ and you

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say, ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God,’ yet we keep killing each other. This is Jihad Fitna, this is what they [the conspirators] wanted to achieve, and they did this under the banner of the Arab Spring.

Within the same song, or during the same performance, Balti and Black Drama make claims both about their country of residence, Saudi Arabia or Tunisia, and about a territory of belonging, the Arab world or Islamic Ummah (nation) – both of which have no clear geographies. In fact, neither Black Drama’s first song nor Balti’s first video were about their country of citizenship. Dark2Men’s first song, Baghdad, merged English and Arabic lyrics to become part of the band’s style: the title and the chorus are in English, but some verses are in Arabic. It took the band about two weeks to write the lyrics, compose the music and record it at Black Drama’s makeshift studio. With Baghdad, Black Drama realized ‘that what we were doing was rap’.8 But why was it Baghdad, and not Jeddah? ‘At the time, some events were happening in Iraq [referring to US air strikes in 1998], and also, remember, we grew up during the war [Desert Storm in 1990–91].’9 Similarly, one of Balti’s first music videos was entitled Ghaza, which amounted to a five-minute compressed history lesson about Palestine. In the 1980s, Tunisia became home to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after their expulsion from Beirut. Growing up during this period, Balti was sensitized to the Palestinian issue, so that the video features the words of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as the chorus. In recent years the term rap has become part of the vocabulary of resistance and revolutionary movements. Tawil-Souri (2011: 469) argued that the ‘very act of “creating culture” in the contemporary period is a form of political resistance’. Discussing Palestinian rap, she argues that it ‘has become a tool for sharing news of social and political realities as well as a vehicle for political critique and mobilization’ (Tawil-Souri 2011: 476). Abdel-Alim (2006) argues that within the hip-hop cultural movement, Muslim hip-hop has been able to ‘create a counter hegemonic discourse that threatens the ruling class and their ideas’ (Abdel-Alim 2006: 46). As a cultural movement, these rappers and the texts they develop are products of specific socio-political contexts, and, as such, they respond to cultural histories and political memories. Rather than buying into popular cultural notions that all rappers are mere translators of a very specific Western culture that is often associated with consumerism, we should examine how some of these rappers discuss these critiques. Here

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again, discourses on modernity, tradition and their impact on personal and collective beliefs about development are clearly articulated. This intellectual debate is a central feature of the Arab hip-hop movement; as Balti suggests, it provides these artists with ‘fundamental principles’ as they develop critical and analytical skills independent from Western norms. We live in an Arab, Muslim society. There are fundamental principles that we should never let go of. I drink alcohol for example, but I shouldn’t encourage people to drink. That is something between me and God. He is going to judge me on my own. But I shouldn’t encourage it. These are principles. We should not compete with the Americans or the French. Their societies are different. Verbal aggression and incitement to violence are corrupting the public taste. A rapper has a big influence on the youth.

If Balti is concerned with maintaining these cultural values as competition with certain perceived corrupting Western values, Black Drama laments the cultural stagnation of Arab society. Citing a tencenturies-old Arab scientific discovery, Black Drama stresses the need to develop ideas in education and culture – a well-documented discourse in the tajdeed movement. Thirty years ago, Russia celebrated sixty years since the construction of the [Moscow] metro. This means that ninety years ago, they had a culture that had developed before that time for a number of years. When I review the Arab World and the Arabian Peninsula, what is the time frame for us? It is much farther back in time. What happened? It was sort of anaesthesia. People don’t want to make progress anymore; they reach a certain point where they have enough. So they won’t do anything anymore. Is this the general status of our society? […] Education and culture that we suppose the West had control over benefited from us and we helped it develop. As we see today, they [people in the West] put a cover on Alhazen [the father of modern optics]. The most important thing is the camera and its reflection of light. It all started here, but who developed it to become the camera that we know? They [Westerners] did that. But the idea started here. We start a certain concept then we stop developing it. The West celebrates development but we stay as we are […]10

This is a recurring historical moment when a generation’s cultural movement precedes its political one. Just as with tajdeed, which started before and lasted long after its An-Nahda movement, the current

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manifestations of hip-hop culture are not bound by a political movement, the Arab Spring. As two rappers approaching their late thirties, Balti and Black Drama are both hailed as being part of the avant-garde for their generation’s problems, ambitions, futures, miseries and lives, and they are actively invested in this position. Thematically, these rappers are offering contemporary articulations and rearticulations of systemic issues identified in tajdeed. They address the challenges facing an Arab present, while taking into consideration an Arab past. In the process, they re-evaluate their roles in society. Everything is relative. When you talk about unemployment, or young people fleeing to Europe by sea, or those put in prison unfairly, you reflect a whole political system. You don’t need to be explicit. When you talk about unemployment, it means there is something wrong, and when you talk about unfair detention it means justice is absent. […] Many people criticize my songs for putting forward the problem with no solution. It is not my role to bring solutions. I just criticize the situation as it is, and it’s up to you to do the rest. But many of my songs have made a positive impact on young people.

My analysis explained how the rappers under investigation epitomize the characteristics of youth-generated media and how their practices delineate the contours of a neo-tajdeed. They present a creative mix that is interested in developing alternative conceptions of life. Whether in Tunisia or Saudi Arabia, their energy offers an important moment that indicates that Arab rap is more complex than previously theorized. It is horizontally linked to other movements, both across the Arab world and globally; at the same time, it is historically linked to other movements and manifestations of youth cultural politics. Rappers are conversant with some Arab-Islamic history and politics, and they connect with each other trans-nationally and trans-locally (Khalil 2014). At the same time, they create artefacts that escape commercial or government control. In the process, they consolidate a critical movement that expresses alternative views on a range of socio-political, economic and cultural issues that directly affect young people.

Conclusion This chapter had three goals. First, to briefly review some of the issues raised in recent discussions about the nature and role of public participation in the so-called Arab uprisings. Second, to suggest that

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it is difficult to make general statements about these Arab uprisings without placing them on a historical continuum. The third task is to suggest that while much has been written about the political, social, economic and general cultural vectors of the Arab uprisings, this has too often resulted in mechanistic and deterministic interpretations of their impact. Instead of premature generalizations about Arab youth, with their inevitable focus on ‘new media’, there is a need to focus on issues of temporality and publicness in the way rap music, and other forms of youth-generated media, are developed and shared. Particularly, the perception of time needs to be understood from within Arab hip-hop itself, and in relation to other cultural practices and social movements on a historical continuum. As argued elsewhere, these are rhizomatic phenomena that should be understood as working both trans-locally and trans-temporally (Khalil 2014). It becomes imperative to rethink the local and the regional, advocating instead for a trans-local and rhizomatic approach that acknowledges the multiple ways in which ideas, practices, symbols and artefacts are developed and appropriated. With hip-hop practices and performances, rappers are articulating the plights of publics. Their actions are also qualitatively and quantitatively developing in public. The publicness of their lyrics, statements and performances reveal them to be cultural interpreters from whom alternative conceptualizations of political and economic articulations can be conceived and practised. Whether in Saudi Arabia or Tunisia, young people’s engagement with hip-hop reveals a movement of disengagement from the cultural politics of the immediate past and a reinscription of specific cultural and political values. Discernible contours of neo-tajdeed are embedded in the engagement of these two rappers, Balti and Black Drama. During the last decade, Arab hip-hop has not been shallow and fleeting, but deep and durable. To speak of neo-tajdeed is to reveal, of course, more than just two rappers, a musical genre or a cultural practice. It is an attempt to bridge a collection of styles, beliefs and practices, and the tangible and intangible outcomes of youth-generated media that reveal the development and preservation of youth cultural politics. Although the existence and power of a political project anchored in hip-hop culture remains untested, my final point in relation to the contours of neo-tajdeed is that rap should be perceived as a platform or an embodiment of a number of trans-local political projects operating in tandem or opposition to political projects, rather than by producing

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their own. It is precisely through this neo-tajdeed lens that we can understand how rap has these multiple temporal and public lineages; how it is local, regional and global; how it is old and new; how it borrows, transforms and reproduces culture and politics.

Notes   1 Unless mentioned otherwise, all quotes by Balti are from a personal interview with the author conducted in Tunis on 14 May 2014.   2 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.   3 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.   4 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.   5 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.   6 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.   7 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.   8 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 22 May 2008.   9 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 22 May 2008. 10 Personal interview with Black Drama, Jeddah, 10 December 2014.

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Campbell, Kay Hardy (2003) ‘Saudi Arabia’, in John Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. New York: Continuum. Clifford, James (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Downing, John (2008) ‘Social movement theories and alternative media: An evaluation and critique’, Communication, Culture & Critique 1 (1): 40–50. el-Hamamsy, Walid, and Mounira Soliman (2013) Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook. London: Routledge. Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (1998). The Information Revolution and the Arab World: Its Impact on State and Society. Abu Dhabi: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research. Fatah, Alaa Abd El (2011) ‘After Tunisia’, The Guardian, 28 January. Available at: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/28/after-tunisia-alaa-abd-el-fatahegypt (accessed 17 July 2018). Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal (2012) That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Gana, Nouri (2012) ‘Rap and revolt in the Arab world’, Social Text 30 (4): 25–53. Gosa, Travis L. and Erik Nielson (2015) The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Hagmann, Jannis (2015) ‘Rapping the Kingdom’, Qantara. Available at: https:// en.qantara.de/node/21178 (accessed 7 April 2016). Hammond, Andrew (2007) Popular Culture in the Arab World: Arts, Politics and the Media. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Hill, Jane H. (1999) ‘Styling locally, staying globally: What does it mean?’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 3 (4): 542–56. Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne (2010) Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in a Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. Khalaf, Samir and Roseanne Saad Khalaf (2011) Arab Youth: Social Mobilization in Times of Risk. London: Saqi. Khalil, Joe F. (2014) ‘Youth-Generated Media’, in Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Thomas Tufte and Rafael Obregon (eds), Global Handbooks in Media and Communication Research. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Khalil, Joe F. (2010) ‘Youth-generated media in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia’, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, last modified 2010. Available at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/146. Khiari, Sadri (2011) ‘The Tunisian Revolution did not Come Out of Nowhere’, in Firoze Manji and Ekine Sokari (eds), African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions. Oxford: Pambazuka Press. Kraidy, Marwan M. and Joe F. Khalil (2009) Arab Television Industries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Laroui, Abdallah (1977) The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Chapter 6 R E F L E C T IO N S O N T I M E I N A R A B IC P O E T RY Atef Alshaer

This chapter aims to shed light on the poetics of time as it appears in different examples of Arabic poetry, which is an important constituent of Arab culture.1 In addition to time as a recurrent theme that reveals the changes that Arab societies experienced, it is also endowed with poetic-philosophical dimensions. The latter explores its nature, effects and consequences in context, as well as without context. Time, as in the past, the present and the future, is a kernel theme in the linguistic literature of Arabic. The patterns of time are timeless in the way they are manifested; yet, they are embedded within particular contexts. Human beings are never in the present without a past, and never in the past without a future. These zones of time are intimately connected. They impact on how people practise, adapt and perceive their life, which is itself constituted within a particular block of time. Yet, beyond the abstract nature of these patterns, which it could be suggested are universal, it is the content and effect of time – as some Arab poets2 from a variety of historical stages have conceived them in their poetry – that concerns this chapter. This chapter is therefore a mediation and exploration of time through examples from Arabic poetry, as a tradition with longstanding roots, a tradition that is constantly adapting to changes while seeking authenticity and renewal. In essence, poetry manifests a search for timelessness as the ripest fruit of the sense within language. The poetry in question belongs to two periods: the old and the modern. The old period extends from the sixth to the thirteenth century, and the modern one runs from the nineteenth to the twentyfirst century. All the poems from the old period were recited and were later recorded in writing in classical Arabic. The other poems quoted in this chapter were written in modern standard Arabic, with this being the predominant linguistic medium for literary, intellectual and official purposes across the Arab world.

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To this end, two types of time can be detected in poetry. While these types echo scientific explanations, they are born of poetic sensibilities that are embedded in psychological propensities and visions. These types can be divided into absolute and relative time.3 The absolute belongs to the physical and psychological world. This time is utterly divorced of whatever human beings do. It is scientific time secure in its mute continuity and circularity, and abstracted from external forces: time whose dynamics are solely related to its own motion. It is an impenetrable time, and it yields the same result everywhere, day and night, as well as darkness and light. Yet, this time, silent and objective, has an irreversible effect on all of the signs of creations, whether they are human, animal or plant. Time changes and, ultimately, causes the vanishing of all that is embodied within a definite beginning; and therefore everything that begins ends. Meanwhile, time has one corresponding object in nature, which is similar in terms of its internal and external presence and impact on human life, namely, language. Language manifests silent circularity and continuity; it is out there. Language is a filler to what is unsaid, things yet to be put into intelligible forms; real, there, but without content; here, a structure awaiting voice. In the words of the Moroccan thinker Abdelkabir al-Khatibi (1982/2007: 10), ‘language is not part of man, but it is the capacity of his ability (and inability for that matter); so that he could live his life and death while speaking and writing about them in as precise a manner as possible’. Standing before existence and existing after it, language does not talk in its own right or make intelligible sense without human intervention. This mass body of sounds, elements, words, phrases, structures and discourse is solid, distant and even irksome, as it can never be seized or understood entirely by any one person or group of people at any one time. It is always bigger than oneself, whatever that self becomes. It is an act of nature in which humans are also the objects of unseen laws. Yet, there is the human, the mediator, and the figure of all in-between motions and things. He feels, and through his feeling, propelled by the will to express them, he fills time with substance. This substance enters and nurses history as matter, as an articulated reality paralleling, overlapping or clashing with other realities. These internal and external realities of time and language make for absolute and relative possibilities for the human who experiences language and time as a subject with agency and an object with limits. Hence, time outside context is absolute; time inside context is relative.4 Both language and time therefore require the will of the human agent to manifest their neutral substance. But what could it be that is

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within language that time can penetrate, language subverting itself, and subverting time itself, scratching its absoluteness from within its relativity? This is poetry, I suggest. At its purest, poetry is an inner dialogue with forces inside and outside man, including language and time. In this dialogue, the poet attempts to capture, and perhaps even own, both time and language. In Arabic poetry, the ways in which time is conceived can be enriched by understanding how time itself was understood and practised in the distant past. This is so because, unlike many other languages and the cultures embedded within them, Arabic, as a language, has maintained its regular, albeit discursive, continuities. In addition to religious sources in Arabic with which most Arabs are familiar through repetition and habitual uses of religious discourses, educated Arabs today can read and access materials in Arabic from the medieval age. This benefits and indeed affects the sensibility of modern Arab poets and writers in general. The language itself distinguishes between various tenses, as well as terms that carry different connotations and implications. If one is thus to study the contemporary Syrian poet Adonis with the poetics of time with his poetry in mind, such a study cannot be fully realized without reference to how he understood time in the Arab past. His thesis regarding time is premised on learning from the past without imitating or being ruled by its own references and contexts (Adonis 2003). This chapter explores time in the spirit of the modes and manners in which it has been conceived and practised, effectively, in the way it has been treated by some Arab poets from the pre-Islamic, classical and modern periods. Some of the selected poets were seminal figures whose poems reverberated across the Arab world, thus affecting perceptions and sensibilities. Other poets interacted with particular contexts and events in ways that shed light on the dynamics of time in poetry. The method of poets, as far as time is concerned, is one of taking hold of time in relation to its own context, as well as of the poets’ own aspirations and ideals. Some poets tend to inhabit and live in time, so as to be reconciled with its motion, while cultivating its energy, attributes and tribulations. Other poets attempt to dominate time, so that it becomes a property over which they have control and some form of claim. Poetry becomes the brainchild of time that is constructed and wrestled out of neutrality to become something that is present in words and resonance. It is the argument here that categories such as absolute time and relative time assist in illustrating the multi-dimensional meanings of the poetics of time, thus highlighting the timed and contextual reality of Arabic poetry, as well as the potential timelessness thereof. This is while keeping in

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mind the times of poets whose context of language and socio-political reality marks their own sensibilities. Yet, the poetic energy that entails the capacity for creation itself can be freed of context in its ascendant connotations so that it rings with psychological, philosophical and even mystical currency of its unbound character.

The subversion of time In the history of the Arab, and indeed Islamic, culture,5 there has been one change that has altered the very concept of absoluteness and the relativity of time, particularly for those poets, and for writers in general, who adhere to the Islamic faith. This all-encompassing change led to fundamental transformations in the way people understand time and act upon this understanding of Islam. Before Islam, in the seventh century, poets from the Arabian peninsula hailed their tribe as being the primordial link to societal and existential security. Life revolved around the realization of man’s inner needs and imperatives completely within the tribal structures and their sanctions and taboos. This constituted the ultimate point of reference for time, all time was inside it, and therefore works, desires, wishes and accounts were either settled within the life span of the poet or they were not. Here, the poet should be seen as the voice of the public, the tribe in particular, elevating as well as being elevated by it (see Alshaer 2016). Yet, this transformation did not prevent the absolute time from being always present, since it is related to phantoms of immortality, which are always present in every man’s imagination and fantasy. The situation described above can be seen and analysed through two poetic materials, one is from arguably the most important pre-Islamic poet, Imru al-Qays, who lived in the sixth century (b. ad 526), and the other is by a poet whose poetry emerged after Islam in the eighth century, namely Abu Sakhr al-Huthali (b. ad 713). The main transformation relating to time is that before Islam there was no solid conception of the afterlife to speak of. The work of man was therefore constituted within life proper. Language and poetry specifically compensated for the shortcomings of man, instituting a sense of immortality – albeit one that is imaginary, or even phantasmagorical. Man tended to approximate, or seize, his own totality through embodying and invoking nature by reflecting and projecting his own echo on nature, his ṣada, as the resonant Arabic word has it.6 However, with Islam, if a profound wish, such as the fulfilment of particular love, for example, were not achieved

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in life, the poet, notwithstanding his severe sorrow over the failure of his love, intimated that he would attain his love in the hereafter, after death. This might not save the poet, as such, because manic, obsessive love, at least, belongs to a realm of absoluteness of some sort – it can be physically and psychologically visceral and therefore it affords no magical recovery with which to transcend its immediate grip (see Barthes 1977/2002). Yet, the concept of the hereafter offered an abiding vision of another possibility, which pre-Islamic life did not entertain. The imaginary therefore shifted from the here and now to the hereafter, but this time with a sense of literal embodiment, with certainty, yaqīn (see Sperl, forthcoming). A comparison between two excerpts from the sixth and the eighth centuries followed by other examples from subsequent centuries and from the modern period will widen the scope of the analysis in relation to the consumption and understanding of time among these Arab poets and, more broadly, among their Arab publics.

Pre-Islamic and Islamic experience of time Failing to avenge the death of his murdered father within his lifetime, the sixth-century poet, Imru al-Qays, lamented that time would run out on him. His lamentation is severe and absolute, bursting forth with an elemental surrender to time as the ultimate arbiter in nature: How can I hope that the vicissitudes of time/fate will spare me? When they have not spared the solid grand hills Indeed, I know that in a little time I shall get hooked in the claws and fangs of (a mysterious beast) Just as did my father, Hajar, and my grandfather And I shouldn’t forget the one murdered at the al-Kulab [site]. (Literatures of the Near and Middle East 2014: 125)

The tone of the great poet carries with it despair, beckoning closure. The poet was despised by his father when he was young. The latter thought that his son was frivolous and unworthy, and therefore he sent him to exile. The son brought disrepute to his eminent father and his Banū Asad tribe through his polygamous pursuit of women and by composing poetry, another sort of ‘trivia’ that made Imru al-Qays less masculine than the other men of his tribe, in the eyes of his father. In this context, Imru al-Qays’ dilemma is that he could not avenge his

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father, who was killed by his own Banū Asad tribe. When he heard the news of his father’s death, he retorted in poetry: [H]e neglected me in my youth and has burdened me [with avenging him] now that I am grown. I will neither be sober today, nor drunk tomorrow (lā sahwa al-yawma wa lā sukra ghadan). Wine today, business tomorrow (al-yawma khamrun wa ghadan amrun). (See Stetkevych 1993: 245)

In pre-Islamic Arabia, such a situation brought utter shame. Revenge is defining. Once it is called for, manhood appears lacking without it. The poet roams the region and seeks the assistance of the echelons of power of the day in order to avenge his father’s death, and he thus exercises a deeply rooted custom of revenge. In this case, he ends in failure. One striking aspect about this poem is the sense of closure that the poet feels and communicates. He fears death, and after his death he would be in disrepute. If anything, the poet uses the medium of poetry, in which he is most competent, to reflect the absoluteness of time, that it had finally caught up with him. He is dying. Youth that once seemed endless and invincible gradually morphs into an old age, and life condenses into past memories and intimations for the increasingly felt end. Every sign in nature is, and has been, marked with time, even ‘the solid grand hills’, so how could he not be marked by it? This is total annihilation and banishment, as far as the poet and his inner self (hesitantly put, his ego) are concerned. There is no hereafter in which he could defer to justice for his murdered father. In fact, his question at the beginning of the stanza says it all: ‘how can I hope that the vicissitudes of time/fate will spare me?’ His entire manhood is reduced to the nothingness that the absoluteness of time has wrought upon him. He tried within the relative time that he had in life to avenge his father’s death, but he failed. However, what survives Imru al-Qays is his poetry, his ṣada, his echo. The absoluteness of time and its inevitable outcomes have been lessened by poetry, whereas his father wanted his son originally to attend to the immediate relative imperatives of living on earth, the urgent work of man in the tribe as a protector and fighter, not as a womanizer and a drunken poet, as Imru al-Qays was (see Stetkevych 1993: 241–87). The poet evokes the absoluteness of time as experienced in his inner world (of resignation) to compete with time. His only solace vis-à-vis his father is his fidelity to memory that he could recall the site where his father was killed – and this remembrance through poetry compensates for the unattainable objective of revenge, which is materially constituted

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and immediate, whereas poetry, in this case, occupies the immaterial and the absolute. The poetic word travels in a space of freedom without an anchored structure to define and contain it, thus ensuring an infinity of presence in other times that are beyond the time and context of the poet. Nonetheless, in the case of the eighth-century Umayyad poet Abu Sakhr al-Huthali, who is from the Arabian peninsula and who is gripped with emotional and psychical absoluteness of a different kind, the poetical outcome is different. Time is not entirely set in a state of closure, even though hope is unseen and is not guaranteed: I wonder at time’s striving to come Between me and her And when what was between us Ceased, time became calm. My love for her gave me more passion Every night Consoling days, your time is the hereafter And Layla’s leaving, you have gone too far away from me, You went further than separation can reach. A shiver seizes me when I remember you As the sparrow trembled, when the rain made him wet. I felt you till they said: he knows Nothing of love And I visited you till they said: he has no patience. (Ghazendar 2002)

Two Islamic values enter the picture here, the hereafter and patience for God’s salvation. Indeed, the circularity and pain that al-Huthali feels over the absence of his beloved, Layla, from his life, is both great and never-ending. Al-Huthali is utterly consumed by his unfulfilled desire to be with Layla. Yet, he intones that if he could not be with her in life, he would be with her in the hereafter, which becomes an Islamic virtue that is produced and reproduced by the public. In other words, life becomes dār mamarr, a passageway to another more authentic and enduring world, as the popular Islamic expression suggests. AlHuthali’s condition is so severe that he highlights how unbearable it is, and he responds to people that his situation does not bear patience. The only consolation is the ‘hereafter’, which is the source of calmness; and he understands that his fulfilment does not belong to the realm of this world; it is in the hereafter, if patience can sustain him to carry such contradictory emotions. The here and now is painful, and unyieldingly

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frustrating; it cannot deliver the ultimate satisfaction of desire that his heart seeks. The hereafter and the death that begins a new reality are not an uncommon theme in the poetry of the Umayyad ʿudhris (pure, unconsummated love), those lovers whose love was unfulfilled, yet while suffering they saw salvation in their death and the hereafter as a compensation for the ‘injustice of fate’ that they had been dealt (see Alshaer, forthcoming). Once the idea of the hereafter as concrete time strikes roots in the imagination and psyche of Muslims in general, it tends to compensate for all the shortcomings, failures and losses that people experience in their lives. Islam therefore introduces time as an open field of possibility; but this openness is conditional. It is only granted to those who, within their relative shortness of life, practised what God, or their understanding of God’s commands, had dictated to them to do. The latter are rewarded in the hereafter, and their eternal life is affirmed with or without satisfaction in the earth-bound life. The saying of Prophet Mohammad, which is used in the cultural discourse of the Islamized side of the Arab world, is: ‘do not curse time, because time is God himself ’ ‫ )(ال تسبوا الدهر فإن هللا هو الدهر‬and this represents the ultimate ownership of time.7 The context of the saying relates to the fact that people used to curse time when a particular calamity hit them at that moment. The Hadith/saying makes time an object of sacredness, standing for a higher power, monotheism, both mystifying and stretching the force of time beyond its present nature. It thus transforms time into an absolute energy and realm, awaiting those who withstand with forbearance the transitory and relative nature of life and human contexts towards the abstract and absolute hereafter, which has neither a time frame nor an end. However, as in all areas relating to fundamental changes in human life that require interior transformations, such changes in ideology often clash or compete at some level with human experience. In this respect, the insight of the German critic Eric Auberbach (1953/2003:  40) is apt: ‘the ethical and rhetorical approaches are incompatible with a conception in which reality is a development of forces’. The above-mentioned manifest reality of Islam thus did not prevent the absolute, as in the inner voice of the poet and his experience of time and its effects, being expressed openly, freely and existentially, as can be found in the great Abbasid poets al-Mutanabbi (915–965), al-Maʾarri (973–1057) and others. Yet, the hereafter, as another quality of time, infinite and idyllic, becomes readily available to the public and poet as the ultimate station of divine accountability, justice and finality. As

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Jacobi (2009: 201–02) wrote at the outset of his study, Time and Reality in Nasīb and Ghazal: when comparing poetry of the jāhiliyya to amatory verses of the first Islamic century, I came to the conclusion that at least some elements of the latter could be derived from a common source, a change in aesthetic consciousness based on two interrelated factors: 1. a new experience of time, 2. A new attitude towards reality.

Time acquires new dimensions which the subjects of the emerging Islamic empires increasingly come to realize entail life and an afterlife, with interpretations of both stretching from the literal to the metaphorical, with their attendant consequences. Against this background, an entire poetic sensibility is shaped around doing good so as to attain the hereafter within this conditional open field of time. The relativity of time is supposed to be filled by deeds and rituals that incorporate the fulfilment of Islam’s obligations. In a poetic proverbial expression that is still widely echoed in the expressive cultural realm of the Arab world, one of the main early jurists and lawmakers of Islam, namely, Imam al-Shaafʾii of the eighth and ninth century, is reported to have said: ‫الوقتُ كالسيف‬ ‫إن لم تقطعه‬ ‫قطعك‬ Al-waqtu kal-sayfi In lam taqtaʿhu qataʿaka Time is like a sword If you do not cut it It cuts you.

Time does not afford emptiness, which is a realm of absoluteness that poets often probe and evoke. It therefore has to be filled by human efforts and action. There is an element of exhortation in al-Shaafʾii’s poetry concerning power relations. No power stays idle and unchanging. To this end, human activity of a virtuous kind has to be maintained so that power can be attained and justice instituted and achieved within its parameters. Here, time is a deliverer of justice. Several websites expound and interpret how time should be spent, quoting the aforementioned proverb as an epitaph. Islamic-orientated websites tend to emphasize

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the importance of fulfilling God’s obligations, thus filling time with what is useful via meeting religious obligations, including prayer, fasting, good and honest work, evoking God, and remembering that time is an invaluable asset that has to be spent well.8 Accordingly, there is no such thing as an empty, free time without filling and stuffing it with visible or invisible actions, including mental, physical or psychological effort. Furthermore, in light of the above poems and others from the realm of Islamic culture, Islamists, particularly extreme ones, tend to take the relativity of time and the brevity of human life to extremes, in that they exhort preparation and engagement in physical jihad against adversaries, be they secularists or external foreign forces. To this latter group, life can be sold, as they refer to their martyrs as individuals who ‘baʾuu al-duniyyaa’ ([they] sold life). This means life is worthless and that the pursuit of satisfaction outside the literal boundaries of religion amounts to waste and sin. However, this unproductive and messianic understanding of time, albeit it is popular among certain Islamist circles, has remained a minor and particular strand in the progressively illustrious journey of modern Arabic poetry, to which I now turn.

The consequences of awakening (Nahda): From the conventional to the mythical In Arabic poetry the past and present abound with expressions and images in which the local and the universal co-exist in ways that the pioneer of Arab awakening tapped into and marked with contemporary inflections. For example, al-Shaafʾii’s saying quoted earlier can be interpreted in universal terms, which transcend the narrow interpretations of Islamist adherents. The poetics of the Umayyad (661– 750) and the Abbasid (750–1258) periods abounds with examples in which the exploration and experience of time echoes the experience of man in existential terms, even though this may be foregrounded by the Islamic tradition in its worldly spiritual sense. In this, poetry is free of immediate ideological shackles, sincere in its expression and exquisite in its aesthetics, bursting with everlasting relevance. Such poetry includes that of Bashar Bin Burd (714–783), alMutanabbi (915–965) and Abu ʿAla al-Maʾarri (973–1057) (see Adonis 2003). In general, the three poets were innovative mujaddidiin, who critically engaged with the opportunities and travails of their time through their understanding of poetry and its relationship to human conditions. Bashar Bin Burd was a pioneering innovator (mubdiʿ),

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who enlivened his poetry with ingenious images that creatively deposit time in language as a liberating reservoir that is to be explored and that expands the human spirit of transcendence. Al-Mutanabbi was an energetic lyrical poet who was concerned with power and authority. He spread and immortalized his own image and travails through the moving energy of poetry. He strove to turn time on its head. Time is seized in his language and made subservient to his own often dramatic context. In short, time was, for him, a force to be put down by the sheer weight of his wondrous authoritative character. In contrast, the third great poet, al-Maʾarri, made a philosophical conception of time in relation to history and the collective identity of the Arab peoples. Al-Maʾarri perceived time as being a force to adapt to so that human conditions can be guided by reason. The latter should be stripped of all superstitions, whatever the reach of their authority. Existentialism and time, in his poetry, relates to one’s state in the world within a particular context, which no previous history could overwhelm to the point that the present ceases to be the primary target of human engagement and potential development. Al-Maʾarri writes: Traditions come from the past, of high import if they be True; O, but weak is the chain of those who warrant their truth. Consult your reason and let perdition take others all: Of all the conference Reason best will counsel and guide.9

The poets in question, though different in their characters and styles, realized the dynamism of language and its openness to creativity and change in ways that transcend past authorities and set ideologies. In particular, al-Maʾarri, who is known for his pessimism and innovative rationality, is a significant pioneer of modernity in its primary sense of individual reasoning and empowerment. Al-Maʾarri’s modernity precedes European modernity and its subsequent metamorphoses. In the lines above, al-Maʾarri explicitly refers to the malleability of truth as an evolving regime and vocation. To this end, modernity has been centred on the reconstruction and evolution of consciousness; it involved alteration in perception and understanding regarding man’s ever-changing context and position in the world. The detection of modernist thoughts and aspirations in the Arabic tradition, along the lines explained above, encouraged continuity and renewal on the part of modernist Arab thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.10 Inspired by the aforementioned periods, the Arab renaissance movement of the nineteenth century thus gave rise to

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various schools of poetry, including the neo-classical school, the romantic, symbolist poets, the realists and others. In particular, the neo-classicist poets tended to incorporate time in a proverbial and ascetic sense, harking back to old times when a similar streak of poetry represented resignation and fatalism of some sort, with a tone that was doom-laden and deathlike. The decline of the Ottoman Empire and the encroaching Western colonialism propounded soul-searching sentiments among Arab poets and intellectuals in general, thus reflecting an Arab world that was grappling with an increasingly hybrid identity and was unsure of its steps. In this respect, some of the leading lines came from the most famous poet of the neo-classical school, otherwise known as the school of resurrection and revival, namely, the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) who penned the following famous lines as part of an extended elegy to the Egyptian nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908): The throbbing heartbeats of man say Life is only minutes and seconds Be elevated after your death by being remembered Remembrance for man is another lifetime … So be patient on the good and bad in life For they are alike.11

Some prominent poets from the neo-classical school, such as Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi, Ahmad Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, came from Turkish and Arab backgrounds, but wrote exclusively in Arabic. Their poetry reeked of the cultural stagnation from which the Ottoman Empire was suffering in its fading stage. Fate and Sufi-like withdrawal from activity and vitality seemed to have reigned, recalling earlier themes from the Abbasid period relating to zuhd ‘asceticism’, as mastered by Abu alʿAtaahiyya (747–826). The latter’s poetic line ‘Take refuge in death, and pave the way for destruction (the end)’ (liduu lil-mawti wa-ibnuu lil-kharaabi), still gains currency among some fatalistic pessimists and certain Islamist nihilists, counting the here and now as being utterly unworthy of attachment and struggle. Hence, the poetry in question echoed the cultural attitudes of a public nursed into decline, awaiting transformation at the hands of feverishly involved colonialists and desperate Arab nationalists. However, Shawqi and his colleagues, such as Hafiz Ibrahim of Egypt, Maʾruuf al-Risafi and Jamil Zihawi of Iraq, and others, facilitated and expressed a period of transition from an old and weary order to a new one, handing the emerging poets a rich poetic lexicon laden with past and present aesthetics and concerns.

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After Shawqi, and with the emergence of romanticism and symbolism in Arabic poetry, the meaning of time acquired mythical dimensions, imbued with poetic-philosophical inflections. Here, the poetry of the great Iraqi poet Badr Shakr al-Sayyab (1926–64) is particularly important. In his famous poem, ‘The Rain Song’, time is synchronized and synthesized as if to stand for eternity in every moment of life. It does not give way to simple aphoristic tendencies, besieged in the binary formula of the here and now and the hereafter. Time is created and rejuvenated with poetry and art in general, given substance through historic places and monumental memories, moored in past creations but woven into future visions. Here, time is embraced as boundlessly bursting with human energy, tragic and giving in equal measure, echoing the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of al-Sayyab’s native Iraq, with its myths of fertility and rebirth, pre-Islamic poetry, with its ringing embodiment of nature and virtue, Islamic civilization and its philosophical lesson of transformation and activity, and Europe and its questioning and scientific creativity. Poetry is firmly placed in nature and its cycles of drought and rain. Ultimately, time nurses wisdom and delivers hope: In every drop of rain A red or yellow colour buds from the seeds of flowers. Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people And every spilt drop of slaves’ blood Is a smile aimed at a new dawn, A nipple turning rosy in an infant’s lips In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life. And still the rain pours down.12

Against this backdrop, the new poetic trends in the Arab world after the 1950s further explicitly grapple with issues of time, as in the past, and its relevance or irrelevance to modern time. This came at a time when the poetic diction and vision was mature to the point where it could only move forward, rather than regurgitating existing formulae from the fifteenth-century Arab poetic creations, extraordinary as they had been. In this sense, modernist poetic trends in Europe, which emerged in the wake of the First World War, in particular, introduced Arab poets to a new consciousness. Colonial encounters, as well as migration by Arab poets to the West, resulted in experimentation in poetry, and in creative writing in general. The new literary attitudes responded to various political, cultural and social changes that were taking place in

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the Arab world and that were also abetted by the acquired sensibilities from the West.13 The modernist poetic trends heightened subjectivity and fluidity as harbingers of revelation and openness in ways that had not previously been considered to this extent. Two startling Arab poets from the modern period can serve to illustrate the different connotations of time in their poetry, and how they understood the poetics of Arabic in the past, namely, the Syrian poet Adonis (b. 1930) and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008). To this end, brief notes on the relevance of time in contemporary Arab debates are presented prior to an exploration of the two poets.

Time and context in modern Arabic poetry Earlier in this chapter I highlighted the impact of time and language and their intertwined complementarity. The Arabic tradition, composed of textual and oral materials that were mainly constituted in classical Arabic and that permeate the cultural sphere of the Arab world today, is accumulative in a way that makes any break with the effectively living past through language and its cultural associations artificial, if not invalid. Most Arab thinkers, including the Moroccan philosopher Mohammad Abed al-Jabri, the Syrian poet Adonis and the Algerian philosopher Mohammad Arkoun, therefore came to consider how the Arab past, in its intellectual and spiritual heritage, could be of use, and what it means for the present. Clearly, the Arab intellectuals and writers who emerged after Islam, which is the most seminal historical milestone in the history of the Arab world as it is known today, accumulated experiences and reflected them in ways that expressed the reality of the Islamic faith, as well as their experiences as human beings who are involved in various contexts. In their case, time, as historical content that is embedded within a spiritual and intellectual tradition, marks their poetic or more prosaic outputs. Yet, the modern Arab world, which since the nineteenth century has witnessed attempts at cultural and political reforms amidst testing, and sometimes crushing political conditions, has inherited a past that is so distant in its socio-political contexts, yet so abiding in its spirituality and intellectual linguistic inspiration and its accessibility to the lives of Arabs today. Arab intellectuals therefore found themselves facing the challenges of a varied past, some of which are clearly open, progressive and aesthetically magnificent, and others are orthodox and stagnant.

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These two main streams of the past manifest an Arab collectivity with access to both dimensions through a living Arabic language that carries conscious and unconscious cultural implications (see Alshaer 2017). Within the political Arab context of the twentieth century, which witnessed the fragmentation of the Arab world on a hitherto unseen scale, Arab intellectuals attempted to filter and refine the understanding of the past in order to rescue it from orthodox manipulations. In this, their concern has been to institute a culture of openness and reason that carries resonances from a once open past that had been abused by orthodox religious and political groups and authorities. Perhaps, one of the main virtues that came from those intellectuals is a passionate and critical drive towards reason entailing respect of time as an everlasting energy of continuity requiring socio-cultural and philosophical adaptations, irrespective of past associations and constraints (see Sabry 2012). In particular, in poetry, the Syrian poet Adonis has been a pioneer in mining the Arab tradition in experimental and questioning ways that subvert and escape contextual boundaries, freeing poetry of past connotations, while being inspired by notable examples of fluidity and progress in that past. In this sense, he is practising poetry as an open field of possibility, inventive in its march towards aesthetic revelation and linguistic ingenuity, and not answerable to, or bound by, authorities. In the spirit of the German philosopher Heidegger, poetry appears to be operative from within the core of language and history as grounds of ascendant continuity and fluidity. Heidegger (1981: 60) explains the notion of founding in poetry as follows: Poetry is a founding: a naming of being and the essence of all things – not just any saying, but that whereby everything first steps into the open, which we then discuss and talk about in everyday language. Hence poetry never takes language as a material at its disposal; rather poetry itself first makes language possible.

Adonis realizes that poetry is not to represent, reproduce or imitate reality, it is to create it anew, to make the essence of things exist and shine in a way that people can feel and be provoked by. More than that, language is an endowed gift or has a collective past resonance, language is a horizon to be seized, explored and crafted anew. In this respect, Adonis is an absolutist agent in poetry, not a relativist, settling into context or reproducing the present. His sense of time entails an endless creativity that is moored in linguistic ingenuity which is absorbent of

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all times; yet, while emerging at this time, it holds the seeds of an everpossible future – futuristic poetry. Time becomes subservient to man in his questioning and restless energy in tilling the horizon and recreating himself and the world anew every time. ‘Man’, he begins: Erasing all wisdom/this is my fire No sign has remained – my blood is the sign This is my beginning … I can transform: Landmine of Civilization – this is my name. ‘A Time Between Ashes and Roses’, This Is My Name (Adonis 1971/2012: 107).

In another appropriately titled poem, ‘The Poem of Time’ (Qasidat alWaqt), Adonis (1982: 324) writes: Embracing the grain of time, and my head is a tower and fire, What is this blood, deeply marked on the sand, and what are these ruins, O, the flame of the present, tell us, what shall we say …? Revealing for the time the secrets of its passions That’s how he will know That it is the lost, the outsider and the different one.

Time is played with here, it is twisted and its whole agency of making change and changing human beings in the process is parodied. What survives instead is man’s capacity and the vision that man is the maker of identity, the founder of the world, as embedded in various constructed essences. Poetry is not declarative, it founds its own unconscious through a conscious and searching human effort to make varied possibilities of vision and aesthetics visible and present, over and above the given imperatives of time, place and social conventions. As Dahir (2000: 237) wrote of Adonis’s poetry: the main issue for Adonis is not to reject the past as an abstract thing or an empty objective entity, but to reject the reading of the prevalent culture of his world to the past, this reading which endows the cultural inheritance with an almost absolute authority over the present.

The reproduction of the past in the cultural life of the Arab world has sometimes been stifling, to the point that Adonis, alongside other

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visionary poets before, such as the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qaasim al-Shaabbii (1909–34) and the emigré poet Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931), called for an outright revolution in the consciousness of people. This revolution has a linguistic basis at its heart. The modernist assumption is linked to temporal consciousness that brings solid conceptions of the past in the service of a present that is infused with its own imperatives and energy. Adonis, like several other poets before him, is aware of Western poetry and its modernist underpinnings as a vocation of emancipation, fluidity and transcendent experimentation. Hence, the radical call for new beginnings, unencumbered by the past, is palpable. As Adonis writes in his astonishing collection, This Is My Name: Can there be no revolution in essence to fashion us anew Eradicating the submission of slaves inside us? Can there be no revolution in essence to start tomorrow anew From scratch, To open the eyes of our sons to the more beautiful time The better world Can there be no revolution, a revolution in essence to innovate anew …? Each letter in my song Is a clay for a new man.14

Adonis’s language gorges on images of renewal, holding poetry as its torchbearer. His poetry is absolutist, not in the pre-Islamic or aphoristic sense that was explored before but in terms that relate to a philosophy of human agency powered by a will for creativity. History is made up of constant struggles, not only of circular power relations abetting resignation and despair. Adonis, in poetry, aims the human struggle at linguistic horizons that are always amenable to exploration and revelation. Yet, his poetry has emerged amidst an Arab world that is deeply wrought with divisions, colonial legacies and occupation, as is the case in Palestine. Whereas Adonis saw the solution in an outright revolution and transformation that is culturally aware and willing, of which poetry is not necessarily representative, but is part of an overall project of enlightenment, others saw poetry as wilfully moored in historical trajectories. In this, whatever ascendance and transcendence poetry might achieve, it remains the brainchild of its time. To this end, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish exemplifies another strand in modern Arabic poetry, in which history is not that distant

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and the present time is compelling in its imperatives for poetic embodiment. In this spirit, Baruut (2015: 92) offered an insightful view with regard to Darwish’s understanding of time and his practice of it in poetry: The visionary poetic time is Hegelian in origin. It is based on the violation of physical time. It belongs to a ‘sacred’ time, which is rooted in the vision of ‘time’, and not the time of ‘time’, the successive time as narrated in the Quran concerning divine time. However, Darwish melanges between the personal time where a personal childhood exchanges functions with the national childhood.

Darwish’s time is contextually bounded, but it is not an imprisoned time, and this results in a free lyrical aesthetics that evocatively reorders reality, rather than repeating it. He lives and struggles against a living colonial history while deriving poetic knowledge from its recurrent patterns of destruction and alienation, willing subterranean images of hope to rise from the wreckage of violence. Hence, Darwish has become a chronicling witness of a history of displacement and of ongoing dispossession. He experienced displacement as a child poet in 1948, when Israel was created on the ruins of his village and of a hundred others, merely six years after his birth in historic Palestine. In one of the stanzas in which Darwish conjures up the Zionist conquest of Palestine in his biographical poem, ‘The Dice Player’, he highlights how time in danger and under intense pressure operates. Then, instincts absorb and react with rawness to unique moments of density that are dominated by fear and impelled by the intuition for survival in the fragile present: By chance I survived: I was smaller than a military target and larger than a bee moving among the fence flowers, I feared for my brothers and father and for a time made of glass, for my cat and rabbit, for a magical moon over the high minaret, I feared for the grapevine that dangled like our dog’s teats … then fear walked me and I walked in it barefoot forgetting my little memories of what I want of tomorrow – no time for tomorrow.15

Time, as experienced and not just imagined, is seen in relation to reality at such moments of grave danger. In this case, the imagination is

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vividly yearning for habitual images from nature, thus constituting its very material of stability and hope; and poetry is a portrayal of human conditions teetering at the edge of time and possibility. Darwish’s poetry is not futuristic to the point where the past is simply absorbed and transcended. It is deeply earthy without being ideological, particularly in the later stages of his poetic vocation.16 He escapes ideology by being acutely aware of the dialectics of the forces on which poetry can thrive, including nature, history, language and man, as an inhabitant of the present with its socio-political imperatives. While time is synthesized and synchronized in Darwish’s poetry, the synthesis is made up of local history and place, where human drama entailing violence and struggle is yet to unfold. Alshaer (2016: 252) writes: Perhaps the source of poetry is one, it is our human identity, from the past of its alienation on this earth to its alienated present. Poetry was born from the first questions of the astonished wonder about our existence, in that past distance in which our human child wondered about the secrets of his primary existence. Therefore, and since the beginning, internationalism was but localism.

Darwish presents time in poetry as if it is embodied in the aspirations of human beings and their tensions. Even enemies are included in this poetry. In his accomplished poem, ‘A State of Siege’, time is besieged, begged to be recalled to its normal state, where freedom is unthreatened by violence: In siege, life becomes the time Between remembering life’s beginning And forgetting its end … Life Life in its entirety, Life with its shortcomings, Hosts neighbouring stars That are timeless … And immigrant clouds That are placeless. And life here Wonders: How do we bring back to life!17 In siege, time becomes place Petrified in its eternity.

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In siege, place becomes time Late for its appointment.18

Darwish presents and manifests lessons on time from within human experiences that are beset by violence and domination. The collection in question, A State of Siege, was written during, and under the effect of, the siege of the West Bank in 2002 when Israel reoccupied the little territory that was left that it did not directly control. In this instance, the poet realizes the value of ordinary and simple time in which daily activities and habits are not interrupted, let alone stopped. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is also besieging their time, occupying it, and depriving and depleting it of normality – a recipe for utter despair, which Darwish encounters with an aesthetics of hope that is nursed through understanding and cultivating humanity. In this context, poetry is a language of considered poetic knowledge and resistance, wrestling back time from its stolen ordinary identity, that of freedom, activity and being. Only domination, as is grippingly shown in the poem ‘A State of Siege’, can halt and abuse time, this gift that constitutes the very primary meaning of our existence. Poetry becomes both historic and historical, accentuating knowledge through sense-afflicting human experiences. Furthermore, the Arab uprisings caused a new understanding of time. The Tunisian poet Awlaad Ahmad conjures up one instance of time that is wholly consumed with revolutionary fervour. The poem is dated on the day when the revolution had just settled on a new order, one that is still being imbued with revolutionary attitudes relating to change, namely, 16 March 2011. It speaks of the present time as a primordial one of birth and renewal, when patriotic citizenship is held passionately. The nation releases its long-suppressed voice and reclaims public spaces, challenging the authority of the presiding dictator, who imprisoned not only the place and the potential of its varied energies but also time and its very identity of movement and positive construction: I have no time for a previous time I have no time for a subsequent time I write now, while you revolt I am either fully Tunisian, or not at all Tunisian in one rush … Tunisian to the point of madness. (Ahmad 2013: 101)

This time of revolution is unambiguously embraced and is considered euphorically authentic. The philosopher and literary critic Alain Badiou

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(2016) wrote of such poets, who represent the repressed voice of their people in such acute times: ‘they search for the words to express the moment in which the eternal patience of the oppressed of all times changes into a collective force which is indivisibly that of raised bodies and shared thoughts’. Here, all times are compressed into the present. The present foretells that citizenship is to be fully accorded, and therefore one’s humanity in all its aspects, in one’s homeland, is seized and freed of the domination that dictatorship thrives on. Time is not to be compromised. It belongs to the people who, through their revolution, restore harmony, with its time to the place. In such poetry, time is an explosive device waiting to be exploded so that reality can be nakedly exposed for what it is. Stillness masks time and, in effect, it imprisons it. In contrast, a movement with a revolutionary magnitude awakens reality from its torpor. Before the revolution, citizens felt as though they were half-citizens, or even less, living, but not free to realize their potential voice; nationals by birth, but not citizens by right. Besieged with injustices, their freedom is ransomed to routines of compliance, succumbing to powers that do not see the irony of their arrogance in claiming to protect them. Citizens are reduced to unthinking objects, mortgaged to a few others with excessive powers that are capable of reducing citizens, not just psychologically and existentially but also physically. The poet dramatizes his nationhood and his attachment to it by birthright, but he also makes it known that his life is incomplete without his citizenship rights, some basic rights without which man is forever a prisoner of history. Freedom is the legal and, indeed, the emotional bedrock of one’s exercise of any understanding of sane humanity. The challenge is to be involved in an act, which in this case is revolutionary. This is while realizing the promises that such time holds to perceive freedom while working for it. Without freedom, man is cripplingly incomplete. This is a state that oppressive politics heightens as time, and the life of new generations are absorbed into the deformities of perception with regard to the priceless nature of freedom, without which humanity simply cannot be realized, whether in relation to oneself or to others. The challenge of every time is thus to make it as free and as meaningful as possible.

Conclusion Time is a place of meetings, meetings for a variety of human thoughts, events, experiences and possibilities. Time is also context, making itself

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present through forces etching their consequences on its somehow neutral motion; yet, it always has a consequential nature as far as the human being is concerned. One of the recurring themes in Arabic poetry concerns time as it wreaks changes through symbols depicting the progress of age and the psychological and physical results that are incurred – a theme that Arabic shares with other literary traditions, where time functions as a fundamental constitutive fact of human fate. Another theme is historical, registering historical events with everlasting resonance, time that has been solidified through the repetition of thought and habits, such as Islam as a religion and culture. Then there is time as an embodiment of tension, parallel emotions and thoughts, such as human experiences leading to a particular set of actions, and faith or an ideology pulling in other directions with an opposite set of actions. Time is also emptiness, its original entity, which, perhaps, only music can come close to expressing. In Arabic poetry, time is often a space to be filled by human actions, stemming from religious obligations or secular yearnings for presence and meaning through human labour and ideals of progress. Time can also signify a burning state of yearning for a past that no longer exists, yet which remains ever potent in its resonant appeal. Time is also a vision for an aesthetic future in which human agency is accorded free rein to manifest the fruits of its ingenuity and innovation. Time can also be subject to an ideology of siege, such as that represented by Israel in its conquest and occupation of Palestine. Such intense and often uncertain time, which people in war zones, or those fleeing war zones as refugees, experience, is devoid of normality. The instincts are threatened and made acute by its density and overwhelming nature: what used to be an ordinary past with mundane hopes and frustrations is recalled and imagined with intense longing. At a very important level, poetry is a case of making visible the human contents of time in language – a wellspring of its scientific neutrality, which suggests that language has always to contend and imbricate itself in time as an evolving energy of culture. Arabic poetry depicts changes of various types that are wrought and chiselled by time as a natural force, or by time as directed and dominated by human agency and force. In this sense, poetry is the closest medium for absorbing time in a language that suits its mystery, as well as its commanding effects on human beings in countless contexts.

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Notes 1 The phrase ‘Arab culture’ refers, first, to a community of language, and, second, to shared historical experiences. Although there are considerable cultural differences between the various Arab regions, there are solid commonalities, including language, religious beliefs and practices, common historical experiences of colonialism, similar food sources and customs, musical tastes and literary practices. Hence, Arab culture is a justified term considering the overall picture of the Arab world and its history, yet Arab culture is not intended to be homogeneous and undifferentiated. The differences within Arab culture are considerable, but there is still an Arab culture that is marked by a common linguistic and literary heritage. 2 The poetic examples used in this chapter draw on poetry written in classical or modern standard Arabic, two related levels of the Arabic language to which all Arabs have access in one way or another (see Suleiman 2003). All the poets quoted in this chapter identified with Arabic as a language of culture and heritage, and often their poetry travelled beyond their area or beyond their nation state as it is known in the modern period. They therefore identified themselves as being Arabs and defended the Arab identity in its linguistic and cultural resonances. The poetry draws on similar linguistic, cultural and imaginative sources that relate to an Arab culture of letters (for engagement with the concept of Arab culture and its various aspects, see Reynolds 2015; also see Khalaf and Khalaf 2009). 3 It is not my intention to dwell on scientific explanations of time, as explored by seminal scientists such as Newton and Einstein. The categories – absolute and relative times – are derived from my understanding of poetic energy and the poets’ conjuring of particular perceptions and their meanings in relation to time. It is my understanding that poetic energy yields absolute and relativist linguistic outcomes that, in origin, reflect psychological roots and aspirations. 4 See note 2. 5 It is noteworthy that Islam and Arabic as language, religion and cultures are deeply interconnected. As Said (2004) wrote in ‘Living in Arabic’, ‘Arabic is Islam, and Islam Arabic at some very profound level.’ 6 On the various sources of asdaaʾ (echoes of the pre-Islamic poet), see Bakir (2008). 7 See the following for reference on the Hadith and its meanings: http:// fatwa.islamweb.net/fatwa/index.php?page=showfatwa&Option=FatwaId &Id=100933 (accessed 29 April 2016). The Hadith is documented in alBukhari and Muslim; see www.alifta.net/fatawa/fatawaDetails.aspx?View= Page&PageID=480&PageNo=1&BookID=3&languagename= (accessed 5 November 2016).

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  8 See https://ar-ar.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=349849468369 161&id=314907888529986 (accessed 29 April 2016).   9 See the entry ‘al-Maʾarri’ at www.centerforinquiry.net/secularislam/ islamic_viewpoints/al_maarri (accessed 10 September 2016). 10 See Bennis (1989) on the categories and dynamics of modernity in Arabic poetry. 11 Ahmad Shawqi, see www.stooob.com/164494.html, translated by Atef Alshaer (accessed 31 May 2016). 12 Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, ‘Rain Song’ (1987). 13 See Bennis’s (1989: note 22) reference to modern Arabic poetry. 14 Adonis (2003), Hadha huwa Ismii, author’s translation, Daar al-Saqi, pp. 7 and 28. 15 From ‘The Dice Player’ (Darwish 2009). See http://metaphorformetaphor. tumblr.com/post/128159010165/by-chance-i-survived-i-was-smallerthan-a (accessed 30 May 2016). 16 On the progression of Darwish’s poetic vocation, see Sylvain (2009: 137–50). 17 From ‘A State of Siege’ (Darwish 2007: 123). 18 Also from ‘A State of Siege’ (Darwish 2007: 160).

Bibliography Adonis (2003) Introduction to Arab Poetics. London: Saqi Books. Adonis (1971/2012) Selected Poems. Trans. Khalid Mattawa. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Adonis (1982) Hadhaa Huwa Ismii. Trans. Atef Alshaer. Beirut: Daar al-Saqi. Alshaer, Atef (2016) Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World. London: Hurst & Co. Alshaer, Atef (2017) ‘Representation of Language in Arab Media for Children’, in Naomi Sakr and Jeannette Steemers (eds), Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World. London: I.B.Tauris. Alshaer, Atef (forthcoming) ‘An Arab and Islamic View of Love: The Poetry of the ‘Uthris’, in Atef Alshaer(ed.), Love and Poetry in the Middle East. Hurst and Co. Ahmad, Awla (2013) Halaat al-Tariiq. Trans. Atef Alshaer. Tunisia: Manshouraat Awla Ahmad. Auberbach, Erich (1953/2003) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Badiou, Alain (2016) ‘The Age of the Poets: Poetry and Communism’. Available at http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2871-the-age-of-the-poetspoetry-and-communism (accessed 19 July 2018). Bakir, Ayman (2008) asdaa’ al-shaa’ir al-qadeem: ta’adud al-riwaayah fii al-sh’ir al-jaahilii. Daa’irat al-thaqaafah wal-I’laam, al-shaarqah.

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Barthes, Roland (1977/2002) A Lover’s Discourse. London: Vintage. Baruut, Mohammad Jamal (2015) ‘al-Ramz al-Dinaamikii fii Sh’ir Mahmoud Darwish’, in Abdel Elah Balqiz (eds), Hakadha Taklma Mahmoud Darwish: Dirasaat Fii Dhikraa Rahiluh. Beirut: Markz Dirasaat al-Wihdah. Bennis, Mohammad (1989) al-sh’ir al-‘Arabii al-hadiith: Bunyaatuhu waibdaalaataha. Casablanca: Daar Tubqaal lil-nashr. Dahir, Adel (2000), al-Sh’ir wal-Wujuud: Diraasah Falsafiyya fii Sh’ir Adonis. Damascus: Dar al-Madaa lil-thaqaafah wal-nashr. Darwish, Mahmoud (2007) Butterfly’s burden. Trans. Fady Joudah. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books. Darwish, Mahmoud (2009) ‘The Dice Player’. Trans. Fady Joudah, in Winter Magazine, 85 (1): Available at http://metaphorformetaphor.tumblr.com/ post/128159010165/by-chance-i-survived-i-was-smaller-than-a-be (accessed 19 July 2018). Ghazendar, Walid (2002) ‘The Traces of Song’, in Translations from Ancient Arabic Poetry. London: Jehat. Available at www.jehat.com/jehaat/ar/ ketabaljeha/books/arabic_poets.htm (accessed 29 April 2016). Heidegger, Martin (1981) ‘Hölderlin and the essence of poetry’, in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry. New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 5–65. Jacobi, Renate (2009) ‘Time and Reality in Nasīb and Ghazal’, in Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (ed.), Early Islamic Poetry and Poetics. London: Routledge. Khalaf, Samir and Roseanne Khalaf (eds) (2009) Arab Society and Culture: An Essential Reader. London: Saqi Books. al-Khatibi, Abdelkabir (1982/2007) Taqdiim to Abdelfatah Klititio, al-Adab wal-gharaabah: dirasaat buniyawiyyah fii al-Adab al-Arabii. Casablanca: Daar Tubqaal lil-nashr. Literatures of the Near and Middle East. (2014) London: Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East (SOAS), 125. Pinckney Stetkevych, Suzanne (1993) The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and The Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press. Reynolds, D.F. (2015) Cambridge Companion to Modern Arab Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sabry, Tarik (2012) ‘Introduction: Arab Cultural Studies: Between Reterritorialisation and Deterritorialisation’, in Tarik Sabry (ed.), Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field. London: I.B.Tauris. Said, Edward (2004) ‘Living in Arabic’, Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 677, 12 February. Available at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/677/cu15.htm (accessed 25 February 2015). al-Sayyab, Badr Shakir (1987) ‘Rain Song’. Trans. Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton, in Salma Jayyusi (ed.), Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press. Sperl, Stefan (forthcoming) ‘The Qurʾan and Arabic Poetry’, in Muhammad Abdel Haleem and Mustafa Shah (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Qur’anic Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Suleiman, Yasir (2003) The Arabic Language and National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sylvain, Patrick (2009) ‘Essentialist Poetics in a State of Siege’, in Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Knowledge 7 (5): 136–50.

Chapter 7 K EY WO R D S I N A R A B P O L I T IC A L M E M O RY : M A H D I A M I L’ S V O C A BU L A RY R EV I SI T E D I N 2 0 1 7 Omar al-Ghazzi

This chapter1 begins with the idea that the political and cultural legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings, as assessed in 2017, is that of crisis, setback, trauma and disappointment relating to how the promise of a longawaited Arab Spring, awakening and rebirth has been crushed. The current sense of loss can be contextualized within a lexicon discussing the states of crisis and disappointment that have animated modern Arab intellectual thought for several decades. Reflections on defeat surged in relation to the al-Naksa, Arabic for ‘setback’, which refers to the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war against Israel under the leadership of the popular Egyptian president, Gamal Abdelnasser, which resulted in a disastrous loss of Arab territories to Israel. The al-Naksa instigated an Arab intellectual debate and soul-searching, particularly in the mashriq, about the reasons for the defeat. That debate took the question of culture seriously, going beyond geopolitics in its intellectual quest to come to terms with loss and to theorize resurgence. This chapter focuses on one important voice in that debate – that of the Lebanese Marxist thinker, Hassan Hamdan, who is known as Mahdi Amil (1936–87). Amil was an important cultural and political theoretician, and an activist in the Lebanese Communist Party. He was assassinated by Islamist militias during the Lebanese civil war in 1987 (for more on Amil, see Frangie 2012). Inspired by William’s (1976) canonical book, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, I will provide an explanation and discussion of the keywords that Amil (1974) used in his reflections on how certain understandings of temporality, modernity, class struggle and politics dominated post-1967 Arab intellectual production. I offer a close reading, which is exclusively focused on his book The Crisis of Arab Civilization or the Crisis of the Arab Bourgeoisies? (Azmat al-hadara

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al-ʿarabiya am azmat al-burjwaziyat al-ʿarabia). Amil published the book as a reaction to, and rebuttal of, a regional symposium held in Kuwait in 1974 entitled ‘The Crisis of Civilizational Progress in the Arab Homeland’. Amil’s book takes a holistic approach in thinking about the failures and limitations of Arab political discourse at the time, and in theorizing what went wrong, and how to move forward. Although Amil’s book is structured as a rebuttal of several authors, it identifies and reiterates what he considers to be common errors in both contemporary logic and intellectual approach. Accordingly, his work can be re-read by extracting the keywords on which he focuses in order to think about what they meant in the mid-1970s, how to begin historicizing their meanings today, and what they may illuminate in relation to post-2011 contemporary Arab thought. In this chapter, I seek to revisit Amil’s work through destabilizing keywords in Arab political memory, which continue to reverberate in the Arab public sphere, by calling for their historicization, together with that of the debates that invoked them. Words carry accumulated memories within them. Those memories may not be explicitly and consciously signified in current articulations. It is thus important to uncover the history of their circulation in order to understand why it is they readily (re-)emerge within intellectual communities as the means by which to explain contemporary political life, and what the effect of this is. Williams (1976) argues that tones, rhythms, meanings and feelings are involved in the process of language development, in general. It is particularly the vocabulary used to explain culture and society that relies on the relations between words and their meanings, which change across time. Words’ meanings are ‘inextricably bound up with the problems … [words are] being used to discuss’ (Williams 1976: 15). These problems may change, re-emerge or take a different form. The words used to describe changing problems should not be assumed to have retained the same meaning. Accordingly, words that have expressed Arab political aspirations and disappointments have a history in terms of when they were introduced, how they developed, and what relationships they had with those who thought about them, with them and against them. They are also part of a collective memory that is strategic, emotive and changing. These culturally and politically important words act as sites of memory in Arab political discourse. The French historian Pierre Nora (1989) conceived of sites of memory as places in which meanings about the past are stored and stabilized. Nora’s framework is useful in also conceiving of words as spaces, where meanings are stored. Many keywords carry meanings that

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have reverberated in the Arab public sphere at different times and that have become operationalized in various political projects. To be able to focus on how these political projects have developed and have related to one another, it is important for scholars to note the continuities and developments in Arab cultural thought, and not just the disruptions (see Frangie 2012). The keywords I examine in Amil’s analysis of post-1967 discourse are: ‘Arab’, ‘Arab awakening’, ‘authenticity’, ‘crisis’ and the ‘colonial bourgeoisie’. Methodologically, it is necessary to note that my words are my translations of them from Arabic. They are therefore approximations, and they carry with them certain meanings and histories in English, which this chapter will not consider. The words I chose are important, not only for understanding Amil’s work but also for reflecting on the situation in the Arab world, both then and now. Counter-intuitively, to say that following the 2011 Arab uprisings there is a need to revisit what Arab intellectuals wrote in the 1970s is, in a way, to do what Amil cautioned against. As Frangie (2012) points out, following Scott (1999), theoretical interventions have a temporally specific ‘problem-space’. Yet, while Amil’s problem-space in 1974 is different from ours in 2017, there is nevertheless an enduring ‘critical purchase’ of his ideas for our present that maintains their relevance (Frangie 2012: 478). Indeed, when focusing on Amil’s conception of temporality and culture, the shelf-life of what he thought against has not expired. Specifically, I am referring to the self-Orientalizing and essentializing tropes and approaches that theorize an Arab self as moving through the ages and struggling to attain/catch up with Western modernity. In his book, Amil noted, and reacted against, a common logical fallacy, which, he argued, the intellectuals who participated in the 1974 Kuwait conference shared. It is the tautological reasoning for blaming defeat on cultural backwardness – a condition seen to afflict an Arab mind or Arab history. Amil responds to the conference participants and revokes their analytical approach in order to understand the present through their examination of an alleged trans-temporal Arab political culture. He contends that any analysis of the dire political situation in the region must be anchored in the present, and must be based on the structural reasoning behind current circumstances – which he considers to be the foreign imperialist interventions in the region and the Arab ‘colonial bourgeoisie’s’ role in hindering the achievement of national liberation. Amil was explicit in his diagnosis of the basis of the problem in the dominant analytical approach of his interlocutors – the Hegelian

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perspective on the movement of history, in which the disjuncture in, and the structural leaps of, history dissolve within a conceptualization of the movement of the same self through time (Amil 1974: 49). Amil insisted that the Arabs’ malaise must be linked to a history of capitalist modes of production in Arab countries. It does ‘not start with Islam, or with the Abbasid, Umayyad or Andalusian eras […] but with the imperialist expansion in the second half of the nineteenth centuries’ (Amil 1974: 23) and how it had developed since then and up to the time when he wrote. Methodologically, Amil’s emphasis on starting the political, cultural, religious and socio-economic analysis with more contemporary structural factors in relation to the modes of production, can be applied to making an analytical leap from 1974 to 2017. While the post-2011 sense of defeat and failure may be reminiscent of the post-1967 period, the structural situation in the Arab world has obviously undergone dramatic shifts, particularly in relation to the mode of production, the neo-liberal turn and new control strategies by the bourgeoisies. Accordingly, I approach Amil’s work, as I read it and understand it in 2017, with the aim of distinguishing between, while combining, the historicized and interpretive approaches. I explore keywords that emerge from his work, beginning with the term ‘Arab’ and how it was deployed by several intellectuals in the region when discussing temporality and history.

‘The Arab’ The conference, with which Amil’s book engages, was convened under the title ‘The Crisis of Civilizational Progress in the Arab Homeland’. While Amil’s criticism is focused on self-essentializing conceptions of an Arab self, he does not hone his critique through the notion of Arabness. Amil’s critique of Arabness is not a question of geography and its relation to identity. Rather, his critique is based on temporality and the way its link to identity works against the political struggle for liberation in the region. In other words, Amil’s book seems to accept the Arab political space and the need for Arabs to think together about national liberation and class struggle through a Marxist–Leninist lens. As a Marxist, Amil is not interested in critiquing conceptions of an Arab identity that are based on alternative conceptions or imaginations of community. In a way, he attacks the conference contributors for their methodology; rather, he does this from the perspective of rival (pan) nationalisms. That erroneous methodology, Amil suggests, is an

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ahistorical conceptualization of an Arab malaise. Amil reserves some of his sharpest attacks for psychologized and individualized references to an ‘Arab self ’ or ‘Arab mind’ – a term that continues to have political cachet in both Arab and Western intellectual and policy circles, in, for instance, Patai’s (1973) The Arab Mind. Amil’s critique is not necessarily explicitly anti-Arab nationalist, but it targets analyses that approach the contemporary situation in the Arab world through thinking about characteristics that are supposedly intrinsic to Arabness. In other words, Amil’s main criticism is around how Arabness is made to hold a simultaneously spatio-temporal, individual and cultural meaning that can serve as an independent variable in political analysis. In Amil’s book, the ideas of Arab thought and the Arab self are dealt with most clearly in his rebuttal of the contribution of the Syrian poet and intellectual Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Asber; 1930–) at the Kuwait conference. Amil accuses Adonis of harbouring a dangerous reductionism and essentialism. According to Amil, Adonis had flattened contemporary social and political relationships in Arab countries, and, more specifically, the historically specific structural relations of production, into a generalized, ahistorical and essentialist human relation between Arabs and the West (Amil 1974: 68). To Amil, Adonis’s failure to historicize Arab politics and economics and their impact on culture was wrong. However, he finds Adonis’s offhand discussion of a relationship between ‘the Arab person’, as an essence, and the Arab state to be deeply problematic. Adonis was one of several Arab scholars who sought to answer the question relating to why Arabs are backward, through thinking about reasons that are intrinsic to Arab culture and thought. Within the realm of culture, Adonis identifies the work of the medieval Muslim scholar alGhazali (1058–1111) as defining Arab thought in its relation to religion, critical thinking and modernity. Adonis claims that textual referentiality dominates Arab social and intellectual life, and it is therefore an obstacle to the achievement of modernity (Kassab 2010). Amil was not interested in al-Ghazali’s thought, or that of any other medieval Muslim scholar, as the starting point for analysing contemporary Arab culture or thought. He explains that other contemporary intellectuals may choose a more progressive or ‘enlightened’ thinker, such as Averroes (Arabic: Ibn Rushd; 1126–98), as the thinker whose work defines Arab culture. Amil’s point here is to criticize the normative text-centredness of many of his contemporaries, as though one thinker or text can explain the trajectory of Arab politics and culture, regardless of the socio-political structural circumstances at the time. Amil explains that if al-Ghazali,

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or Ibn Rushd for that matter, is the model for Arab thought, then it is implied that Arab thought is al-Ghazali’s thought. This text-centric leap erases the conditions that produce hegemonic interpretations. If that is to be done to texts, it can also be applied to habits, preferences and everyday cultural practices, Amil argues. ‘Consequently, it is easy and possible, without any effort or research, to explain any social phenomenon in contemporary Arab reality along the lines of: “the Arab” prefers oration over writing because he preferred it in the past’ (Amil 1974: 76). Amil’s point is that such an erroneous anachronistic approach can be used just as methodically to make ridiculous claims. The notion of the Arab mind also arises in Amil’s rebuttal of the Egyptian philosopher, Fuad Zakaria (1927–2010), who discussed the contemporary Arab ‘crisis’, a keyword I will examine later, as a ‘crisis of the Arab mind’, implying that the problem is in the exceptionalism of that mind, rather than in the historically bound social structure that determines Arab thought-formation and textual interpretation (Amil 1974: 115). ‘When thought is divorced from its social presence, then its present can become equated (yatamathal) with its past.’ However, that relationship of equivalence between past and contemporary thought does not actually exist, because thought, Amil (1974: 116) claims does not emerge by itself but through the ideological field, which is the social structure of its formation. He notes that in debates that are centred on ahistorical cultural arguments, there is often slippage between discussing the Arab ‘mind’, ‘person’, ‘thought’, ‘heritage’ and ‘culture’ (Amil 1974: 121). These terms become erroneously exchangeable, he implies, because they are held together by the Arab qualification, which conceals the time-dependent structural conditions of society. Another term that connotes an action by ‘the Arab’ is the notion of ‘awakening’, which is the next of my keywords that emerges from Amil’s book.

‘The Arab awakening’ The idea of an Arab awakening is inspired by the lexicon of the Enlightenment and the European Renaissance. In the Arab world, al-Nahda (from the root nahada: to wake up or rise up) refers to the cultural and political movement of the nineteenth century, in which Arab intellectuals and writers modernized the Arabic language, theorized the compatibility of Islam with Western values of modernity, and contemplated the meanings of a renewed Arab culture/identity. It is at the roots of enduring hegemonic conceptions of, and attitudes

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towards, Arab modernity and Western thought. The fin-de-siècle alNahda Movement came with a particular historiography that generally defined national identity in opposition to Ottoman rule, and that often propagated an idea that the Ottoman era was a deviation from Arab authenticity. The idea was that with a new embrace of Western values and a renewed commitment to indigenous culture, Arabs would awaken and rise up from centuries of sleep and dormancy. This narrative mirrored Europe’s historiographic narrative leaps from Greek classical ‘origins’ through the Roman Empire and into the Renaissance and the achievement of modernity. The legacy of al-Nahda loomed large throughout the twentieth century in the Arab world, including during the 1974 Kuwait conference, whether in claims that Arab intellectuals should instigate a new Nahda, or in analyses of why the European Renaissance succeeded while the Arab Nahda failed. Amil considers this line of thinking to contribute to a strategically misguided bourgeois discourse. His critique is firstly based on the difference between al-Nahda and the renaissance, in terms of the conceptualization of new cultural beginnings. He argues that while renaissance is a rebirth – a birth of something new – al-Nahda is not a birth, but is a rising up of the same thing, which was in a state of sloth or dormancy. Al-Nahda could also be an awakening, in the sense of an entity waking up or instigating the rise of Arab culture. ‘al-Nahda is not a birth of something new but it is the nahda of the same thing which has to rise up from a static condition,’ explains Amil (1974: 158). Amil considers that the Arab ‘colonial bourgeoisie’, a keyword I will explain later, has given itself the role of that instigator or inflictor of the al-Nahda, to the detriment of Arab liberation (Amil 1974: 158). However, the original fallacy that Amil identifies in the conception of the al-Nahda is the implication that Arab culture, or the Arab body politic, is temporally sovereign. It just needs to be awoken into life and rescued from its slumber. The al-Nahda metaphor blends the intellectual and the cultural with the nationalist. For Amil, the crucial point is that the al-Nahda frame erases class distinctions and class struggle. He views the renaissance as a more useful metaphor, through its implication that what is reborn is a new creation, rather than just a newly awoken but age-old entity. Amil’s critique of the ‘Arab awakening’ concept was also developed in response to the Egyptian philosopher, Fouad Zakaria, whose intervention establishes a parallelism between the European Renaissance and the Arab awakening, as he examines the factors that prevented the ‘Arab mind’ from mounting a renaissance that was similar

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to ‘Western culture’. To Amil, this is a hopelessly wrong question to ask, one bound to fail to contribute to a constructive discussion about liberation. Amil poses another question as a corrective: ‘What are the socio-historical conditions that enabled Western Europe to launch the industrial revolution and to move into capitalist production; and what are those that prevented the Arab countries from mounting that revolution and moving to that form of production?’ (Amil 1974: 123). Amil responds to his question by claiming that ‘the answer is in the social factors that the Arab countries lacked, which existed in Western Europe’. He adds that the answer is the emergence of a social class, the bourgeoisie, in Western Europe, with its strong drive towards scientific and technological development that was based on applying new scientific and technical skills in economic production (Amil 1974: 123). Amil’s line of enquiry is grounded upon an analysis of power structures, and it is bound in time and space. In contrast, he accuses his contemporaries of indulging in circular and tautological reasoning that is based on a utopian logic of a collective awakening to an imagined ideal past (Amil 1974: 124). He adds that it is strange that every time that alleged ‘Arab mind’ tries to leap towards an age of science and reason, it falls into the trap of an Hegelian dialectic that prevents it from seeing that the move from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ – in thought and society – will not be a continuation of the old in the new, or a connection with the self that allows the old to live in the new. He emphasizes that the move from the old to the new takes the form of a struggle, not an awakening. It is a struggle through which a process of transformation in the structure of thought and society takes place, only after which may the new emerge from the old, and only if the new is capable of destroying the old (Amil: 1974: 126). In addition to concealing the class dimension, Amil contends that the metaphor about the awakening of the Arab mind indulges in a flawed conception of modernity, which today we can recognize as Western-centric and Orientalist. In fact, Amil’s critique implicitly suggests that there is a certain level of self-hatred in the framing of modernity through the metaphor of awakening. Of course, what Arab culture is meant to awaken to is a condition of modernity, which is conceived as being equivalent to Western modernity. The process of becoming modern, Amil argues in response to Zakaria, is imagined as being akin to simply using a magic wand in order to transport Arab thought from its past to its ‘present past’, and then into its future (Amil 1974: 137). By the present past, Amil refers to the common (mis)

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conception that an Arab culture, or thought, is an entity that has been conceived in the past and that persists into the present. Though the version of the past that persists may be imagined as being dormant, bruised or mutated, it is nonetheless thought to be recoverable as a result of the process of an awakening – the Arab version of the European Renaissance. Furthermore, Amil adds that presenting the European Renaissance in the sixteenth or seventeenth century as though it were equivalent to an Arab renaissance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries holds a deeply flawed assumption that the Arab world today is in the same position as Europe at the beginning of its capitalist development. This alleged equivalence is a ‘product of the utopian vision of historical movement, which portrays history in terms of a linear and connected trajectory,’ asserts Amil (1974: 139). The idea of awakening is precisely the concept that captures that utopian vision of history. Here, Amil does not consider his Marxist historical temporality, which conceives of the class struggle as originating in the emergence of capitalist and imperialist modes of production and as culminating in national and international liberation as being utopian but, on the contrary, as being a grounded analysis of structural problems. This is a limitation of Amil’s communist-committed analysis that must be kept in mind as I move to the next keyword, which is the notion of authenticity – another conceptualization that Amil thought was haunted and misled his contemporaries.

‘Authenticity’ Authenticity (Arabic: asala; the root is asl, which means ‘origin’) is another keyword that Amil identified as being worthy of deconstruction. Contrary to the way in which it is often used to explain Arab political and cultural decline, Amil explains it as actually being a reflection of intellectual failure and bourgeois deception. He contends that authenticity is a manifestation of the same dominant Arab discourse about modernity (Amil 1974: 175). It is what is to be resurrected, rescued or melancholically discarded, in the pursuit of modernity, he suggests. Authenticity is construed as being an essence of Arab culture, the fate of which has to be contemplated and theorized. As a concept, it is powerful enough to have withstood the passing of centuries, but vulnerable enough to be threatened by the pursuit of Western modernity. (For more on authenticity in Arab politics, see al-Azmeh 1993.)

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In their conception of modernity, Arab intellectuals often begin with the following premise: ‘Arab civilization was prosperous, and then it entered into a path of decline which it has not yet left’ (Amil 1974: 20). Though the specification of when Arab civilization prospered, or when it began to decline, changes depending on the politics of the speaker, it is suggested that the line of thinking remains the same. Accordingly, questions such as the following are posed by the thinkers concerned with authenticity: ‘How did [Arab civilization] leave that path of civilization? How will it arrive at progress? Will it retain its “Arab authenticity” in its march to “modernity”?’ (Amil 1974: 20–21). The answer to the last enquiry becomes a quest to search for the reasons for the crisis in the structure of Arab civilization itself. This steers analysis onto the deadend path of centring the enquiry within the past, while attempting to locate the present’s problems and to find solutions for them. The implicit assumption is that the past is equivalent to the present. ‘Even if seemingly different, both are [conceived of as] being a single essence, which is “Arab civilization”,’ adds Amil (1974: 21). Accordingly, the problem becomes one of civilization, rather than of a particular sociohistorical issue. The problem is then conceived as being inherent to the structure of the Arab person – in their essence – and that is why, following that line of thinking, there needs to be a return to the essence in order to acknowledge and address the problem (Amil 1974: 21). The Syrian historian Shaker Moustafa (1921–97) is one of the thinkers whom Amil criticizes for his conception of authenticity. Amil specifies that he disagrees with Moustafa’s implication that the present Arab reality appears to be the sum of its supposed component parts and origins. Accordingly, the present manifestations of Arab reality are mere extensions of their seeds in the past, which have developed in a dialectical movement of disruptions and continuities and which have re-emerged in the current reformulation. What remains, and can be salvaged, from these seeds, is what is authentic about Arab reality and contemporary culture, according to Amil’s assessment of the dominant meaning of the word. Authenticity, then, is linked to the other terms that were commonly used in post-1967 cultural analyses. The notion of the Arab mind or self is contingent on the concept of authenticity. The Arab awakening is posited as being the required action needed to transport that Arab authenticity into the modern world. The question of what is to be done to, or what would happen to, authenticity as it faces modernity is at the heart of another keyword, the critique of which is crucial to Amil’s project, and that is the notion of an Arab civilizational crisis.

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‘The crisis’ While the keywords I have so far explored are terms that Amil deconstructed and criticized, ‘crisis’ is a term that Amil re-appropriated. He criticizes the way his contemporaries conceptualize it, and he offers an alternative use. The notion of crisis is central to Amil’s analysis, as is reflected in the title of his book The Crisis of Arab Civilization or the Crisis of the Arab Bourgeoisies? As the title suggests, Amil invites the reader to consider the political complexities of a seemingly selfevident, and certainly ubiquitous, term, like crisis. It appears to be straightforward, in the sense that the conception of what is happening in the Arab world as crisis is clear when discussing the early 1970s. The crisis is that in their pursuit of post-colonial liberation and selffulfilment, Arab countries have ended up suffering from the further loss of land and subjugation to hostile powers. To Amil, this is a crisis, but it is not rooted in an Arab civilization. It can only be unpacked through an analysis of the grip of a dominant class (what Amil calls the colonial bourgeoisies), not only on politics and economics but also on discourse. The essence of the crisis is in the tautology of Arab intellectual bourgeois narratives, which confuse the consequence with the cause, and the cause with the consequence (Amil 1974: 58). Amil explains that the protagonist in Arab bourgeois historiography is an authentic Arab self, which possesses authenticity due to its social and cultural continuity across time, but it is simultaneously backward due to that same authenticity. Arabness is thus confined within a dialectical relationship between authenticity and temporal alienation. Arab reason is seen as being backward because it does not look at history through a historicist lens, but that non-historicist perspective is the result of that backwardness (Amil 1974: 124). Stated differently, the dominant understanding of crisis is that the ‘Arab mind’ must become modern, but that the modern mind is not Arab. ‘The Arab mind cannot return to a state of growth unless it stops wanting to grow as an Arab mind’ (Amil 1974: 126). So therefore the only way to surmount that impasse, according to that logic, is either for the Arab mind to let go of its Arabness, or for it to remain Arab but ‘continue in its state of stunted growth’ (Amil 1974: 127). In that way, every problem is a crisis, and every crisis becomes a tragedy (Amil 1974: 126–7). The only way out is the self ’s rejection of itself. The ‘crisis’ is framed as being a problem of overcoming Arab backwardness and achieving progress. Amil unpacks the word ‘progress’ in Arabic (tatawor). What is the meaning of tatawor? he

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asks (Amil 1974: 16). Tatawor is the movement from tawr to tawr (movement from one temporally bound state to another). To Amil, it is important to think about what it is that is hoped to progress, and what the trajectory of movement from tawr to tawr is leading to. To him, the unit that should be analysed through time is the mode of production. Moreover, the aspired-for movement should be one that takes society from imperialism and capitalism into communism and liberation. Even if one disagrees with Amil’s endpoint, one can still agree with his argument that the crisis is in thinking that it is an Arab civilization that is moving, and that the movement is one from backwardness to progress. For instance, Amil accuses the Syrian poet Adonis of reproducing that fallacy in his conception of progress and backwardness in exclusive relational terms, such as that one of them can only be explained with reference to the other. That line of thinking, Amil (1974: 68) suggests, is the crisis, because it transforms a structural time-determined relation of production into ‘a general human relation and consequently into an ahistorical and essentialist relation’ between a supposedly backward and an allegedly progressive Arabness. This Arab intellectual discourse on a civilizational crisis and the vocabulary that is associated with it are the crisis, which is really an Arab bourgeois crisis, Amil asserts. This is why it is worth exploring next Amil’s notion of ‘the colonial bourgeoisies’.

‘Colonial bourgeoisie’ As opposed to the other keywords I discuss, which were used by Amil’s contemporaries and which were criticized by him, the ‘colonial bourgeoisie’ is the term that he thinks has been strategically obscured in the Arab political and cultural lexicon. Actually, unlike the other keywords, this term stands out as sounding particularly archaic when read in 2017. The bourgeoisie and its relation with colonial legacies have not been at the forefront of analyses of the Arab uprisings. In Amil’s writings, he accuses ‘the colonial bourgeoisies’, the post-colonial elite, of hindering the achievement of true national liberation. He postulates that the Arab bourgeoisies also propagate narratives about, and symbols of, awakening, authenticity and/or an Arab civilization, in order to conceal their role of obstruction. Amil here echoes Fanon’s (1963) analysis of the role of the national bourgeoisies in continuing the legacy of colonialism, while purporting to fight it. For Amil, the colonial bourgeoisies, whose voice is amplified by the intellectuals whom he is criticizing, find it convenient to use the discourse on civilizational awakening because

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it conceals how liberation, development and modernity should not be framed in narratives of return or becoming, nor as a struggle against an inherited past; but rather they should be discussed as a present-day battle against them – the colonial bourgeoisies. In Marxist terms, Amil (1974: 199) accuses nationalist bourgeois historiography and cultural analysis of erroneously flipping the base and the super structure through their claim that cultural analysis supersedes the theorization of class struggle and the modes of production. According to Amil, then, ‘the crisis’ is reproduced in the discourse of the colonial bourgeoisies, but there are two strategic functions behind bourgeois logic and vocabulary. The first is to conceal the equivalence between the bourgeois classist positionality and the prevalent form of Arab thought, with its problematic understanding of modernity. The second function is also to conceal the structural differences between itself, as the Arab bourgeois class, and the Western bourgeoisies, and to project a (structurally impossible) relationship of class equivalence between the two (Amil 1974: 134). Amil adds that the Arab bourgeoisies are structurally dependent on imperialism, which puts them in a permanent crisis as a result of their inability to bridge their class illusions of equity with their Western counterparts and their realities as the Arab bourgeoisies. By structurally dependent, Amil basically means that it was European imperialism that empowered and institutionalized the influence of the post-colonial Arab bourgeoisies in the first place, which is why he calls them the colonial bourgeoisies. Amil suggests that the root of the crisis is the Arab bourgeois illusion that modernity is the condition for their integration into the European bourgeoisies. This illusion is powerful, since it is the very force that propels bourgeois ideology (Amil 1974: 159). The idea of Arab backwardness is the mask that hides Arab bourgeois failure as a ruling class, he insists. The focus on Arab reason, or civilization, changes the conversation and erases the dismal failure of bourgeois rule in the Arab region for a century and a half (Amil 1974: 164). Another term, which I have discussed, ‘the awakening’, as a keyword in relation to the Arab intellect, can be conceived of as being synonymous with the birth of colonial bourgeois thought (Amil 1974: 157). The fixation on backwardness absolves the colonial bourgeoisie from its historical responsibility for Arab social, political and cultural realities (Amil 1974: 135). In his elaboration, Amil echoes post-colonial theories and approaches by stating that the colonial bourgeoisie is in a constant state of estrangement, which it tries to project onto the concept of the Arab

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mind. The estrangement reflects its structural helplessness and its failure to achieve its aim of an equivalence with the Western bourgeoisies or, as Amil calls them, the imperialist bourgeoisies (Arabic: al-burjwaziyah al-imbiryaliyah). The Arab colonial bourgeoisie at last self-identifies with (tamathol) the Western imperialist bourgeoisie because of the impossibility of achieving equivalence to it. That necessary distance between the colonial Arab and the imperialist Western bourgeoisies, and the former’s desire to bridge this distance through mimicry, blinds Arabs from seeing how that very desire leads to a state of estranged paralysis and, ultimately, to a doomed modernity (see Amil 1974: 160–1). Consequently, the Arab ‘colonial bourgeoisies’ are the central reason behind the ‘crisis’ in the Arab world. For Amil, the solution to the ways in which he conceives the problem is through the class struggle that is reflected in ideology. The desired endpoint is national liberation, which Amil discusses as a process that started in the 1920s with the establishment of communist parties in the Arab world, and that can only end through Marxist–Leninist rule. Ideally, its application in the Arab world would take the form of ‘Marxist nationalism’, which is the interaction between Marxist ideology, and its basis of universal class struggle, with the specifications of nationalism in Arab societies (see Amil 1974: 155). National liberation cannot be achieved through an individual intellectual rejection of the state, society or culture, but, Amil suggests, through a process of struggle and social empowerment instead. Following Amil’s elaborate dissection of what he considered to be simplistic argumentation from his contemporaries, his political solution seems dogmatic. This is not only an issue of the change in the ‘problem-space’ but also applies to a historicized analysis of his work. As Younes (2016: 111) points out, Amil’s work ‘betrays a gap between aspiration and reality’ particularly in relation to how the project of a socialist revolution could not resist the political realities of civil war Lebanon from the mid-1970s, and until his tragic assassination in 1987. Nonetheless, it is crucial to revisit Amil’s critique of the popular cultural analysis, as applied to Arab politics in the 1970s. The keywords that he thought with and against remain important in 2017, since they emerge in political discourse in various iterations and interpretations. This vocabulary is a site of memory that stocks emotive notions of Arab hope and tragedy, but it also brings to the fore intellectual formations and histories that require systematic enquiry and debate. It also has a history that is related to political events in the Arab region and that needs to be brought to the fore.

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Conclusion Temporality is crucial to Amil’s framework. Indeed, the theme of the Kuwait conference was the dichotomy of backwardness and progress. Backwardness appears in Adonis’s work, and is understood as ‘a tendency to focus on the past’ (tamahwor hawl al-madi), and progress is understood as a ‘tendency to focus on the future’ (Amil 1974: 111). Amil refutes this linear understanding of temporality. He asks ‘Is everything old, old? And is everything new, new?’ ‘Can’t the new be a renewal of what is old? And can’t the old take the form of the new without being new?’ He gives the example that Nazism/fascism in the 1930s cannot be seen as being more progressive than the 1870 Paris Commune (Amil 1974: 112–13). Accordingly, temporal linearity should be disrupted in political historiography. Linking the work of Amil with that of Williams, it is important to note that even the words we use to talk about politics must be conceived of in temporal terms: the ways in which their usage and meanings are projected onto them have a history that is repeated, mutated, interrupted and restructured. Writing about Arab modernity and temporality in 2017 is consumed by the experience of the 2011 uprisings and what they have led to, more than six years on. While the uprising’s long-term legacy remains to be seen, their impact in 2017 can be easily read as that of crisis and failure. In some countries, such as Syria, Yemen and Libya, the scope of the violence unleashed against the civilian populations is staggering. The scale of the suffering, displacement, destruction and death has changed the region indefinitely. This assessment stands in sharp contrast to those hopeful early months of 2011, when the Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali regime in Tunisia and the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt crumbled under the pressure of popular protests. The unimaginable happened then. Contrary to the long-held popular opinions and academic paradigms, ordinary Arabs finally appeared capable of instigating democratic political change. Given the contrast to the situation six years later, a sense of familiar disappointment, but also paralysing shock, has taken over the Arab world. The Syrian war, in particular, has had a profound impact on Arab leftist, progressive and liberal political positions, which became sharply divided on how to think about the bloodshed in Syria – a country torn apart by its Baʾathist regime, armed opposition, and by jihadist fighters on both sides of the conflict, in addition to Russian bombardment and foreign interventions by Iran, Turkey, Western states and the Arab Gulf states. A crisis it is, but whose crisis? Is it a crisis of politics, economics, civilization or culture?

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Amil’s work is important in addressing these questions – not least in reflecting on the history and meanings of the words we use – what they reveal, and what they conceal. For instance, many academic analyses of the 2011 Arab uprisings, particularly within media and cultural studies, overlook the question of class. It is important to address how class dynamics played out in the protests in different countries. The 2011 protest movement was often framed and mediatized as a panArab event. However, as I argue elsewhere (al-Ghazzi 2016), the use of a common Arab cultural repertoire, symbolism and vocabulary was strategically meant to use the successful Tunisian protest as a political opportunity to disrupt controlled authoritarian media and political environments, and to conceal structural differences within and between Arab countries. Furthermore, in relation to the rise of radical Islamic ideologies, and an ever-expanding academic field in which to analyse them, the question about the centrality of structural factors within hegemonic interpretations of religious texts is still with us. Amil’s work points to the limits of cultural analyses if they are divorced from a structural approach. As Williams (1976) argued, cultural keywords consist of a vocabulary ‘which has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions’ and they are also ‘subject to change as well as continuity’. Keywords go through ‘a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view’ (Amil 1974: 24–5). In contemporary analyses of the 2011 Arab uprisings, and what they may have meant for Arab polities, there is a critical need to historicize the language we use in order to realize the continuity and disruption of the meanings that they offer. I am not calling simply for a semantic analysis but, rather, for an Amil-inspired approach that thinks about how words, by purporting to reflect an evident reality, conceal structural problems, histories and relations of power. An Amil-inspired historical analysis of Arab political culture reveals an Arab discursive tendency to unreflexively oscillate between promises of progress and the desperation over backwardness. In the context of the Arab world, moments of hope are typically discussed as being the promise of progress that takes the form of a return to a golden age. While, in the more durable times seen as part of a decline, public discourse is often dominated by expressions of melancholia over Arab backwardness. This oscillation is based on self-essentializing tropes and words about an Arab self that moves through time – a self, as Amil suggests, that only recognizes itself in relation to the visibility of the Western other.

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Words have a way to make us remember certain significations and, consequently, to forget others. For instance, by using the term ‘crisis’ in Arab historiography, we remember the different crises, but we tend to forget and avoid seeing the continuities in Arab thought and intellectual genealogy, because past and current intellectual interventions tend to cluster around events that are conceived of as being ‘Arab crises’ (Gershoni 2006; Frangie 2012). Keywords are not simply tools for analysis. They purport to be a-temporal; however, my point is that even though the words ‘Arab’ or ‘the Arab awakening’, for example, were used in 2011 within the context of the uprisings, they are not used to have the same meanings as when they were used at any other point in history. The Arab bourgeoisies in the twenty-first century are different from those of the mid-twentieth century, and the notion of crisis has continued to accommodate different meanings. Yet these differences are concealed through the repetition of a seemingly unchanged vocabulary, which holds memories that conceal histories. In a way, Amil’s legacy, which should be taken by Arab-focused cultural and political studies, is to urge us to ask different questions than those that search for the reasons for Arab backwardness. An important pathway along which to do so is to uncover the temporal stories that are shrouded by our vocabulary.

Note 1 I would like to thank my friend and colleague Dr Ghenwa Hayek for her support during a helpful brainstorming session about this chapter.

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Amy Singer and Y. Hakan Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kassab, Elizabeth S. (2010) Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. Nora, Pierre (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26: 7–25. Patai, Raphael (1973). The Arab Mind. New York: Scribner. Scott, David (1999) Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Williams, Raymond (1976/1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press. Younes, Miriam (2016) ‘A Tale of Two Communists: The revolutionary projects of the Lebanese communists Husayn Muruwa and Mahdi “Amil”’, Arab Studies Journal 24 (1): 98–116.

Chapter 8 R E T H I N K I N G A R A B P H I L O S O P H IC A L E X P E R I E N C E I N T H E T I M E O F R EVO LU T IO N Abdelaziz Boumeshouli Introduction This chapter uses qualitative material from a series of in-depth interviews with key emerging philosophers in the Arab region to argue that the ethical and political demands made in the Arab world since the Tunisian revolution in 2010 have ushered in a new Arab philosophical experience that, in the main, rejects religious and political teleologies of becoming in favour of a more humanist experience of the self and the world. The new Arab philosophical experience is more concerned with the politics of the present, the everyday and the body. A new path to the philosophy of the future in the Arab region is beginning to take shape, and it will be the task of this chapter to detect the return of the philosophical debate to the Arab public sphere, through observing the various new philosophical trends that interacted with the Arab movement of 2010. To be precise, these philosophical trends delineate a path that has started prior to these revolutions and continues after these movements have wound down. I will also try to highlight the new themes of what we might call a philosophical revolution that is appearing in the Arab world, and which is led by philosophers who are characterized by a type of necessary audacity for philosophizing as an innovation in relation to life and its concepts. The chapter engages with three main questions: can we consider the Arab uprisings to be a philosophical event? That is, as a reflexive common subjectivity that has a desire to reinvent its present temporality. Can we consider the ethical demands made during the peaceful demonstrations as being practical forms of philosophizing? Wasn’t what was witnessed in the piazzas and public squares the beginning of a new formation through which the inter-corporeal aspired to have the free body test its will?

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Philosophical experience is not – in terms of its experientiality – public. This is because every philosophical experience is a private experience linked to a philosophical personality that dares to experience philosophizing. However, as this kind of experience takes place within and for a public context (i.e. in a public sphere) it becomes, by default, a public experience. Philosophical experience is also conditioned by the cultural time to which it responds and through which philosophizing is done. Philosophizing in the Arab world is now responding to a different socio-cultural and political temporality that is driven by different ethical concerns, let us say, from those with which many pan-Arabists were concerned. Arab philosophical concerns are now driven by concepts such as liberty, dignity, recognition and citizenship, which are radically different from the concepts that preoccupied pan-Arabists, such as loyalty to the identity or group, or the domination of the sect or the party, and the clan or nationality. Although we have not yet reached the breaking-off stage, or a radical rupture between two different cultural temporalities, due to the slow pace that is required in the course of the shift towards a new horizon, the cultural time that was triggered by the revolutions, and which coincided with the Arab movement, represents, for the philosophizing Arabs, an enabling opportunity through which to emerge from their theoretical and professional isolation so as to face and respond to an event, not merely to comprehend it. This has also presented them with an opportunity to think reflexively about the nature of their philosophizing. This very moment is what motivated me to go directly to the coterie of philosophers and Arab intellectuals in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon, in order to open a dialogue with them that aims to highlight their perspectives and attitudes, and thus to trace the sources of the new philosophical experiences in the Arab world, with the prospect of mapping out new philosophizing spheres that express and speak to ‘doing philosophy’ in the current geography and cultural time of the Arab world. So, what is the status of Arab philosophers within this new temporal geography? What are the perspectives that characterize the experience of their private beings? Can we talk about a new rebirth of philosophy in the Arab world, a philosophy that transcends the restoration of the Arab or Western philosophical tradition? Can we consider the recent Arab movement, initiated by the Tunisian revolution, as being a precursor to a different philosophical experience in the Arab world?

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New Arab philosophical experiences The impact of the Arab movement, with its strong momentum that impels it towards the establishment of a new prospect of liberty in the Arab world, based on Arab philosophical experiences, is evident in the rise of a different form of philosophizing that does not include within its priorities the achievement of major projects that have a direct connection to ideological thinking, whether traditional, national or revivalist, for its challenges became universal. As long as this is so, the movement aspires only to establish a philosophical life that expresses the depth of the radical transformations that concern the concepts of nation and citizenship, as well the citizen as an individual who deserves to live a worthy life of liberty and dignity, and to enjoy his/ her universal rights. The Arab philosopher today no longer thinks through the lenses of identity affiliation (in order to restore a missing essence) as much as s/he is thinking of actualizing the philosophizing experience in its potentiality to raise the limit of demands for the right to a free life. A key question today for the philosophizing Arab is: how can philosophical life become possible? From this emanation, the Arab philosopher today faces a different potential of/for thinking. Philosophizing is now characterized by a kind of audacity with which to think about the conditions and principles of the philosophical life for which s/he aspires.

Philosophizing as a pattern of existence, or as an experience of life Abdelsamad al-Ghabass (2013), one of the major names among the new philosophers in Morocco, demonstrates that ideas, as the Arab revolutions proved, do not live in minds alone, but make up the same structure of objects and events. Ideas and concepts are dictated by the structure of events and objects. For al-Ghabass, their existence in a technological way has a formula, in which the technological becomes an organizational power for the people’s potential to live, and their dreams and aspirations materialize. For example, we cannot separate the car from a specific idea about acceleration and about the relationship between space and time; moreover, it cannot be separated from a specific vision of an auto-connected world, which is achieved as an open field for the accelerated movement of human forces, and this applies to other means of technology, such as the internet and mobile phones. Accordingly, although it is loaded with a neutral existence,

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the developing structure of technological innovations that broke into people’s everydayness, whether in the East or the West, is, in its depth, an instrumental structural medium. Al-Ghabass is keen to highlight the non-human intellectual effect that impacted on the Arab movement, and that forged the political and ethical demands it made. Al-Ghabass concludes that the question of history, in essence, despite there being a conflict of interests and contradiction between forces and positions, is a question of liberty’s search for a system that includes it. Liberty carves its own path at the heart of history, whether the system that includes it was servile or liberal, as it imposes a degree of awareness of itself through the human being, and when awareness reaches a level that exceeds the dominant social system, the potential clash happens, leading to the implosion of the prevailing dominant structure. The question here is: what is the place of all of this in the intellectual and philosophical influences? Al-Ghabass confirms that the revolutions of the Arab movement, although devoid of a guided leadership for the congregated masses, is an expression of simmering and disclosed ideas in the form of slogans, such as the people’s will, dignity, liberty, toppling the authoritarian regime, etc. Ironically, al-Ghabass discerns that the great Arab philosophical projects, like those of Mohammed Abed alJabri, Abdellah Laroui and Hassan Hanafi, thought about change, but change as praxis was separated/distanced and set aside from its actual historical scope. Al-Jabri’s engagement with the idea of the privileging of an intellectual task: that of rethinking and reordering Arab heritage so that it was able to speak to, and inform, its present cultural temporality. When we read al-Jabri and, to some extent, Laroui, we will not find enough to satisfy our search for the interpretation of the occurrence of the recent Arab movement. In contrast, al-Ghabass discerns that when we read what was written by the new thinkers, we find that their experience is linked to a fundamental question: how can we create an existential field in people’s lives that opens up the possibility of change, so that liberty is an action, and not just a potential? Thinkers and philosophers are used interchangeably to reflect the make-up of this group of public intellectuals. New philosophical discourse in Morocco has, since the beginning of the second millennium, been more concerned with opening new prospects for experiencing liberty, as an existential field that tests the potential for the free reshaping of the existence of the being. Al-Ghabass asserts that the revolution that occurred at the heart of contemporary thought began from the principle that makes philosophy an experience of life, and that affirms it as a force with

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which to commit to a prospect of individual existence beyond the cultural straits in the prevailing structure, and that allows the body to be experienced as a present, and as a field of joy, which is a fundamental merit of the individual being. This philosophical experience has retrieved the individual who was damaged by the old ideas that gave heed to the masses, instead of the individual, which means that this experience has retrieved the individual as an actual sphere of every revolution and change, and by returning to the conceptual field of the new thinkers, a philosophical declaration for the next revolution is revealed. Al-Ghabass’s book, entitled The Body and Universality, the Principles of a Revolution to Come (2013), speaks to this philosophical shift. Al-Ghabass points to concepts such as the ‘primary cause’, which are based on a conceptual vision of the concept of the human being, and the right to the body, or the present which opens the door to the being that lives the here and now, and that deserves its present and its body in the here and now, and points to the immanent moral principle that restores the ethics of the individual, and points to a hedonist existence that celebrates the experience of life.1 In this context, in his 2002 book, The Demise of Truth, Ouzal critiques teleological grand narratives of becoming to advocate difference and being otherwise as prospects for being in the world. Taking his cue from Deleuze, Ouzal argues that the production of concepts in philosophy is inseparable from our consideration of philosophy as an experience. Ouzal returns to the aforementioned concept of the primary cause as an ontological concept that construes humans from the moment that they produce their self as a state of a capable being; that is, when it is separated from the structure of the effect, thus, in turn, becoming a cause, it becomes a principle from which to change the self and the world. However, they do not become like this if their base, as a cause, has not stemmed from their self-awareness as liberty. Liberty, in this sense, is dependent on the human need, as a need for liberty. This concept intersects, according to Ouzal, with the ‘ontological conduit’ concept, which establishes an unexpected reality, one that is open to infinite possibilities of occurrences, meaning that the formation of the being is, in reality, a possible event, and therefore an expression of the ontological conduit mode, which is not based on any constancy, but on this changing constant, as permanent change. What is constant is only this conduit that is haunted by the process and filled by the possibilities of occurrence, which means that the event is the deepest sign of existence, for what does not occur does not exist.

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The path of being in the world and its formation as an awareness remain inseparable from the possibility of the event that transfers it from one state to another and establishes it as a pattern for change. Thus, the history of the being, in its quest for liberty, continues to seek a prospect of permanent liberation and emancipation from a teleological metaphysics of becoming. This is because the ontological conduit is not only an expression of the process of existence but also a process pattern for the human being, which seeks to complete its occurrence in liberty. Liberty is thus not only an essence, but it is the event itself that reveals who the human being is. The human being is an event. It is not an essence, but, rather, it is the pattern of an essence, that is, of existence, an expression of the occurrence/experience that shapes its being according to its pattern of liberty. Ouzal confirms that ideas – regardless of the slowness of their effects  – have a significant impact on the changing of people’s lives. However, the question that imposes itself today, in light of the Arab movement and its new ethical temporality, is how should we move to the level of distinguishing between a philosophical discourse that makes its fundamental life through theory and a discourse or, rather, a kind of philosophizing that makes its fundamental field in life between a discourse that does not view any benefit or application for philosophy and a discourse that believes that there is an application for philosophy, in the changing of the self? How can we live in ways that raise the limits of the demand for liberty and the right of the being in the joy of existence; that is, its right to live without coercion from a subjugating authority that dictates its will on the people, separating them for their ability to think, and thus from their ability to exist in their own way? What is the role of philosophy in this context? (See Boumeshouli 2015: 242.) Further to Ouzal’s line of questioning, al-Ghabass indicates that the Arab uprisings brought to the fore a fundamental principle that rectifies an attitude that prevailed in a certain period in the history of philosophical studies – that concepts give birth to their own reality, and do not merely describe it. The new Moroccan philosophers that I interviewed see concepts as a requirement for human existence, rather than as a focus on the demands of the text. Concepts here become the necessary tool for activation, that is, a stimulus for being to act its beingness in the world, to act its ability to produce the new. Producing the new, here, is to promote liberty as action rather than as concept. At the forefront of these concerns is the question of the body and the right to the body, and the search for the grand perfection that

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should be satisfied by the social system which finds its principle in satisfying the pleasures of the body and achieving the joy of existence. These concerns essentially differ from what had been initiated by previous thinkers, such as Mohammed Abdu to al-Jabri, who were too preoccupied with re-studying/rethinking heritage. New philosophers in Morocco, such as al-Ghabass, are asking new questions. ‘I deserve my body, I deserve my present, and that’s non-negotiable,’ writes al-Ghabass at the start of his 2008 newspaper article series, later published in a book (The Body and Universality, the Principles of a Revolution to Come, 2013). His book is considered a declaration for the movement of the body. For him, the demand for a philosophy of the body was fulfilled in the revolutions of the Arab movement. This demand was manifested in an individual, physical expression by the Tunisian activist, Amina Sboui, who posted a picture of her naked body along with the sentence: ‘I own my body and it is nobody’s source of honour.’2 This event is not isolated from the context of the Arab movement, for it had a wide reach and influence in raising the extent of the demands of the people to use physical experience as an experience of and for liberty. Ouzal observes here, by referring to Nietzsche, that thinking happens through the great reasoning (La Grande Raison); that is, through this body that can, by its emotions (joy or sadness), produce perceptions that are like this experience for us, and these perceptions may have their own credibility and validity that will make them influential or not. However, they remain perceptions that stem from, and are due to, a reality that is experienced by the thinking being. It is here that the joy of ideas is manifested, which is a special and distinguished joy, as an act of creativity and as the creation of an idea. For al-Ghabass, when we write or think, we are writing in life and for life. Our own lives become artistic effects of our personal existence. Humans should be defined according to the effort they exert in the moment (as temporality) to make their existence in the passing moment enjoyable, and with an aesthetic depth, thus achieving the alternative idea of eternity, as a feeling that is not measured by temporality but, instead, by appropriating a share of the infinite through intracorporeal experience as a form of aesthetics. Al-Ghabass advocates a relationship with time that finds its energy in joy and in bringing joy. The art of living is what gives this effort a final value. There is, according to al-Ghabass, no value in any political or social outcome3 without achieving our right to the joy of existence and by pursuing our lives artistically and aesthetically.

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The birth of the self as a potential for philosophical life In The Anthology of the Subject (Self), A Manifesto for the Birth of the Subject in the Arab World, Barqawi (2014: 11), a Syrian thinker, attempts to provide a road map for the aspired-to philosophical life. Barqawi’s declaration is characterized by a kind of audacity that calls for the liberation of the philosophical experience from its formidable obstacle, which is confining philosophy within the tenets and walls of the classroom. Barqawi (2014: 134) declares bluntly that he is not ‘among those who walk behind the tyrants of philosophy and their smart or ordinary students’. What unites the coterie of new thinkers in the Arab world is this determination to put philosophy at the heart of the battle of life, which made Tunisian thinker Fat’hi al-Triki (2009: 16) describe the new trend of philosophizing as the ‘wandering philosophy’, because philosophy has been drifting without a well-defined theme, rather, it has become without its own dwelling, has lost its birthplace, and is permanently travelling and on the move, becoming, in its wandering, connected to the people, listening to their concerns and attempting to understand their ways of life, and sharing with them its sustenance, hopes and solutions. This wandering philosophy is disquieting, because it is no longer imprisoned between the well-known walls within which its boundaries are secure. It has become connected to life. It has also become, in its enduring travelling, connected with the marginalized, the incarcerated, the apostate, the outcast and the outlaw. Philosophy, in this case, defies experts, technicians, clergymen and politicians, and dares in steadfastness and patience to embarrass, disturb and to cause doubt to seep into people’s hearts, as truth dwells at the edge of doubt. Philosophy’s goal here is to resist the stifling of individual liberties and improve that part of the world that is still capable of change (al-Triki LinkManagerBM_REF_PhbJlrli2009: 16). The new thinking in the Arab world aims to make philosophy into a practice. It is no longer just a process of concept production (al-Triki LinkManagerBM_REF_PhbJlrli2009: 21), but a practice of life and an expression of the conditions and the way of life of the being. Arab thinkers are trying to offer a personalized attribute in their philosophizing that stems from the depth of the problems of existence that they experience. Philosophy, for new thinkers in the Arab world, is the practice of personalized philosophizing that is embedded in experience. Barqawi’s philosophical declaration is characterized by personal experience; an ‘intellectual autobiography’ declaration in which his ‘thinking ego’ becomes a conceptual personality, an ego that demands the restoration

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of its existence as an expression of a new kind of transformation in the Arab personality. The transformation takes place from a personality without a self to become ‘the subject (self, essence) personality’. Within the former, identity is part of a group project, which does not live its individual experience freely, as it lives within the order of a pattern of others, blurring the ability of the ego to become a self-conscious subject (self, essence). ‘The subject (self, essence) personality’ is not just selfconscious but is also capable of producing a pattern of life. ‘As for me,’ comments Barqawi (2014: 11), ‘I declare the birth of the subject (self, essence), despite all the throes of history and the abuse by all forces of violence across the whole world to prevent the presence of the subject (self, essence), or regaining its presence or its rebirth in those cultures that have not experienced its birth yet’. According to this perspective, it is not possible in the current Arab philosophical moment to ignore the subject/self in favour of the compliance with the post-modernist discourse that prevailed in post-Hegelian Western philosophy, for the simple fact is that the Arab ‘subject (self, essence)’ has yet to go through its modernist experience. The declaration of the death of the subject, in the Arab current context, becomes meaningless. For al-Triki (2009: 21), philosophy assumes, in its work, the existence of the active subject that philosophizes and has a particular societal base, and this base determines eventually the philosophical engagement and give[s] it its course. We already know that every philosophical production is inevitably an expression of the idea of the author, his/her experience, imagination, conscious and subconscious, but it is also a demonstration of historical specifications governing the author. The philosopher is a thorny and complex composition of multiple formats and different levels, which are overlapped by the political, economic, religious, social and ideological practices, etc.

And since philosophy is a ‘diagnostic activity’, as Foucault stated, then it is philosophy’s mission to diagnose the present, and thus it is a project that is fully concerned with our present, our living reality (Barqawi 2014: 14). The ontology of the subject (self, essence), as envisaged by Barqawi, is a method to diagnose this absent subject (self, essence), and so this ontology aims to make the subject (self, essence) that is absent from reality and awareness, and to present it as an active subject (self, essence), which is aware of itself, and therefore rejects all attempts to force the subject (self, essence) to be what it is intended to be at the level

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of teleology. The diagnosis that is practised by Barqawi stems from the contemplation of the shameful existence of the subject (self, essence) that does not live through the existential discontent; this subject (self, essence), the degeneration of whose decadence itself could not have been imagined, is a subject (self, essence) that did not live through the nightmares of existence that are necessary to awaken it from its fatal slumber; this diagnosis has motivated Barqawi (2014: 11) to shout (shouting in the Deleuzian philosophical sense), ‘as I am watching it in such a tormenting and ludicrous state, I chose to carry its flame’. So Barqawi is the flame carrier of the subject (self, essence), who discovers, as he contemplates the subject’s (self ’s, essence’s) submission and the repression of its existence, that that existence is in a major historical dilemma. As when the subject (self, essence) is in a dilemma, then existence is in a dilemma, and denying the existence of the subject (self, essence) is denying the subject (self, essence) of existence (Barqawi LinkManagerBM_REF_9uN39u962014: 15). Barqawi’s (2014: 14) philosophizing is not limited to diagnosis, but exceeds it in order to think about the future, and to preach in a prophetic way about how this subject (self, essence) should be, which is for it to be engaged in the form of a creative presence for the happiness of history ‘as the happiness of history and society (depends on) the presence of the active, creative, self-aware subject (self, essence), which senses its presence’. Barqawi raises a fundamental question for himself: why the subject (self, essence) now? He repeats the question in different ways: ‘why return to the subject (self, essence)?’ His answer can be condensed in the following responses: A. Because the subject (self, essence) is an important issue that has not been studied systematically in the Arab context. B. Because we are experiencing the abandoning of the subject (self, essence) from itself and its drowning in degradation. C. Because the subject (self, essence) is neither there, nor here, nor anywhere. It is the existence and anything else does not exist. D. The return of the subject (self, essence) is a declaration that it is the centre of the world, since it is responsible for its fate, and the fate of existence as a subject (self, essence). This return is thus the liberation of the subject from its alienation, from which it has emerged. E. The return to the subject is liberation from a false concern that is represented in the return to the progenitor, and restoring it is a response to the problems of existence; it is a return to the unity

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of human existence, that is, the unity of the subject (self, essence) that produces diversity. The return to the subject (self, essence) is a declaration of what the subject (self, essence) is not. The return to the subject (self, essence) is a declaration of its birth (in the Arab world) as both the centre of existence and of existence itself. The return to the subject (self, essence) is a rebellion against the culture of ‘us’ that is, the culture of the contempt and humiliation of the subject (self, essence). It is a return to the crucial confrontation with the technicalcapitalist and the knowledge-globalist mind; that is, it is a return to nature to protect it from destruction, to the glorification of earth and joy, that is, to human happiness. The return to the subject (self, essence) is the knowledge of the subject (self, essence), and to appreciating it as an absolute existence, but it is also recognition to live together, in accordance with the principles of friendship, harmony and common destiny. It is a return to the unity of the subject (self, essence) and liberty; that is, it is a return to the broad field of life full of variety and diversity.

In other words, the return to the subject (self, essence) requires some sort of philosophical audacity that is associated with exercising an emphatic rhetoric and action, and this is what we find in Barqawi’s philosophical rhetoric. It is a rhetoric in which the emerging philosophizing ego is associated with a purpose: a road map is drawn towards what we call the philosophical life. In his book The Anthology of the Subject (Self), Barqawi (2014: 27) writes: I liberate the subject (self, essence) from the captivity of metaphysics, as it was harshly treated when it was only viewed from the angle of identity, and treated Platonically. I revived and awakened it from its dark tomb, which was laid down by the history of philosophy, tainted with structuralism, [it] is the living subject (self, essence) whose voice is ringing in my ears. The subject (self, essence) that I seek is the subject (self, essence) that I gave voice to after they silenced it, I removed embarrassment from its face after they veiled it, got it its heart back after they prohibited it, revealed all its beauty after they defaced it, spread its diversity after they killed it, returned thinking to its mind after they paralyzed it, returned its wings after they nailed it. Then I put a flame in its hand after they buried it.

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Here, Barqawi writes with the confidence of a prophetic philosopher. His goal is to establish a philosophical life where the subject (self, essence) is existence itself, that is, the creative existence of the endless potentials of the creativity patterns of the world.

Alter-Modernity, or the New Enlightenment as a potential of a philosophical life There is a new potential for philosophizing as a condition for the establishment of the philosophical life and as an expression of the spiritual prospect of belonging to the world, as an excessive belonging to liberty that is caused by a self-induced dynamic flow that is not calculated in any prior identity programme. Fathi al-Miskini asks the following questions: 1. Which experience of alterity can provide us with the proper sense of alter-modernity? 2. In what sense is heterogeneity (adversity) a post-modern way of affiliation? 3. What is the dynamic relationship between heterogeneity (adversity) and liberty in the prospect of a contemporary transition from sectional modernity to spatial post-modernity? Al-Miskini poses a fourth question, through which he returns to the most special survival tools that we have available to us, namely, our current bodies: how do we inhabit the genes that we know, after the discovery of the genome of life on earth, the planet that roams in its orbit with nothing except an old map, so that they are without nostalgia and private life? From whom do we differ, then? (See al-Miskini 2011: 208.) Al-Miskini alerts us to the differentiation between alterity and heterogeneity. For him, alterity lies in the juxtaposition between the ego and the other. It is opposite to the corporeal in which the object corresponds to itself, and therefore it is a category that belongs to the history of the self-same that was found in the family of cogitos and in its varied metaphysical completeness. While alterity is a negative pattern, heterogeneity is a positive pattern of the reproduction outside our old selves. Heterogeneity cannot therefore be anything other than liberty, ‘the liberty to be modernizers in our own way, to use modernity as an open horizon for the development of the self […] and as an unprecedented form of virtue’ (al-Miskini 2011: 212).

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Liberty, according to this perspective, is the journey; it is like thinking: a possibility to go far beyond our old selves. ‘For when I think, I go beyond what I know. And when I am liberated, I go beyond myself ’ (al-Miskini 2011: 213). For al-Miskini, ‘alter-modernity’ becomes a formula for liberation from our internal boundaries. For al-Miskini, heterogeneity is a pattern of existence with liberty, but it is an existence that extends beyond our old selves. Heterogeneity is the formula through which the self can be reinvented, reinvigorated anew. This gives way to a double subjective meaning: that of the self as an alter-modern and the self as an altering and changing entity. Alter-modernity, here, must be understood as a deviation from the transcendent West, and the thinking towards immanence through the experience of liberty. Through heterogeneity, we can liberate ourselves from transcendence and old forms of selfing. ‘Heterogeneity is the art of inventing an active, open, and temporary alterity, and thus it forms an escape route from the culture of transcendence that the modern state has translated into identity programmes’ (al-Miskini 2011: 217). For al-Miskini, heterogeneity is the ability to dwell in a post-identity world, without the need for any kind of reconciliation with death, as only the living being is in a suitable position to be heterogeneous and to resist any form of identity death. So, the challenge is to do away with the cultures of identity and to enter the culture of liberty, as the only limit that does not overburden the post-modern being, and to consider it as an affirmative liberty, one that is based on the new art of applying spatial energies for ourselves (al-Miskini 2011: 221). Affirmative liberty has no theme, it is just ‘an exciting vital spherical energy, and therefore the last adventure that does not need a language, and every radical liberty is inherently an excessive expression about what any language cannot embrace without turning into music, i.e. into a spherical place without limits or angles or snags’ (al-Miskini 2011: 223). As long as heterogeneity functions within a non-identity alterity status, therefore, it opens itself to an artistic individualization that is based on an excessive sense of affiliation to liberty (al-Miskini 2011: 225). Philosophy is the art of searching for a new enlightenment, as preached by Nietzsche. Al-Miskini has envisaged a special way of philosophizing. He is not concerned with providing abstract conceptual answers. Instead, his philosophizing is informed by life and through the suffering of his philosophizing subject (essence, self), which lives among other essences (subjects, selves), sharing the affiliation to a homeland that is besieged by an identity fence, which was broken by the Tunisian revolution, through which he lived; therefore, the revolution,

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for him, is not an uprising about identity but an uprising of and for the body. The body, for him, became, thanks to the revolution, a vital form of liberty. Al-Miskini paints qualities of the heterogeneous that make it a relentless initiator, a seeker of the new art of individualization, and an expression of the New Enlightenment that defies teleological identity constructions. Perhaps the New Enlightenment that is proposed by alMiskini as a formula for alter-modernity, serves as a road map towards our goal, which is that of a ‘philosophical life’ that can create, in an unprecedented manner, from the art of philosophizing, or, according to al-Miskini, the art of individualization, our aesthetic horizon, which will liberate us from the identity device that weighs heavily on our spiritual life, and stifles its creative horizon.4

Philosophy as a penetration experience and therapeutic exercise Egypt is experiencing an enormous amount of philosophical activity, and a philosophical movement that has its roots in the works of Ibrahim Bayoumi Madhkour, Abdulrahman Badawi, Zakaria Ibrahim and Fouad Zakaria, and others who have attempted to establish a philosophical life in the Arab countries, but the defeat of 1967 and, more exactly, the frustrations of the Arab experience in achieving the renaissance for which the intellectual pioneers were calling, made those who are interested in philosophy, not only in Egypt but also in the Arab world, turn their efforts towards a kind of systematic thinking, which concurred with the re-studying of the Arab-Islamic heritage. This redirected Arab thought to projects that focused on critiquing and reinterpreting the Arab cultural heritage. This movement was led by major Arab philosophers, such as al-Jabri in Morocco, Tizini in Syria, Mrowa in Lebanon, Arkoun in Algeria and Hanafi in Egypt. Despite the extreme importance of this movement in the development of contemporary Arab thought and philosophy, the project that called for the renewal of heritage as a condition for the aspired renaissance became unresponsive to the new prospects that were posed by universalism, including the question of participatory citizenship. The revolution was thus a surprising event for those who put their hopes on change through a re-reading of heritage. Most Arab intellectual projects have been inclusive, linked and responding to major nationalist, religious, political challenges. The new philosophical experiences that I am keen to describe in this chapter challenge identitarian, comprehensive philosophical pursuits. The new

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Arab philosophical experience is still concerned with these problems, but with a focus on how these concerns affect the individual. In this context, the Egyptian political thinker, Mohammed Safar, sees the Egyptian revolution experience as an expression of an open text that remains possible for interpretations that can give it value and meaning, and therefore we should, as philosophizers, seriously discuss the matter of the relationship between religion and the state, and the matter of the relationship between religion and life; that is, we can no longer afford to ignore these matters. The other matter is related to the social system, or the form of civic life; that is, there must be a rethinking of the matter of the purpose of life in this society. Safar also poses key questions, following the Egyptian revolution, around the crisis of governmentality: how do we exercise political authority when the latter has lost its legitimacy in society?5 Safar advocates the need for authority in society, but the kind of authority that respects individual freedom and dignity. Philosophers, according to Safar, must engage with the relationship between the human being and God. It is, for him, a matter that needs resolving. According to Safar, we can either envisage faith as the foundation of social, moral and political commitment, therefore, making the spiritual part of the political process, which Foucault calls spiritual politics, or we position faith within a special relationship between the human being and his/her Creator, which exists in the private sphere. To resolve these matters, argues Safar, we need to summon philosophizing as a thrusting and penetrating exercise.6 Philosophy, according to the Egyptian philosopher, Ahmed Abdul Halim Attia, is the tool that can work to dismantle the dogmatic fences that have surrounded and shackled Arab societies for decades. Philosophy’s role becomes essential in the effort it exerts to expose the form of servitude that is produced by this thick dogmatic fence. This task will not be achieved, argues Attia, without the philosopher’s preoccupation with the present, as a temporality, and the questions imposed by the Arab movement of 2010, which allowed the thinker to resume his/her philosophizing, whilst asking new questions that are informed by the present realities of Arab experience. Despite Attia’s belief that philosophy will not be in the foreground, he demonstrates that it, as Hegel states, arrives late. Attia proposes that we rethink the notion, or essence, of the human being in Arab societies in relation to a pluralist democratic prospect that will create a free atmosphere, which provides the individual with creative dissension and the motivation for a philosophy that breaks dogmatic fences, and paves the way for the rebuilding of an ontology of the present. The key challenge is to produce the kind of environment where philosophizing

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takes on the task of asking and creating new questions that astonish us again, sufficiently to renew life, and with it, philosophy. Attia insists that, in this post-revolution moment, it is necessary for the Arab philosopher to be preoccupied with the present, as it is the living embodiment of life’s dynamics. The present time, here, means the revolution which, for Attia, is not merely about toppling a despotic regime but also about dismantling the dogmatic fences that hinder the emergence of the experience of the present as such. ‘Nothing will save us,’ remarks Attia, ‘except philosophy. Nothing will save us except thinking.’ Attia sees philosophy as a means through which to attain, and live in, liberty. Attia wants us to struggle for liberty as a human dwelling and homeland, which, in other words, protects him/her from oppression and servitude, and liberty is, as such, also the home of philosophy. In this context, the Egyptian thinker Mustafa al-Nashar, the Head of the Department of Philosophy at Cairo University, believes that liberty in the current Arab moment is manifested in the revolution, as it is an expression of the aspirations and the will of the people. Their demands for dignity and justice, he argues, are part of an applied philosophy that can be traced to the Enlightenment. It is an applied philosophy, because it does not make the philosophizer more able to practise mere thinking, but also to live according to a pattern that is driven by thinking towards objectives, that is, towards what it demands of a life that corresponds with the requisites of the mind. Al-Nashar believes that philosophy is a therapy, not only for the ills of the psyche but also for the ills of the intellect that can lead to existential melancholy; a deficit that impedes humans’ abilities to use their minds.7 Al-Nashar believes, like André Comte-Sponville and Luc Ferry, that philosophy can improve the quality of our lives and that its mission could be therapeutic. Therapy by philosophy, as al-Nashar says, is as old as philosophy itself, as philosophy did not arise only to answer fundamental questions that haunted human beings, and to saddle their minds and affect their performance in life, such as their questions about the nature of existence. Therapy by philosophy is, for al-Nashar, the practical actualization of philosophizing. ‘How can philosophy benefit me in my own life?’ al-Nashar asks. It is through philosophizing that the individual can come to terms with the meanings of self, avoid victimization, and become responsible for his/her fate. In his book, Therapy by Philosophy, al-Nashar (2010: 46) observes, ‘the fact that the individual continues to insist on this contemplative stance with the self (subject, essence), means that he/she has already entered the first step in therapy by philosophy’.

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Conclusion Through the course of this chapter, I have realized that I did not seek to examine contemporary Arab philosophy as a conceptual presence, or as most education systems in Arab countries teach it. Instead, in this chapter, I sought to give an insight into new experiences of philosophizing in the Arab region which, I argue, were energized by the Arab revolutions and the movement they created. Using in-depth interviews, I attempted to explore new and noteworthy experiences of contemporary Arab philosophizing and how they have been weaving a new narrative about self, individuality and the present as a temporality. New Arab philosophizing arises as a potential for a different life, one that moves towards a universal horizon. The philosophical life, in this sense, means engaging with life situations, having an aspiration to innovate the present, to make the body live through the experience of the joy of existence, and in engaging the self not just as an identity being (project) but as an ontological mission. To be philosophizers at the current moment, that is, a moment when a new horizon for the Arab being has opened, thanks to the Arab movement, requires a way of philosophizing that devotes a way of life to practising our ability to innovate ourselves (as essences and subjects) by contributing to a noncentral humanism, a humanism that embraces heterogeneity and our own diverse experiences. Philosophizing, as understood by many of the new Arab philosophers, is a means of vitalizing our existence: a way to make us live better. Here, philosophy is a practice of virtue, but of a virtue that has no moral mission. Philosophy’s mission is to enable human beings to be a form of existence’s happiness. The life that is truly worthy of the human being is that which cannot be dismantled into separate parts, and therefore we will not know the joy of life – no matter how much wealth and technological progress we acquire – unless we have dedicated the highest and most cherished place among the objectives we seek in life to beauty and thought (al-Nashar 2010: 15). This requires the resumption of philosophical life that is inspired by lived experience rather than mere concepts. Philosophizing, in this sense, is an expression of an upward movement by a vital force towards the mastering of an innovative formula for our existence in the world. The new Arab movement of philosophizing is in harmony with the Arab revolutionary movement that energized it, but we can say that it also precedes it. My encounter with new philosophical experiences in the Arab region reveals an upcoming philosophical revolution in the Arab world,

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that is, the beginning of a new Arab philosophical life. This projection is not the outcome of an excessively optimistic tendency, but it is an outcome of interaction with Arab philosophical experiences, which are attempting to practise philosophy as philosophizing, and as a formula with which to create its own conceptual field, that is, its concept, which carries a living conception and not just a formal one. The new Arab philosophers are seeking, with a rare passion, to proclaim the birth of new philosophical life, philosophizing that is inspired by lived experience and the present as a temporality. We are not as much as we exist, but we exist as much as we are, and we will not be the subject of being, if we do not – ourselves – become a project.

Notes 1 For the sake of having a solid piece of research, I decided to draw the ideas and concepts from the interview I conducted with al-Ghabass and Ouzal about this paper in Marrakech on 25 January 2014. 2 Sboui says in a testimonial in her book, My Body is Mine, that ‘I discovered philosophy at the age of thirteen; the beginning was with the Lebanese writer, Khalil Gibran, who fundamentally rejects society’s norms, as well as poverty and the lack of social justice. He speaks without limits about the taboos, gender, regressive ethics, and describes the contempt and spite for women in Arab society. And a large number of young Arabs, like me, owe him the credit for helping us to think and to act’ (Sboui 2014: 63). 3 See reference in Boumeshouli (2015: 133). 4 I also based my tracking of al-Miskini’s path on the transcripts of two interviews that were conducted consecutively in Tunisia on 10 and 11 May 2014, during a research conference of the Arab Council of Social Sciences. 5 The ideas included in this chapter are from the transcript of our interview with Safar, which was conducted with him at the University of Cairo during the annual conference of the Egyptian Philosophical Society, 8 December 2013. 6 The views included here are from the transcript of our interview with Attia, which we conducted with him at the Cairo College of Literature on 8 December 2013, during the Egyptian Philosophical Society conference. 7 The ideas included are from the transcript of our interview with al-Nashar, conducted with him at his office in the Department of Philosophy, Cairo Faculty of Literature, on 10 December 2013, during the annual conference of the Philosophical Society.

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de La Boétie, Étienne (2005) An Essay on Voluntary Servitude. Trans. Mustafa Safwan. Germany: Jamal Publications. Deleuze, Guattari (1997) What is Philosophy? Trans. Mota Safadi. Beirut/ Casablanca: National Development Centre, the Arab Cultural Centre. Derrida, Jacques (2011) Right to Philosophy. Trans. Izz al-Din al-Khattabi. Beirut: Arab Organization for Translation. al-Ghabass, Abdelsamad (2013) The Body and Universality, the Principles of a Revolution to Come. Casablanca: Afriqya al-Sharq. al-Ghabass, Abdelsamad (2014) Desire and Joy: A Philosophical Vision. Casablanca: Dar Afriqya al-Sharq. al-Habib, Sohail (2014) Ideological Concepts and the Arab Revolutions. Beirut: The Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies. Harb, Ali (2013) Soft Power Revolutions in the Arab World, from the System to the Network. 3rd Edition. Beirut: Arab House for Sciences, Publishers. Hashem Saleh (2013) Arab Uprisings in the Light of the Philosophy of History. Beirut: Saqi Books. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1981) Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. Imam Abdelfattah Imam. Volume I. Cairo: The House of Culture for Printing and Publishing. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2002) Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Trans. Khalil Ahmed Khalil. 2nd Edition. Beirut: The University Foundation for Studies and Publishing. Heidegger, Martin (2003) Basic Writings, Part II. Trans. Ismail al-Musadiq. Cairo: Supreme Council of Culture. Heidegger, Martin (2012) Being and Time. Translation, introduction and commentary Fathi al-Miskini. Beirut: New Book United House. al-Hroub, Khaled (2012) The River against the Swamp. Beirut: Saqi Books. Husserl, Edmund (2009) Philosophy as a Rigorous Science. Translation and introduction by Mahmoud Rajab. Cairo: National Centre for Translation. Husserl, Edmund (2011) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. Ismail al-Musadiq. Beirut: Arab Organization for Translation. al-Jabri, Mohammed Abed (1984) Critique of Arab Reason, Volume I: Formation of Arab Reason. 1st Edition. Beirut: Dar al-Talea’a for Printing and Publishing. Kamal, Abdul-latif (2013) Arab Revolutions, New Challenges and Anticipated Battles. Publications of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities in Rabat, Research and Studies Series, No. 61. Kant, Immanuel (1968) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. Trans. Nazli Ismail Hussein. Cairo: Arab Book House for Printing and Publishing. Kant, Immanuel (2005) Reflections on Education. What Is Enlightenment? Trans. Mahmoud Bin Jamaa. Tunisia/Sfax: Dar Muhammad Ali for Publication.

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Kaplan, Robert (2015) The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate. Trans. Ihab Abdulrahman Ali. Kuwait: World of Knowledge Series, No. 420, National Council for Culture, Arts and Literature. Katheer, Idris (2013) The Eloquence of Philosophy: Conceptual Approaches of the Human Being and the World. Jordan: The Modern World of Books for Publication and Distribution, Irbid. Kojeve, Alexandre (1947) Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard. Levinas, Emmanuel (1994) Liberté et commandement. Paris: Fata morgana. Levinas, Emmanuel (1995) Altérité et transcendance. Paris: Fata morgana. al-Miskini, Fathi (2001) Identity and Time: Phenomenological Interpretations on the Topic of the Us. Beirut: Dar al-Talea. al-Miskini, Fathi (2005) The Philosopher and the Empire: On the Enlightenment of the Last Human Being. Casablanca: Arab Cultural Centre. al-Miskini, Fathi (2011) Identity and Liberty: Towards New Enlightenment. Beirut: Dar Jadaweel for Publishing and Distribution. al-Miskini, Fathi and Benchikha, Om al-Zain (2011) Arab Revolutions: A Non Autobiography. Beirut: Dar Jadaweel for Publishing. al-Nashar, Mustafa (2010) Therapy by Philosophy. Cairo: Egyptian Saudi House for Publishing. Ouzal, Hassan (2002) The Demise of Truth. Dar, Casablanca: Afriqya al-Sharq. Ouzal, Hassan (2004) The Wisdom of Modernists – The Anthology of the Present. Marrakech: Philosophical Research Series. Ouzal, Hassan (2012) Intellectual Terrain: Towards Immanent Philosophy. Philosophical Research Centre in Morocco, Marrakech: Philosophical Research Series. Ouzal, Hassan (2013) The Logic of Desire and the Logic of Thought. Casablanca: Afriqya al-Sharq. al-Qubbi, Murshed (2014) Revolution in the Arab Contemporary Thought. Beirut: The Arab Cultural Centre, Mouminoun Without Borders Foundation. Raphael Khasaba, Dawood (1959) An Invitation to Philosophy. Cairo: National Centre for Translation. Saleh, Hashem (2013) Arab Uprisings in the Light of the Philosophy of History. Beirut: Saqi Books. al-Triki, Fat’hi (2009) The Wandering Philosophy. Beirut: Dar al-Tanweer.

International references Bataille, Georges (2011) L’expérience intérieure. Paris: Gallimard. Habermas, Jürgen (1987) L’espace public, archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise. Paris: Payot. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2008) Phénoménologie de l’esprit. Traduction Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Le monde de la Philosophie. Paris: Flammarion.

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Miloz, C. (1985) La terre d’Ulo. Méditation sur l’espace et la religion. Paris: Albin Michel. Sboui, Amina (2014) Mon corps m’appartient. Paris: Edition Plon. Spinoza, Baruch (1953) Ethique. Traduction Charles Aphun. Paris: Librairie Garnier frères.

Journals The Arabs and World Thought Journal, Issue No.10, Spring 1990. Journal of Philosophical Papers, Special Issue on Philosophy and the Revolution, Issue No. 31, Cairo, 2012. Bada’el Journal, a special feature on Arab uprisings, Issue No. 12, January 2013. al-Hiwar al-Mutamdin website, Issue 1443, 27 February 2006. al-Awan website, the Arab uprisings feature for the year 2011.

Recorded interviews ●●

●●

●●

Interviews with Ahmed Abdul Halim Attia, Mustafa al-Nashar and Mohammed Safar were all conducted at the University of Cairo during the annual conference of the Egyptian Philosophical Society, which took place between 6 and 12 December 2013. Interviews with both Abdelsamad al-Ghabass and Hassan Ouzal were conducted in Marrakech on 25 January 2014. Interview with Fathi al-Miskini was conducted in Tunis on 10 and 11 May 2014, during the research conference of the Arab Council of Social Sciences.

INDEX 1967 4, 12, 14, 37, 51, 55–7, 116, 133, 163, 165–6, 172, 194 Abdelnasser, Gamal 163 Adonis 139, 146, 151–3, 160 aesthetic(s) 54, 93, 135, 145–6, 148, 150–2, 154, 156, 158, 187 Agamben 21 Ait Mansour, Hicham 1 Ait Nuh 13, 73–87 al-Ghabass, Abdelsamad 183–7 al-Huthali, Abu Sakhr 88, 140, 143 al-Jabri, Mohammad Abed 9–10, 15, 58, 64, 80–1, 150, 184, 187 al-Miskini, Fathi 192–4 al-Nahda 168–9 al-Triki, Fat’hi 188–9 alcohol ban 95, 100–2, 104, 107 aletheia 84 alterity 192–3 Aly, Ramy 13, 43, 45, 47, 54, 57 Amazigh 9, 73, 75, 77–9, 81, 85–6, 88 Amil, Mahdi 14, 56, 163–79 an-Nahda 114–16, 130 Arab culture 2–3, 5–6, 9, 11–13, 116, 125, 159, 161, 167–71 intellectuals 4, 150–1, 165, 168–9, 172, 182 nationalists 104–5, 167 philosophers 10, 182, 194, 197–8 publicness 4, 7 reason 9, 64, 80, 90, 173, 175 Arab Spring 14, 32, 44, 113–14, 129, 131, 163 Arab Uprisings 1–4, 8, 10, 114, 118, 131–2, 156, 163, 165, 174, 178, 181, 186 Arab movement 181–4, 186–7, 195, 197 Arabic poetry 137, 139, 141, 143, 145–7, 149–51, 153, 155, 157–9 architecture 24, 28, 30 argileh 93, 96–9, 102

artists 2, 46, 51, 53–5, 57, 59, 97, 99, 113, 118, 121–3, 187, 193 Asad, Talal 45–6, 64, 98, 141–2 Atlas Mountains 12, 85, 87, 125, 135, 137 authenticity 165, 169, 172–4 awakening 114, 134, 146, 163, 166, 168, 170–2, 175, 179 Bab al-Hara 13, 93–5, 101–5 Badiou, Alain 2, 156 Baghdad 116, 129 Balti 120–3, 125–31 Baraka 76, 78, 81, 87 Barqawi, Ahmad 188–92 Bayat, Asef 44, 69, 128 Beirut 8–9, 12–13, 93–4, 96–103, 105, 107–8, 116, 129 Berber 124 Bergson, Henri 10, 21, 23–4, 41, 88 biopolitics 21 Black Drama 120–5, 127–32 body, the 15, 181, 185–7, 194, 197 border 12, 18–19, 88 Boumeshouli, Abdelaziz 15, 181 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 21–2, 29, 31, 35, 39, 86 Café Rawda 93–5, 97–100, 103–4, 107–8 café trottoire 97 Cairo 47–8, 51, 53, 60, 62–3, 67, 98, 110, 116, 196 checkpoint 8, 12, 17–22, 24–5, 28–36, 38 citizen journalist 48, 51 citizens, citizenship 36, 48, 51, 69, 115, 127, 129, 156–7, 182–3, 194 civil society 7, 43–5, 61, 163–4, 174, 176 colonial bourgeoisie 165, 169, 173–6 colonial, colonialism 4–5, 12, 30, 32, 34, 37–8, 40–1, 56, 82–3, 87, 118, 126, 148–9, 153–4, 159, 165, 169, 173–6 communication 7, 15, 21–3, 30–1, 45, 74–5, 91, 98, 115–16 crisis 34, 50–1, 65, 70, 114, 116, 163–6, 168, 172–7, 179, 195

204 cultural politics 12, 46, 56–7, 113–14, 118–20, 126–8, 131–2 cultural Salafism 74, 76, 79, 86 cultural studies 5–7, 178 cultural temporality 8, 10, 43, 58, 64 cultural time 3–7, 9–10, 13, 57–8, 64–5, 73, 75, 77–81, 83–8, 182 culture 1–7, 9–15, 17, 22, 44–6, 50, 52–4, 79–80, 84, 86–7, 94–6, 98, 100, 102, 109, 113, 115–19, 121–7, 130–3, 137, 139–40, 146, 151, 163–72, 177–8, 189, 193 Darwish, Mahmoud 17, 150, 153 Dasein 88 diaspora 7, 19, 24, 113, 127 digital media 2 drama series 93–4, 100, 102–3 dreams 9, 13, 32, 34, 58, 74–7, 81, 86, 88 Egypt 4, 13, 43, 45–51, 53–4, 56, 59–62, 64–5, 116, 148, 177, 182, 194 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah 46, 54–9, 61–2 enlightenment 54, 153, 168, 192–4 essence 10, 88, 114, 137, 151, 153, 167, 171–3, 183–4, 186, 189–93, 195–6 ethics, ethical 2–3, 13, 49, 144, 181–2, 184–6 ethnography 13, 80, 88, 94 event 8, 18, 23, 59, 84, 86, 103, 128, 178, 181–2, 185–7, 194 everyday life 4, 6, 10–11, 73, 75–6, 81, 94, 127–8 existence 29, 31, 35, 44, 76, 83, 132, 138, 155–6, 183–93, 196–7 Fabian, Johannes 23, 31 Geertz, Clifford 80 God 73–5, 79, 128–30, 143–4, 146, 195 Gumbrecht, Ulrich Hans 86 Habermas, Jürgen 6 Hall, Stuart 59, 65 Handel, Ariel 19–22 hashd (mobilization) 56–7 Heidegger, Martin 5, 21, 23, 29, 35, 84, 88, 151

Index hermeneutic(s) 19, 81, 84, 86–7 heterogeneity 11, 192–3, 197 hip-hop 14, 113–15, 117–22, 124, 126–9, 131–2 historiography 13–14, 59, 169, 173, 175, 177, 179 holy 74, 82, 101, 110 humanism 197 identity 10, 19, 23, 30, 34, 96, 99, 107, 122, 125, 128, 147–8, 152, 155–6, 166, 168–9, 182–3, 189, 191, 193, 197 (im)mobility 18 Imru al-Qays 140 individualization 193–4 intellectual thought 115–17, 163 intellectuals 2, 4, 54, 97, 99–100, 116, 148, 150–1, 165–8, 172, 174, 182, 184 interdisciplinarity 2 internet 6–8, 78, 98, 121, 183 interpretation 4, 10, 79, 86, 168, 184 Islam 13, 75–9, 85–6, 94, 128, 140, 144–5, 150, 158–9, 166, 168 Islamic 4–5, 13–14, 59, 76–80, 98, 118, 120–1, 129, 131, 135, 139–43, 145–6, 149–50, 153, 178, 194 Islamic Ummah 128 Israel 18, 20, 22, 30–2, 36–8, 154, 156, 158, 163 Jabri, Abed Mohammed 3, 10, 58, 64, 80–1, 150–1, 187, 194 January counterculture 13, 43–6, 57, 59–65 joy 185–7, 191, 197 Khalil, Joe F. 1, 6, 16, 113, 115, 117–18, 132 Khatibi, Abdelkabir 10, 138 language 43, 64, 77, 84, 86, 88, 113, 123–6, 137–40, 147, 150, 153, 155–6, 158, 164, 168, 178, 193 Lebanese Communist Party 163 Lebanon 97–8, 100, 104, 176, 182, 194 Levinas, Emmanuel 73 liberty 105–6, 182–7, 191–4, 196 linear, non-linear time 9–10, 12, 80

Index linguistics 7 lived experience 5, 10, 15, 21, 58, 197–8 Marxist 1, 163, 166, 171, 175–6 media 3–9, 11–15, 23–4, 46–50, 56–8, 61, 63–4, 76, 79–80, 83, 94, 98, 100, 108, 111, 113, 115–21, 126–7, 131–2, 178 media studies 3, 8 memory 13–14, 30, 64, 83–4, 94, 142, 163–4, 176 métissage 77 milieu 93 mnemonic 13, 81, 83–4, 86–8 modernity 4, 8, 14, 83, 87, 91, 115, 122, 124, 130, 147, 163, 165, 167–72, 175–7, 192–4 Morley, David 12 Morocco 12, 87, 182–4, 194 Moustafa, Shaker 172 Mubarak, Hosni 44–5, 48, 65, 177 music 8, 47, 76, 79, 100, 117, 119–26, 129, 132, 158, 193 Muslim 6, 45, 47–9, 78, 100–1, 108, 124, 129–30, 167 Muslim Brotherhood 45, 47–9 Nahda 56, 114–16, 130, 146, 168–9 Naksa 1, 12, 14, 55, 163 Nassif, Helena 13–14, 93 national security 56–7 neo-tajdeed 113–15, 117, 119–21, 131–3 neo-tradition 95, 98–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 187, 193 occupation 19, 30–2, 37–8, 127, 153, 158 oppression 65, 196 oracle 74, 77–8, 87 Ouzal, Hassan 12, 17–19, 21–2, 185–7 pagan 78–9, 81, 87 Palestine, Palestinian 12, 17–22, 24, 26, 30–41, 118, 127–9, 150, 153–4, 156, 158 Pappé, Ilan 36 past 3, 5, 12–14, 18, 23–4, 27, 29, 32–3, 38, 76–7, 82–4, 87, 93–5, 97–100,

205

102–8, 117, 120, 128, 131–2, 139, 142, 146–53, 155, 158, 164, 168, 170, 172, 177, 179 phenomenology, phenomenological 8, 18, 21, 24, 31, 34, 36 philosophical experience 15, 181–3, 185, 188, 195, 197 philosophy 5–8, 14–15, 80, 123, 153, 181–2, 184–9, 191, 193–8 poetics 14, 137, 139, 146, 150 poetry 4, 7, 14, 114, 116, 121–3, 137–58 political memory 14, 163–4 politics 6, 12–15, 21, 24, 36, 46–7, 50, 54, 56, 58, 60, 64–5, 104, 111, 113–14, 118–20, 123, 126–8, 131–3, 157, 163, 167, 171–3, 176–7, 181, 195 post-modernity 8, 192 primary cause 185 public, publics 3–7, 12–5, 21, 23, 31, 38, 45, 47–57, 60–1, 63–4, 76, 78, 83, 96, 98–9, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 113–14, 116–18, 120, 126–7, 130–3, 140, 143–4, 148, 156, 164–5, 178, 181–2, 184 public intellectuals 184 publicness 3–9, 11–3, 15, 46, 63–4, 132 Ramadan 13, 83, 93–5, 100–3, 107–8 rap 14, 113–14, 117–29, 131–3 religion 75, 77, 84, 107, 128, 146, 158, 167, 195 revolution 13–14, 44–8, 51, 53–5, 59–60, 63, 65, 87, 116, 118, 153, 156–7, 170, 176, 181–2, 184–5, 187, 193–7 rhizome 119 ritual 75, 77, 81, 87, 102 Sabry, Tarik 13, 16, 73, 115, 151 Safar, Mohammed 195 saint 73, 75, 77–8, 81 Saudi Arabia, Saudi 12, 14, 113–14, 119–21, 124, 129, 131–2 Scannell, Paddy 1–2, 88 Scott, David 23–4, 37, 126, 165 screen 94–5, 98, 100–3, 108 Shawqi, Ahmad 148–9 shrine 73, 76–8, 81–2, 86–7

206 Sidi Eissa 74, 76–8, 86 space(s) 2, 7, 12–13, 19–21, 23–6, 29, 36–8, 43, 52, 62, 83–4, 86–8, 93, 95, 98–9, 101–3, 108, 143, 158, 165–6, 170, 176, 183 spaciocide 20 structure of feeling 8 subject, the 30, 84, 188–92, 198 tajdeed 14, 114–19, 130 Tamazight 73, 79 tatawor (progress) 173–4 Tawil-Souri, Helga 12–13, 17, 19, 31, 127, 129 teleology 190 television 1, 6, 8, 13, 47, 49, 78–80, 86–8, 93–4, 97–102, 104, 108 temporal objects 20 temporality 3–5, 7–8, 10–15, 18, 20–4, 29, 33–8, 58–9, 64, 77–81, 83–4, 88, 102, 132, 163, 165–6, 171, 177, 181–2, 184, 187, 195, 197–8 tents 103, 110

Index therapy 196 time 1–4, 6–15, 17, 19–24, 26, 28–40, 43–4, 48, 56, 58, 62–5, 73, 75, 77–82, 84–91, 94, 100–4, 106–8, 121, 126, 130–2, 137–42, 144–9, 151–6, 158, 164, 166–8, 170, 174, 178, 181–3, 196 Tunisia 1, 4, 113–14, 118, 123–4, 127–9, 131–2, 177, 182 25th January 13, 44–5, 47–8, 51, 53–5, 59–60, 65–6 universalism 194 Virilio, Paul 21 Williams, Raymond 164, 177–8 youth-generated media 115, 117–21, 126–7, 131–2 zaman 58 Zionism 20, 36

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